Daily Score Blog

It’s the first night of the Environmental Comedy Festival, where great comics will crack jokes about the environment (and environmentalists). Sightline, meanwhile, will enjoy the satisfaction of knowing we’re helping to reconcile laughing people and nature.

And the first person to call me—Stacey—at (206) 447-1880, ext. 107 (or email at stacey@sightline.org), will get a free ticket!

Since it came out about a year ago, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's climate change documentary, seems to have pushed the issue into mainstream consciousness.

Millions saw the movie itself -- but they were largely true believers anyway. But perhaps more importantly, Gore's Academy Award has earned him a wider audience among the potentially undecided: 39.9 million TV viewers tuned in for the academy awards themselves, plus 49 million weekly viewers who saw Gore on Oprah. Heck, combined, that’s more than the total number of people who voted for George W. Bush in 2004! It’s almost as good as being on American Idol.

But, how much effect has this media blitz had on attitudes among Americans?

Sadly, it’s not as dramatic as you may think.

I first ran across Sightline's book Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things during the winter of 1997, just after it was published. I was working as an editor at a now-defunct weekly newspaper, and part of my job was to look through stacks of new books that publishers sent us and assign reviews for a handful of them.

Stuff was one of 'em. I can't remember if we reviewed it, but I do remember how intrigued I was by the book's premise--that everyday products, from your Korean-made shoes to your Columbian-grown coffee tell powerful, largely untold stories of the social and environmental impact of seemingly mundane choices.

And the book--slim at 88 pages--was packed with startling facts that told these stories. Producing a cheeseburger requires 700 gallons of water. Coffee is the world's second largest legal export commodity. Americans spend twice as much on children's athletic shoes as they do on children's books. Ten percent of the world's pesticides are used on cotton farms.

Well, a few years later, I ended up working at Sightline, so it's clear Stuff (and the organization's other work) had an impact on me. But I'm far from the only one. On the book's tenth anniversary, it's worth sharing a few tidbits of Stuff's own secret lives over the years.

Since Stuff was published, we've sold or given away some 40,000 copies. It's been turned into a musical and a high-school video documentary. Teachers and educators have used it in countless ways--including developing a curriculum around the life cycle of a sneaker. Our online curriculum for the book (on our site, pdf) has been downloaded thousands of times.

Just last week, I fielded a call from a film producer (a kinda famous one, even), who is keen on turning it into a feature film. In January, a commercial publisher wanted to update and re-release Stuff (sorry readers, we're not going to do it).

I'm not much of a gourmand, but I do love to play with food. Well, food data, anyway. So when I happened upon the Food System Factoids blog, I totally pigged out. The menu may not be for everyone, but if you have a craving for analyses of food pricing trends, or evaluations of carbon emissions from US agriculture, you'll find plenty to satisfy.

Take, for instance, this post on the relative change in prices of soft drinks and processed fats vs. fruits and veggies. The data's a bit old now, but what a story. From 1985 to 2000, the real, inflation-adjusted cost of fresh fruits and veggies went up almost 40 percent, while the costs of soft drinks went down by nearly a quarter.

Putting the numbers in context: a dollar's worth of coke in 1985 cost just over 75 cents in 2000. But a dollar's worth of apples or broccoli rose to almost $1.40.

So the incentives are pretty clear: given that median incomes didn't rise that much over that period, and poverty rates remained constant, there were quite a few folks who pretty much had no choice but to trade apples for Coke. No wonder North Americans (including Cascadians) grew so much heavier over the period.