RedEye wrote:As for Captain Planet, the show was over-simplistic and overdone, like so many other children's shows of that era. Things are rarely as black and white
as portrayed in the show. Real life is messier, lots messier. It also fostered the idea that these problems could be fixed NOW, instead of showing that environmental issues are like a puzzle that requires a lot of time to resolve.
We didn't get this way overnight, and we won't fix it overnight, either. There is also the problem that these "crimes" might not be criminal in the country where the alleged criminals are "hiding", and that makes rendition a lot more difficult.
It is a start, though; and that is a very good thing.
Well, I always thought that you could make Captain Planet better by doing it as a Evangelion-style deconstruction. With things like the bad guys being more complex (Such as my idea for Dr. Blight as a Norman Borlaug type figure who tries to help people, but destroys the environment with her efforts as well), Gaia not necessarily having humanity or human civilization's best intrests in mind (Remember, the reason we tried to isolate ourselves from nature and wipe it out is because living without the aid of modern technology was a life of disease, starvation and being at the mercy of nature), bringing up complex questions (Such as if humans evoved to exploit resources without restraint, can we ever truly stop being polluters?) and and answering them in the most depressing manner possible and having an apocalyptic ending (where Gaia WINS non the less).
But then that's just my idea.
:EDIT: And that statement about why we tried to leave nature in the firt place kind of shows the flaws in Bezerker's idea that we can all live happily in nature if we just dispose of civilization, because it was really crappy for us when we did live with nature and no technology, also the fact that people don't like living in nature with no technology for those reasons exactly and will never accept your philosophy. The problem with his "well some technolgy is okay as long as it doesn't seperate us from nature" is that a philosophy of technological progress and living with nature is somewhat contradictory. Not to mention, where do you draw the line on what technology is or is not acceptable? Not to mention the fact that there was no prelapsarian period that you beleive was a time when humans happily coexisted with the environment, as shown by the evidence that hunter gatherer tribes engaged in some very environmentally-unsound practices for gathering prey. Plus the path of technology can lead us to environmental progress alongside civilization (if we don't irreversably screw the environment up first) and eventually keep us from going extinct (if we don't wipe ourselves out first).
