This week marks the start of Sesame Street’s 40th season. As announced in an article in National Geographic, the show will be focusing on a green storyline this year:

As another example of the show’s forward thinking, Davis said, the new Sesame Street season that begins next week will introduce children to the basic ideas of sustainable living. “It’s a curriculum about nature and caring for the world that is just right for today,” he said. “This show continues to stay very current with ideas that are in the zeitgeist.”

Sustainability. Makes you feel smart just reading that word, doesn’t it? Who doesn’t want sustainability? This is a great new tactic of the Left; the raping of our language and the use of beautiful sounding, unassailable words to represent an agenda with far more controversial ideas. Sustainability.

Sustainability is not just about putting your empty beer bottles into a special bin to keep them separate from your other trash. It’s also more than driving a car with a giant battery in it (which will eventually poison our water system after all of these “Hybrids” end up in a landfill… didn’t think about THAT, did you Mr. Begley?). It’s also more than building giant solar panels which require preciously scarce water to stay constantly clean and efficient or giant windmills which end up killing endangered birds. No, sustainability is not any of those ineffective yet relatively benign efforts at “saving our planet.” Sustainability, as a National policy, is the most regressive and dangerous idea the Green-Left has ever put forth. Sustainability is the death of the West’s economic dominance.

Spend just ten minutes reading up on the various aspects of sustainability, sustainable living, sustainability and de-growth, sustainability and population control… These concepts all start with the same basic premise: We humans, are the problem. There are too many of us, we are exploiting the earth’s resources… If we don’t radically change how we live, the earth will not be able to sustain us.

And now, it’s the new concept being pushed on our kids through those fuzzy little monsters on Sesame Street. We’ll be watching to see how this philosophy manifests itself and what little green seeds will be planted into the fertile minds of our pre-schoolers who were placed in front of the show by their parents hoping they’d get a head-start in phonics and counting.

Radical environmentalism, demonization of capitalism and corporations, social justice through environmental security… these issues, of course, will not be part of Elmo’s World… But, as PBS Ombudsman Michael Gelter said last week about Sesame Street’s Fox News parody:

I don’t know what was in the head of the producers, but my guess is that this was one of those parodies that was too good to resist. But it should have been resisted.

Let’s hope that radical environmentalism doesn’t turn out to be one of those ideas that the producers find “too hard to resist.”

Addendum: You think I’m exaggerating about this whole “Sustainability” message to our kids and how it will affect our economy? Take a look at the blog page that is associated with the National Geographic / Sesame Street article. They suggest that instead of buying a new Halloween costume, kids should swap old costumes with their friends. What kid of insignificant impact on our environment would such a move make? But, ask the poor guy who owns the Halloween costume shop in your town… what kind of impact will it have on him?