If, as this symposium argues, attention to historically specific popular cultures of science can help us deepen and complicate our understanding of the way that science lives within culture, an examination of the way that science circulates in children’s popular culture is particularly important. Children function as implicit targets of many projects of “popular science,” but across American history, the social and political aims of these projects have not been uniform. This paper will show how children’s popular science in the 1970s reflected shifts in social perceptions of both science and childhood. In that decade, American children’s media, influenced by the social movements of the previous decade, began to consciously incorporate messages of multiculturalism, feminism, and social justice. The paradigmatic example of this shift is 1972’s “Free to Be You and Me,” a television show, record, and book created by TV personality Marlo Thomas, which taught lessons about tolerance and equality. In this paper, I will examine the ways that children’s media in the 1970s, while incorporating the counterculture’s social goals, also reflected its growing negative attitudes towards science and technology. While children’s culture in the United States during the twentieth century had historically been a site for efforts at science recruitment and displays of wonderful technologies, during the 1970s, adult unease at nuclear armament and worry about environmental problems such as extinctions, overpopulation, and pollution had begun to appear in children’s literature, magazines, and television. This paper will examine the National Wildlife Federation’s magazine Ranger Rick; the television show “Big Blue Marble”; and selected iconic works of children’s literature, including the work of authors such as Bill Peet, Dr. Seuss, Richard Adams, Robert C. O’Brien, and Jean Craighead George. Many of these works repeated adult fascination with negative consequences of development, technology, and exploration, often making this point by allying child readers with threatened animals or landscapes. In this paper, I will ask how scientists and science took their place within these cultural depictions of environmental challenges, looking for ways that science’s perceived association with militarism and short-sighted profit-seeking might be represented to young audiences. I will examine the production and reception histories of these works in an effort to understand the cultural context within which they were produced. And, finally, I will seek out historical responses of child readers and viewers to these potentially terrifying narratives.