The Story of Stuff: one of the most successful viral environmental films of all time. Annie Leonard’s hit 20-minute webfilm has received over 13 million web views by individuals in over 200 countries, prompting her to write the book, “The Story of Stuff”. Illini Union’s One Book, One Campus program chose this book as the 2011 selection. They invited Annie to campus on Wednesday, November 14th, where she met with student leaders in the afternoon, followed by a public lecture and reception at the Illini Union.
During her lecture, Annie focused on a simple message: our industrial economy is trashing the planet, poisoning us with toxic chemicals, worsening inequity, all while making us increasingly unhappy. She argued that we need to stop viewing ourselves as only consumers and become more engaged as citizens. In a stirring call to action, she explained, “We’re using one and a half planets worth of resources. Change is coming and the only question is whether it will by design, or by disaster”.
The Green Observer had the chance to sit down with Annie for an exclusive interview.
Q: What message would you want students to take away from your work?
A: For students, this is the first generation that followed all the rules, got good grades, did not get into trouble with the law and will still graduate without a job.
So I think our focus right now needs to be on doing everything we can to get people engaged and involved again. People are forgetting how to make change. We’ve been bombarded with these messages about 10 simple things you can do for the planet. We call that the individualization of the problem. I’m all for those things, of course, but that’s just a part of being a responsible adult in society. You don’t get extra credit anymore for those.
Students should see universities as safe spaces to develop these activist and citizenship skills.
Q: Why have your new movies, like Story of Broke, dealt more with social or economic issues?
A: The goal was not to get people to watch movies, instead to get people to take that inspiration and become active and make some change.
We decided, “Lets take a risk and explore some of these deeper underlying issues that are uncomfortable to talk about”. And with anything you want to do to make things better, you will butt up against this wall of undue corporate influence, so we decided to make a film about it.
Some people wrote to me and asked, “Annie, I thought you were an environmentalist, why are you changing issues?” I said, “I’m not changing issues; we have to get the corporations out of our democracy. We’re trying to get environmentalists to think more deeply and systematically about these problems.”
We made Story of Broke because all around the world, we are told in respsonse to all these things we want, like a clean environment, healthy jobs, renewable energy, “I’m sorry. We can’t do that. We’re broke”. Meanwhile, we’re giving $10 billion in subsidies to the oil companies and $1.2 billion to Walmart. I wanted to make people aware that we are not broke. It’s our money, and it’s been hijacked.
Q: So what can we do?
A: This is an “all hands on deck” situation. Do what turns you on.
Emily Cross
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