I came across this NY Times article which covered a video that is “about the effects of human consumption.” Well, more accurately it reflects the negatives of human consumption.

The video was created by Annie Leonard, a former Greenpeace employee and an independent lecturer who paints a picture of how American habits result in forests being felled, mountaintops being destroyed, water being polluted and people and animals being poisoned.

Apparently the video quickly spread among teachers who,

recommended it to one another as a brief, provocative way of drawing students into a dialogue about how buying a cellphone or jeans could contribute to environmental devastation.

Here is a quote from the short 20-minute video.

We’ll start with extraction, which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planet. What this looks like is we chop down the trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.

I think it is good to express some of the negatives about negative externalities associated with consumption , but to con a small child into believing that having stuff makes them bad isn’t helpful for the long term health of our environment. Further the political, moral, and economic knowledge needed to fully understand this issue takes more than 20 minutes to digest. I spent a few years studying and thinking about it all.

Feeling that we are inherently unable to take care of ourselves, that what we do and how we consume is wrong creates a fundamental doubt in humans. This doubt may result in development of a person who thinks that humans are bad, that their actions are wrong, which may at best create self-loathing problems, and at the worst create a person who doesn’t think humans can do good things. Its essential for survival to consume, so if its bad, then me pursuing what is in my interest, surviving, is bad. That’s a bit mixed up.

Short videos used as propaganda, propagates a reactionary mind, which isn’t beneficial to the conversation of taking care of our environment. Jerk-knee reactions, like “plastics are bad because they are from oil” is determinant. What about plastics that save lives like IV bags?

Find out more about the video at http://www.storyofstuff.com/.