TV is Teaching Our Children to Care for the Environment

Let's be honest: a lot of TV for kids is pretty terrible. But The Octonauts is not. The Octonauts are animals who rescue other underwater creatures. They're very cute and very brave, and these days, they’re also climate educators.

My four-year-old just started the new Octonauts series Above and Beyond, in which the underwater explorers expand their creature-saving adventures to animals on land. In one of the first episodes I saw, the crew encounters a group of bombardier beetles, who tell them about a dilemma. “We come from a teeny-tiny island nearby,” says a beetle. “We were happy there, but then the water slowly began to rise. Our island got smaller and smaller. Then, a big wave knocked us off… and our island was gone.”

Whoa. I thought. Rising oceans. Is this show secretly about climate change?

The Above and Beyond series features animals challenged by droughts, mudslides, floods, and hurricanes. In an episode on permafrost thaw, a character says, “Temperatures have been rising all over the world, and it may just not be cold enough for the ground to stay frozen anymore.”

While environmentally-themed TV for kids isn’t new — you might remember Captain Planet, the hero who was “gonna take pollution down to zero” — it hasn’t always honed in so specifically on climate issues. Now, there are a growing number of shows intentionally teaching their youngest viewers about what could be the most formative force in many of their lifetimes.

I’m happy that my kid’s after-school TV is starting to reflect the world he’s living in. He’s already learning about the climate emergency through osmosis, when our California skies are clogged with smoke, or when our rain comes much too fast or not at all. Many kids are already worried about climate change, and we need to address these worries directly, including highlighting solutions.

As much as I love The Octonauts, highlighting solutions is one place where Above and Beyond could do better. The episodes I’ve seen have all focused on downstream interventions: In the bombardier beetle episode, the Octonauts listen closely to their new friends, and ultimately decide that the best course of action is to simply find another island where the beetles can live. In other words, it’s all adaptation and no mitigation. To say nothing of the fact that — assuming creatures in the Octonauts’ world will see as much sea level rise as is possible in ours — another island is likely not a long-term fix.

This might be the most important lesson that these shows can teach: Saving the planet is hero work.

It might feel like too much to ask that TV for kids who don’t know how to tie their shoes would attempt to teach about systems-level change. But there is at least one show that tries. Rainbow Rangers follows the exploits of seven girls — each with a special power, and clad in a different candy-colored hue — who regularly descend from their palace in the clouds to help animals in danger on Earth. The Rangers not only fix the immediate problem they see — say, a baby elk trapped inside a cave after an earthquake — but then try to resolve the root cause of the problem. Bonnie Blueberry, clearly the brains of the operation, will start asking questions that will help them reach a solution. “I’m not sure why we’re getting any earthquakes here… this area isn’t on a faultline,” she says. She soon discovers the answer is fracking, led by the show’s resident industrialist villain. They ultimately convince him to convert to wind power, and the animals are safe once more.

Bonnie Blueberry’s focus on solving for root causes is reminiscent of the “ever-expanding circles of influence” strategy espoused by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Dr. Johnson argues that while any one individual’s power to stop climate change is indeed essentially zero, we can multiply our impact by slightly expanding the reach of the climate actions we engage in. For example, instead of only building a personal compost heap in your backyard, you could organize your homeowners association to bring composting service to the whole neighborhood.

Rainbow Rangers is showing kids how this works. Yet, it also shows the real limits of their power in the face of the climate crisis that adults have set into motion. After an unseasonable snowstorm leads to flooding, the Rangers decide to expand a riverbed to accommodate the new volumes of water, choosing this because, “We can’t stop spring snowstorms.” (“You can protest!,” my climate-panicked brain screams. “Get out into the streets, girls!”) But, as always, Bonnie Blueberry is right. If any individual adult is mostly powerless in the face of this emergency, children — with no spending power, no voting power, and very little personal agency — are even more so.

Despite this, educating kids about climate gives them a chance to exercise one measure of control they do have — moral sway over the adults in their lives. My son has started to ask me awkward questions, like, “Why don’t we have an electric car?” One of my answers has historically been a vague declaration about how there needs to be more charging infrastructure, something that feels so out of my hands as to be useless to put my time into. But when I looked into it I found that — as with so many climate challenges — there are smart people working on it right in my neighborhood, and they’re providing easy ways for people like me to support them.

Which brings us right back to those ever-expanding circles of influence: If kids have a little power; adults have more; and groups of adults start to have the kind of power that makes a difference, over the companies and governments, over the homeowners associations and investment vehicles that all must shift — and quickly — if we are going to create a just and livable future.

Exposing our youngest humans to the climate emergency is uncomfortable because it opens the possibility of them holding us accountable. Once they start asking questions, they will realize that the villain of this story is us. But the heroes? Also us. This might be the most important lesson that these shows can teach: Saving the planet is hero work. It will require awe-inspiring feats of courage and cooperation. It will require bold acts of sacrifice, and an unwavering, radical belief that we are worth saving. Imagine looking any child in the eyes and telling them that we are not.

Happily, our kids have heroic role models like The Octonauts’s Captain Barnacles, who never hesitates to help a creature in need, no matter how small it is, or how big the obstacles to protecting it. Like Dr. Johnson, who in a recent interview said, “On my gravestone for sure I will earn the words, ‘She Tried.’” Like the people choosing to write storylines about climate change into kids’ TV, who are putting the “every job a climate job'' ethos into action. I’m grateful.

Follow The Thread! Subscribe to The Thread monthly newsletter to get the latest in policy, equity, and culture in your inbox the first Tuesday of each month.