The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health—and a Vision for Change

The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health—and a Vision for Change (2010) is a book by Annie Leonard. It is based on a short animated documentary with the same title (2007) written and narrated by Leonard. Leonard criticizes American consumer society that values novelty, accumulation, and low prices for being unsustainable. Overconsumption affects our health, our happiness, and our planet. Leonard travels from factories, to waste landfills, to mines to show the human and environmental costs of Stuff. She concludes that because the resources on our planet are finite, the environmental costs of consumption are unsustainable. To save our planet, we need a new way of understanding the world: We need to consume less.

The Story of Stuff approaches the materials economy, or modern manufacturing ecosystem, through the framework of systems thinking. Systems thinking proposes that things can’t be considered in isolation; everything is connected. She divides the materials economy into five components: extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. In each section, she shows how each segment relates to the others. Leonard explains how each stage of production is guided by corporate interest, consumer demands, and the paradigms that shape our worldviews.