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Friday

22

October 2010

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 30

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Just because I don’t talk about it as much anymore doesn’t mean our collective lives are no longer in danger. The ongoing series highlighting our impending dooooooooooooooooooooooooooom continues:

Of all the questionable lessons our schools are imparting to young kids, the idea that Legos are destroying the planet might just be the most absurd.

“Riding in the car one day with his parents in Tacoma, Wash., Rafael de la Torre Batker, 9, was worried about whether it would be bad for the planet if he got a new set of Legos,” reported The New York Times in May. Where once we dispensed practical advice to children about children about consumerism, “waste not, want not” is being supplanted by the lesson that want (sic) a new toy makes children part of an apocalyptic death cult.

…the Environmental Protection Agency, in conjunction with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is now paying Leonard to produce more propaganda.

Leonard describes herself as an “unapologetic activist,” and isn’t shy about painting hyperbolic doomsday scenarios for children where corporations and consumerism end up destroying life as we know it. Such anti-capitalist radicalism doesn’t seem to concern many educators.

In Leonard’s 20 minute Story of Stuff documentary, she explains the production of consumer goods by starting with natural resources. “Extraction which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planets,” she says.

As if that weren’t bad enough, she embraces a largely discredited and radical Malthusian view regarding resource development. Leonard intones darkly that “we are running out of resources and we are using too much stuff … In the past three decades, one third of the planets natural resource base has been consumed – gone.”

Don’t let the children forget: “Doooooooooooooooooooooooomed!”