The Story of Stuff rebuttal, part one

Photo compliments of Miqul's photostream on Flickr

In my previous article, I cited the need for us as Christians to be better stewards of God's earth. To make my point, I included a review of an informative but admittedly biased piece analyzing the impact of our materialism. 

One of my readers suggested everyone watch a rebuttal and I said I would do a follow-up on it once I had time to review and research it. I have only been able to look at part two of four of this individual's response, but we can glean a significant amount about the validity of the point and counterpoint through extrapolation.

 In other words, which person has more valid claims and how many invalid ones are there in each? The ratio in part two, which is almost 12 minutes in length, is a significant enough sample to see just how much bias each point of view contains.

I found the following points made by the rebuttal to be very valid—to better understand them, I suggest you click on the link to the rebuttal above: 

1. The woman in The Story of Stuff uses the word synthetic as though it is inherently bad—while I accept that man is more likely to make something that is harmful to the planet (either in manufacturing, disposal, or both) than God is, this is not automatic.
2. This is related to the last point, but we don’t know the full impact of the use of natural products either, including the food we eat.
3. There is absolutely a need to weigh one danger against another, and the fact that BFR’s save an estimate of 40,000 is perhaps the most valid counterpoint.
4. BFR’s (Bromanated Flame Repellants) absolutely are better than PCB’s (Poly-Chlorinated Byphenols), which I am happy this individual recognizes as intensely harmful—I had a person I attempted to get an donation from in my environmental job claim that was all liberal media hype.
5. There is absolutely no reason this should be shown to nine year olds in classrooms—it is not appropriate for children that young. While I am unaware of this piece being used for teaching nine-year olds and doubt that is a regular occurance as he seems to imply, it probably is happening occasionally.
6. Obviously he is right about the people in third world countries moving from their impoverished homes to jobs in factories being better off, even where toxic things are produced. They choose to move there because the trade-off is good for them.
7. The use of other countries to produce goods and even the transplanting of the labour force does help those countries move from poverty. The irony here is that the woman’s point is the same claim used by the right-wing to hammer away at illegal immigration and the one used by the left-wing to hammer away at NAFTA and companies taking jobs overseas. It is sickening to see how these “ideals” are applied selectively, like how in the Terry Schiavo case, suddenly liberals were for state’s rights and conservatives for using federal government intervention.
8. Clearly, our intent is not to pollute other countries—no reasonable person thinks that, and that is where one needs to be careful about the use of rhetoric. What she should have said was that the choice is made to pollute elsewhere rather than in this country because protecting against pollution is more costly and more difficult in this country than a third-world nation.
9. He is right about the involvement of so many different cultures and religious backgrounds being beautiful in the manufacture of a radio.
10. His reversal of the process, while overstated, made the point about her overstatement and the benefits she was ignoring in one fell swoop—brilliant!
11. I have no doubt more kids in the Congo have left armies than classrooms to work mining material for our products.

In a few days, I will post the rebuttal claims that do not hold up.