Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  Firefly (Joss Whedon, 2002). The backstory for the Western-cum-space-opera has the “Earth-that-was” being “all used up” before the remnants of humanity takes to the stars in search of a new home.

  Fringe (J. J. Abrams, 2008). Contact between parallel universes causes the environment of one to catastrophically degrade.

  Godzilla (Ishirō Honda, 1954). Monster awoken by undersea nuclear testing ravages Tokyo.

  The Happening (M. Night Shyamalan, 2008). In an effort to protect itself from destruction, Nature generates a disease that triggers mass suicide in humans.

  Idaho Transfer (Peter Fonda, 1973). Time travel allows a small group of teenagers to skip over the ecological catastrophe that will soon wipe out humanity and start civilization anew fifty-six years in the future.

  Ilha de Flores / Island of Flowers (Jorge Furtado, 1989). A narrative voice reminiscent of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy traces wealth, power, and waste through the networks of contemporary global capitalism.

  I Live in Fear (Akira Kurosawa, 1955). A man paranoid about nuclear war is desperate to relocate his family from Japan to Brazil. The Cold War as itself a nightmarish science fiction.

  An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006). Al Gore tries to mobilize Americans toward climate action through an extended PowerPoint presentation.

  Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978). Spore-like aliens invade San Francisco, replacing human beings whose gray, shriveled corpses are removed by ubiquitous sanitation trucks. As with the 1956 original, the implication is that these replacements may be better at being us than we are.

  Lessons of Darkness (Werner Herzog, 1992). An unknown intelligence unfamiliar with human society visits the apocalyptic site of burning oil fields following the first Gulf War.

  Life after People (2008). This paradigmatic example of the Quiet Earth subgenre of books and documentaries concerned a world emptied of people, frequently drawing on footage of present-day postindustrial cities for its supposedly futuristic visuals.

  Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976). Based on the book by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, a future civilization has struck a sustainable balance for consumer capitalism by executing people the day they turn thirty.

  Lost in Space (Irwin Allen, 1965). Both the lighthearted original television series and the darker 1998 “reboot” film see the Space Family Robinson escape an ecologically threatened Earth.

  Mad Max (George Miller, 1979). Life isn’t easy in Australia after the end of cheap oil.

  The Man in the White Suit (Alexander MacKendrick, 1951). Capitalism requires a logic of planned obsolescence and egregious waste for its continuance.

  The Matrix (Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 1999). The battle between man and machine takes a turn when humans black out the sky in an effort to stop their solar-powered creations from taking over. Later editions in the series make clear that humanity really can’t leave the Matrix, even if they’d like to; the environment they’ve ruined could not possibly sustain their numbers.

  Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926). This seminal film of class division between a pastoral leisure class and a brutally exploited industrial class still speaks to us.

  Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009). Humanity has finally solved its energy problems through helium-3 mining on the moon. There’s only one problem: someone’s got to run the facility.

  Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968). Catastrophic climate change following a nuclear war has scorched the United States, transforming New York into Arizona. Later films in the series reveal that the mass extinction of both cats and dogs is responsible for the very importation of great apes first as pets and then, quickly thereafter, as servants, which is what started the whole mess in the first place.

  “Plastic Bag” (Ramin Bahrani, 2010). Solitary inner monologue of a plastic bag (unforgettably voiced by Werner Herzog) that survives the human race by millions of years, wishing only that his creators had manufactured him so he could die.

  Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, 2010). Spellbinding Kenyan short film depicts a dystopian future for Africa in which all life on the surface has died.

  The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy, 1985). An experiment to create a new global energy grid goes horribly wrong, causing nearly everyone on Earth to vanish.

  Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979). Almost excruciatingly slow film about high-stakes gambling after a new ice age.

  Revolution (J. J. Abrams, 2012). What happens when all the lights go out.

  Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, 1972). All planet life is extinct, save for those housed in a threatened orbital nature preserve.

  Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, 2008). Among the many deprivations of this post-apocalyptic future is the privatization of water.

  Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973). A wildly overpopulated globe is fed by Soylent Green, a tofu-like food substitute that is absolutely derived from high-energy plankton, not from ground-up human corpses.

  Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979). Surreal film loosely based on the Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, whose depiction of a dangerous depopulated “Zone” eerily anticipates the Chernobyl disaster seven years in advance.

  Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986). Facing certain destruction at the hands of a whale-friendly alien probe, the crew of the Enterprise travels back in time for a madcap romp in twentieth-century San Francisco as they try to save the whales.

  Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Force of Nature” (Robert Lederman, 1993). The Federation discovers that their overuse of warp drive is slowly destroying the fabric of the galaxy. A galactic speed limit is imposed, but the imposition of even this slim reality check so disrupts the series’s cornucopian, expansionist fantasy that it is essentially never mentioned again.

  Terra Nova (Brannon Braga and Steven Spielberg, 2011). Settlers from a dying future seek to colonize the Cretaceous.

  Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936). Based on a novel by H. G. Wells, the film depicts a human race that repeatedly destroys itself through violence and blunt stupidity. The film’s final lines argue that unless mankind is ultimately able to conquer the stars, it might as well have never existed at all.

  Threads (Mick Jackson, 1984). Incredibly bleak BBC miniseries about life in a blighted England following a nuclear war.

  The Time Machine (Simon Wells, 2002). Accidental overdevelopment of the moon destroys technology civilization, ushering in the familiar Eloi and the Morlocks of Wells’s 1895 novel. Almost entirely forgettable aside from its sublime, time-lapsed vision of Earth’s destruction and renewal after the loss of the moon.

  Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, 2003). A family seeks clean water and safe food after an ecological catastrophe has destroyed civilization.

  Torchwood: Miracle Day (Russell T. Davies, 2011). Everybody living forever is not as great as you’d think.

  Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1996). A virologist deliberately releases a supergerm to kill off the human race in the name of protecting the environment.

  The Twilight Zone: “The Midnight Sun” (Anton Leader, 1961). Rod Serling’s vision of an Earth growing ever hotter takes on new relevance in an era of climate change. See also “Two” (Montgomery Pittman, 1961), in which a post-apocalyptic landscape is revealed to be a new Garden of Eden in one of the series’s few happy endings.

  Waterworld (Kevin Reynolds, 1995). Catastrophic sea level rise after the ice caps melt.

  Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967). This New Wave apocalyptic masterpiece is required viewing for the long tracking shot of an endless traffic jam alone.

  Zardoz (John Boorman, 1974). Surreal Sean Connery fantasy film that begins with the proposition that “The gun is good. The penis is evil.”

  ZPG: Zero Population Growth (Michael Campus, 1972). An overpopulated, environmentally degraded Earth installs a thirty-year-ban on procreation.

  Comics, Animation, Music, Games, and Other Media

  “Big Yellow Taxi” (Joni Mitchell, 1970). So
ng. They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.

  Captain Planet and the Planeteers (Barbara Pyle and Ted Turner, 1990). The Spirit of Earth, desperate for a solution to the ecological crisis, entrusts five teenagers from around the world with element-themed magic rings capable of summoning an ecological superhero. The power is yours.

  Civilization (MicroProse, 1991). Long-running computer game series includes both fallout zones and global warming in later stages. Ecological themes are extended in the sequel, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999).

  Cowboy Bepop (Shinichirō Watanabe, 1998). Anime space opera in which Earth is a marginally habitable, ruined backwater as a result of both an apocalyptic scientific accident and everyday industrial degradation.

  Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Sun (TSR, 1991). Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting in which the release of wild, uncontrolled magic has laid waste to the world.

  Fallout (Interplay, 1997). Satirical series of post-apocalyptic video games, parodying 1950s and 1960s fantasies of post-nuclear-war survival.

  Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (Bill Kroyer, 1992). Didactic coproduction between animation studios in Australia and the United States on the need to save the rain forests.

  Fraggle Rock (Jim Henson, 1983). Children’s television series about an underground ecological niche where all life forms have a necessary role to play. Another Jim Henson Productions project, the ABC sitcom Dinosaurs (1991–94), frequently focused on ecological themes, culminating in a highly unusual series finale that sees these anthropomorphic dinosaurs cause the ice age that leads to their extinction through excess capitalist development.

  Futurama (Matt Groening, 1999). Episodes of this long-running animated series frequently lampoon the excesses of consumer capitalism from an ecological perspective.

  H. M. Hoover, Children of Morrow (1976). Another children’s book series set after the end of the civilization, this once caused by pollution.

  “In the Year 2525” (Zager and Evans, 1969). Song. In the year 9595, I’m kinda wonderin’ if Man is gonna be alive; he’s taken everything this old Earth can give, and he ain’t put back nothing in….

  The Jetsons (Hanna and Barbara, 1962). Futuristic cartoon look at the world of tomorrow depicts a humanity that lives entirely in domed skyscrapers. Occasional references to the natural environment in follow-on movies darkly hint that the air below their homes is hopelessly polluted by smog, and that grass is recognizable only from history textbooks.

  Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004). In this delightful and ecologically minded video game, the ceaseless accumulation of our disposable junk progresses on larger and larger scales until it ultimately rolls up the entire Earth.

  Jack Kirby, Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth (1972). A young human boy emerges from a nuclear shelter (Command D) into a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by mutants and talking animals. Later issues of the comic book suggest this is, in fact, the actual future of the canonical DC Universe of Batman and Superman. Even stranger are the Atomic Knights created by John Broome and Murphy Anderson in 1960, with whom Kamandi shares a universe; the Atomic Knights wander a post-nuclear-holocaust (but surprisingly stable) America in medieval suits of armor, riding giant mutated dalmatians.

  Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead (2003–). Alongside World War Z, the best of the current zombie fictions depicting a bleak already-dead world, in which hardened bands of survivors struggle both to survive and retain their human decency.

  The Land before Time (Don Bluth, 1988). Perhaps the best children’s film ever made about mass extinction.

  Dr. Seuss, The Lorax (1971). Capitalism’s ruthless exploitation of the environment inevitably destroys the conditions required for its own continuation, unless.

  “Mercy Mercy Me (the Ecology)” (Marvin Gaye, 1971). Song. Things ain’t what they used

  to be.

  Alan Moore, The Saga of the Swamp Thing (1982). While the character technically predates Moore, his take on the inhuman living swamp (who fights on behalf of Earth, either for or against the Justice League) is definitive. Current storylines have Swamp Thing (as the avatar of the Gaia-like “Green”) fighting alongside Buddy Baker, a.k.a. Animal Man (avatar of the “Red”), against the “Black” (the embodiment of death, decay, and rot). In Moore’s V for Vendetta (1982) floods and crop failures are a major cause of the dystopian government in power in future Britain, while his seminal superhero comic Watchmen (1985) takes place against a backdrop of looming nuclear war and inevitable ecological disaster.

  9 (Shane Acker, 2009). Insidious “Fabrication Machine” technology has destroyed the environment in this animated film, leaving nine self-aware rag-dolls the only conscious life in a ruined world.

  “(Nothing but) Flowers” (Talking Heads, 1981). Song. There was a factory; now there are mountains and rivers. If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower.

  Portal and Portal 2 (Valve Corporation, 2007, 2011). The madness of science. Apeture Science’s slogan is the cracked motto of the American century: “We do what we must, because we can.”

  Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997). The most strident articulation of the ecological themes operative across Miyazaki’s work, also evident in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Spirited Away (2001).

  Settlers of Catan (Klaus Teuber, 1995). The iPad “app” version of the game features a single-player “story mode” that culminates in a climate-change-inspired rules modification in which overdevelopment of Catan leads to total desertification of the island.

  SimEarth (Maxis, 1990). Early “god game” from Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, allows players to fiddle with the variables of the environment. Spore (Maxis, 2008), also designed by Wright, has a similar feel, but is dedicated primarily to biological evolution.

  WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). Let Disney sell you a critique of its own ecologically destructive practices, nicely packaged in an environmentally friendly cardboard DVD case never used again for any subsequent film releases. And yet the film has an unexpected utopian streak that somehow manages to transcend its troubled origins. Pixar similarly explores tough ecological questions in its 2001 film Monsters, Inc. (Peter Docter, 2001), which subtly and smartly allegorizes resource imperialism and the economics of scarcity in late capitalism.

  Brian K. Vaughan, Y: The Last Man (2002). Killing off all the men is once again the necessary first step toward a rational and sustainable ecotopia.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  CHRISTINA ALT is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney, currently researching intersections between early ecology and literary modernism. She will be taking up a lectureship at the University of St Andrews in 2013.

  BRENT BELLAMY is a PhD candidate in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, writing a dissertation on contemporary U.S. post-apocalyptic fiction.

  GERRY CANAVAN is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Marquette University, teaching twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. He is currently at work on two book projects: one on SF and totality, and the other on the work of Octavia Butler. He is also (with Eric Carl Link) the editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction.

  SABINE HÖHLER is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Recently she has finished a book-length study titled Spaceship Earth: Envisioning Human Habitats in the Environmental Age that explores ecological discourses on the Earth’s “life support systems” between 1960 and 1990.

  ADELINE JOHNS-PUTRA is Reader in English Literature at the University of Surrey. Her books include The History of the Epic (2006) and, edited with Catherine Brace, Landscape: Process and Text (2010). She is currently editing a special issue on climate change for the journal symplokē.

  MELODY JUE is a PhD candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University, writing her dissertation on intersections between ecological thinking and oceanic literatures, with particular interest in oceanic SF.

  ROB L
ATHAM is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. A senior editor of Science Fiction Studies, he is the author of Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption (2002) and coeditor of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (2010). He is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction.

  ANDREW MILNER is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University in Melbourne, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English at the University of Liverpool, and the Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack Visiting Professor of Australian Studies for 2013 in the Institut für Englische Philologie at the Freie Universität Berlin. His recent published work includes Tenses of Imagination (2010) and Locating Science Fiction (2012).

  TIMOTHY MORTON holds the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, where he lectures on literature, ecology, and critical theory. He is the author of Ecology without Nature (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010), as well as the forthcoming Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality.

  ERIC C. OTTO is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities at Florida Gulf Coast University. He is the author of Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism (2012).

  MICHAEL PAGE teaches English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is currently working on two book projects, Views of the Land: Romanticism, Agriculture, Landscape, and Ecology and Ecology and Science Fiction.

  CHRISTOPHER PALMER is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication, Arts, and Critical Enquiry at Australia’s La Trobe University. He is the author of multiple investigations into SF and related genres, including Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern (2003).

  GIB PRETTYMAN is Associate Professor of English at Penn State Fayette. His recent work focuses on the role of Eastern religions in SF and utopia, with an emphasis on the work of Aldous Huxley, Ursula Le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson. He also serves as associate editor of Resources for American Literary Study.

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON is the Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus-Award-winning author of myriad SF novels and stories, including most recently Galileo’s Dream (2009) and 2312 (2012).