"THE BATTLE FOR SURVIVAL" -HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT SCHOOL COMIC BY MAJOR UTILITY

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NOT JUST COMICS! THIS IS AN IMPORTANT POLITICAL/ENVIRONMENTAL ARTIFACT FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT! READ ON!!!! This set of 11 near-perfect (excellent, just newsprint yellowing) is a key historical set of the "anti-environmental" movement by America's utilities. Just after Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" (1962) started Environmentalism, the Nixon Administration led the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in December, 1970. Only months later, America's utilities began their war on "the Twin Dragons" of irrational "fear of pollution" and the "fear of technology" by corporate propagada directed at 10-16 year olds - a whole generation - with Consumer Power (Michigan) using over 25,000 copies of this comic as part of a "classroom educational set" sent to nearly every teacher in Michigan. Consumers was fighting for nuclear power (it nearly bankrupted the company) and opposed government regulation, and this was a key part of it's strategy. As a recent doctoral dissertation approved by Princeton University says, A team of educational consultants employed by the company--headed by aformer employee of Encyclopedia Britannica--produced materials translated into threeclassroom resource kits targeting students at the upper-elementary, middle-school, and high-school levels. These kits were promoted to schools through meetings with school administrators, promotional films, direct mailings to school principals, exhibits at educational conferences, and ads published in teachers' publications such as Teachers Voice and Today's Education. The Consumers Power Company then began distributing some 25,000 kits to teachers throughout the company's service area in Michigan. The major themes conveyed by these environmental resource kits included: the necessity of trade-offs between environmental protection and economic development (or "Progress" as this program put it); the notion that everyone, rather than industry specifically, was responsible for pollution; and the assertion that technology was the key to solving problems of air, land, and water pollution. The trade-offs theme was also at the center of a comic book distributed by the Consumers Power Company aimed at ten- to sixteen-year-olds. Entitled The Battle for Survival: The War against Environmental Pollution it featured a teacher instructing a group of students on the twin problems of industrial pollution and "fear of pollution," which were depicted in the comic as twin heads of a "frightening two-headed monster." The comic suggested that, although it was time to start fighting pollution itself, the fear of pollution was just as great a threat to society. Irrational fear of pollution, according to the comic, had led to attitudes hostile to economic growth and even to modern society as a whole. "Pollution itself," the teacher warned the students in the comic, "has frightened many people into thinking we've got to do away with modern society--give up many of the good things--even necessities--in order to have a cleaner world. They would have us going back to a very primitive way of life because they have been frightened by pollution." *** Though striking in its suggestion that environmentalists sought to "do away with modern society," the comic reflected, albeit in extreme terms, the broader themes pushed by electric utility PR in the early 1970s. *** Like other utility PR material circulating in the schools, the comic told students that too much environmental protection could threaten their quality of life and the modern conveniences they enjoyed as a result of abundant electricity." Joe Greene Conley II, ENVIRONMENTALISM CONTAINED: A HISTORY OF CORPORATE RESPONSES TO THE NEW ENVIRONMENTALISM, Princeton, 2006. THIS IS A MAJOR ITEM BOTH FOR COMIC COLLECTORS INTERESTED IN CORPORATE PROPAGANDA IN THE SCHOOL AND FOR ENVIRONMENTALISTS! ELEVEN - YES, 11!!! - COPIES OF ONE OF THE OPENING SALVOS IN CORPORATE RESISTANCE TO ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION (HELLO? CLIMATE CHANGE?) BY TEACHING KIDS HOW IT'S DANGEROUS! DON'T MISS THIS IMPORANT OFFERING!!! B... read more

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