Green Screen: Did You Watch PBS Kids As A Child and End Up Majoring In Environmental Studies?...
Leo Guth | November 11, 2021
Special to The Echo | Chelsea Clough from flickr.
Zoboo, the lemur from the hit children’s show Zoboomafoo, in 2013.
...you may be entitled to some cultural analysis.
Last year while we were all quarantining watching Tiger King, I thought to myself, how the heck did I get here? Not in a grand, existential way, just academically. Here I was, on the precipice of senior year concentrating in Conservation & Society. I had taken Matt Hoffman’s Religion and Environmental Justice and Olya Milenkaya’s Conservation and Wildlife Biology, but I wasn’t really sure how these things connected. It got me wondering why I had become an Environmental Studies (ENS) major in the first place. So, I started thinking back to my beginnings.
When I was little, my parents wouldn’t let me watch Spongebob, so I had to watch Zoboomafoo instead. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Zoboomafoo was a 2001 live-action TV show on PBS Kids from Chris and Martin Kratt — you might also know them from their more recent animated series, Wild Kratts. In Zoboomafoo, the Kratt Brothers give a live Coquerel’s Sifaka lemur, Zoboomafoo (or Zoboo), a healthy snack, and then he spins around and transforms into a cheerful talking puppet version of himself while saying, “Zoboomafoooo!” Between corny jokes and musical numbers, the episodes share facts about animal behavior and anatomy while clips of baby animals play. If you’re still curious, you can still find it on VHS in Ellison library! The show doesn't really stand up by today’s standards, but to infant Leo, it rocked. Later, movies like Over The Hedge (2006) and Wall-E (2008) taught about overconsumption paletably through personified animals performing family-friendly slapstick comedy.
In my teen years, movies like Snowpiercer (2013) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), gave me a look into an apocalyptic future where environmental destruction and a draconian ruling class reigned supreme. None of these works were documentaries but all still left me wanting to learn more about the environment and humankind’s effect on it. Upon realizing this, I thought, “I’m a Conservation & Society student, why isn’t studying these works in the curriculum?” After doing a little research, I discovered that there is an entire academic discipline for analyzing the environmental themes in literature and film — Ecocriticism.
For many ENS majors at Warren Wilson, the course load mostly consists of biological sciences, political theory and pedagogy. All are important for solving present threats to the environment, but lack a critical component to gaining public engagement on these issues — the human aspect. If we, as students of conservation, fail to explore the ways that humans tell stories about our relationship to our environment, we will miss an opportunity to understand the influence the media has on society’s attitudes towards environmental stewardship. In doing so we forfeit one of our greatest tools in drawing attention to ecological problems, entertainment!
Let me give you a little background on the subject. Much like other disciplines belonging under the umbrella of Environmental Studies, Ecocriticism got its start in the 1970s. The earliest recorded use of the word was by William Rueckert in his essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” published in the University of Iowa’s literary magazine, The Iowa Review in 1978.
Rueckert defines Ecocriticism as “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.”
However, only in the 1990s did the field gain greater academic recognition when Cornell University Ph.D. student, Cheryll Glotfelty, began researching the link between environmentalism and literary analysis inspired by growing literary interest in feminist theory and African American studies. Glotfelty began writing hundreds of letters to authors of works in her bibliography, including Harold Fromm. Together they compiled those selections into The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology published in 1996 by The University of Georgia Press. Glotfelty reached out to Ann Ronald, dean at The University of Nevada, Reno and with her help, Glotfelty was granted a teaching position there and the title of professor of literature and the environment.
When I described my vision of Ecocriticism as part of the Conservation & Society curriculum to my advisor and ENS Department Chair, Liesl Erb, she said that it probably wasn’t going to happen. At least, not anytime remotely soon. Instead, she suggested that I do an independent study on it, and, with her blessing and the guidance of her spouse and science communication guru, Pete Erb, that’s just what I’m doing.
In this column, I’ll be giving you my take on some of my favorite contemporary movies, TV shows and songs that I think express important messages that influence the public’s understanding of the environment. I have to apologize to fans of Steve Irwin, David Attenborough or Al Gore, however. I won’t be covering any documentaries in this series just because well, their whole point is to educate. Instead, I’ll be going over family movies like Monsters Inc. (2001), TV satires like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and music by artists like MARINA and Arlo Guthrie, just to name a few. I hope this series will change the way you think about media and the environment, even if like me, it's too late to change your major.
