What do we do with agency?
I’m thinking about the Captain Planet series because when I was a kid, I remember how caring about the environment was framed as something that we all could do wherever we were living. The cartoon seemed to inspire a sense of responsibility in its audience, certainly I recall taking extra care to recycle stray Gatorade bottles at soccer games or use less paper towels to clean up a mess that I otherwise might have grabbed. I wasn’t fighting any supervillains, but still felt like I was doing my part (The Power is Yours!).
Specifically related to plants, I remember going for long walks in the woods near my parents’ house. I think in early middle school, I had a phase where I wanted to know a lot of things about trees and the animals that depended on them. So you could reliably find me sitting under some tree, reading a book, or alternatively talking to them — convinced that proximity would give me some knowledge that words on a page could not. I think Captain Planet, on some level, was designed for its viewers to think of themselves as stewards of the natural world. We might not have special powers, but we could pick up some garbage or spend some time outdoors.
Especially as a child in the late 90s and early 2000s, plants and the natural world were often framed as “resources” to be consumed, much different than the conflict we see playing out now between multinational corporations and Western governments vs a largely unified scientific community and environmentalists over the future of the planet. Captain Planet is a bit nostalgic then, as it made environmental concerns seem cool and something to which any kid had agency over. How would we adapt Captain Planet to today’s audiences of young people in a world where it feels like we need international structural change, moving away from worrying about individual kids throwing away plastic bottles?
