Overconsumption Goes Viral: Annie Leonard's the Story of Stuff.

• Author: Mark, Jason
• Position: Essay

Viewers of Fox News's Glenn Beck have heard by now that the enemies of the Republic are legion: the community group ACORN, the labor union SEIU, the Tides Foundation, former White House adviser Van Jones, Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Democratic Party, the liberals, the elites, Annie Leonard....

Annie who? You might not have heard of her, but according to Beck who dedicated two days of his show last year to attacking her--Leonard is responsible for "propaganda going on in our schools." She is, he said, spreading an anti-capitalist message, "this indoctrination stuff" that suggests, among other things, that our society's consumerist frenzy and the advertising industry's constant manufacturing of wants have contributed to a social malaise.

The target of his ire is The Story of Stuff, a twenty-minute web video focused on the perils of overconsumption. Leonard developed the film--which is nothing more than a rapid-fire narration by Leonard accompanied by cartoonish line drawings--with the modest intention of getting "activists in the progressive movement" to go "a little deeper in our analysis."

To Leonard's great surprise, her video has become an online phenomenon, picking up the kind of viral energy usually reserved for the latest Kim Kardashian gaffe. In the six months following its December 2007 debut, some three million people viewed the movie. In total, nearly eight million people have seen The Story of Stuff online. More than 10,000 DVDs have been distributed to classrooms and churches.

But with popularity often comes notoriety, and its helpmate, controversy. The Competitive Enterprise Institute developed a detailed critique of the film. At least one school district, in Missoula, Montana, voted to prohibit the film from being shown in its classes. Former CNN host Lou Dobbs joined Beck in denouncing the video. After the Beck episodes, Leonard, a veteran environmental campaigner accustomed to political combat, received death threats.

W hat's all the fuss about? The Story of Stuff opens with Leonard confessing to an obsession with her iPod. From there, she launches into a whirlwind tour of the "materials economy"--the chain of extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal--that explains where our stuff comes from and where it ends up. Along the way, she manages to touch upon the United States' bloated military budget, sweatshop abuses, global migration and urbanization, toxins in breast milk, externalized...