Putting a value on the human effort in our stuff

Picking up on the urban migration thread, I’ve been researching what’s been driving that mass exodus from the world’s rural areas. In my travels, I came across The Story of Stuff, which I highly recommend. I love it for giving such a succinct explanation of such a huge and complex subject, for the wonderful way in which it’s presented (I wish more corporate presentations looked like this), and for the way it’s promoting grass-roots distribution of the message. In it, Annie Leonard explains the linear processes which determine where the stuff in our lives comes from and where it goes: extraction > production > distribution > consumption > disposal.

Our rate of consumption of Earth’s natural resources (in the past three decades, we consumed one-third of the planet’s resource base) is clearly unsustainable. And as multinational mining companies start moving into undeveloped and developing countries to exploit their resources, we’re now subjecting the inhabitants of those countries, in a much deeper and more significant way, to globalised economics. It’s no longer viable for them to sustain themselves off the land, and they are forced to work in mines and to move on to factories in urban centres to manufacture the products.

In developed countries, the economics of food production mean that the land simply cannot support small, specialist farms any longer. Instead, agriculture is an industry, the vast majority of it conducted on a terrifyingly huge industrial scale. (If you haven’t heard of Concentrated Animal-Feeding Operations or CAFOs, read this horrifying article by Raj Patel from The Observer Food Monthly, which explains them from about half-way down.) And so, even in developed countries, people are still emigrating from rural areas to urban conurbations.

As Leonard points out, the problem with this chain is that it’s not a cycle – it’s linear. We keep on taking good clean stuff out of the ground, but only putting toxic stuff back. (Even in agriculture, we’re taking the nutrients out of the ground and putting synthetic chemical fertilisers in, instead.) It’s totally unsustainable. And until we break the way that most consumers in developed (and increasingly in developing) countries see consumption as a means of fulfilment, we’ll never break the chain. We need to get back to valuing the human effort in the things we surround ourselves with. Good old artisan-crafted, high-skill, low-intensity local production.