For more than 50 years, corporate America and its PR firms have worked really hard to

brand environmentalists, alternately as dangerous radicals, or silly idealists.

Rooms who romanticize farming and yearn for that most ridiculous goal, pristine nature.

The idea of a fice of pristineness is this idea that everyone who is arguing to protect

human health, who is arguing to protect people's water supply and the quality of their air,

is really only focused on protecting pristine places for their view, for the enjoyment of

a select number of people.

That's Carol Muffet, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental

Law.

In our series with Earther last year, the ABCs of Big Oil about the fossil fuel industries

influence in schools, Carol walked us through a presentation he unearthed that laid out

the importance of shaping the public's opinions about the oil industry and environmental issues.

This is at the heart of the industry's efforts to paint environmentalists as a special

interest, and those efforts were for a long time very, very effective, but the industry

was really effective at presenting all of them as just environmentalists who were money

hunters, who were concerned about trees and bunnies and didn't care about people at all.

Reporter Keati Wurst, author of the new book Miseducation, brought us some incredible

tape of a fossil fuel lobbyist speaking to a middle school class in Arkansas, trotting

out this exact same idea.

It's human life the most important thing here is being healthier, wealthier, happier,

living longer, or is pristine nature more important than what?

What building millings, what building houses, stop getting stuck out of the ground, we

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