This is the final chapter of this 4-part series.

This is part 3 of a 4-part series. The remaining chapter will run tomorrow.

This is part 2 of a 4-part series. The remaining chapters will run tomorrow and Friday.

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Last year, I was horrified to learn from The New York Times that Annie Leonard’s video, “The Story of Stuff” was being shown to extremely young students in schools around the country.  In case you are unfamiliar with “The Story of Stuff,” imagine compiling every environmental and Marxian economic fallacy into one video with a smiley face.  Imagine teaching students that military spending is 50% of the budget (it isn’t), that 4% of our original forests are left in America (our forests are increasing) and we are using too much “stuff” (only if you ignore trivial economic concepts like efficiency and prices, and think our prosperity must be curtailed).

Consequently, I spent about a week combing through the video’s footnotes, and subsequently created the 4-part “Story of Stuff” critique debunking the entire video.  Since that time, I have received hundreds of emails telling me that my video critiques were used to get Leonard’s video out of the classroom.  I’ve also been on Glenn Beck’s television show and CNN to discuss some of the many problems with Leonard’s work.

Recently, I learned that Leonard wrote a book version of “The Story of Stuff,” which will likely be brought into your child’s classroom as well.  As a result, I went to her book signing and challenged Annie Leonard publicly to debate me on the merits of her work at any University in the Country.  She agreed!

I’ve been in contact with her staff to schedule the debate sometime next Fall.

Above is part 1 of my 4-part critique and below you’ll find the video where she agrees to debate me at her book signing.

The critique’s remaining parts will roll out over the course of this week.

We’ll start with extraction which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation which is a fancy word for trashing the planet. What this looks like is we chop down trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals. — The Story of Stuff  

This and other ‘teachable moments’ are being brought to a classroom near you by The Story of Stuff. According to the New York Times it has been watched by over 7 million children in the US. Annie Leonard, the filmmaker, says she spent 10 years traveling the globe collecting the information contained in the 20-minute film. 

It’s hard to know where to start with Leonard. Is it the fact that she had enough “stuff” to spend 10 years on the film; or the amount of stuff she used making the film; cameras, computers, planes and cars; or the fact that everything about her life is based on the very “stuff ” she so abhors; or is it that pretty much everything she says is false. 

For now lets ignore Leonard as another spoilt idiotic Californian (whose life has been gorgeously enriched by “extraction” and who conveniently ignores that in this anti-extraction sermon) and concentrate on how a documentary that has so many factual inaccuracies is being shown to so many impressionable children by their teachers. 

Lets look at a few simple facts. 

All our buildings including our schools and Annie Leonard’s home in San Francisco are built from “stuff” that has been either mined or grown. That’s a good thing, right?  It’s important kids know this and appreciate this. 

Extracting or growing this stuff is subject to rules called laws, which exist everywhere. Leonard is particularly harsh on corporations because they are big, she fails to mention that a great thing about them being big is that they are subject to lots and lots of rules (some of the rules are silly, but no matter) and also because they are big journalists are always investigating them to make sure they don’t break the rules and that’s very good too. 

Problem is when children see Leonard’s film in the classroom they don’t get to hear about all the good things stuff does. Stuff gave my Dad a hip replacement at 91; I think that’s good. Hospitals use loads of stuff so people don’t die really young like they do in places where there’s very little stuff. Your bicycle is made of stuff and your computer is made of loads of stuff not to mention your car. Artists use lots of stuff to make other stuff that they hope someone might like, like jewelry or movies or sculpture or paintings. Lots of stuff allows us to travel much further than our bicycle will take us, it allowed 45,000 people to travel from all over the world to Copenhagen in December 2009 to campaign against other people traveling across the world. 

Stuff builds homes so people are protected from the elements and don’t die just because it rained for a week. And stuff is nice to eat. I like sushi and chicken pie and avocado, not necessarily together. People who don’t have access to enough stuff die all the time in places like Africa and that is really not good. Stuff brings water to places that would never ever, ever get water otherwise and that’s good because you can’t live without water.

Making stuff, even silly stuff gives someone somewhere a job that didn’t exist before and that allows his kids go to school and people to get all the other stuff that makes life lovely. 

So children you see stuff is great, stuff makes life bearable, beautiful, long, healthy and free. Now there’s a lesson we all need to learn. 

The Story of Stuff has been shown to seven million children in classrooms. If your children have not seen it the chances are that they will someday soon most probably on Earth Day later this month. Or they have seen that other error-ridden documentary An Inconvenient Truth. I have even heard from parents whose children have been forced to watch The Day After Tomorrow in their science class. 

Children are receiving a very unbalanced education about how their world works and parents are getting angry and demanding change. To meet that demand we have decided to make our documentary Not Evil Just Wrong free to any school that will agree to show it.  

The documentary examines Global Warming hysteria and some of the bigger flaws in Global Warming science. It also looks at how making stuff needs energy from fossil fuels and how that energy means life for billions of people across the planet.

To find out how you can help restore balance and debate to your child’s classroom go to www.balanced-ed.org.

Disney had taken miles of extraordinary footage from the long-running English nature series and condensed and shaped it into a story of sorts: mama polar bear and her cubs emerge out of hibernation in the arctic snow, with the adorable babies blinking at their first sight of the summer sun. She begins the task of teaching them to survive. Papa bear, meanwhile, or “dad” as he’s known in the narration, is off on the ice floe, trying to catch a seal for his dinner. But “global warming” is making this difficult to do as the ice is breaking up earlier than usual. Dad falls into the frigid water and begins swimming for his life. He swims and swims till he gets to Antarctica where there is an abundance of seals. But dad is too weak from all that swimming, can’t nab a seal, and lies down and dies. End of family.

Now, polar bears don’t mate; they copulate and split. “Dad” has never seen the cubs he spawned and never will. Neither is he any longer interested in mom nor she in him. It’s not a family. And “dad” is, in all probability, played by a number of polar bears from different episodes in the original series. This sad downer of a story has been cobbled together by the Disney writers to make a point: we Homo sapiens are a mortal danger to families and to our beautiful planet.

After a lucrative opening weekend, moviegoers realized that this picture was not something they wanted to take junior to see, and business fell off sharply. The movie could have made a fortune if an uplifting story had been created. Sure, nature can be treacherous and the world is often a dangerous place to live in. But that’s not the main fact of life. The main fact of life is that a gloriously beautiful and perfectly designed planet (and universe) has been created for us and for all our animal and vegetable co-inhabitants (my brother the carrot). Sunrises and sunsets are thrilling; even rainstorms and hurricanes are breathtaking. The BBC photographers captured all of this and the Disney film does show a lot of it, including the mass migration of thousands and thousands of animals. But of course, they focus in on the one baby elephant that gets separated from the herd and wanders off to starve to death. Hour upon hour of glorious footage, filmed by brilliant and intrepid photographers are turned into an agitprop picture condemning consumerism and capitalism.

“Wall-E,” a brilliant animated picture, is another example of the Disney crowd using its powerful creativity to send a message to the younger set: we are destroying the earth. “We” meaning, of course, America with its incredibly successful production of “stuff”. And like all good propaganda, it has more than a kernel of truth to it. The waste in this country is overwhelming. I don’t object to reasonable preachment in favor of conservation and against waste. What pisses me off is the fact that the cultural left is frightening the children. And they’re doing it on purpose. Polls of little kids have been taken which show that they are scared as hell that the earth will be an uninhabitable place to live in when they grow up.

There’s a video called “The Story of Stuff” being shown in classrooms around the country. It has been put together by a former Greenpeace employee and, to quote The New York Times, it “paints a picture of how American habits result in forests being felled, mountaintops being destroyed, water being polluted and people and animals being poisoned”. The filmmaker also complains that the federal government “spends too much on the military.”

Children are being frightened. It’s not enough that the cultural left is sexualizing them at an early age, it’s also making a generation of worrywarts out of them: trans-fats and second hand smoke and climate change and toxic this and toxic that. And who is strong enough to save us from all this? Only the government, of course; only Big Brother. Worriers tend to vote Democrat and the left is systematically manufacturing a generation of them. Child molesters belong in jail.