The Environmental Agenda in Schools

In the early 1970s, children were reminded by Woodsy Owl to: "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute." The effective anti-littering campaign caused guilt in an entire generation of children when a foil gum wrapper was carelessly dropped on the ground. 

Littering is bad. I think most Americans can get behind that idea and agree that they don't want polluted water in their taps and toxic waste dumps in their backyards. 

At some point though, the environment was hijacked by left-wing nut jobs who place more value on a tree than on human life. As a result, even sensible ideas to protect the earth and its citizens come under intense scrutiny by skeptics and conservatives are branded as greedy, corporate-loving consumers who don't care about destroying the planet. 

Marching the liberal political agenda into public classrooms has only polarized the right and left on environmental issues. "The Story of Stuff" is an animated, self-described documentary funded by the Tides Foundation, a left-wing environmental group. This anti-American, anti-capitalist "documentary" is presented as scientific fact to impressionable children and trumpets the liberal narrative that greedy American corporations are stealing resources from third world countries and trashing the entire planet in the process. The opinions expressed in this "documentary" are often backed up by erroneous or misleading facts and have no place in our schools. (To read a transcript of The Story of Stuff go to: http://www.storyofstuff.com/pdfs/annie_leonard_footnoted_script.pdf

This is not the first time liberal environmentalists have infiltrated the educational system to indoctrinate youth and present opinion as science. The 2006 "documentary" An Inconvenient Truth about former Vice President Al Gore's global warming campaign, has been included in science curricula in schools around the world. In 2007 a group of global warming skeptics in Great Britain sued the Secretary of State for Education and Skills to prevent the screening of the film in English schools, which are legally forbidden to promote partisan political views. The judge eventually ruled that the film could be shown, but only when accompanied by an explanation of its numerous scientific errors.

Indoctrinating youth with questionable science to promote the environmental agenda has no place in our schools. "The Story of Stuff" needs to be tossed in the landfill and the Woodsy Owl campaign should be recycled.