Your tax dollars at work: EPA now funding propaganda videos telling kids juiceboxes are destroying the planet
By: Mark Hemingway
Commentary Staff Writer
10/20/10 11:05 AM EDT
Of all the questionable lessons our schools are imparting to young kids, the idea that Legos are destroying the planet might just be the most absurd.
“Riding in the car one day with his parents in Tacoma, Wash., Rafael de la Torre Batker, 9, was worried about whether it would be bad for the planet if he got a new set of Legos,” reported The New York Times in May. Where once we dispensed practical advice to children about children about consumerism, “waste not, want not” is being supplanted by the lesson that want a new toy makes children part of an apocalyptic death cult.
According to the Times, Young Rafael’s class had just watched The Story of Stuff, an animated anti-capitalist diatribe by former Greenpeace employee Annie Leonard. The program, which was financed in part by left-wing Tides Foundation, is big hit among among school teachers looking to beef up their schools’ environmental curricula. Leonard claims her video has been viewed by over three million people online, and some 7,000 copies of the DVD have been sold. Another environmental group, Facing the Future, is working developing curricula designed around the program for schools in all 50 states.
What’s more, the Environmental Protection Agency, in conjunction with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is now paying Leonard to produce more propaganda. Watch this video by Lee Doren of the Competitive Enterprise Institute where he discusses what’s going on. Leonard is now producing videos with your tax dollars aimed telling at six to nine-year-olds their juiceboxes are destroying the planet:
YouTube: Annie Leonard Project Funded With Your Tax Dollars!
Leonard describes herself as an “unapologetic activist,” and isn’t shy about painting hyperbolic doomsday scenarios for children where corporations and consumerism end up destroying life as we know it. Such anti-capitalist radicalism doesn’t seem to concern many educators.
In Leonard’s 20 minute Story of Stuff documentary, she explains the production of consumer goods by starting with natural resources. “Extraction which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planets,” she says.
As if that weren’t bad enough, she embraces a largely discredited and radical Malthusian view regarding resource development. Leonard intones darkly that “we are running out of resources and we are using too much stuff … In the past three decades, one third of the planets natural resource base has been consumed – gone.” Further we live on a “finite planet” – in Leonard’s view of the world rain no longer fills up water tables, trees can’t be regrown and we no longer continue to discover new supplies of resources such as metals and fuels.
Teaching this worldview isn’t just tantamount to pushing political propaganda, it actually misinforms children about basic economics. Leonard’s story only makes sense if you discount two key principles: human innovation and pricing mechanisms. Human beings don’t completely exhaust resources because they’re constantly finding ways to do more with less — in just over 60 years we’ve gone from vacuum tubes to the transistor radios to eight-core microprocessors in personal computers. And in rare cases where a commodity actually becomes scarce, it becomes extremely valuable until new supplies of that commodity can be found.
In her recent book, The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health – and a Vision for Change, Leonard’s quite blunt about her agenda being driven by ideology rather than facts. “There’s no way around it: Capitalism, as it currently functions, is just not sustainable.”
It’s only natural when a work is thematically dishonest that the specific facts would be wrong, too. For example, right after an animation where Leonard shows a big gas can labeled “U.S. taxes” filling up a tank, Leonard explains, “After all, more than 50 percent of our federal tax money is now going to the military.” That is simply not true. The largest share of our tax money goes to entitlements such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The federal government spends more than twice as much on entitlements as they do on the military. According to Doren, Leonard appears to be getting her facts from radical left-wing groups such as the War Resisters League. (Doren has lots more videos on his YouTube channel debunking the facts behind Leonard’s specious videos.)
Other facts just don’t add up either. Leonard tells kids corporations make up 51 percent of the 100 largest economies. The actual number is significantly smaller than that and even Exxon-Mobil, the largest corporation on earth is one half of one percent the size of the U.S. economy. Elsewhere, she’s just misleading – she bemoans the fact that we only have four percent of our original forests in America, but fails to note that the country is actually more forested than it was 100 years ago now that we’re less dependent on wood as fuel.
Despite the fact that Leonard’s work is quite fairly described as dishonest, Leonard continues to rack up accolades and The Story of Stuff and her new PBS videos are likely coming to a classroom near you. Aside from the recent New York Times profile, Leonard has also been declared a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine.
“My friends often don’t believe me when I say I can spend an entire evening listening to stories about garbage and be completely mesmerized,” declared a writer at Time. “That’s because they haven’t met Annie Leonard.” Sadly, the only way one can be mesmerized by Leonard is if you’re unable to distinguish between stories about garbage and stories that are garbage.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: washingtonexaminer.com |
