Stuff

We watched The Story of Stuff in my Life Management class today. If you haven't watched it yet, I encourage you to click the link and check it out. It's about 20 minutes long, but very fast paced and really interesting. It discusses how our materialistic world got started and how it's affecting our Earth.

This got me thinking. I have geek lust for the new Kindle 2. It's an electronic device that's about the size of a piece of paper, and the thickness of a pencil. It's a method of reading ebooks, newspapers, newsfeeds, etc. But my question is, which is worse for our environment, paper books, or electronic devices like the Kindle? On one hand, trees have to be chopped down to make the paper for old school, printed books. On the other, how many resources are used to make disposable plastic and silicone-based electronic devices?

Something that really stressed me out about this video is that 99% of the things we buy are thrown away within 6 months, because of planned and perceived obsolescence.

Just something to think about today.