Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome.
What's on TV tonight?
cartoons better keep the kids away.
A recent conservative survey says children's environmental cartoons are giving the wrong
message.
One producer says no.
Yellowstone National Park is big, but it's way too small.
Ecologists say we need to think big, really big, vision mapping.
And in nature, everything is used in one way or another.
Only we human beings were capable of making biocons, having mepples, nuclear residues.
You know, no one wants it.
No one wants it in their backyard, no one wants it in their front yard, no one wants
it.
Zero emissions manufacturing to the rescue.
The Environment Show, a national production, made possible by Heming's MotorNews, the
monthly Bible of the Old Car Hobby, 1-800-CAR-H-E-R-E.
This is Bruce Robertson.
Sex, drugs, violence, and now environmental issues.
These are the reasons we need to keep informed about the television programming our children
are watching.
This according to John Shean, Executive Director of the Washington DC-based Center for Media
and Public Affairs.
She and says children simply are getting the wrong message about environmental issues.
We found that doom and gloom prevailed the environmental world of cartoons and viewers
are warned of the looming crisis which requires swift intervention to save the planet from
destruction.
And we found that cartoons tell the kids about problems.
The Captain Planet is an unashamed propagandist for environmental activism.
And this series aims to educate, motivate, mobilize children with an approach that at
times resembles direct mail.
Evil forces are threatening our way of life and doom is imminent.
Nine out of ten environmental plotlines invoke images of pessimism and destruction, yet
despite all the doom and gloom cartoons endorse the importance of individual change and
collective action for solving the problems.
What is more says she and the positive messages are also giving the wrong impression.
All problems are presented as having a solution if only we work hard at finding it.
And all scientists and business leaders, regardless of their work, are portrayed as the so-called
bad guys.
Serious charges.
Nick Boxer is Executive Producer of the series Captain Planet and the Planetirs, now known
as the new adventures of Captain Planet.
My response is that our shows are research we consult with experts on a regular basis.
We try and stay in touch with the most recent research and literature.
And we try and do a balanced interpretation of the issue in a story format that kids will
understand and can learn from.
As you begin crafting a storyline or a season's worth of stories, how would you characterize
your goal if you are heading toward a message or a theme that you are trying to develop?
How do you approach that?
Well, the real focus of the series is number one to empower children to let them know
they are going to inherit this planet and that they can shape in a sort of its destiny.
So it is most important for us that we empower kids.
And then number two, we want to inform them about environmental trends, themes, just so
they grow up with what I consider a more balanced view of their relationship to the environment.
She and says scientists and business leaders are always portrayed as the worst characters.
Boxer says absolutely untrue.
I mean, I can tell you we did a show called Bottom Line Green in which a villain is trying
to sabotage a company and a businessman who is installing environmentally friendly technology
to update his factory to recycle chemicals and things like that.
We did a show on mass transportation in which a business plan is putting together a mass
transportation program in a Latin American country that is environmentally correct and
you know, it is a positive character.
We actually have dozens of positive role models for scientists and business people.
I think what they may be looking at is the villains who are in fact really not intended
in most cases to represent businessmen or scientists but really to represent the problem
themselves.
I mean, we have a character, for example, named Haggis Greedley.
And Haggis Greedley is not like a real person.
He's sort of a super villain.
He represents the problem.
He represents over consumption.
He represents waste of resources.
So he's more allegorical than literal.
Other characters likewise are named Luton Plunder and Sly Sludge.
Sheen says the point is, no matter what the characters are called, it's the message
the children are getting that is the problem.
Cartoon rarely educates the kids to the difficult choices that underlie most environmental
controversies.
For example, programs fail to explore real life trade-offs between human needs and environmental
conservation.
The end result may be that they see problems, or they think that problems like pollution
and solid waste and air can be solved without some sacrifice because there are some
plistic solutions that are offered and not a realistic.
There are trade-offs.
There are things that we have to give up.
And there are sacrifice have to be made to solve these problems.
Just simply recycling our cans is not going to completely solve the solid waste problem.
Again, Nick Boxer.
We are sometimes accused of being one-sided.
And one of the things I refute that with is, I think society is one-sided.
We do not present to children the impact we have on the environment.
That is not something you grow up and are taught about.
For example, no one says to a child,
see this door, see this desk, see this newspaper, see the framing of your house, see the wood
floors in your house.
All these things mean the trees were cut down.
See this baseball bat, see these wood blocks, see these pencils, all these things mean
the trees were cut down.
Which is not to say there is anything wrong with cutting down trees.
I am simply saying that we should have as a society an understanding of how we are using
our resources.
Nick Boxer is executive producer of the syndicated cartoon series The New Adventures of Captain
Planet.
Now in its sixth season, produced by Turner Broadcasting, we spoke to him in Los Angeles.
John Shean is executive director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs.
His television viewing was conducted earlier this spring.
She incursions children and parents not to think of cartoons as news.
To which Boxer counters by saying, unabashedly, we are an environmental program.
This is Bruce Robertson.
The Bigger the Better.
In the days of John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt and the great conservationists of the 19th century,
it was a radical idea to mark off huge tracks of land on a map as designated wilderness
areas.
Yellowstone, the grand titans, the Grand Canyon.
Modern conservationists say, while this system worked for its time, we need a new radical
idea.
Bill McKibben, author of the landmark book The End of Nature and Other Works, says we
need to think big, really big.
Doug Freilich tried it and filed this report.
Author Bill McKibben says the old methods of land conservation are not working.
We are running out of steam.
On the one hand, they are becoming politically more difficult all the time, as try to deal
with more settled areas, the old approaches of parks and things get more difficult.
And on the other hand, we begin to understand that even those park systems and things weren't
big enough and complete enough in many ways.
As we move into the 21st century, a new style of wilderness protection is emerging, reflecting
the wisdom of conservation biology.
The central idea being, bigger is better.
Conservation biologists use vision mapping to create huge tracks of protected wilderness.
26 million acres of northern forest to New England, 20 million acres in the northern
Rockies.
McKibben says this new thinking is transforming the conservation movement.
Well, it's driven mostly by science, I think.
The emerging conservation biology, which is kind of the science that drives it, is a fairly
new science and an emerging one.
We are only beginning to understand just how important large size of reserves, for instance,
is to protect wild species.
And given those large sizes that are required, it becomes necessary to ask how we are going
to have human beings and animals interact in the same places.
And that's why so much of what's going on is more creative than the old Yellowstone model
to identify a pretty place and put a fence around it.
Jamie Sion was one of the first to propose a vision mapping plan.
Now editor of the northern forest forum, a bi-monthly journal of the northern Appalachians,
Sion says the idea of vision mapping came to him in well in a vision.
1987 I was hiking along the Appalachian Trail in the White Mountain National Forest, and
I was asking myself the question, why is it that all the wilderness has to be out west
in the Rockies and places like that?
Why can't we have some big wilderness in the east?
And I got to thinking about the Appalachian Trail connecting Mount Katadon in the northern
regions of Maine with Springer Mountain in Northern Georgia.
This is one continuous trail, over 2,000 miles long.
Well, if we widen the trail, that carter of the Appalachian Trail to 3 or 4 or 5 miles wide,
and then connected wilderness reserves up and down that chain into the carter, the Appalachian
Trail carter, in other words, take a reserve that may be 20 miles away from the Appalachian
Trail and build a connecting carter to it.
We could effectively create a continuous wilderness reserve system that went from Maine down
to Georgia and hopefully even into Florida.
And that in theory, a wolf or a poover could hike from Maine to Florida now in practice
that probably wouldn't happen.
But there could be this kind of genetic exchange and just big wild areas.
At first, science proposals were not widely received.
Recently it seems conservationists are realizing the critical value of science' new wildland
ethic.
Sensing this change, he recently unveiled a proposal to establish an 8 million acre network of
wilderness reserves in northern Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
He says the network would not likely be complete for 75 years, clearly a long-range plan that
would make wise use of vision mapping.
Even though conservation biologists may be coming around to this method, the question
is, will a conservative political and economic climate support this type of proposal?
History is rarely predictable, says Sion, citing the abolition of slavery as one example
of a changing society.
In the 1780s, people were considered toots without in the 1840s they were considered toots.
As late as 1857, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the absolute right of the slave owner.
And yet slavery was gone by the middle of the 1860s.
It happened very fast.
On the other hand, a very abrupt, I mean, it was a long process with a very abrupt finale.
Another process that is much more recent is the collapse of the iron curtain and the Berlin
wall and communism and the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union.
Are there any political experts in the CIA or in the US government or anywhere else who
would have predicted a year before the Berlin wall came down that this was going to happen?
And yet it happened.
So just because we've got a colossally ignorant, colossally hostile to the environment,
Congress today doesn't mean that we will tomorrow or ten years from now.
Sion says it was relatively easy to set aside the Yellowstone parks and the Grand Canyons
of the Nation as wilderness.
There are scenic treasures and at the time, we're of little commercial value.
Sion says now we need a new conservation ethic, a strategy that is orders of magnitude greater
than anything we employ now.
As valuable as Yellowstone is, says Sion, so too is our own backyard.
For most of us, he says this may be difficult to conceive, requiring too rapid a change
of attitude.
But says Sion, father of four and a half year old, Brooke, the hope is with the next generation.
When we're born, and as I say, I have a four and a half month old son, so I'm going through
this right now.
It's very exciting and wonderful time in my life.
And when we're born, as Brooke is showing me, we have that connection with the natural
world, born in us, that delight in his space when I first showed a very small, wonderful,
and a very small stream about a mile from our house.
It's inexpressible to joy that burst over his face.
It was something new and different, but it was natural and wonderful, and it was so exciting
to him.
And I think the tragedy that I suffered and that most people suffer, as they grow over,
is that society basically severs that inborn connection with the natural world.
So one of the things I'm going to work hardest with raising Brooke is to see that that connection
that is there that was born with him doesn't get severed.
I'm not going to try to make him connect.
I'm just going to try to protect him from forces that would sever that connection.
If he and his generation grow up with that connection intact, much of the stuff that's
taken for granted by our nature is strange.
Culture.
Striking is nonsense.
Much the way the culture of slavery seems so natural to people growing up in the 1820s,
and it seems utterly absurd and alien and deeply offensive to people growing up today.
This is Doug Freilich.
Yet to come, the coming of the new industrial age, for a cassette copy of today's broadcast,
call 1-800-747-74-44, ask for the Environment Show, Program Number 297, that's 1-800-747-74-44,
the Environment Show, Program Number 297.
He who finishes with no toys wins, the object being to end up with nothing.
This is the idea behind Zero Emissions Manufacturing, a technique slowly gaining popularity.
Industrialist Guinter Pauli was the first to experiment with Zero Emissions when he
established the world's first ecological factory, manufacturing soap detergent in Europe.
Today, Pauli is a special adviser to the Tokyo-based United Nations University.
Pauli says we are entering the next industrial revolution, one characterized by this concept
of Zero Emissions.
It's the blend between the impatience of the entrepreneur and the depth of the scientist.
It is the desire to find breakthrough solutions to industrial problems, and it really is about
imagining that new type of industry were waste as nothing exists.
Because we are supposed to be the intelligent species on Earth, but we are the only ones
on Earth that make products no one wants.
I mean, in nature, everything which is waste for one is food for someone else.
Only we human beings were capable of making dioxins, heavy metals, nuclear residues, no one
wants it.
No one wants it in their backyard, no one wants it in their front yard, no one wants it.
So we have to really see how can we mimic industry, how can we mimic nature, and as such
have a new paradigm for how industry can function.
The supporting theory behind Zero Emissions is in turn based on fundamental business practices,
reduce your waste and loss, and you increase your profits.
Today, Pauli is heading up an academic research team from the United Nations University,
interested in establishing a Zero Emissions Research Institute somewhere in the United States.
The Zero Emissions Research Institute, or Ziri, as it would be called, would start from
the University Home Base in Tokyo.
Well, it would function like a virtual university, a virtual research network.
I mean, we have these incredible opportunities offered to us on the information highway.
In Tokyo at this moment already, on one particular program for converting all the way from the
beer brewery into inputs for other industries, we have 210 researchers full time assisting
us in the development of that over the internet.
We only have six people full time.
So what we're looking at is creating a permanent information highway hub.
A center where electronically we can get all the information together, and once we have designed
those total solutions, how we can spread it out again to the world and particularly to industry,
so they can integrate it practically.
So what we're looking at for the United States or for the world, actually, is to have a base
in the United States.
And why in the United States?
Well, in the first place because the United States from an industrial point of view is still the leader.
And if you as industry is embracing this and backing this up, we're very convinced that actually
industry all around the world will fall over as soon.
Paulian, his team, have not only decided the facility should be located in the United States,
they further believe one site in particular would be more suitable.
Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Paulian says the city and the region are particularly well suited for the ziri.
And what to me is very critical is that first of all, Chattanooga is this hub around
very critical research centers.
I mean, the best research centers you will find, not just in America, but you will find in the world.
You have Oak Ridge, you have Georgia Tech, you have Muscle Shows, you have Tuluhaso,
you have Vanderbilt University, you have University of Tennessee, you have a real stronghold
of research capabilities which are topped by Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
And therefore we believe we have an enormous access to research capabilities.
And second, you have this unique opportunity that these research that can be developed on ziri
missions finds a business community around Chattanooga, which is really ready to be a living
laboratory on what ziri missions means in terms of competitiveness, new industries,
new type of manufacturing jobs, etc.
And I think this mixture of the research capabilities on one hand and second, this opportunity
to put these ideas into practice in this living laboratory.
I think that is really what is attracting us in a very unique way.
Pauli cites one example of zero emissions.
Firmamentation, he says, is a basic process in the food industry.
Beer, vinegar and soy sauce are typical examples of fermentation.
While producing the product you want, fermentation also generates a lot of waste that is otherwise unusable.
Pauli says this waste is a waste.
But we have done as we looked at old outputs, point for point,
that for example, a beer brewery or a soy a manufacturing or a vinegar manufacturing unit is generating.
And we ask the question, who can do something with that waste?
For example, spend grain, which is the residue of the barley after we have brewed the beer.
Spent grain is 70% fiber and about 16 to 20% protein.
Now today that is given either to the cow or it's insinurated and in some cases even it's just landfills.
And we said this cannot be done.
What can we do then?
Well, we look very practically.
What is the most efficient way of using this?
We found out through our tiny scientists that for example you can grow mushrooms on this.
If you grow the mushroom, the fiber is then converted into a carbohydrate,
which is very easy to digest by cattle and makes very good food.
And the protein can be extracted by an earthworm.
And the earthworm does this on its own.
It don't have to add any energy.
And then the earthworm becomes an excellent concentrated protein which then be given to chicken.
This is just to give you the first part of the cycle.
We do that in every single step.
Just considering this brewery process, Pauli says the end result is a product that is seven times more nutritious for humans than the original product alone, beer.
In addition, four times as many jobs are generated in the process.
And this is just from one product.
Closer scrutiny of all of our processes will show that zero emissions can be applied with similar results.
Pauli says response to zero emissions manufacturing from industry so far has been tremendous.
In Japan, 80% of the operating research funds at the university comes from the private sector, that is industry kicking in the money.
In the United States, Pauli says the idea is catching on with DuPont,
one of the first to commit to zero emissions.
At DuPont headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, employees wear buttons that say, ask me about zero.
Pauli says with proper direction and channeling the race to the bottom to zero to achieve nothing could well become the most competitive of business grambles, who can achieve the most with the least.
Ziri, the Zero Emission Research Institute, to be located in Chattanooga, will be the force channeling and enabling this race to start.
Guntr Pauli, a noted industrial theorist, and now with the United Nations University, is counting on this happening.
This is Bruce Robertson.
Well, that's a report on the Environment Show for this weekend.
We're certainly glad you joined us, make a note tuning again next week for more news on the environment.
The Environment Show program about the environment, the air, water, soil, wildlife, and people of our common habitat.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for its content.
Dr. Alan Shartuck, executive producer, this is Bruce Robertson.
The Environment Show made possible by Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of the Old Car Hobby, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0