A third of our world’s resources have been wiped out in the past three decades. In the U.S. less than 4% of our original forests are left—and 40% of our waterways are not unfit for drinking. And while we only have 5% of the world’s population in the U.S., we use 30% of the world’s resources—and creating 30% of the world’s waste. 80% of the plant’s forests are gone—and in the Amazon rainforest alone, we cut down 2,000 trees a minute.

And that’s only the tip of the iceburg.

If you think these statistics are disheartening at best, you are right. I just finished watching The Story of Stuff, created and narrated by Annie Leonard. This twenty-minute video is essential for any consumer—particularly anyone living in the United States—to watch.

Every day, I am asked to buy more stuff. If I pledge a boycott of a product or—gasp!—a company, I’m always met with hostility from otherwise kind people. “You have to support those jobs!” they tell me, or, “You have to support the economy!”

What about our own lives? What about our health and the health of our planet? As Leonard’s video shows, if we continue using at the rate we are right now, we will run out of resources and—well, I suppose we’ll simply die.

Please watch The Story of Stuff today. As scary as the numbers are, Leonard is very entertaining and easy to follow, and the animated drawings used to depict our bleak situation are as well. It’s essential that we know not only about the resources and animals we are depleting, but also about the people in the third world—thousands of whom have to move every day simply because we tear up their land, destroy their communities through pollution and deforestation, and make them desperate for work after we take their livelihood.

We need to realize that our purchases are not giving people jobs—they are instead allowing people to live without enough money to pay their bills, without healthcare from the employers that refuse to pay it, and keeping them in poverty. We are also keeping third world children in poverty, working in unsafe mines where they get sick and die.

From our contaminated, cancer-causing pillows to toxic breast milk, polluting factories and waste incinerators, businesses purposely making new things obsolete as soon as we buy them to governments allowing them to do so—something’s got to give. That something, of course, is us. We need to really look at our stuff and wonder, “Do I really need this?” The answer is usually no.