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/.

There is a smoke stack on the back of every government program. That is to say that every government programs impose a cost on third parties where the third parties are not receiving compensation.

This came out of the context of discussing when government may need to intervene in the market. Milton Friedman and some other classical liberals (libertarians) think that the only case for government is when it is not feasible for market arrangements to make individuals pay another individual when harm is imposed on the that second individual. Requiring contractual parties to pay third parties, outside of the contractual agreement, who are harmed by the agreement, compensation for that harm.

After Milton Friedman made this point he brought up the concept of a smoke stack on the backs of every government program. That while it is important to consider these situations where government may intervene, it is also important be realistic about the ’smoke stacks’ that will be turned on as a result of utilizing the government.

He also mentioned Terry Anderson and PERC who has shown that often private arrangements are better for the environment than ‘command and control’ government regulation.

Watch the interview yourself.