The Story of Stuff

How much a $4.99 radio actually costs and what 7 football fields are doing in the Amazon jungle.

If you think you “get” the concept of sustainability, are you willing to bet your favorite gadget on it? Let’s start with an easier question: Do you know where that gadget came from and how?

Instigator Annie Leonard spent 10 years traveling the world, tracking where our stuff comes from and where it ends up — essentially dissecting our “materials economy” to reveal the very real crisis it’s in. She then partnered with a couple of sustainability advocacy groups to produce The Story of Stuff — a part-educational, part-revelational, part-mobilizing 20-minute film that sucks you in, preconceived notions of sustainability and all, and hurls you into the nitty-gritty of it, all through delightful animation and a refreshingly fast pace.

The film reveals the fundamental brokenness of our consumption model — we’re using a linear production-consumption-disposal system, but running a linear system on a finite planet is, well, ludicrous.

Without stealing too much of the film’s thunder, we’ll just say that it busts a number of sustainability myths that even the most eco-conscious of us hold, pushing us to delve far deeper into the issue than the superficial nature of the “green” fad. (Hint: Recycling doesn’t help nearly as much as you’d like to think, so stop buying those I Heart Recycling shirts.)

The Story of Stuff explores issues of government and corporations as they relate to sustainability, probes political, cultural and commercial principles of consumerism, and really makes us question how it’s possible for RadioShack to sell a radio for the laughable price of $4.99, which doesn’t even pay for shelf space.

For us, the pinnacle of how deformed our culture is came from a quote of the famous post-war economist Victor Lebow’s frightening advice to the Eisenhower administration:

It’s not surprising, then, that we live in a world economy where those who don’t own or buy a lot of stuff simply don’t have value. Which explains why the Third World is being exploited, why natural resources are being pillaged from those who have inhabited them for generations, why that capitalist sense of entitlement is really humanity’s greatest downfall.

The film ends on a hopeful note, suggesting a more realistic solution in a new system based on sustainability and equity, where millions of us intervene with small contributions all along the system, so that our cumulative impact makes a real, tangible, literally world-changing difference.

And it all starts with seeing the big picture like you’ve never seen it before.

So go ahead, see. The Story of Stuff is easily the best thing you’ll do for your global citizen conscience this year.

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The Year in Ideas: 8 Best of 2008

8 things that shaped the year’s innovation footprint, or what Buckminster Fuller has to do with tap water and Michael Phelps.

This being an indiscriminate ideas blog, we’ve put together a selection of the year’s best ideas — big and small, spanning a multitude of categories, and held together by the sole common tangent of being truly, tangibly, future-changingly innovative. Here’s our shortlist for the 8 most compelling ideas of 2008.

iTUNES GENIUS

Music recommendation services have been around for a while, driven by smart algorithms that seem to know your music taste better than your bff. But despite all the Pandoras and Last.fm’s of the world, the music industry and its business model are falling apart. And digital music leader iTunes may have a win-win solution for both consumers and the industry, thanks to the recently released Genius feature.

So why is Genius genius? It works remarkably well — its recommendations are immaculate and the playlists it builds can rival even the most meticulously compiled mixtape that your 8th-grade sweetheart spent 3 weeks crafting. More importantly, it fights the two deadliest threats to today’s music industry — the failure to monetize “fandom” (Last.fm may be great at helping you discover new favorite artists, but not so great at cashing the fandom check) and consumer’s music library overload. (Anyone with more than a few hundred songs in their iTunes, which is pretty much everyone, is slowly losing track of the tracks and forgetting some of those artists even existed.)

In a world where keeping up with our own music is becoming overwhelming and getting new stuff is anything from burdensome to illegal, Genius steps in as a welcome and well-crafted one-two-punch solution.

LZR RACER

No one made more waves in Summer ’08 than wonderboy Michael Phelps. And when a record-breaking 8 Olympic gold medal streak is almost shadowed by another wave-maker, we know there’s something big going on.

Wave-maker in point: Speedo’s technologically supreme and ethically controversial LZR Racer Suit. It’s been called anything from “technological doping” to downright incapacitating for non-LZR-wearing swimmers.

But here’s the thing: 3 years of R&D produced technology that’s utterly groundbreaking and innovative and all those superlatives attached to true progress. So we find it ridiculous to put a “moral” label on it. It’s like saying that cars should’ve never upgraded to better tires because it would’ve been unfair to all the lagging manufacturers, or Firefox should’ve never revolutionized the web browser because it was unfair to Netscape and Internet Explorer.

Progress has to start somewhere, and the laggards better suck it up and learn to keep up.

YES WE CAN SONG

We’ve featured it again and again. And, yep, we’re doing it yet again. Because will.i.am‘s deeply moving, celebrity-powered remix of Obama’s New Hampshire primary speech managed to do something extraordinary, something never before seen in the stiff world of politics: Tap the very emotional chord that makes people so profoundly moved by and connected to music, and translating it to political motivation.

The resulting Song For Change became the most-watched election-related video on YouTube and we strongly believe it had a lot to do with getting the President Elect that much-needed, make-or-break youth vote.

BUCKYPAPER

It may be a scientific cliche that the best of discoveries happen by accident, but it’s exactly the case with buckypaper — a revolutionary material composed of tube-shaped carbon molecules 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.

What makes buckypaper unique isn’t simply its ability to conduct both electricity and heat, but also the fact it’s 10 times lighter and 500 times stronger than steel.

You could say that buckypaper virtually came from outer space.

In 1985, British scientist Harry Kroto tried to simulate the conditions that exist in a stars, the source of all carbon in the universe, to see how they make the element of life. But halfway through the experiment, something unusual happened: A bizarre 60-atom carbon molecule shaped like a soccer ball popped up out of the blue. Kroto thought it looked like iconic architect, inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, so he named the new molecule buckminsterfullerene, or “buckyballs” for short. (Besides the wacky name, the discovery also landed Kroto and colleagues the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996.)

Fast-forward 20-odd years, and you’ve got a renewed interest in the chemical oddball, resulting in the development of a thin film that forms when the carbon tubes are filtered through a fine mesh and stick together in a liquid suspension — that’s buckypaper.

So we can sit back and wait for that super light, super fast, thunderstorm-proof buckypaper jet plane.

RICOH GREEN BILLBOARD

Consumerism is the reason why we’re in our climate pickle, no question there. It’s wasteful and gratuitous and driven by excess. And the marketing industry is pouring more fuel into its fire than anything else. So it’s refreshing to see bold, innovative efforts that significantly shrink the carbon footprint of capitalism’s necessary evil.

Case in point: Times Square’s first “green” billboard for office equipment supplier Ricoh. At $3 million, the board is powered solely by 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels connected to a bank of batteries. Comapred to a traditional electric billboard, it’s estimated to save 18 tons of carbon over the course of a year — enough to light 6 large houses.

And with over 15,000 billboards in New York City alone, do the math. Ok, we’ll do it for you — roughly 270,000 tons of carbon spewed into the atmosphere each year just by NYC’s outdoor advertising, the equivalent of lighting a small 90-house village.

The board took about a year from inception to completion and entailed a whole lot of challenges. Eventually, they were able to find a small California-based company, PacWind, that makes very efficient turbine technology that actually works in very little wind.

The best part is how “real” company executives are about the new technology and its drawbacks. (Like, say, the fact that the billboard will go out on a cloudy day.)

An advertisement is not a mission-critical function… nobody will ever die because our eco-board is lit or is not. So we think that if it goes dark, it’s actually an even brighter light on the fact that we’re using alternative energy and that we’re not wasting carbon in order to advertise.

You said it, brother.

GOOGLE ANDROID

Granted, Android was unveiled in late 2007. But its fundamental “great ideaness” lies in its category-defying, industry-revolutionizing open model. And it officially became open-source only a couple of months ago, on October 21, 2008.

Today, the entire source code is available under an Apache license, which allows developers and vendors to add free extensions and toss them right back into the open source community. And open-source evangelists’ nitpicking aside, that’s something rare and precious in today’s telecom oligopoly and the stifling proprietariness of everything. (iPhone/AT&T lovenest, we’re looking at you.)

GINA

When BMW’s GINA concept car fist made the buzz rounds mid-year, many thought it was a hoax or a clever teaser for something a bit more… real. It turned out, however, to be a no-B.S., totally serious, perfectly real effort by the trend-setting German automaker.

The GINA Light Visionary Model is, simply put, a car made out of cloth. Instead of having a metal or plastic body, GINA is draped in a flexible material stretched over a movable wire mesh, making the car a structural chameleon — the driver can choose to change its shape on a whim.

Beyond the sheer cool factor, GINA is also considerably more environmentally reasonable than traditional cars. Not only does the light fabric take much less energy to produce than heavier, more rigid materials, but it also makes the total weight of the car much lower, resulting in significantly better fuel efficiency.

Plus, it’s fucking badass.

THE TAP PROJECT

You may recall how seriously we take the drinking water problem around here. Which is why the Tap Project is topping our ideas list this year — a small but incredibly smart, ambitious and inspired project that has the potential to make tremendous difference to the poor by asking ridiculously little of the wealthy.

Here’s how it works: During World Water Week in March this year,the Tap Project launched a nationwide effort, inviting restaurants and their patrons to simply donate $1 (or more) for the tap water they’d normally get for free. Every dollar raised buys a child in the third world 40 days worth of clean drinking water.

Pause to digest that. Exactly.

So simple. So potent. And so eye-opening, juxtaposing what we in the seat of privilege take for granted with the deadly lack thereof that kills — literally — millions.

The Tap Project is the brain child of creative icon David Droga and was developed in partnership with UNICEF. Over 2,350 restaurants participated in the 2008 push, raising more than $5 million — the equivalent of 1.7 million days of clean drinking water for children around the world.

With close to 1 million restaurants nationwide (it’s the second-largest industry outside of government), you can only imagine the project’s full breadth of potential as it continues to reach critical mass.

Now that’s an idea.

History, Animated, Quick and Uneuphemistic

The moon hoax, why Nixon lost the debate, and what dinosaurs have to do with Gerald Ford and a chicken.

Despite our general dismissal of history as a boiling pot of mistakes that humanity never learned from, we have to admit it offers a great and telling tale or two. And the History Channel is out to prove it.

The Great and Telling Tales of History is a brilliant series of 1-minute films in which history’s walking encyclopedia, historian Timothy Dickinson, tells us, in a grandfatherly voice and an endearing British accent, little-known and fascinating facts about the history of politics, pop culture and the world at large.

But what makes the films truly marvelous is that we’re taken through the unexpected twists and turns of history by artist Benjamin Goldman‘s wonderful animation — dark and delightful at the same time, every bit as full of unexpected twists and turns as the stories themselves.

The talks aren’t just mere recaps of history, either. They’re full of Tim Dickinson’s own, often unapologetic and unorthodox, theories about the world — like the rather snarky short on drugs, in which he shares this uneuphemistically true sentiment about human nature:

The point is, we are fundamentally dissatisfied with our standard biological condition, and we’ll find one way or another of altering it.

Some of our favorites: Jimmy Carter vs. the Killer Rabbit,  The Brain, The Strange Case of Mary Toft, and Charles Darwin.

>> via Coudal

Photography Spotlight: The Obama Phenomenon

What a camera and a chalkboard have to do with the political and cultural heritage of our time.

There’s no question the Obama campaign ignited some powerful human emotions. But it’s hard to grasp just how powerful by simply talking about them from the sidelines of abstraction. That’s why photographer Scout Tufankjian decided to dissect those most visceral, deeply moving elements of the history-making campaign.

Nearly two years ago, Tufankjian reluctantly took an assignment to shoot an Obama book signing, something she called “a photographer’s nightmare.”

But as soon as Obama walked into the room, the crowd became so transfixed that Tufankjian couldn’t help being intrigued and absorbed by the energy. Inspired, she set to explore this incredible phenomenon by following the candidate along the campaign trail, documenting not the stereotypical glamor moments of high-stakes politics but, rather, the Obama’s guy-next-door everyday, the immense emotional charge of his supporters, the most intimate moments of the Obama family.

What started as a reluctant assignment evolved into a rich and incredibly profound portrait of America.

You can’t help finding yourself absorbed and overwhelmed by Obama’s incredibly powerful presence — powerful not because he is now the leader of the free world, but because it appears to move people — everyday people — deeply, to touch them on a fundamentally human level so uncommon in politics.

Somewhere between Beatlemania and The Fallen, the collection captures those big human truths that Obama resonated with so deeply, the very resonance that got him elected in the end.

Indeed, it’s hard not to appreciate the strong resemblance, both photographic and cultural, to the incredible social force that was Kennedy captured in The Fallen, particularly in the eerie reminiscence of the images showing Obama’s arrival via the Pennsylvania rail.

It’s no surprise, really, since one of Tufankjian’s photographs shows a woman answering the question of why she was voting Obama with a simple yet momentous phrase: “The Kennedy Package.”

Perhaps the most powerful element of Tufankjian’s photographic feat is actually just that — his exploration of the vast spectrum of Obama supporters. Armed with a chalkboard and a camera, she simply asked people at Obama rallies to jot down why they were voting for him.

The book, featuring over 200 of Tufankjian’s most impactful photographs from this 2-year-long portrait of the Obama phenomenon, is available on Amazon December 8 — and what better holiday gift than a rich piece of political, cultural and emotional history?

via DPS

Update: Thanks to a friend of Scout’s for pointing out Scout is indeed a she, not a he. The mistake has been fixed and we’re, needless to say, deeply embarrassed to have been even less accurate than GWAP’s infamous Gender Test.