Captain Planet and the Planeteers: Kids, Environmental Crisis, and Competing Narratives of the New World Order

Abstract

The environmental crisis is presented as a contested cultural discourse with conflicting social and political narratives pervasively targeted at children. Textual analysis of an environmental cartoon, and interviews with the cartoon's producers and child viewers, are used to deconstruct popular themes being transmitted to children in the name of “saving the planet”. The cartoon is critiqued as representing and promoting a liberal environmental paradox espousing: a simultaneous call for children to both conserve and consume; a diffusion of responsibility that supports the notion of environmental crisis as everybody's fault; simplistic, individualistic solutions to complex corporate and bureaucratic problems. Narratives of nature as a social actor are proposed as rhetorical and epistemological alternatives for the recreation of children's social, political, and environmental awareness.