The Green Mister Rogers: Environmentalism in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

Date: 2022
Author: Sara Lindey and Jason King
Foreword: Junlei Li
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781496838674
Purchase: Amazon (Paperback) | Amazon (Hard Cover) | Amazon Kindle

Description

Fred Rogers was a pioneer in children’s television, an advocate for families, and a multimedia artist and performer. He wrote the television scripts and music, performed puppetry, sang, hosted, and directed Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for more than thirty years. In his almost nine hundred episodes, Rogers pursued dramatic topics: divorce, death, war, sibling rivalry, disabilities, and racism.

The Green Mister Rogers: Environmentalism in “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” centers on the show’s environmentalism, primarily expressed through his themed week “Caring for the Environment,” produced in 1990 in coordination with the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day. Unfolding against a trash catastrophe in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Rogers advances an environmentalism for children that secures children in their family homes while extending their perspective to faraway places, from the local recycling center to Florida’s coral reef. Rogers depicts animal wisdom and uses puppets to voice anxiety and hope and shows an interconnected world where each part of creation is valued, and love is circulated in networks of care. Ultimately, Rogers cultivates a practical wisdom that provides a way for children to confront the environmental crisis through action and hope and, in doing so, to develop into adults who possess greater care for the environment and a capacious imagination for solving the ecological problems we face.