I once had a girlfriend who had so much stuff in her garage that it was unsafe to enter.

If you opened the door, something might have fallen on you. If you managed to get past the solid wall of stuff that leaned against the door, you were in danger of getting trapped under a pile of debris -- perhaps never to be seen again. At the very least, you might twist your ankle stepping on something that collapsed while you tried to work your way around a column of boxes, magazines, camping equipment and God-knows-what -- there was no place to put your foot on the floor.

A few months after I met this lady, I did her a big favor. A friend and I pulled all the stuff out of her garage and I built massive shelves throughout the structure. We then put all of her stuff back on the new shelves so she could sort through it, keeping the essentials and eliminating the junk.

The process took her about a year -- that is, the process of filling her garage with even more stuff, packing all the aisles between the shelves until it was literally impossible to get inside. At that point, the garage no longer served its purpose as a catchall for the extra stuff from her house. So like an old artery on a bad diet, the house itself slowly became clogged with stuff.

Sometime during those years my stepfather died and my mother relocated to Oregon from Montana, bringing almost all of their 40 years worth of accumulated stuff with her. After a couple days of helping her unpack and set up her new house, and already frustrated by my girlfriend's endless stuff, I pointedly asked Mom why she moved all her ";junk" from Montana. She burst into tears: ";This 'junk' is my life," she said.

So I listened attentively when my friend, a researcher at a university, recently told me that he had decided to ";unstuff" -- get rid of his stuff, that is. He's near retirement age, and with grant money getting thin due to the recession he's likely to leave his post at the university soon. But what about his collection of hundreds of volumes of professional journals, his thousands of pages of field notes and proposals, his students' papers -- the documentation of his life's work?

";I'm chucking it," he said.

";All of it?"

";Almost all. I started sorting it a page at a time. Then I started chucking whole boxes of material, then whole shelves. I've moved a huge recycling bin into my office, and I'm filling it as fast as I can."

I thought of my mother, and asked him if he wasn't losing part of his identity. After all, what are we if not our reservoir of memories? Every material thing we have touched is part of our history, reminding us of who we are and where we've been.

";I am not my stuff," he said firmly. ";Getting rid of it feels great -- it's liberating. Besides, we're all going to die: I want my kids to have to deal with my body, not my body of work."

What a conundrum. There are people in other cultures who get by just fine without most of the stuff that Americans accumulate. They have lives, identities and fates, and they are honored after death.

Meanwhile, Americans are a big part of the world's stuff problem -- we want and have far too much of it and we're destroying the planet's resource bases as we mindlessly acquire more.

Yet for me, preserving the past -- both my personal records and our collective past through the accumulation of books, old maps and art -- is a noble endeavor. And who am I to judge that someone else's video-game collection, pet rock or ";plastic crap" isn't equally meaningful to them?

So if we care about the planet, we all have psychological work to do. We must sort out our emotions about our stuff, distinguish between our addiction to piling up stuff and our genuine needs, and learn when and how to let go. You might have to unstuff your mind before you can unstuff your ecological house.

Philip S. (Skip) Wenz is a freelance writer specializing in ecological design issues.

He was a general contractor, residential designer, teacher and writer in the in the San Francisco Bay Area and founded and for 10 years directed the Ecological Design Program at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture.