My name is William Schatten. In this film I play a successful American farmer, Eric Pearson.

There are many opinions about America's rapid growth. Some say the character of our people caused it. Some say our gift for organization.

Eric Pearson believes there is one main reason the land. In this program he tries to prove that the ground we stand on inspired even dictated America's pattern of growth.

Welcome to high school. Meet your teacher, William Schattener.

This is from that series we mentioned in episode one. It's called American Enterprise and it was commissioned by Phillips Petroleum in the 1970s.

They got William Schattener to host the whole thing and in each of five vignettes he plays a different character, each with a different take on why the American economy grew the way it did.

So right off the bat, unchecked economic growth as position does a good thing. There's no questioning that and the series was created for high school civics and economics classes to help teach American teens about how the American economy was shaped and how it's supposed to work.

That's right. It was distributed to schools and community groups through a company called modern talking pictures.

Their distribution plan for the series had it reaching 12 million people a year. Darna, let's take a listen to the one liberal character that Shattener plays in this series.

My name is William Schattener. In this film I played Tom Novak, a community college professor who's field as ethnic studies.

Tom is the third generation American and the first member of his family to graduate from college. He has some strong ideas about what or rather who made America happen for him.

Our economic growth is rooted in the special character of the American people.

I love it. So immigrants make America great, but only because their hard work grows the American economy. Got it.

And you'll notice that so far there's been no mention of petroleum and later references to it do show up here and there, but mostly this series is actually focused on these two broader ideas.

The first one is that capitalism is great. And the second one is that nature is a resource that's basically to be used for economic benefit only.

That totally sums it up and that's the focus of a lot of oil funded educational materials. Again, this idea goes way back to way before anyone was talking about climate change.

American industrialists were really invested in pushing a particular approach to nature really from the early days of America's founding.

Melissa Aronchick, a media studies professor at Rutgers University has spent a ton of time digging into how this very particular approach to nature came about in America.

So essentially, if we want to look at the beginning of a 20th century national awareness about the need to protect the natural environment, we have to look at the naturalist, John newer and the four-ester different control.

And we especially have to look at how they interacted because each of them came to stand for very different idea of what nature and forests in the environment in the United States.

So, okay, Melissa mentioned John Mirror, who I think most of us are probably heard of, but Gifford Pinsho, maybe not so much.

He was the country's first forester, the very first head of the US Forestry Service. And while Mirror really pushed this idea of conservation and nature for nature's sake, like this pristine nature idea that the fossil fuel industry has been trying to pin on environmentalists ever since then, Pinsho viewed it as a resource.

...