With Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) helping to kick the modern environmentalist movement into gear, important Hollywood films directly related to the environment and climate change began to appear by the early 1970s. In Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972), for example, unexplained developments have essentially destroyed most plant life on earth, leading to the establishment of huge outer-space habitats where plant species can be maintained. That film is discussed in detail here. Meanwhile, perhaps the best remembered of these early environmentalist films is Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973), in which a combination of overpopulation and environmental destruction lead to widespread food shortages and other hardships. That film is discussed in detail here.
It might be noted that 1972 also saw the initial broadcast of a special television adaptation of The Lorax, based of a 1971 book by Dr. Seuss, which moved environmentalist film/television into the realm of children’s culture. This special remains one of the most effective environmentalist statements in all of children’s culture. It is a cogent critique that clearly attributes environmental destruction to the effects of excessive capitalist exploitation of the natural environment. Children’s feature films devoted to issues of environmentalism and climate change also include FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992) and Once Upon a Forest (1993), though the most effective of such films is probably Pixar’s WALL-E (2008), which is discussed in detail here.
Fictional films devoted to environmentalism and climate change did not really develop into a major force in commercial film after their beginning in the 1970s. Indeed, the American distribution, by Fox, of the Australian-produced FernGully: The Last Rainforest in 1992 was motivated less by a desire to convey environmentalist messages than by a desire to cash in on the success of the Disney Animation Renaissance at the beginning of the 1990s. An overtly environmentalist film (based on the Fern Gully stories of Diana Young) FernGully focuses on the theme of the destruction of the earth’s rainforests. In this case the rainforest is located near Mount Warning, on the northern coast of Australia, but the theme is global and the specific location is not particularly emphasized. Indeed, the voice actors in the film are mostly American and no Australian accents are featured. The film is quite clear in its identification of the destruction of the rainforest as a crime against nature, though it is somewhat vague in its explanation of the dire consequences of rainforest destruction and it addresses the economic impetus behind this destruction hardly at all. Further, the urgent real-world issues featured in the film are presented within a supernatural plot featuring fairies and an evil spirit, as well as a number of talking animals, which might make the film more entertaining to children but probably also obscures the environmentalist message by displacing it into an unreal world.
The film focuses on FernGully, a particularly rich area within the rainforest that serves as the home of a magical tree spirit, Magi Lune (voiced by Grace Zabriskie), who many years earlier had saved the area from the ravages of the evil spirit Hexxus (voiced by Tim Curry with an over-the-top spirit of menace) by entrapping the villain within an enchanted tree, but only after all humans had fled the area. Subsequently, the animals of the rainforest have lived in peace and harmony with their natural surroundings, believing humans to have been rendered extinct by Hexxus’s earlier assault. The central character of the film is one Chrysta (Samantha Mathis), a young fairy who is training (half-heartedly) to succeed the aging Magi Lune as the guardian of the forest. The tranquil life of the denizens of FernGully is initially interrupted by the arrival of Batty Koda (Robin Williams), a somewhat deranged bat that has been rendered so due to the results of gruesome experiments conducted on him by human scientists. This character thus not only offers Williams a chance to enact his trademark hyperactive zaniness, but also introduces the secondary theme of animal experimentation, though with a light touch that presents this potentially horrifying motif as essentially humorous. Indeed, the song “Batty Rap,” in which Batty relates his experiences in the laboratory, was specifically censored in the final released version of the film in order to make those experiences seem less frightening to children. Meanwhile, the film does very little to suggest that the same sort of mentality that enables such experimentation on animals is also central to the lack of respect for nature that has led to the ongoing destruction of the world’s rainforest (and environment as a whole). Individual viewers can, of course, supply such links in their own readings of the film, but I suspect that children would be unlikely to make this interpretive move without considerable urging from parents.
The peaceful forest is then disrupted much more seriously when human loggers arrive at the rainforest with their monstrous “leveller,” a machine that saws down and cuts up trees en masse. In the process, the loggers cut down the enchanted tree and free the evil Hexxus, who takes control of the leveller and heads straight for FernGully, hoping for revenge against Magi Lune. Ultimately, Hexxus is defeated and FernGully is saved, so that the film ends on an upbeat note that diminishes the urgency of its environmentalist message. All in all, the film seems to suggest that some heroic figure will surely ride to the rescue and save the planet, no matter what threats are heaped upon it. In addition, the magical elements of the film contribute to the exotic and almost other-worldly feel to the setting of the film, which tends to make its message seem less relevant to everyday life in the United States. Finally, the fact that most of the true evil in the film is attributed to Hexxus rather than to human profit seekers displaces the real blame for environmental destruction from its real perpetrators onto nonexistent supernatural perpetrators, further diluting the political message. As Ian Wojcik-Andrews argues, “Ferngully is a disturbing film, because the words and images it uses to discuss the destruction of the environment do not actually critique the ideological systems causing the environmental destruction” (133). But the film does at least make an effort and it could probably make a positive contribution in conjunction with other films delivering similar messages.
FernGully was, in fact, followed one year later by Once Upon a Forest,another film with environmentalist themes that was distributed by Fox, though this time produced by Hanna-Barbera. This film dispenses with magic, but still employs the time-honored children’s film precedent of cute talking animals to convey themes concerning the threat of human development to the natural habitats of animals. Here, a poisonous gas spill ravages one animal “community,” while a construction project threatens the wetlands that provide homes for a community of birds. As in Disney films such as Bambi, the focus of Once Upon a Forest is entirely on animals, while human beings are treated as strange, faceless, alien threats. The film delivers a clear message that pollution is bad and nature is good, but (even more than with FernGully) the film avoids any real engagement with the issues involved. It opts instead to focus on a plot that involves (successful) efforts to save one small badger whose lungs are badly damaged in the poisonous gas spill. Meanwhile, the success of these efforts ironically involves the ability of a group of animal “children” to build a flying machine based on the designs of their mentor, the old badger Cornelius, thus presumably setting the animals on the same road of technological development that has threatened their habitats in the first place.
Occasional environmentalist warnings continued to appear in science fiction films of the last decades of the twentieth century. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), the human race is in the process of relocating to outer space to escape an earth that has been environmentally devastated by unspecified causes (though, in the Philip K. Dick novel on which the film is based, the cause is identified as nuclear war). Soon afterward, Hayao Miyazaki’s Kaze no tani no Naushika (1984, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) used the format of the animated film to explore a blighted landscape in the wake of an environmental catastrophe. In Millennium (1989) agents from a future so polluted that humans have all become sterile travel to the past to retrieve fertile humans in the hope of repopulating the planet in some far future time when the pollution has abated. Occasional other films explored such themes as well, as when Waterworld (1995) envisions a future earth almost entirely covered by water thanks to the melting of the polar ice caps.
Environmental warnings once again became a key element of mainstream science fiction films at the beginning of the twenty-first century, starting with Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which is discussed in detail here.Indeed, Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) was extensively touted as the first major film to deal with climate change in the way the phenomenon has generally been understood in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, that film does no display a sophisticated a sophisticated understanding of climate change, opting instead to sensationalize climate change in a mode clearly modeled on the classic disaster film cycle of the 1970s, which peaked in 1974 with the release of The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and Airport 1975 (the first sequel to the 1970 disaster film Airport). However, the most direct predecessors to The Day After Tomorrow were large-scale cosmic disaster films such as Armageddon (1998) and Deep Impact (1998), which involve potential impacts of asteroid strikes on earth, as well as Emmerich’s own Independence Day, which brought the standard disaster film format to the alien invasion film. The best of the cosmic disaster films, however, is probably Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2007), which involves a collision between earth and a rogue planet, though this film deviates substantially from the usual disaster film format. This format, incidentally, was revived with Greenland (2020), which involves a comet impact on earth.
In 2008, the classic alien-invasion film The Day the Earth Stood Still was remade, this time shifting its warnings about the possible consequences of an unrestrained arms race to ones about the consequences of continued environmental irresponsibility. 2008 also saw the release of The Happening, by M. Night Shyamalan, in which the earth itself issues that humans must stop mistreating it. James Cameron’s planetary adventure Avatar (2009), a film with strong environmentalist themes, went on to become the top-grossing film of all time, holding that spot for a decade. Click here to access a detailed discussion of this film.
In some cases, science fiction films have focused on environmental disasters that have already occurred, rather than warning about future ones. For example, the 2006 South Korean monster movie The Host, directed by Bong Joon-ho, is a direct response to the revelation in July 2000 that the American military had been dumping dangerous formaldehyde in the Han River near Seoul.In the film, this pollution of a crucial resource leads to the birth of a deadly mutated monster that begins to threaten the city and its inhabitants, much in the way that the American bombing of Japan in World War II inspired the creation of Godzilla as a giant monster resulting from radiation-induced mutation. The Host gained considerable positive critical attention worldwide, though it saw only limited release outside of Korea, perhaps the only place where its social and political commentary fully resonated.
With potentially disastrous climate change looming all around us, environmentalist science fiction has tended to focus more and more on this topic in recent years. Such films have often featured apocalyptic themes in the 2010s, as in Emmerich’s 2012 (2012), a large-scale disaster film partly inspired by popular fascination with the notion that the ancient Mayans had predicted the end of the world in 2012. It depicts calamities that go beyond even those of the The Day After Tomorrow, though it is ultimately more a display of special effects than a thoughtful exploration of environmental issues. Other high-profile films dealing with catastrophic climate change include Snowpiercer (2013), in which a global climate disaster is caused by attempts to prevent a global climate disaster, and Interstellar (2014), which deals with a number of other science fiction motifs, as well as depicting a future in which climate change and crop blights have almost wiped out the entire food supply on earth, triggering a plan to evacuate the planet.
It has, in fact, become a staple of science fiction film in the 2010s to depict a future earth that has been ruined by the decay of the natural environment. In the Netflix film Io (2019), for example, environmental devastation renders the earth uninhabitable, causing humanity to be forced to abandon the planet and relocate to an outer-space habitat near Io, a moon of Jupiter. There are signs, however, that (with most humans gone) earth’s environment is beginning to recover. Meanwhile, the Canadian-produced The Humanity Bureau (2017), features a United States that is ravaged by environmental decay, while at the same time taking pains satirically to link these future conditions to the present-day policies of the Trump administration. For example, because America has been depleted of resources by climate change and other environmental and political disasters, all citizens are required to be “efficient” and “productive.” Nicolas Cage stars as an agent of the titular bureau who is charged with finding and deporting inefficient citizens, supposedly sending them to an idyllic setting where they can be cared for properly (but actually sending them to gas chambers to be executed, a motif clearly meant to recall the German Nazi “Final Solution”). That the film is meant as a satirical commentary on U.S. environmental and immigration policies (and on the Trump administration in general) is made clear at several points, as when the blighted future U.S. is described as having built walls around itself, while one potential deportee shown early in the film (a former governor of Colorado who is now down on his luck) has a poster on his wall reading “MAKE AMERICA GREAT” and even has an old photo of himself having dinner at the White House with President Trump. Cage’s character discovers the true nature of the work of the Humanity Bureau and reveals it to the public, triggering a revolution.
Finally, the cosmic disaster format was prominently applied to climate change in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021), which employs a potentially disastrous comet strike as an allegory for climate change. That film is discussed in detail here. Meanwhile, much of the activity in twenty-first-century climate change films has involved the attempt to apply one after another generic format to the issue. In addition to Avatar, high-profile films in this category (click on the titles in the remainder of this paragraph to access a detailed discussion) include George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which employs a postapocalyptic format. Meanwhile, three recent films explore the impact of climate change in a mode that is reminiscent of what has come to be known as the “New Weird” in recent fiction, which typically combines horror with science fiction (and possibly other genres, as well). These films include Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), which is an adaptation of a key New Weird novel by Jeff VanderMeer. Other films in this category include Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (2021), Garland’s Men (2022), and David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022).
Finally, climate change has not, in general, factored heavily in television programming. A recent USC-Good Energy study on Climate Silence reported that only 0.6% of all scripted film and television released between 2016 and 2020 even mention the term “climate change,” while only 2.8% of all scripts in this period involved any climate-related terms at all. One recent innovative attempt to use the longer form of television effectively to make points about the potential effects of climate change is the Apple TV+ miniseries Extrapolations (2023), which has gained considerable attention, though reviews have been mixed. The series consists of 8 different episodes, each set in a slightly later point in time, beginning with an initial episode set in 2037 and ending with the last episode set in 2070. The idea is to trace the progress of global climate change across several decades, but the series is never really able to establish and maintain a coherent, continuous narrative.
The first episode is set during a climate accord conference being held in Tel Aviv in an attempt to map international strategies in the face of a growing climate crisis to many parts of the world (much of the episode focuses on a water crisis to the Middle East, which hopes to get free access to new desalination technologies being developed by a tech firm headed by evil billionaire entrepreneur Nick Bilton (Kit Harington). In the end, Bilton agrees to supply his desalination technology to the Middle East free of charge—in return for raising the target limit on global warming (so that he can continue killing the planet with his corporate activities). It’s an interesting concept, but problematic, showing, among other things, no understanding of the Middle East, which is already so heavily invested in desalination technologies that they will likely already own the most advanced technologies in 2037, so that the main problem will be getting the rich Arab states (such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE) to share the technologies with poor Arab states (such as Syria, Jordan, and Egypt). Meanwhile, there is no mention of the vast wealth made by the rich Arab states in producing the oil that is a central culprit in destroying the world’s climate. Indeed, there is no mention at all of the rich Arab states in this episode, and perhaps the biggest weakness of the series as a whole is its failure to explore the causes of climate change (and especially to examine the role of fossil fuels as a key cause). We at least get to see another climate destruction profiteer (played by Matthew Rhys) get destroyed by a mother walrus after he taunts her baby in the midst of a melting Arctic. All in all, the episode’s strength is its understanding of the urgency of the problem of climate change and of the contribution of corporate greed to making the problem worse. Still, its lack of attention to actual details of the global politics behind climate change is disappointing.
The subsequent episodes are problematic as well. Episode 2 is a somewhat sentimental episode in which research scientist Rebecca Shearer (Sienna Miller), a carry-over character from the first episode who works for Bilton’s company, struggles to prevent the company from lying (!) to the last surviving humpback whale as part of a project that is actually meant eventually to restore the species. Again, there is no real examination of the reasons why the whales are extinct, other than a brief bit of arm-waving, while the suggestion that the dignity of this one whale trumps the salvation of the species is a bit of extreme individualism that seems unhelpful in a series supposedly meant to convince us all to make individual sacrifices in order to combat climate change. Meryl Streep makes a cameo appearance in this episode as Rebecca’s mother, indicating the willingness of many top stars to contribute to the cause of the series, even though the series itself seems deeply flawed.
Episode 3 features Daveed Diggs as Mashall Zucker, a rabbi in Miami who had appeared in Episode as a rabbi in Israel swearing he would never move to Miami. The episode focuses on the rising sea levels that are threatening much of Miami, including Zucker’s synagogue. It’s a genuinely silly episode that completely ignores any examination of the causes of the rising sea levels, assumes they are inevitable, and seems to conclude that the best thing to do is to accept them with good humor. The episode even ends with Zucker happily singing along to “Singin’ in the Rain,” followed by Gene Kelly’s famous rendition, which plays over the closing credits.
Episodes 4 and 5 are unusual in that they constitute a two-part sequence, with both parts set in the same year (2059). These episodes are also unusual in that the second of them is set largely in India, whereas most of the series tends to concentrate on America and Americans (especially rich Americans), as if they are the only ones who have something at stake in relation to climate change. Again, though, these episodes don’t really engage the issues involved, and when they do their treatment is simplistic and one-sided, as when episode 4 vaguely suggests that geo-engineering is probably a bad idea, without really considering the benefits and drawbacks in anything like a careful and detailed way. Also, these two episodes together constitute a sort of techno-thriller but show little understanding of technology and definitely aren’t very thrilling.
By episodes 6 and 7 (set in 2066 and 2068), the series begins to forget that it was supposed to be about climate change, which simply becomes an element of the background for some mediocre post-cyberpunk stories about the impact of advances in computer technology on what it means to be an individual human being. Then the final episode, set in 2070 and entitled “Ecocide,” nominally returns to ecological themes. The episode is essentially a courtroom drama in which Bilton is tried (and convicted) of “ecocide,” after which he is sent to an orbiting prison. There is still very little in the way of actual exploration of climate issues, other than the vague stipulation that Bilton had the technology to mitigate climate change for many years, but opted not to use it for business reasons.
All in all, Extrapolations is plagued by a general lack of imagination and failure to, well, extrapolate in any meaningful way into the future. The focus of the series is mostly on relatively affluent Americans, who are the people least affected by climate change, which thus becomes more of an inconvenience than a devastating existential threat. Life by 2070 doesn’t seem all that different for most people in the series from life in 2023, which tends to suggest that climate change is not really all that serious. In any case, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would be stirred by this series to make the fight against climate change a top priority in their own life.
A somewhat similar idea of trying to imagine the future is central to the British series Years and Years, a co-production of HBO and the BBC that first aired in 2019. This series focuses on a single British family and only covers the period from 2019 to 2034. To some extent, it is largely a dystopian fiction that imagines the deterioration of political crises that were already underway when the series was made, with the world situation beginning to unravel with an American nuclear strike on a Chinese island. However, the climate crisis always lurks in the background. Indeed, by the end of the series, the political situation has improved and that particularly crisis seems to have passed. Indeed, as one character reminds us at the end, regardless of this momentary victory, living conditions are only going to get worse “if we don’t fix the weather.”