Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a man named "Walt Disney", who had a dream: he looked at a piece of totally worthless mosquito-infested swampland outside of Orlando, Florida and dreamed some day it might be a place where parents and children could go together to have fun and grow closer to each other; a place where the technologies of the future could be displayed and tested; a place which might be called "The happiest place on earth." Today, his dream is a reality, and people come from all over the world to share in the magic.

Well, okay, that's one way to tell the story. But there is a different lens though which we can view this same story...

Once upon a time, a greedy corporation called "Disney" was looking for ways to please its stockholders. Following a similar insatiable avarice, the president, a union-busting guy named "Walt" who ran a cartoon sweatshop, gained control of 47 square miles of some of Florida's most pristine wetlands. He devastated the local ecology, killing and destroying the homes of many of the local creatures, and replacing the beautiful glades with a series of cookie-cutter resorts, vacuous rides, and acres of chemically-treated lawn. Every year millions of people are tempted by this facade, and fly in jets to Orlando (choking the central Floridian skies with traffic, and emitting untold tons of CO2) in order to consume, consume, consume -- leaving mountains of waste behind them.

Neither story is entirely true, neither is entirely false. The difference between them has to do which set of values one adopts. What's more important -- mosquitoes, waterfowl, and alligators? CO2 sequestration? A good return on ABC/Disney stock? A chance to delight your kids with a one-of-a-kind vacation they'll remember as long as they live? Clearly, many of us choose the last two.

In EPCOT's "The Land", there's a telling bit of hypocrisy called "The Circle of Life". The film conscripts some of your kids' favorite characters (The Lion King's Timon, Pumbaa, and Simba) into a tale of environmental woe and redemption.

The film starts out with Timon and Pumbaa trying to (gasp!) dam a river! in order to build (you can't make this stuff up) a resort. Simba is angry, angry, angry -- his face becomes darkened and menacing as he explains they're behaving like a very dangerous animal (no, what can it be?) ... Man!

Oh! No! cry Timon and Pumbaa, we're nothing like man! (That horrible animal!) So Simba tells all the gathered folks and kids how man screws up everything for everyone and decimates the environment -- a savanna narrative somehow augmented with shots of cities, stores, lights, and a few well-placed film clips from the late 1960s and 1970s showing polluted skies and dead fish.

But hey, it's okay by the end: Man has redeemed himself. Simba is happy again, and the more prey-like animals, in precariously close proximity, share his mood. Why? Because man is, uh, studying animals to learn more about how to help them. And trying to find ways to improve things. And telling other people how important this is. In short, man is okay as long as he's caught the environmentalist religion, and talks the talk.

And of course Timon and Pumbaa have learned a valuable lesson. They won't build the nasty, yucky resort.

Haha! Just kidding. Of course they still plan to build the resort. But it will be an environmental-themed resort, and no longer use a dam, so that will make it all just fine!

I was amazed at their choice of topic matter. There I was, at a resort theme park, watching a move about how environmentally evil resort theme parks are. A park which does pretty much every "evil" thing portrayed in the movie. But by the end we learn it's all okay as long as you educate people about environmentalism, as long as we all buy into the associated political platform.

A few days ago, there was a bit of a flap about Al Gore's continued (and clearly intended to be secretive) use of private jets and large luxury limousines -- a mode of transportation Megan McArdle describes as "just about the single most carbon-wasteful thing in the world, except maybe burning high-sulfur coal for the sheer fun of it."

I'm not trying to pick on Al Gore in particular: it seems this sort of thing is endemic. The least they could do is have the courtesy to try to be candid about it: "Yes, I could live in a straw hut, use a composting toilet, and fly commercial like have suggested you all should, but I can't live up to that. And nobody would listen to me if I did."

In view of that trend, and movies like "The Circle of Life", it would appear that the ultimate "carbon offset" is environmentalism itself.

Who can be a perfect environmentalist? In order to be consistent, you'd have to be a Jain and starve yourself to death. We're all guilty. But hey, as long as you swear fealty to whatever the agenda-du-jour is, you won't be attacked. You've bought your indulgence, you've paid your protection money -- you can now go on your merry way, as before, and pollute all you want.

Me, while I'd rather have cleaner air than dirtier air, preserving or restoring earth-as-it-was before mankind isn't my top priority. I value humans more than alligators, so while I'd want my kids (should I have any) to inherit a nice clean planet, I'd also not trade that for the death of many other people's kids. And I don't mind that Disney used wetlands for a resort, as long as we set aside an area to preserve the wetlands for future generations to see and visit, and to maintain biodiversity.

But I'm troubled by the manifest hypocrisy of some of loudest proponents, troubled by the often nearly anti-human undercurrent, and troubled by the subtle manipulation and deception I see time after time -- which indicates the kind of people in charge aren't, shall we say, especially bright moral lights.

One last story?

In the first environmentalist movie I viewed, as a little boy (kindergarten or so), they showed a cute, cute chick hopping around a would-be construction area. We all cooed. At the end of the movie, they showed a shot of the same chick, now (I lie not) crushed to death, half-driven into the dirt by a construction vehicle. I cried and was sad about that for days.

Of course, the kind of people who'd deliberately kill a cute little chick were, in fact, the very people who made that bit of manipulative tripe. And in fact, they did so -- "for a good cause", you know -- violating their own implied principle so they could traumatize little kids in a politically useful way. And the chick was (of course) a baby chicken (I figured out in retrospect) so there was no way it was on a construction site unless someone put it there. And ran it over, for effect.

Similarly, I don't think we were actually supposed to think about what Disney was doing as we watched "The Circle of Life." I also noticed it had to depend on outdated footage (when pollution levels were much higher) to show what man is supposedly currently doing now. (As the environment gets cleaner, the rhetoric becomes increasingly shrill.)

They also portrayed damming a river to create a lake as an inherently terrible thing to do. Yet North America, before Europeans, was literally infested with beavers who efficiently dammed pretty much every stream and river which flowed near trees, creating lake after lake across the continent.

But hey, as long as you seem to display good intentions, and vote for the "correct" political measures, all will be forgiven and overlooked.