The Monkey Wrench Gang ( 1975 ), as the inspiration for their movement .
Tracing the non-violent ideas of Naess ' s Deep Ecology through the various iterations shows a clear trend in radicalization of the environmental movement . The ones who were too radical for the Sierra Club left for Greenpeace . Those who were too radical for Greenpeace started Earth First !, and those who were too radical for Earth First ! left to found ELF . Methodically , the environmental movement radicalized through the belief that the previous group was less effective than the new group .
Which leads to the cartoon , Captain Planet , an environmentally conscious children ' s television program which ran for 113 episodes in the mid 1990s . Captain Planet originated during this radicalization of the environmental movement , and the messages delivered are explicitly radical in their scope . Each week a different environmental issue was explored in a thirty minute Saturday morning cartoon . The show was extremely popular , and the characters represented children of different ethnicities , so there was widespread appeal across many diverse viewing demographics . The TV show eventually launched a children ' s environmental non-profit which still exists today .
How does the show markets and explains environmentalism to children ? What type of environmentalism does the show teach ? The non-profit website uses the terms preservation , conservation , and sustainability interchangeably , yet major differences separate these ideas . Moreover , the episodes often show the Planeteer children fighting against corporate greed
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