Original Website: http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Friends of ours are producing a great object manipulation show, "Paraphrenalia", at the National Arts Festival starting in 3 weeks. They clock this as a reference point, and it makes for some fascinating and quite sobering viewing.

The Story of Stuff

Do we really need storage units to store all our stuff? Really? Show your kids, consumerism isn’t everything. more about "The Story of Stuff", posted with vodpod Posted in Trading

Do we really need storage units to store all our stuff? Really? Show your kids, consumerism isn't everything.

Check out this video called "The Story of Stuff." Jason Clark, a friend of mine who blogs at Deep Church posted a link to this last week. We both share an interest in the nature of how we are formed by our culture around us to live and practice certain ways of life, often without thinking about it. This video focuses on some of the questions that can be asked of the consumerist system that we take for granted.

Oftentimes, when questions are raised about how we live in bad systems, we can admit that they're bad and even that we're complicit in perpetuating them, but we just feel trapped. For example, we live in a culture of Total Work. That is, work all day, all the time, produce, produce, produce - a system that I think goes against the very nature of what it means to be a human creature and to live life well. But how do we break out of it? We can't just stop working. (I'm trying to think through this problem for a paper that I'm writing for a conference this summer - more on that later)

This video however, takes us through the problems of a system and offers us an alternative way of living at the end. Throughout the site, there are ideas for trying to implement other ways of living to promote a better system. For me, I'm particularly interested in being able to recycle as much as I can. Since moving into a new neighborhood that has a recycling program, I may only throw away 1 bag of trash per week. When we lived in an apartment without a recycling program (even though we tried to recycle paper as much as we could through another outlet), we were taking out the trash every 2-3 days or so. That's a huge change. I'm even trying to be mindful of recycling technological good like computer equipment. Sometimes you have to pay for it, but it's better than throwing it in a landfill (or burning it!)

All of this plays into our being good stewards of creation. That a way to live our theology.

The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

A new paradigm is emerging. Consumption for consumption sake- the basis of the american economy is not sustainable. The linear nature of our people made environment can be replaced with a new way- a cycle of use and reuse. A new way, a better way.

everyone should view this and stop over consuming