Save the Rainforest

Somewhere around the end of the 80s, American elementary school decided its cause was the rainforest, and for the next decade every classroom orbited it. Teachers built entire units around it — canopy, understory and forest-floor diagrams pasted on every wall, adopt-an-acre fundraisers, rainforest borders framing the bulletin board, endangered-species reports stacked on the library shelf. The anchor artifact: the "Rain Forest Rap," a roughly seven-minute World Wildlife Fund educational video from 1988 — an MTV-style music video about Peru's Amazon rainforest, produced by Andrew Young and directed by Susan Todd, with rappers Jesse Itzler and Victoria Grace urging kids to learn about the rainforest and spread the word. Teachers wheeled in the TV cart and played it on rotation, year after year.

The cultural infrastructure: The Great Kapok Tree in the classroom library, FernGully on VHS checked out perpetually, Captain Planet on Saturday morning, and the Rainforest Café turning the whole cause into a mall restaurant where you could dine under an artificial canopy and the smell of rain. WWF paired the rap with the film "Amazonia: A Celebration of Life," and for a generation of kids the rainforest became their first environmental cause, their first sense that they could learn something far from home and take action.

For a whole cohort the rainforest is what they remember instead of state capitals — the acreage counts, the burning-football-fields-per-second stats, the names of animals they've forgotten but the feeling that the world was on fire and they were supposed to help save it.