Stuff overruns our lives, trash crusader says

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- Annie Leonard talks trash better than anyone in America.

Leonard knows trash. The force behind the viral video "The Story of Stuff" and one of Time Magazine's 2008 "Heroes of the Environment," Leonard is obsessed with what we throw away and why we have so much of it.

"My goal is to make the invisible visible and have people think more comprehensively about life," says Leonard, from the back seat of a car somewhere between Portland and Seattle, where she grew up.

Leonard, a Berkeley, Calif., resident and mother of a 10-year-old daughter, is on the road promoting her new book "The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health - and a Vision for Change." (Free Press).

"All this stuff came from somewhere. And it goes somewhere," she says. "Everyone should visit a landfill."

Leonard knows landfills, from one end of the Earth to the other. Visiting more than 30 countries over more than a decade, she's seen firsthand the effect of consumerism on the environment and human health.

Toxic chemicals are used in everything, she says, from electronics to pillowcases, without much thought given to the latent effects on humans. Compounding the problem is a relentless demand for new clothes, electronics and other consumer goods, otherwise known as "planned obsolescence." When we buy the new stuff, the old stuff goes into landfills or gets incinerated, releasing toxins into the air.

"Products are not safe," she says. "Products are made to be disposed of as fast as possible."

Leonard's 20-minute video uses cartoon stick figures ("I watched a lot of 'Schoolhouse Rock' making this") to demonstrate the linear progression of "stuff," from the extraction of resources, to the factory, to the store, to the consumer and, finally, to the landfill.

Since its release online in December 2007, the video has garnered more than 8 million hits, and she's been featured in Time, USA Today and last month on "The Colbert Report."

Her solutions to the problem aren't limited to recycling. She digs deeper, questioning the amount of usage to begin with, and posing the core question - does having more stuff really make us happier?

In addition to her firsthand experience, Leonard's expertise comes from working in Washington, D.C., for Ralph Nader and a number of environmental and consumer groups, including Greenpeace. In doing so, she's become a lightning rod for the political right.

Conservatives target her point that it's the government's job to help its people rather than cater to big business. Specifically, a line in her video - "It's the government's job to take care of us" - has critics accusing her of being a socialist, among other things.

"In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have said that," she says. "[But] I think we need government. All these corporations have shown they can't be relied upon to do the right thing."

Critics see exaggeration

Leonard gets trashed by such conservatives as Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck, among others, for what they call her anti-consumerism, anti-American stance. Bloggers accuse her of focusing only on what America consumes instead of what it produces (one of her main points: with 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. consumes 30 percent of the Earth's resources, damaging the ecosystems of other countries in the process).

Some say she exaggerates the effect of chemicals used in electronics, some of which they say are bound to the product and won't allow particles to escape into the air, and that she ignores the fact that some technological advances she accuses of being part of "planned obsolescence" (flat-screen TVs, for example) lead to products that use less energy.

But some attacks get personal, threatening violence and accusing her of "terrorizing" children with her video.

Christopher C. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Fox News that Leonard was trying to talk people "into rejecting the prosperity that will allow them to live into their 70s or likely 80s."

Her critics, she says, are missing the point.

"These crazy people who say I'm undermining the fabric of our country - it's a lack of deeper thinking," Leonard says. "I'm not anti-stuff. I want us to value the stuff we have."