I got a little obsessed with mine.

In fact I got a little obsessed with all my stuff.

Have you ever wondered where all the stuff we buy, comes from

and where it goes when we throw it out?

I couldn't stop wondering about that. So I looked it up.

And what the text book said, is that stuff moves through a system

from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal.

All together, it is called the materials economy. Well, I looked into it a little bit more.

In fact, I spent 10 years traveling the world,

tracking where our stuff comes from and where it goes.

And you know what I found out? That is not the whole story.

There's a lot missing from this explanation.

For one thing, this system looks like it's fine. No problem.

But the truth is it’s a system in crisis.

And the reason it is in crisis is that it is a linear system

and we live on a finite planet

and you can not run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely.

Every step along the way, this system is interacting with the real world.

In real life it’s not happening on a blank white page.

It’s interacting with societies, cultures, economies, the environment.

And all along the way, it’s bumping up against limits.

Limits we don't see here because the diagram is incomplete.

So lets go back through, let's fill in some of the blanks and see what's missing.

Well, one of the most important things its missing is people, yes people.

People live and work all along this system.

And some people in this system matter a little more than others;

Some have a little more say. Who are they?

Well, let’s start with the government.

Now my friends tell me I should use a tank to symbolize the government

and that’s true in many countries and increasingly in our own,

after all more than 50% of our federal tax money is now going to the military,

but I’m using a person to symbolize the government

because I hold true to the vision and values that governments should be

of the people, by the people, for the people.

It's the governments job to watch out for us, to take care of us. That’s their job.

Then along came the corporation.

Now, the reason the corporation looks bigger than the government

is that the corporation is bigger than the government.

Of the 100 largest economies on earth now, 51 are corporations.

As the corporations have grown in size and power, we’ve seen a little change in the government

where they’re a little more concerned in making sure

everything is working out for those guys than for us.

OK, so lets see what else is missing from this picture.

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 trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside,

we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.

So here we are running up against our first limit.

We are running out of resources. We are using too much stuff.

Now I know this can be hard to hear, but it's the truth we’ve gotta deal with it.

In the past three decades alone,

one-third of the planet’s natural resources base have been consumed. Gone.

We are cutting and mining and hauling and trashing the place so fast

that we’re undermining the planet’s very ability for people to live here.

Where I live, in the United States, we have less than 4% of our original forests left.

Forty percent of the waterways have become undrinkable.

And our problem is not just that we’re using too much stuff,

but we’re using more than our share. We have 5% of the world’s population

but we’re consuming 30% of the world’s resources and creating 30% of the world’s waste.

If everybody consumed at U.S. rates, we would need 3 to 5 planets.

And you know what? We’ve only got one.

So, my country’s response to this limitation is simply to go take somebody else’s!

This is the Third World, which – some would say –

is another word for our stuff that somehow got on someone else’s land.

So what does that look like? The same thing: trashing the place.

75% of global fisheries now are fished at or beyond capacity.

80% of the planet’s original forests are gone.

In the Amazon alone, we’re losing 2000 trees a minute.

That is seven football fields a minute.

And what about the people who live here?

Well. According to these guys, they don’t own these resources

even if they’ve been living there for generations, they don’t own the means of production

and they’re not buying a lot of stuff. And in this system,

if you don’t own or buy a lot of stuff, you don’t have value.

So, next, the materials move to “production“ and what happens there is we use energy

to mix toxic chemicals in with the natural resources to make toxic contaminated products.

There are over 100,000 synthetic chemicals in use in commerce today.

Only a handful of them have even been tested for health impacts

and NONE have been tested for synergistic health impacts,

that means when they interact with all the other chemicals we’re exposed to every day.

So, we don’t know the full impact on health and the environment of all these toxic chemicals.

But we do know one thing: Toxics in, Toxics Out.

As long as we keep putting toxics into our inudstrial production systems,

we are going to keep getting toxics in the stuff that we bring

into our homes, and workplaces, and schools. And, duh, our bodies.

Like BFRs, brominated flame retardants.

They are a chemical that make things more fireproof but they are super toxic.

They’re a neurotoxin–that means toxic to the brain What are we even doing using a chemical like this?

Yet we put them in our computers, our appliances, couches, mattresses, even some pillows.

In fact, we take our pillows, we douse them in a neurotoxin

and then we bring them home and put our heads on them for 8 hours a night to sleep.

Now, I don’t know, but it seems to me that in this country with so much potential,

we could think of a better way to stop our heads from catching on fire at night.

Now these toxics build up in the food chain and concentrate in our bodies.

Do you know what is the food at the top of the food chain

with the highest level of many toxic contaminants? Human breast milk.

That means that we have reached a point where the smallest members of our societies - our babies

are getting their highest lifetime dose of toxic chemicals from breastfeeding from their mothers.

Is that not an incredible violation?

Breastfeeding must be the most fundamental human act of nurturing;

it should be sacred and safe. Now breastfeeding is still best

and mothers should definitely keep breastfeeding, but we should protect it. They should protect it.

I thought they were looking out for us. And of course,

the people who bear the biggest of these toxic chemicals

are the factory workers, many of whom are women of reproductive age.

They’re working with reproductive toxics, carcinogens and more.

Now, I ask you, what kind of woman of reproductive age

would work in a job exposed to reproductive toxics,

except for a woman with no other option? And that is one of the “beauties” of this system?

The erosion of local environments and economies here

ensures a constant supply of people with no other option.

Globally 200,000 people a day are moving from environments

that have sustained them for generations,

into cities, many to live in slums, looking for work, no matter how toxic that work may be.

So, you see, it is not just resources that are wasted along this system,

but people too. Whole communities get wasted.

Yup, toxics in, toxics out.

A lot of the toxics leave the factories in products,

but even more leave as by-products, or pollution. And it’s a lot of pollution.

In the U.S., our industry admits to releasing over 4 billion pounds of toxic chemicals a year

and it’s probably way more since that is only what they admit.

So that’s another limit, because, yuck,

who wants to look at and smell 4 billion pounds of toxic chemicals a year? So, what do they do?

Move the dirty factories overseas Pollute someone else’s land!

But surprise, a lot of that air pollution is coming right back at us, carried by wind currents.

So, what happens after all these resources are turned into products?

Well, it moves here, for distribution.

Now distribution means “selling all this toxic-contaminated junk as quickly as possible.”

The goal here is to keep the prices down, keep the people buying, and keep the inventory moving.

How do they keep the prices down? Well, they don’t pay the store workers very much

and they skimp on health insurance every time they can. It’s all about externalizing the costs.

What that means is the real costs of making stuff aren’t captured in the price.

In other words, we aren’t paying for the stuff we buy.

I was thinking about this the other day.

I was walking and I wanted to listen to the news

so I popped into a Radio Shack to buy a radio.

I found this cute little green radio for 4 dollars and 99 cents.

I was standing there in line to buy this thing and I was thinking

how could $4.99 possibly capture the costs

of making this radio and getting it into my hands? The metal was probably mined in South Africa,

the petroleum was probably drilled in Iraq, the plastics were probably produced in China,

and maybe the whole thing was assembled by some 15 year old in a maquiladora in Mexico.

$4.99 wouldn’t even pay the rent for the shelf space it occupied until I came along,

let alone part of the staff guy’s salary who helped me pick it out,

or the multiple ocean cruises and truck rides pieces of this radio went on.

That’s how I realized, I didn’t pay for the radio. So, who did pay?

Well. These people paid with the loss of their natural resource base.

These people paid with the loss of their clean air with increasing asthma and cancer rates.

Kids in the Congo paid with their future – 30% of the kids in parts of the Congo

now have had to drop out of school to mine coltan,

a metal we need for our cheap and disposable electronics.

These people even paid, by having to cover their own health insurance.

All along this system, people pitched in so I could get this radio for $4.99.

And none of these contributions are recorded in any accounts book.

That is what I mean by the company owners externalize the true costs of production.

And that brings us to the golden arrow of consumption.

This is the heart of the system, the engine that drives it.

It is so important that protecting this arrow has become the top priority for both of these guys.

That is why, after 9/11, when our country was in shock,

and President Bush could have suggested any number of appropriate things:

to grieve, to pray, to hope. NO. He said to shop. TO SHOP?!

We have become a nation of consumers. Our primary identity has become that of being consumers,

not mothers, teachers, farmers, but consumers.

The primary way that our value is measured and demonstrated

is by how much we contribute to this arrow, how much we consume. And do we!

We shop and shop and shop. Keep the materials flowing, And flow they do!

Guess what percentage of total materials flow through this system is still in product or use 6 months after the date of sale in North America?

Fifty percent? Twenty? NO. One percent. One! In other words, 99 percent of the stuff

we harvest, mine, process, transport – 99 percent of the stuff we run through this system

is trashed within 6 months. Now how can we run a planet

with that level of materials throughput? It wasn’t always like this.

The average U.S. person now consumes twice as much as they did 50 years ago.

Ask your grandma. In her day, stewardship and resourcefulness and thrift were valued.

So, how did this happen? Well, it didn’t just happen. It was designed.

Shortly after the World War 2, these guys were figuring out how to ramp up the economy.

Retailing analyst Victor Lebow articulated the solution

that has become the norm for the whole system.

He said: "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life,

that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction,

our ego satisfaction, in consumption.

We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisors Chairman said

that "The American economy's ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods."

MORE CONSUMER GOODS?

Our ultimate purpose? Not provide health care, or education, or safe transportation,

or sustainability or justice? Consumer goods?

How did they get us to jump on board this program so enthusiastically?

Well, two of their most effective strategies are planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence.

Planned obsolescence is another word for “designed for the dump.”

It means they actually make stuff to be useless as quickly as possible

so we will chuck it and buy a new one.

It’s obvious with things like plastic bags and coffee cups, but now it’s even big stuff:

mops, DVDs, cameras, barbeques even, everything! Even computers.

Have you noticed that when you buy a computer now,

the technology is changing so fast that in just a couple years,

it’s actually an impediment to communication? I was curious about this

so I opened up a big desktop computer to see what was inside. And I found out

that the piece that changes each year is just a tiny little piece in the corner.

But you can’t just change that one piece, because each new version is a different shape,

so you gotta chuck the whole thing and buy a new one.

So, I was reading industrial design journals from the 1950s when planned obsolescence

was really catching on. These designers are so open about it.

They actually discuss how fast can they make stuff break

that still leaves the consumer having enough faith in the product

to go out and buy anther one. It was so intentional.

But stuff cannot break fast enough to keep this arrow afloat,

so there’s also “perceived obsolescence.”

Now perceived obsolescence convinces us to throw away stuff that is still perfectly useful.

How do they do that? Well, they change the way the stuff looks

so if you bought your stuff a couple years ago,

everyone can tell that you haven’t contributed to this arrow recently

and since the way we demonstrate our value is contributing to this arrow, it can be embarrassing

Like I’ve have had the same fat white computer monitor

on my desk for 5 years. My co-worker just got a new computer.