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1. April 10th, 2010 | Ryan says:
   
   

   Hi Justine!

   This is a very interesting video, and I love the message. I hate how much plastic packaging we use without thinking. I have a concern that it didn’t address, though. In Yemen, they are literally running out of water. This is mostly because the government allows 40% of the country’s water supply to go toward irrigating Qat (a chewed stimulant with effects somewhere between coffee and cocaine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khat) every year. While that’s a big problem in itself, it’s going to be hard to get the 80% to 90% of the country’s citizens to stop chewing. Until then, is there any option besides bottled water that can support the whole country? I know that water desalinization is fairly easy, but I don’t know how viable it is to get water to everyone. That also isn’t an answer for landlocked countries. I’m all for not producing millions of tons of disposable plastic every year, but what are some other options you know of to provide water to places like that?

   I’m also very disappointed with the way The Story of Stuff Project is presenting their argument in this video. I think they’re trying to scare people just as much as Coke and Pepsi do, to manufacture a demand for their own agenda. In my experience, fear is caused by ignorance, and manufactured demand is just a company scaring us into believing we need something. So, manufactured demand is making people ignorant of something and offering them a solution to their new-found fears that helps you financially, ideologically, or some other way.

   If Annie Leonard wanted us to know how much oil is used to make the plastic for bottles every year, she could have just told us; it’s a staggering amount, to be sure. However, she framed it in terms of how many cars it could “power.” The number she gave us (1,000,000) is completely useless, because she didn’t tell us for how long each car would last, which kind of car, under what driving conditions, etc. For all we know, it’s enough oil to turn a Hummer on an idle for 5 minutes, but it could also be enough to drive a Prius 1,000 miles. The point is, she’s playing off of our own fears and ideologies by masking the fact of the matter.

   She could have said that it’s enough oil to light 10,000,000 lamps, or to grease 100,000,000 industrial crank shafts, but she chose cars because the average, liberal minded American thinks about gas mileage whenever cars come up: it’s relevant to her audience. That, combined with the flashy number “A Million” is enough to throw a lot of people into a rage. “We could be saving a MILLION cars’ worth of gas if people would just drink tap water!” a viewer might tell his friends, without even thinking that it could probably power 800,000 cars for a lot longer. Who wants to go around listing dry facts, though? No one will listen if you tell them plastic bottles consume 100,000 barrels of oil per day. You have to make it exciting and scary to give people an interest in sharing the information and acting on it. Pepsi knows that, and so does The Story of Stuff Project. Personally, I’d rather have facts so I can argue with the scare tactics of the other side, and with the people who can point out scare tactics when they see them. If all I have is sensational numbers and pseudo science, how can I argue with my uncle if he tells me about profit margins and the number of jobs bottled water creates in America? The Story of Stuff isn’t concerned with my ability to argue my (or their) beliefs coherently. They want as many people as possible to spread the word, and to do that, they’re acting just like the people they claim are doing wrong.

   Watching this again, I see that Leonard is also playing on the natural human fear of conspiracy to explain the cause of the fear she’s generating. She seems to be saying that bottled water companies are intentionally giving us bad-tasting, unhealthy, expensive water that’s bad for the planet just for profit. The people who make bottled water aren’t evil. They actually see themselves as performing a service, and as employers vital to the country’s economy. If we attack them as money-grubbing conspirators against our health, we look crazy. We need to acknowledge the benefits they contribute to society, but point out the bad things their actions cause, and suggest ways to improve them. They are human after all, capable of making mistakes, but generally responsive to constructive criticism.

   She also says that the companies are defending their multi-billion dollar industry by competing with and beating out our “…basic human right to clean, safe drinking water.” That’s not one of the human rights in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 25 of that document entitles everyone to a standard of living “adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family,” (http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/) which includes drinkable water. It does not include a right to water that hasn’t been filtered and bottled, since that won’t lower our standard of living to below and adequate for life. She’s accusing Coke and Pepsi of violating our human rights, and I don’t think she can back it up.

   I hate seeing someone I agree with use such bad argument techniques. If this organization can’t argue concisely and factually, how can the people who support it? All this video does is put me in an awkward position between supporting what I believe in and denouncing it for hypocritically using scare tactics.

   -Ryan

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