The city of Missoula is one of Montana's key liberal hotbeds - its growing population is at least partly responsible for the slow purpling of the state in general recently. Considered by much of the rest of the state to be a crunchy dreadlocked embarassment, Missoula voted for Obama by a 30 point margin.

But even in a city that extolls freedom of expression and has more granolas per square foot than anywhere east of Portland, north of Boulder and west of St.Paul, the fearful hand of censorship has managed to make its presence felt here in the past couple of weeks.

During a January 29 meeting, the Missoula County Public School trustees found that a high school wildlife biology teacher violated district policy on academic freedom when she played the 22-minute long video "The Story of Stuff." The teacher, Kathleen Kennedy, was attempting to engage her students with Annie Leonard's spirited and sharp critique of our consumer economy and its effect on the environment and our culture at large.

The 4-3 ruling came about after a disgruntled parent, who was already fuming about another liberal-oriented video that was shown in school, thought Kennedy crossed the line and cried liberal bias. By all accounts, the man put a great deal of time in preparing his assault on Kennedy - bringing a long, detailed PowerPoint presentation to the meeting, supposedly calling various details of the video into question.

From the description of the meeting, Kennedy wasn't made aware that she needed to provide a full defense in writing explaining her rationale for using the video and was shocked to find that the school board was going to vote on the appropriateness of the video. Beyond that, the school board was missing three members who never had a chance (and may never get a chance) to vote on the matter.

Most alarming about the decision - beside the basic fact that it's censorship pure and simple - is the explanation the "majority" gave for voting against Kennedy: she didn't offer a "balanced" view of the topic. There is NOTHING in the academic freedom policy in the district stating that a teacher needs to provide an equally weighted counter-argument when presenting materials to their students. Provided the teacher presents the material as an objective facilitator for discussion (which by all accounts Kennedy did), they are not violating the academic freedom policy for the district by presenting information to their students that has a point of view. Based on what is known about the class session in question, it seems obvious that Kennedy never came anywhere near prostyletizing the material to her class.

Kennedy said she played the video as a way of initiating a discussion about the impact of consumerism on the environment. Is that not what we want in our high schools? While there may be other material that isn't quite as glib and overly simplistic as "The Story of Stuff"- I can't fathom the idea of not presenting a REAL and SIGNIFICANT perspective about our consumer economy in a high school setting.

Let's think about this - as young adults, only in high school are people in a position to actually think about the broad nature of society that they are going to play a part in before they commit to a career within that framework. If we don't look at the big picture - and "The Story of Stuff" is a classic "big picture" video - then how can we expect them to make informed choices about what they want to do?

Now more than ever that kind of opportunity to question our economic engine is essential. We are currently drowning in debt, jobless and desperately looking for a way to turn around an economic cratering of enormous proportions. As I argued in a past post, conventional wisdom and the common assumptions held by our current administration and nearly all the major media outlets is that we HAVE to prop the consumer/material economy back up to bring prosperity back.

Yet very little attention is being paid to the underlying truth that - as it stands now - the materials economy is unsustainable. We are continuing to extract virgin raw materials to produce goods for a global economy. As we continue down this path on a planet with finite resources - we will eventually have to pay the piper, WALL-e style.

Given the nature of our economy, shouldn't we examine the consumer culture? While one can nibble away at the more inflammatory parts of the "Story of Stuff," can anyone really argue that we are NOT on a path to fuel a physically unsustainable system in which we assume we can manufacture unlimited products with a finite supply of resources? And if it turns out that we do want to keep the consumer economy going, shouldn't we at least think about the hurdles we are going to face - on waste, on natural resource and wildlife exploitation, and on environmental poisons?

Fortunately, the issue has created a significant backlash and last week's meeting was dominated by people vehemently disagreeing with the decision. But to reverse the decision requires a board member from the majority to bring it back up for a re-vote with the entire board (assuming all of them chose to show up at a meeting). That's a dubious proposition, but not as dubious as the prospect of facing up to the underlying reality of our way of life.