This is another diary in the continuing “New Environmentalism” series. In this series, we’re going to be looking at ways to change the way we live and work – sometimes significantly – in order to live in harmony with our environment and deal with the inevitable post-oil period.
Goals of the New Environmentalism: devise a practical, realistic vision for a sustainable future and a plan for moving from our modern society to a sustainable society. In this society, we claim that the proper goal of economic activity is not growth but, rather, human happiness.
Knoxville Progressive and I encourage you to contact either of us by email if you’d like to be a contributor to this series (post a diary / host a discussion).
This week’s New Environmentalism is going to take a slightly different tack. In previous weeks, we’ve looked at actual techniques and technologies that can be used by a sustainable society. Everything from transportation to water management. This time, we’re going to look at something whose benefit and purpose is a little more vague: environmentalism in entertainment!
I’m of the firm belief that entertainment is important in shaping a culture. A lot of what we see and think about how life “should be” is based on what we see in our entertainment. Not just on the boob tube, but books, on stage, in art galleries, and even in ads and on t-shirts. Most people pick up attitudes, opinions, and wants from their entertainment. I don’t have any proof for this; just a gut feeling based on personal observation of people around me and what I know of modern history. So take the rest of this section with a grain of salt.
What we see a lot in our entertainment right now is excess. It’s very rare to see a TV show or movie where at least one main character doesn’t have a fancy, expensive car or an SUV. Big homes and bigger TVs are the rule, along with expensive clothing and jewellery. Characters that are genuinely concerned about the environment are either borderline (or outright) comic relief, or mocked. There are exceptions, of course, and non-visual entertainment, like books or plays, is often less extreme in this regard.
We can see this very clearly in the development of the suburbs. TV focused on happy suburban families with housewives, dogs, big houses and cars, and 2.5 children helped encourage people that that was the life they wanted. Combined with other factors, of course. But enough moaning about the way things are, let’s look at more positive examples!
Ancient Entertainment
So, let’s hop in our Tardis and jump back in time a few thousand years, when our forebearers were running around in the woods in fur and bronze armour and hitting each other over the head with sharp bits of metal. They didn’t have television, or books for that matter, but they did have stories. Most cultures quickly developed a significant oral tradition, what we now like to think of as “mythology”. Since these cultures were so immediately dependent on the natural world, awareness of the dangers and demands of the ecosystem was very important to them, and their stories were structured to pass on that knowledge.
The most obvious example of this is Native American mythology. Much of it was very directly and immediately related to respect for nature and proper practices. Hunting practices, building practices, even (in some cases) farming practices were all tied into the mythology. Spirits of animals and of the land were very important, and needed to be respected. Other mythologies contained similar lessons, but were more subtle or indirect about it. In Greek mythology, for example, the same elements of nature that the Native Americans worshipped more-or-less directly were embodied at one remove, as human-ish Gods and Goddesses. The lessons of respect and caution were still maintained, though. Crossing the Gods was a quick shortcut to the grave, and irritating them by being careless or not following the proper procedures was almost as bad.
There are other examples of this, these are just the two that I’m the most familiar with. The same elements come into play in practically any mythology, from Chinese to Norse. Somewhere along the way, Christianity seems to have lost it. I’m not quite sure how, nor do I want to speculate on why here. The lesson to take away from this is that environmentally-aware entertainment doesn’t have to be boring or dry. You can embed effective lessons in a larger work with a different apparent focus. We also see that general respect for and appreciation of nature is, for most people, as good as high-level knowledge about climate processes, cycles, pollution, and all that other stuff. Even if they can’t see the whole system, they can still appreciate it.
Science Fiction and Fantasy
Moving back to the modern day, we’re now going to look at a few places where environmentalism pops up. One place where it shows up fairly often is science fiction and fantasy. This isn’t really surprising. One of the purposes of science fiction is to look at the consequences and purpose of technology. In the modern world, it’s hard to do this without thinking about how it effects the environment. Fantasy harkens back to bygone days, where man lived much closer to nature. Here, environmentalism becomes important because it’s a convenient way to accentuate the dangers and demands of the natural world.
Science fiction often leads towards over-dramatized examples of the consequences of ignoring environmental factors. The most recognizable of these is the “flooded cities” world, where global warming has lead to the melting of polar ice caps and filled the streets of coastal cities with water. While not necessarily particularly realistic or useful, this pops up in so many places that I can’t even start naming them. A close second are “new ice age” scenarios, where environmental damage or nuclear war trigger a glacial advance. This was very popular during the cold war, but has slid out of fashion since then. Other novels look at more subtle consequences of pollution and environmental damage. Smog-filled, densely-packed dystopian cities hammered by acid rain are common here, especially in cyberpunk novels. Runaway consequences of genetic engineering are also popular, though less so these days.
One good example that Knoxville mentioned when I suggested this diary was The Sheep Look Up. I’ve never read it, but it looks interesting. philinmaine mentioned Bruce Sterling‘s Heavy Weather, which looks at some possible consequences of global warming on weather patterns.
Not everything’s doom and gloom, though. There are books that look at ways for a technological civilization to work together with nature instead of against it, though they tend to be subtle. Lois McMaster Bujold‘s Vorkosigan saga touches on this, though as usual, the technology’s little more than a background for her characters. Genetic engineering in her setting is much more developed, and conducted with considerable thought into the organism’s role in its environment. The socities we see are very conscious of their habitat, and do their best to shape it as carefully as possible. Since many are in marginal habitats – sealed artifical environments on space stations, partially-terraformed worlds, and the like – this is no surprise. Here on Earth, we’ve got a lot of “buffer” to absorb mistakes. A space station has almost none.
Environmentalism in fantasy is often linked to magic. Magic comes from the natural world, and nature is inherently magical. The canonical example here is, of course, found in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. The Ents protect and defend the natural world, and the wrath of their forests against those who would assault them is swift and devastating. The Hobbits generally live in harmony with nature, and get along fine despite their homeland being right next to an ancient and treacherous wood. And then we have the wizard Saruman and the dark lord Sauron, who try to bend nature to their will, resulting in desolate, blasted lands where nothing grows.
Anime
Another interesting bastion of environmental awareness in modern-day entertainment is Japanese anime. It’s not ubiquitous there, but there are a lot of big-name works with strong environmental themes. The ones that I think people here are most likely to be aware of are the works of Studio Ghibli. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the studio’s first film, tells of a world where mankind has been almost wiped out by out-of-control mutant fungi and insects. It follows the princess Nausicaa, who sees the beauty even in these creatures, and seeks a way to live in harmony with them. The movie’s good, but the manga (made available in North America by Viz Media) is truly epic.
I don’t expect many people here to have seen or read Nausicaa, or even heard of it. I do expect some people to have seen another Ghibli film: Princess Mononoke. The first time I watched it, I couldn’t make much sense of it – it didn’t really seem to have an ending that resolved anything. Neither “side” really “won”. I was too used to domestic movies about environmentalism that I’d seen growing up, and had expected either “nature” or “man” to “win”. The second time I watched it, I realized that the two had come to an understanding, and were able to exist together, instead of constantly fighting. The fighting was corrupting both, and victory would’ve destroyed both.
Another interesting example, one that I expect very few people here to know about, is Earth Girl Arjuna. The series is very directly about the environment, and looks at it from a number of angles. Some of the takes on issues are oversimplified or just plain wrong, but as an examination of environmentalism, it’s excellent. Juna is forced to live a sustainable life, and finds it to be rather difficult, especially relating to the people around her that don’t. The ending focuses heavily on the spiritual aspects rather than the practical (and is a tad depressing – basically, a micro-Crash scenario), but it’s still an excellent series.
Other anime touch on it in a vague way. Gundam, for example, has much of mankind forcibly relocated to space colonies so Earth’s environment can recover. The environmental issues implied by this aren’t a major theme in the series, though, and it takes a back seat to character development and philosophy. (And, of course, on giant robots blowing each other to bits.) This kind of “soft” environmentalism seems to be fairly common in anime, especially recently. With the recent anime “boom” here in North America, that could be a good thing… If the details don’t get censored in the translations.
Music
Music is kind of the opposite of the above two cases. While environmentalism was never really predominant, especially compared to other progressive issues (like war), I do remember some real, semi-mainstream songs about the environment.
Unfortunately, I can’t remember any. Nor have there been any recently. I’m not going to speculate on why; a discussion of the ever-expanding reach of the corporate monoculture’s tentacles could consume an entire diary by itself. There may have been a few with environmental overtones or themes, but they tend to be in the same category as what Ed the Sock refers to “War is Bad and People Die” videos – there’s no real insight or lesson, just an attempt to exploit real issues to sell an album.
If I’m missing something here… Please, bring it to my attention. I’m aware that some neo-Pagan music has environmental themes, but I don’t really consider it mainstream.
What Can You Do?
There’s not much that can be done to affect the kind of mainstream entertainment content that gets produced. Entertainment’s a big business these days, and the companies at the top know what’s at stake: control of culture. They’re perfectly willing to sacrifice a lot of money now in order to ensure that they’ll be the only players in the game for the foreseeable future.
If you have some talent at crafting entertainment, it might be good to try and incorporate environmental themes into your work. As mentioned above, it doesn’t have to be blatant to be effective. Sympathetic or heroic characters that just happen to be environmentalists and try to live sustainable lives rather than driving around in muscle cars can make your readers think. I’ve no clue about the creative processes for other works; I’d think it would be harder to introduce it subtly in music and visual art, but perhaps something more blatant is more suitable there?
Even if not, never fear, there’s still stuff you can do. And this stuff’s easy, it doesn’t even require joining any boards or running for office. Choose your entertainment carefully, especially when entertaining friends, or going to the movies with them, or whatever. Try to steer away from stuff that glorifies material excess and towards things that look at more subtle sources of happiness. If you can find enjoyable stuff that actually has some awareness of the environment woven in, you get bonus biscuits! In general, spend as much time considering what you feed your mind as what you feed your body.
So now I’ll throw the floor open… What do you think of this topic? What entertainment have you found that, subtly or openly, raises the issue of the relation of the environment to man? Do you have any hints for getting people to watch/read it?
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