FernGully’s Eco-Propaganda Returns

A mazon has just announced a live-action remake of FernGully: The Last Rainforest, and the producers couldn’t be more excited to bring this tale of eco-moralism to a new generation. “Our goal,” producer Jon Sheinberg declared, is “to honor a timeless classic and extend its powerful themes.” Those powerful themes, in case you’ve forgotten, are that loggers are destroyers, industry is evil, and the natural world exists in perfect harmony — that is, until humans ruin it.

For the uninitiated: FernGully follows Crysta, a fairy living in an idyllic Australian rainforest, who accidentally shrinks a logger to fairy size. He soon learns the error of his ways, but the real villain is Hexxus — a sludgy, seductive pollution demon literally summoned from the earth by a logging machine. (Industry doesn’t just damage nature in FernGully. It releases evil itself.)

Good art conveys its message with subtext. FernGully is the equivalent of a flashing neon billboard with a single message: Those who want to use resources, build structures, or develop land are evil.

That’s not art. It’s shameless propaganda.

If Amazon’s decision to resurrect the tale is any indication, Hollywood’s appetite to produce such propaganda is relentless. FernGully is just a single entry in a long and remarkably consistent genre of children’s entertainment with a single, ideological message: Builders are villains. In the 2012 movie adaptation of The Lorax, the Once-ler industrializes an ecosystem into oblivion for profit, while a corporate villain named O’Hare sells bottled air to a polluted town. In Avatar — essentially a big-budget, live-action FernGully — an American mining company destroys an indigenous alien ecosystem for a mineral called “unobtanium.” How subtle.

But there’s an inconvenient truth for Hollywood embedded in these stories. The builders and doers it portrays as villains are actually not the bad guys.

Maybe in the 1970s, when rivers caught fire and smog choked American cities, the developers-as-villains narrative was grounded in a semblance of reality. Today, it isn’t. Emissions of America’s top air pollutants have fallen 78 percent since 1970, while the U.S. economy grew more than 320 percent. New cars are 99 percent cleaner than they were 50 years ago. The bald eagle had just 417 breeding pairs in 1963. Today there are 316,700 eagles in the Lower 48 alone. Boston’s Charles River, deemed un-swimmable since the 1950s, was declared safe for swimming again in 2013. And earlier this month, the New York State Department of Health announced that for the first time in a half century, it’s safe to eat “some fish” from the Lower Hudson River.

Our environmental success has been driven by a mixture of innovation, stringent environmental standards, and economic growth. Innovation delivered cleaner methods of industrial production, lower-emissions energy generation like solar and nuclear, and incredible fuel efficiency in passenger vehicles. American environmental regulations — while often overzealous — nonetheless curb the most wanton environmental abuses, including limiting particulate matter in the atmosphere and ending the discharge of pollution in waterways. And, as the landmark Grossman and Krueger study showed, after early stages of industrialization, economic growth correlates with a cleaner environment by enabling the exact clean-energy innovations and stronger pollution regulations at the heart of environmental cleanliness.

Long story short, America’s environment improved precisely as our economy grew. For those who see the world through the simplistic FernGully lens, that doesn’t make sense. But it’s easy to see what happened: American industry — subject to American environmental standards and buttressed by American innovation — got cleaner as it got bigger. Economic growth is the best environmental medicine, creating the funding and scale necessary for robust environmental innovations.

That means the villains aren’t loggers, or factories, or miners, or manufacturers. If anything, they produce products cleaner than almost all of their foreign counterparts. Today’s real environmental destroyer is not capitalism or development at all. It’s China.

China generates more than 60 percent of its electricity from coal and emits more greenhouse gases than the entire developed world combined. Chinese manufacturing operates under environmental standards that would be illegal in the United States. Every factory that leaves America for China doesn’t reduce pollution — it exports it.

With that in mind, the world’s real-life Hexxus isn’t a logging company. It’s a state-owned, communist behemoth that belches pollution into the air, empties trash into the ocean, and dumps waste into waterways.

Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with children’s films having messages. The best ones do. But the message matters. For decades now, Hollywood has told children that human ambition, initiative, and innovation are inherently destructive and that the natural world is something that must be preserved at all costs.

How about this instead: Teach children that using their creativity, industry, and drive to improve the world around them is not only good for themselves and others, but good for the world, too. Teach them that using the gifts of nature to build something is not destruction; it’s civilization. Not only will this message replace green guilt with initiative and hope, but it also has the added benefit of being true.

With the new live-action FernGully, Hollywood is trying to teach children that the bad guys are those who put profit over the environment. The irony is rich. China is the world’s biggest polluter, but Hollywood will never say so. After all, that would hurt its bottom line.