The lies of children’s books and movies?

As an environmental studies major, I would love to think that by planting more trees we could indeed save the world. The possibility that something that easy and relatively inexpensive could stop global climate change and the associated impacts, is inviting. Yet the truth of the matter is that our world cannot be saved by just planting a tree or riding a bike or using reusable water bottles. Every human through out the history of time has helped enhance climate change and miniscule changes by the current few generations is not enough to reverse the previous impacts. It seems it should be clear that build up over thousands of generations can’t be fixed by a only a few, yet majority of people, tend to be hesitant to even make small changes let alone fight for big changes.

The article “Individualization: plant a tree, buy a bike, save the world?” by Michael Maniates suggests that this problem stems from what he calls the “individualization of responsibility”(33). This he says is what most children and adults, including myself, grew up learning due to many different factors including “the historical baggage of mainstream environmentalism…(and)the dynamic ability of capitalism to commodify dissent”(33). Though I never read the book The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, I did grow up watching movies such as Fern Gully, a movie about protecting the rainforest and the world by supporting a certain group listed at the end of the movie, and various other books involving planting flowers or trees in order to save the environment. Though I’m happy to say these actually worked to make me the environmentally aware person I am today, Maniates’s point about individualization of responsibility still applies to even me. It is so much easier to think you’re helping preserve the world by bringing reusable bags to the grocery store, but then it masks the fact that in the process of driving to the grocery store, buying cheap processed food and then driving home to consume that food. Instead of worrying about the reusable bag, we should be worrying about the lack of public transportation(33) to the grocery store most Americans have or even the impossibility of buying cheap locally grown foods due to the subsidies on large scale processed food. These are the issues which our generation needs to deal with even though they are the tough and politically charged issues most of us are afraid to go after.