Gere 111

Hello today I am going to talk about the stuff that we buy and where it ends.Have you ever wondered where all the stuff we buy comes from and where it goes when we
throw it out.? I couldn’t stop wondering about that. So I looked it up. And what the text books said is
that our stuff simply moves along these stages: extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal. Alltogether, it’s called the materials economy. Well, I looked into it a little bit more. And you know what I found out? That is not thewhole story. There’s a lot missing from this explanation. For one thing, this system looks like it’s fine. No problem. Butthe truth is it’s a system in crisis. .2Every step along the way, this system is interacting with the real world. In real life it’s not happening on ablank white page. It’s interacting with societies, cultures, economies, the environment. And all along the way, it’s bumping up against limits. Limits we don’t see here because the diagram is incomplete. Well, one of the most important things that is missing is people. Yes, people. People live and work allalong this system. And some people in this system matter . little more than others; some havea littlemore say. Who are they?

Well, let’s start with the government. It’s the government’s job is to watch out for us, to take care of us. That’s their job.5Then along came the corporation. Now, the reason the corporation looks bigger than the government is that the corporation is bigger than the government. Of the 100 largest economies on earth now, 51 are corporations.6 As the corporationshave grown in size and power, we’ve seen a little change in the government where they’re a little more concerned in making sure everything is working out for those guys than for us.7OK, so let’s see what else is missing from this picture

Extraction
We’ll start with extraction which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation which is a fancy word for trashing the planet. What this lookslike is we chop down trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals. So here we are running up against our first limit. We’re running out of resources.8 We are using too much stuff. Now I know this can be hard to hear, but it’s the truth and we’ve gotta deal with it.
In the past three decades alone, one-third of the planet’s naturalresources base have been consumed.9 Gone. We are cutting and mining and hauling and trashing the place so fast that we’re undermining the planet’s very ability for people to live here.10
Production
So, next, the materials move to “production“ and what happens there is we use energy to mix toxic
chemicals in with the natural resources to maketoxic contaminated products.
There are over 100,000 synthetic chemicals in commerce today.21 Only a handful of these have even
been tested for human health impacts and NONE of them have been tested for synergistic health
impacts, that means when they interact with all the other chemicals we’re exposed to every day.22
So, we don’t know the full impact of these toxics on our health andenvironment of all these toxic
chemicals. But we do know one thing: Toxics in, Toxics Out. As long as we keep putting toxics into our production system, we are going to keep getting toxics in the stuff that we bring into our homes, our workplaces, and schools. And, duh, our bodies. Like BFRs, brominated flame retardants. They are a chemical that make things more fireproof but they are super toxic.24They’re a neurotoxin—that means toxic to the brain. What are we even doing using a chemical like this? Yet we put them in our computers, our appliances, couches, mattresses, even some pillows. In fact, we take our pillows, we douse them in a neurotoxin and then we bring them home and put our heads on them for 8 hours a night to sleep. Now, I don’t know, but it seems to me that in this country with so...