Photograph by Ryan Molnar / Connected Archives
WORDS BY CHRIS BARANIUK
A very special cameo in the boondoggle of a blockbuster that is Waterworld is played by a tomato plant. A ragged, rather pathetic-looking plant thrown carelessly around by Kevin Costner. The single red fruit this plant bears, which Costner’s character moodily eats in a deleted scene, is a kind of emblem—a fragment of a once thriving ecosystem that kept humanity afloat for millennia. The film is set in a postapocalyptic future where the polar ice caps have melted, raising sea levels by many meters. Earth as we know it is gone—almost entirely submerged.
But in 1996, as the video release of Waterworld loomed, Universal Studios deployed a masterstroke of merchandising. According to one collector, the company gave out small, Waterworld-branded packets containing a single terracotta pot and a sachet of tomato seeds. Perhaps so that moviegoers could imagine what it might be like to live on a planet bereft of biodiversity, clinging to their tiny tomato plants and fighting to survive.
If the question is, Why aren’t there more films about biodiversity loss?, you might be forgiven for answering “Waterworld”. The most expensive film ever made at the time, Waterworld cost $235 million and was widely considered an extravagance. A somewhat disappointing film that only managed to turn a profit after video sales. It has gained a cult following in more recent years, however.
Hollywood in the 21st century has occasionally grappled with the climate catastrophe in films such as The Day After Tomorrow and, through metaphor, Don’t Look Up. But what about the specific problem of biodiversity loss, which has been going on for centuries already? The sixth mass extinction is an existential threat to humanity that could wipe out many of our food sources and sabotage life on Earth.
It is terrifying, cinematic in its magnitude, and yet the film industry has barely touched it, except in solemn documentaries that tend to preach to the choir—initiated members of the audience who nod along grumpily in a, let’s face it, largely empty cinema.
There are a handful of fiction films pitched at the mainstream that do contemplate biodiversity loss, or, at the very least, lean on the dead planet trope. Blade Runner is a good example. “Do you like our owl?” asks Rachel. “Is it artificial?” Deckard quizzes. “Of course it is.” There are little hints throughout the movie, especially visually, which clearly signal that this is no longer the planet of David Attenborough. And what about Snowpiercer? It’s set in a future where Earth has been turned into a giant, inhospitable snowball. A small band of survivors, imprisoned on a very fast train, are fed slabs made from reconstituted cockroaches.
Outside Hollywood, Studio Ghibli is to be commended for thoughtfully exploring the importance of ecosystems and the terror of biodiversity collapse. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind brilliantly and poetically depicts a future time following a gigantic war, where mutant insects roam the “Toxic Jungle.” Back in Hollywood, there are a couple of films that delve into the immorality of deforestation, or ecocide—FernGully: The Last Rainforest, or most famously, Avatar.
These films are few and far between. And yet many A-Listers are vocal about the importance of protecting our environment. Leonardo DiCaprio, Jane Fonda, and Harrison Ford spring to mind. When Ban Ki-moon, former Secretary-General of the UN visited LA in 2011, he said of the climate crisis, “I am sure Hollywood can make good stories from this.”
“One of the things that is missing from media representations, full stop, is our dependency on the web of life.”
Why are climate change films, especially those focused on biodiversity collapse, still so rare? Death and destruction are not the issue—the only thing that sells better is sex. Studios may, though, be uneasy about projects that risk coming across as divisive or politically motivated. That excuse aside, there are other factors, said Julia Steinberger at the University of Lausanne, who researches the relationship between ecology and economics.
“One of the things that is missing from media representations, full stop, is our dependency on the web of life,” she explained. The interconnectedness of human beings with nonhuman organisms is not something we in the West are very good at talking about, showing or feeling, she argued. Indigenous societies, conversely, often have long-standing traditions, rituals and language that transmit the significance of the web of life much better. “We in the West would see ourselves as consumers, destructors,” Steinberger said.
Good writing can do a decent job of fleshing out our human relationship with nature, though. 1972’s Silent Running is, like Waterworld, a deeply flawed film that doesn’t really know what to do with itself. And yet the concept is brilliant. Set far in the future, the last vestiges of Earth’s biosphere—fragments of forests and some woodland creatures—are being transported through space in giant geodesic domes made of glass. Lifeboats for life itself.
On board is ecologist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), who snaps at his three crewmates when they fail to see the value of the fresh food he is growing.
“It has a taste and it has a color! And it has a smell!” shouts Lowell, contrasting one of his cantaloupes with their synthetic, machine-borne fodder. “And it calls back a time when there were flowers all over the Earth. And there were valleys. And there were plains with tall green grass that you could lie down in and go to sleep in. And there were blue skies. And there was fresh air.”
It’s a stunning cascade of sentences that sums up the splendor of our planet. If we lost all that tomorrow, we might well feel bereaved. But what if it took a few hundred years? Ecologists have long fretted over how people can find it hard to appreciate that things are dwindling. Significant biodiversity loss has happened during the past century—but slowly, relative to human lifespans. If you could transport someone from the early 1800s to the present day, they might be shocked at the lack of moths at night, for example.
One movie that speeds up biodiversity loss so you can really feel it is the harrowing BBC TV film Threads. Following a nuclear strike on Britain, civilization as we know it is crushed and the land is left an irradiated mess. Hardly any crops grow. Pests take over and people are left hunting rats, just to survive.
The opening visual is that of a spider carefully weaving its web as a narrator voices:
“In an urban society, everything connects. Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.”
“Audiences in the next several years will see a lot more content that reflects our climate-altered world, our biodiversity-altered world.”
The film is first and foremost about how nuclear apocalypse threatened, and still threatens, to tear modern society apart. But the choice of an arachnid as metaphor, and the focus on ecosystems breaking down in the latter part of the film, shows that the makers were considering even bigger consequences. A planet utterly defiled.
Sarah Bezan, at University College Cork, studies creative representations of species loss and revival. She points out that during the Cold War era, filmmakers seemed fixated on narratives where human beings were horribly transformed or turned into mutants. Take The Alligator People, a film where a doctor injects people with alligator serum—it eventually morphs them into reptilian monsters.
“Whatever it is that the human is, has become annihilated, because we have annihilated ourselves,” said Bezan. Such disaster movies don’t have to be depressing, she added. “It can help us to grieve what we have lost but also wake up and think about how things can change.”
Hollywood isn’t really interested in lecturing people, notes James Hamilton, a media professor at the University of Georgia. But it is open to innovative storylines that have a chance of doing well commercially. Avatar is worth mentioning again here because, upon its release, it set the record for the highest-grossing film of all time, grossing nearly $3 billion.
Anna Jane Joyner is founder and director of Good Energy, a nonprofit that consults on climate change-related content in movies and TV shows. Joyner says there is room for more biodiversity-related material on screen but that she and her colleagues try to be tactful about this. Writers don’t want to feel like they’re taking on the role of activist, she explained.
Fundamentally, powerful stories are just powerful stories. Good Energy consulted on world-building for the Apple TV Series Extrapolations. One episode follows a marine biologist seeking a way to talk to a humpback whale, just as the species nears extinction. “I just cried, I’m close to crying right now—it hit me on an emotional level,” said Joyner.
The Natural Resources Defence Council has an initiative called Rewrite the Future that is similarly focused on supporting content makers on subject matter related to climate change. Daniel Hinerfeld, director of the initiative, said that disaster movies have their place but writers should consider positive stories based on human endeavor and solutions as well.
His colleague Meredith Milton, creative director, added that personal responses to climate change such as climate anxiety or grief are increasingly working their way into productions.
Both Milton and Hinerfeld sense that Hollywood is starting to embrace more content like this. And while the pair are contractually unable to discuss specifics, they say there are plenty of interesting projects in the works. “Audiences in the next several years will see a lot more content that reflects our climate-altered world, our biodiversity-altered world,” said Hinerfeld.
Stories that aren’t merely despairing about biodiversity collapse have an opportunity to inspire audiences in what remains an age of great peril, said Bezan. Writers ought to think about how their narratives can acknowledge disaster while also foregrounding the human ability to feel and understand, to change—and to make things right. “The impulse is that we’re the problem,” said Bezan. “But we have to be the solution.”
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Why Doesn’t Hollywood Make More Mass Extinction Films?
