Today's kids are seeing 'green'
They've learned about global warming from animated penguins and woolly mammoths. Are cartoons and toys turning them into stewards of the environment?
By Stephanie Hayes
Published July 9, 2007
Forget "Mommy, where do babies come from?"
These days, kids can explain how penguins kiss and make mini-penguins.
Or how the polar ice caps are melting.
Or how your SUV guzzles too much gas, Mom!
Saving the world is chic with the PB&J set. And for every environmental morsel taught in school, there's a TV show or movie with an elementary take on the natural world.
The characters are snuggly animals or audacious kids. They're happy-go-lucky -- even if global warming melts the ice, they can still hang 10 on a wave.
It's enviromania. And it's coming soon to a kid near you.
Grownups drive Toyota Priuses and watch Al Gore documentaries. Sheryl Crow tells us to wipe with one square. "Green" is the hottest buzz word since Brangelina.
No doubt, it's cool to care.
But is it weird when your kid scolds you for leaving on the lights?
Take Diego Santana, 6. He tells his mom not to litter.
"I'll say, 'where did you learn this?' " said Tanya Santana, a 41-year-old St. Petersburg crossing guard. "There's just something going on. Why does my son know about global warming?"
Kids are learning more in school. Science scores among fourth-graders have risen since 1996.
The entertainment industry is along for the ride.
Ice Age: The Meltdown is one big global warming metaphor. The animals scamper to get off the ice before their home melts.
In Over the Hedge, suburban development drives sad-eyed animals - possums, squirrels, hedgehogs, a tortoise - out of their natural habitat.
On television, there are even pint-sized animal ambassadors.
Bindi Irwin, 8, is the Crocodile Hunter's offspring and star of Bindi the Jungle Girl on Discovery Kids.
In June, she read from a global warming children's book outside the U.N. headquarters. A polar bear ice sculpture melted behind her in the sun.
"We really do have to save our oceans, " she told a bunch of students.
It's grooming for adulthood, said Alma Mintu-Wimsatt, a marketing professor at Texas A&M University and co-author of Environmental Marketing: Strategies, Practice, Theories and Research.
The flip side - kids have money to blow on junk.
"A conservation message is simply another form of product placement," she said.
Products are everywhere - Happy Meal toys. Baskin-Robbins smoothies. Build-A-Bear dolls. T-shirts. Books. Nintendo Wii games.
The Children's Place sells a tiny shirt that reads "Traveling Green." There's a picture on it, too.
A hybrid car.
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"You see, what was once mere wilderness is now 54 acres of man-made, manicured, air-conditioned paradise." -- Over the Hedge
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When Robert Ridky was young, kids went outside.
"I was a little child when Sputnik went up in the sky, said Ridky, education director at the U.S. Geological Survey in Washington D.C. "The whole nation turned out. There was that spirit of inquiry."
Today, kids see movies in air-conditioned multiplexes. They buy stuff in malls. They watch YouTube clips of nesting hummingbirds.
Technology can be good for the environment. But is digital environmentalism as good as getting your hands dirty?
"This whole consciousness of getting involved in the natural world, engaging in science, we were very good at in the post-Sputnik days, " Ridky said. "We're losing some of the thrust and interest that is absolutely vital."
National park attendance is dropping. Kids are staying inside.
"If people are spending substantially less time in nature, we're concerned that we won't be as environmentally conscious in the future, " said Oliver Pergams, a biologist who co-wrote a study tying low park attendance to increased use of electronics, such as video games.
Movies and TV shows with a green message are harmless, some say.
"Parents can't teach them everything," said Carol Wicks of Seminole, who recently brought her son Colton, 3, to Great Explorations children's museum in St. Petersburg. "We've had a lot of talk about global warming. That's going to be in their lifetime."
Green slogans on shirts are cool with Johnny Forbes, a sales associate at the Children's Place in International Plaza.
"If they don't learn now, they're never going to learn," said Forbes, 25.
He rang up the shirts and stuffed them in a bag.
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"Deep inside the jungle where nature's running wild, coming to the rescue there's a very special child. Talking to the animals and swinging from the vine, this rough and tough adventurer is working all the time." -- Go, Diego, Go
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What's a real scientist's take on the trend?
Some movies and shows deserve credit, said Ridky of the USGS.
He likes Dragonfly TV and Fetch on PBS Kids.
He praised Dinosaurs Alive, an IMAX movie that follows paleontologists as they uncover fossils.
"They have animation of these dinosaurs, but they're also looking at the fossil records," he said. "It's far more engaging from a scientific standpoint."
In the sea of penguin flicks, Ridky has a clear winner: Happy Feet.
"It told a complicated, intelligent story and this incredible journey of penguins and how they care for their young and interact," he said. "It was very captivating."
Surf's Up, a cartoon tale of surfing penguins, is a different story.
"I just found it loud and annoying," he said. "Animals are interesting to watch in their own right. They don't need to be on a surfboard."
It's not letting up any time soon.
There's a documentary about arctic bears on the horizon, and an animated film about bees making honey.
And coming in 2008: a comedy about a bear that becomes a martial arts master to save friends from a malicious snow leopard.
Kung Fu Panda.
Stephanie Hayes can be reached at (813) 893-8857 or shayes@sptimes.com.