Annie Leonard’s ‘Story of Solutions’ Shows How to Create Change By Fixing a Broken System (Video)

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http://www.alternet.org/activism/annie-leonards-story-solutions-shows-how-create-change-fixing-broken-system-video



Annie Leonard’s groundbreaking video, The Story of Stuff, awakened millions of people to the repercussions of our consumer culture. Now she’s taking on an even bigger campaign—transforming our flawed economic system and calling for a new conversation about how we can create meaningful change. The Story of Solutions, the newest video from Leonard and her Story of Stuff project, encourages viewers to push for solutions that change the economy’s goal from “more” to “better.”

In the video, Leonard says: “Changing the goal of the entire economy is a huge task. Of course, we can’t do it all at once. But when we focus on game-changing solutions, we gradually make it possible for a new game to be played.”

Alyssa Figueroa: What inspired you to create The Story of Solutions?

Annie Leonard: I’ve been so surprised at the response to The Story of Stuff in terms of how many people have seen it — it’s now past 30 million views. But what’s surprised me more is the number of folks who’ve written to ask us for additional films, and by far the most requested one is The Story of Solutions. A lot of people say, “It’s nice the problem is outlined, but what can we do?”

Its been nearly six years since I released The Story of Stuff, and the reason I didn’t do The Story of Solutions right away is because there were a lot of questions that came in from people about specific aspects of what’s wrong with the economy. And there were so many questions about what they can personally do. So first we did a series of films about problems with the materials economy—about manufactured demand and toxic products and our throwaway culture—that were made in partnership with groups that had the capacity to handle tens of thousands of people coming to them to get involved. Because in the beginning it was just me and a couple other people here. We didn’t have the capacity to handle the interest, so we started working with groups to which we could direct our viewers.