About a month ago, a friend of mine at work told me to check out this video online. He said it was both funny and so true at the same time. The video is about twenty minutes long and is done in flash. The subject is an overview of the materials economy. The video deals with where we get material to create products we use daily and where these items go when we're done with them. More than that Annie Leonard, who hosts the video, breaks it all down from extraction, production, distribution, consumption and finally disposal.
Feed The Arrow is the name that evolved as my friend was walking past me at Home Depot one day and saw a customer eyeballing some tool that was on sale. The tool in question was an item that Home Depot got in a transaction known as a host buy. Host buy means that the producer of the item wants Home Depot to market it and is willing to either give, at no cost, a quantity of the item or sell the item on the condition that any unsold units will be bought back. Home Depot has nothing to lose.
So in the video Annie talks in depth about 'The Golden Arrow' which is the heart of the system. She explains how the arrow is the one thing that has to keep moving so that money can be made. As a society we symbolically pay homage to the Golden Arrow as we go about our daily lives, not even aware how embedded the Arrow has become in our lives.
My friend dubbed this blind faith to consumerism 'Feed The Arrow' and it stuck with us as a running joke every time we saw the system in action at Home Depot. The system is real folks and it works with or without your knowledge or consent. Watch this fabulous video and you will understand more what I'm babbling about here.
This topic and the associated running joke of a title was the subject of my next podcast. It still will be a podcast but the amount of time it's taking to do research and compile information as well as produce the creative content I want to use is taking far longer than I had hoped. I had listed this podcast as 'In The Studio' on the podcast page of this site. It's titled Podcast 5 but is now being pushed out as I have other things I want to podcast about in the meantime.
I'll be changing the podcast page to reflect this sometime later today. It would give those of you who download my podcasts a far better insight as to what I'm discussing in Feed The Arrow if you have seen this video by Annie Leonard.Labels: Ecology, Home Depot, News |
