For more than fifty years, Corporate America and its PR firms have worked really hard to brand environmentalists alternately as dangerous radicals or silly idealists, rubes who romanticize farming and yearn for that most ridiculous goal, pristine nature.
The idea of the Provice of Christinas is this idea that everyone who is arguing to protect human health, who is arguing to protect people's water supplies, the quality of their air, is really only focused on protecting protecting Christine places for their view, for the enjoyment of select number of people.
That's Carol Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. In our series with Earther last year, the ABC's of Big Oil, about the fossil fuel industry's influence in schools, Carol walked us through a presentation he unearthed that laid out the importance of shaping the public's opinions about the oil industry and about environmental issues.
This is at the heart of the industry's efforts to paint environmentalists as a special interest. And you know, those efforts were for a long time, very very effective. But the industry was really effective at presenting all of them as just environmentalists who were bunny hunters, who were concerned about trees and monnies and didn't care about people at all.
Reporter Katie Worth, author of the new book Miseducation, brought us some incredible tape of a fossil fuel lobbyist speaking to a middle school class in Arkansas trotting out this exact same idea is utilized.
The most important thing here is being healthier, wealthier, happier, living longer, or is pristine nature more important? Building new houses, stop getting step out of the ground, want to leading exactly as it is, because that would be difficult.
The idea that environmentalists just care about polar bears and trees wasn't all the industry's fault. Of course, there has always been certain factions of the environmental and climate movements who do a better job of advocating for polar bears than people. But what the industry's education and marketing campaigns pulled off was framing these two things, humans and nature, as somehow always separate and mutually exclusive. You can't possibly
care about people if you care about polar bears. You can't possibly care about the poor if you think trees are cool. Obviously none of that is true. You can care about both human communities and polar bear just fine. This idea that people in nature are separate, or that it's shameful in some way to care about nature is one that climate organizers would do well to reject. Here's a jibwe attorney and climate activist Tara Hauska.
I think the climate movement does itself a huge disservice by even trying to condition themselves or allow their conditioning to continue, that we are somehow separate from nature, that nature can be summed up in statistical data and analysis, and that we are hard knows, you know. Here's the solutions.
There are tons of examples of ads and campaigns that underscore the framing of the silly, unrealistic, elitist environmentalist. Today, we're going to look at one that I uncovered recently and just can't stop thinking about. It's one of the records produced as part of the Standard School Broadcast, which started in nineteen twenty eight and continued for decades, eventually
becoming the Chevron School Broadcast. This installment, in particular is about the Industrial Revolution and introduces an obnoxious counter to the Progress and Innovation of Industrialists, Ms Scratch, the Environmentalist and consumer Advocate. This album came out in nineteen seventy two, so a few years after Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader started to make the issues of public health and environmental
conservation a big deal. It would have played in hundreds of schools throughout the Western United States throughout the seventies. In a series of vignettes, a baritone captain of industry regales listeners with tales of all the amazing innovations that American industry has gifted the world. And then here comes Miss Scratch, shrill and lecturing to rain on the parade. It's so similar to how environmentalists are still depicted today that I think it's worth a closer book that's coming
up right after this quick break. So most of this record is one long skit, and the basic premise is that a businessman has been asked by his boss to give a thorough accounting of America's contributions to global industry. He starts with the a's agriculture.
Right without mechanized agriculture, There's some doubt that the Middle West could ever have been opened up without slavery. That is, indeed, the reaper may have served the cause of abolition. And throughout the years, our vast agricultural expansion hasn't benefited the United States alone.
For example, right after.
World Wars one and two, US agriculture virtually kept Europe alive.
And you, miss Scratch, you've heard all of these benefits of mechanized agriculture. Have you anything to say against this remarkable achievement?
Yes I have.
Look there, please the entry for nineteen thirty four, look across the plains and see Oklahoma blowing away, the dust bowl worked to death and left to blow away, or this entry more recent.
Follow me down this country road.
The farm on the left belongs to a man whose grandfather homesteaded the land back in the eighteen fifties. There's the house right next to the pepper tree, a nice big verandah and a screen door to bang when kids run through. But there on the veranda porch a hand lettered sign farm for sale. Why are they selling? They can't compete against the big farm combines with their costly equipment and corporate management and all the rest. And where are they going to the cities where they will melt?
In with the other dispossessed and never feel at home again. As long as they live where, they'll forget the seasons and the soil, and forget that things are born new in their season and die in their season, and that this is the way life should be. They'll forget, but worse, their children will never know.
Really, Miss Scratch, I think your romanticizing life on a farm.
Life on a farm is a hard life.
And life in a city is an easy life.
Yes, well, let's move on.
Ugh.
Miss Scratch is the worst. Her voice is annoying. She's both naive and condescending, and the big booming voices of the men who know things get to sort of end her rant with an eye roll and a move on. Next up, airplanes and air travel. The businessman mister Merritt bit on the nose there anyway. Mister Merritt talks about the amazing innovation of flight and how air travel opens
up the world and improves relations between different peoples. Then Miss Scratch comes in like a wet blanket to point out that planes are used for war and that back home in America they're noisy and polluting.
The air jets are fouling, the air and assaulting our ears with noise, and it's contributing to the acceleration of our lives so that we think we've got to get everywhere.
In a hurry.
She is Queen Buzzkill. What this little skit also does throughout is underscore the idea that there are two sides to every story, and that there are always trade offs between progress and nature. Even the characters' names kind of underscore this, this idea that there always has to be this quote unquote balance between the two sides. Mss Scratch and mister Merritt with him tallying up all the good things that industry has brought and her pointing out the downsides.
When we get to automotive, it really jumps out.
The automobile is an incredible convenience to the average American in his everyday life. For parents getting to work, running down to the store, picking up the kids, and for the kids themselves, going on vacation trips, going on dates. Almost everything we Americans do involves the automobile in some way. Don't forget that most of us took a quick ride in a car on our way to being born.
Miss Scratch. Anything on the debit side, for the automotive industry.
Mister Merritt reminds us that most of us took a quick ride in a car on our way to being born. May I remind you that many of us will take a quick ride in a.
Car to our death.
More than fifty five thousand deaths each year in automobile crashes. It's true that horses used to kick their owners in the shins now, and then what fifty five thousand deaths?
Anything further?
Miss, scratch you bet.
Automobiles contribute their pollutants to our air. Air that's getting so foul it threatens to choke the life of our cities. Ugly concrete scars striped across our land, mountains sliced, and meadows defiled for highways and freeways so that people can go tearing mindlessly from one place to another. And then on our vacation we get in our car and drive a long way to reach those beautiful places we'd probably still have all around us if we'd never even had the automobile.
Anything further, Well.
None of this mentions the fact that mister Merritt's average family is burdened down by car payments, upkeep insurance.
Well as far as that goes.
The automotive industry itself contributes to millions of paychecks. It's provided employment that has helped to build our economy and consumer economy with the highest standard of living in the world.
Every house with its share of worthless.
Junks, every family freed from grudgery, junk.
That wears out as soon as possible, so they have to go out and buy another one or two.
Time for recreation, time.
Spent sitting at a baseball game or a football game, or in front of the television set, a nation full of.
Spectation time for the family.
Six hundred thousand divorces.
Every time, friend and enjoying life.
More than twenty thousand suicides.
A year, Miss Scratch. Would you give up your automobile? Would you give up your standard of living? Would you prefer to live like an Australian aborigine without even a vessel to carry water in and a lifespan of thirty years?
That last bit is the exact talking point that still gets lobbed at climate activists today. Do you want to give up your car, or your iPhone or your computer? If not, better not say a word about climate change, or you're just a hypocrite. Seems to me it's time to rethink what it means to be an environmentalist or a climate activist, to reject the framing of the fossil fuel industry, to stop reacting to that frame and instead define it for ourselves. In fact, reframing that identity might
even be part of a larger climate solution. Here's Tarahawska again.
That connectivity that needs to happen. It needs to happen between every human being and nature. I think we'd be a lot further along in that conversation if we were accepting of that as a solution and also creating space for it to really be heard.
That's it for this time. Thanks as always for listening. I'm in the process of digitizing a whole bunch of the standard school broadcast records and I will make those available online in the coming weeks at drillednews dot com, so keep an eye out for that. Big thanks to this week's new Patreon supporters, Simon Bennett and mar Sell Boma. If you'd like to support our work, please check out Patreon dot com slash drilled. You'll get access to add
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