{"id":1071,"date":"2009-05-15T08:11:14","date_gmt":"2009-05-15T13:11:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/05\/15\/story-of-scary-stuff\/"},"modified":"2009-05-15T08:11:14","modified_gmt":"2009-05-15T13:11:14","slug":"story-of-scary-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/05\/15\/story-of-scary-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Story of scary Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kvU_vhopKKc?version=3&#038;rel=0&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com\/2009\/05\/11\/tales-from-waste-land\/\">Environmental pied piper<\/a> Annie Leonard&#8217;s 20-minute teaching video <a href=\"http:\/\/www.storyofstuff.org\/\">The Story of Stuff <\/a>got five minutes of frantic Fox News treatment a few days ago &#8212; which means it&#8217;s making an impact out there in the wilds of America. New York Times Education writer <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/05\/11\/education\/11stuff.html\">Leslie Kaufman, writing about it on Sunday<\/a>, noted that six million people have viewed the film on the Story of Stuff web site, millions more have seen it on YouTube, over 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facingthefuture.org\/\">Facing the Future<\/a>, a sustainability and global issues curriculum developer for schools in all 50 states, is drafting lesson plans based on the video. Kaufman calls it &#8220;a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation.&#8221; She also notes its critics, including a Montana school board that decided against showing the video &#8220;after a parent complained that its message was anticapitalist.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Fox&#8217;s liberal media watchers apparently took the Times story as a cue <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/search-results\/m\/22276068\/toxic-teaching-tool.htm#q=%22Story+of+stuff%22\">to do a segment on it<\/a>, so they invited Allegheny College environmental studies prof Michael Maniates and the American Enterprise Institute&#8217;s global warming skeptic Chris Horner to debate it for a full, well, not quite five minutes. (If the environmental studies field had its academic stars, Maniates would be one of them, alongside David Orr, Gus Speth, and a few others. That list alone makes me want to ask: where are ES&#8217;s Judith Butlers and Donna Haraways? But that&#8217;s a topic for another conversation.)<\/p>\n<p>Horner describes the video as an &#8220;abysmal&#8221; marriage of Malthus and Marx &#8212; &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/story\/0,2933,520207,00.html\">community college Marxism in a ponytail<\/a>&#8221; (sounds scary, doesn&#8217;t it?) &#8212; and claims that it &#8220;terrorizes children into rejecting the prosperity that will allow them to live into their 70s or likely 80s in America as opposed to their 40s if they&#8217;re lucky in Haiti or 50s in India &#8212; these poor societies that we idolize and romanticize through philosophies like this, which [&#8230;] were disproven some time ago.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s that very connection between us living into our 80s here and the Haitians and Indians living only to their 50s &#8216;there&#8217; that the video is so good at thematizing. Despite its oversimplification of the details, Leonard&#8217;s video captures the systemic interconnections between ecology, industrial growth, human rights and social justice, and corporate globalization in ways that&#8217;s nearly impossible in twenty minutes. It&#8217;s not a marriage of Malthus and Marx &#8212; calling it that is just Horner&#8217;s attempt to make it seem both dated and dangerous, though he may be shooting himself in the foot, since most Fox viewers aren&#8217;t likely to know much about either of them. It&#8217;s really a simplified &#8216;for-kids&#8217; version of a pretty current synthesis of ecological economics (and industrial ecology) with world systems theory and political economy &#8212; or, in a word, political ecology.<\/p>\n<p>One of Maniates&#8217;s points (one of the few he&#8217;s allowed to make in such a short segment) is that the video is being greeted well not only by the environmental left but also by parts of the right. You can see a bit of that on the <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.christianitytoday.com\/women\/2009\/05\/stuff_the_sleeper_hit.html\">Christianity Today <\/a>blog, for instance (though I&#8217;m not sure how &#8216;right&#8217; they are). Some interesting critical discussion of the video can also be found on tech-geek <a href=\"http:\/\/www.andybrain.com\/qna\/2007\/12\/07\/annie-leonards-the-story-of-stuff-review-and-analysis\/\">Andy Brain&#8217;s blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>Thanks to <a title=\"greenmuseum.blog \uff7b Stuff gets Real.\" href=\"http:\/\/blog.greenmuseum.org\/blog\/?p=80\">GreenMuseum.blog<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sustainablepractice.org\/2009\/05\/14\/stuff-gets-real\">SustainablePractice.org<\/a> for alerting me to the Fox story.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Environmental pied piper Annie Leonard&#8217;s 20-minute teaching video The Story of Stuff got five minutes of frantic Fox News treatment a few days ago &#8212; which means it&#8217;s making an impact out there in the wilds of America. New York Times Education writer Leslie Kaufman, writing about it on Sunday, noted that six million people [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[196,691215,689354],"tags":[4412,4448,16147,16148,271,4439],"class_list":["post-1071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecoculture","category-politics_postpolitics","category-image_nation","tag-ecomedia","tag-ecopolitics","tag-environmental-studies","tag-malthus","tag-marx","tag-political-ecology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-hh","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12241,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/11\/02\/navigating-climate-trauma\/","url_meta":{"origin":1071,"position":0},"title":"Navigating climate trauma","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 2, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm happy to share my talk from the recent Vermont Humanities conference. It captures the essence of things I've been writing and thinking about over the last while. And rather incredibly for a humanities conference, it was 100% glitch-free (despite the talk's audio-visual intricacies; well, the image fades aren\u2019t perfectly\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Anthropocene&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/FrIQ3WRF4NA\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1033,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/26\/about-this-blog\/","url_meta":{"origin":1071,"position":1},"title":"About this blog","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"An online space for environmental cultural theory, this weblog has two primary objectives: (1) To communicate about issues at the intersection of ecological, political, and cultural thought and practice, especially at the interdisciplinary junctures forming in and around the fields of ecocriticism , green cultural studies, political ecology, environmental communication,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Blog stuff&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1162,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/12\/02\/from-cap-trade-to-apocalypse\/","url_meta":{"origin":1071,"position":2},"title":"From Cap &amp; Trade to apocalypse","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 2, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=pA6FSy6EKrM&hl=en_US&fs=1& Annie Leonard's Free Range Studios, whose viral video The Story of Stuff made some waves a little while back, has now produced a critique of the Cap and Trade system, some version of which is the most likely outcome of negotiations taking place in Copenhagen over the coming days.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Climate change&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Climate change","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/climate-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/pA6FSy6EKrM\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1007,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2008\/12\/01\/the-idea-behind-this-blog-original-version\/","url_meta":{"origin":1071,"position":3},"title":"the idea behind this blog (original version)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 1, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Every blog has its reason for being. The idea behind this one was originally to serve as a forum for thinking in and around the Environmental Thought and Culture Graduate Concentration, which I coordinate at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont. But that idea mutated\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Blog stuff&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2886,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/03\/06\/the-anthropoloblogosphere\/","url_meta":{"origin":1071,"position":4},"title":"The anthro(polo)(blogo)sphere","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 6, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Having looked at the debate among critical geographers over blogging and social media (here, here, and here), let's look at another, adjacent discipline: anthropology. No work necessary: Ryan Anderson's latest post at Ethnographix does it for us. Anthropologists,\u00a0 Anderson writes, have been \"slow to find their way into the vastness\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Academe&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9373,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/07\/05\/inequality-and-environmental-crisis\/","url_meta":{"origin":1071,"position":5},"title":"Inequality and environmental crisis","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 5, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"As part of its Ford Foundation supported Inequality Project, The Guardian is providing a provocative\u00a0glimpse of Oxford geographer Danny Dorling's\u00a0important research into inequality and the environment. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the complexities surrounding causes and potential solutions to the environmental crisis. Read the article here.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Eco-culture&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}