I have watched an anti-consumption propaganda video called “the story of stuff”. In this video Annie Leonard’s tells a story about where stuffs come from and where they go after we have consumed them. The main reason behind the video seems to be to make people aware of the effect of consumption.

I agree with Annie that we can’t go on like we do to day, but I don’t agree with her on how to fix things. The video and Annie tells us to consume less, and that argument is used by many environmental-fundamentalists and by the political left wing. But I think that is a wrong way to attack the problem.
The problem is not the mechanism of the market-economy and the solution is not to make people stop consume or to forbid counties and companies to trade. That would only shrink the world-economy and make people poorer. Few would accept that.

The challenge is to make the production sustainable and many steps are taken in that direction, for example the Kyoto-protocol. The technological development should be one of the reasons why we don’t need to go back to stone age to save the planet.