In case you missed it, over at the Millennial Star, there's an opinion piece about WALL-E. The basic premise is that the film is environmental propaganda, and that the environmental movement is a tool of the devil to take away our freedom, therefore WALL-E is chief wrench in Satan's toolbox.
Poet's Inc. was first to "break the story" as it were, and my comment got big enough to be worth posting here.
I think the modern environmental movement (I'm talking lobbyists here not lovers of songbirds and blue skies like Tim and Alison) invites some of this hysteria on itself. In a more perfect world people watching WALL-E would realize rather quickly that trash overwhelming the earth is not a practical way to destroy the planet. It is literally impossible to run out of places to bury things; it's just not reasonable. So, the film's message must not be "throw away less stuff" but something more abstract, and picking an unrealistic doomsday scenario would be smart to do purposefully so the audience is not distracted from the real theme.
The problem is, the EPA issued a pamphlet saying exactly that (we are going to run out of landfill space) in the 70's. And consequently we have a bunch of legal requirements to recycle things from the ensuing panic. The scientific basis for running out of landfill space? The guy typing up the pamphlet at the EPA felt like putting it in.
So there are a lot of people who don't really appreciate being jerked around by environmental policy of dubious benefit and consequently become a little hypersensitive about it. And so the logic goes "obviously this is not about saving the environment because this makes no sense, therefore it is about having power to make me do stuff, i.e. Satan"
Now while the link between "don't throw away plastic bottles" and "don't have any babies at all" is obviously VERY tenuous, I felt it deserved a better shake than what Bryce gave it.
Now for a real world example! Global warming; look kids, it's real. The temperature of the Earth had been going up until 10 years ago and may still be; it's a wiggly graph. There are good reasons to think we might be causing it; computer models of climate with elevated CO2 levels have higher temperatures, it's a greenhouse gas, etc.
One possible solution is to reduce CO2 by using a cap and trade system where the total carbon emissions allowed in the US are converted into certificates and bought and sold. This has the advantage of allowing the carbon gains to be made in the easiest locations through the market mechanism. So the free markets work their magic and we save the planet.
At the same time, however, we just chose to let someone else (or at least a regulating body appointed by elected representatives one of which may have been voted for by us) decide how much we get to breathe .
So we have a balancing act, combining the strength of our conviction that human CO2 warming is real, the size of the danger if the problem is ignored, and the cost in lost liberty if it is not.
I think the problem with "Wall-E: the religion of environmentalism" that has touched a nerve is the same problem the climate lobby has; rigid intolerance.
It is possible to disagree that WALL-E is propaganda and still be a good Mormon. It is possible to believe we need more nuclear power plants and be a good environmentalist. When Bryce Hammond or the Sierra Club publicly suggest otherwise, I think it becomes reasonable to start worrying about what image these self-appointed spokesman have created.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
WALL-E<==>Satan
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3 comments:
Careful John, just be aware that Bryce likes to have the last word.
What's that Cougarg?
I agree that the stories we tell ourselves are very important. I'm kind of talking about stories like "Little Red Riding Hood" or "Everything that Rises Must Converge," but am actually more referring to the great over-arching and under-girding "macromyths" that we use to explain The Way Things Are and What We Ought to Do Because of It. From either a secular or spiritual standpoint I agree with Bryce Haymond, the story that ends with a not-very-distant destruction of the world, a destruction of which we all will bear the guilt of bringing upon ourselves and upon each other is a false and very destructive story to be telling ourselves.
The funny thing is that I saw Wall-E as being an example of an entirely different kind of story. This, to me, does not look like the story that told Toni Vernelli to have an abortion. As a post-apocalyptic narrative, the film is outrightly cheerful. It shows a future in which humanity continues no matter the challenges it faces. It shows people that are challenged to cope with the slothfulness that technology makes possible, but people that ultimately catch a sense of their potential and choose to pursue it even though it's a harder path. It shows a planet Earth that itself is resilient and rises to the demands placed upon it.
What the Wall-E doesn't do is delude people into thinking that the road ahead is going to be easy, that we have no responsibility to live our lives sustainably because when the catastrophe comes either 1) we'll be dead already, or 2) the Millennium will come and everything will be okay. That's a Satanic story if ever I heard one, the story that we can "eat, drink, and be merry" because the consequences won't be ours to deal with. "Don't worry about air pollution, don't worry about using energy more efficiently, don't worry about excessive driving. The buck doesn't stop here, so get what you can out of the free meal."
Startlingly, Bryce Haymond's story seems to tend in this direction, and, just like the extreme environmentalists would do, he tries to motivate us through fear: fear of "socialist schemes," fear that having an interest in living more efficiently or sustainably is going to automatically lead people to kill their babies.
Sorry Bryce, but I think the human race, the children of God, have a brighter future than that. And it's going to arise out of the inherent goodness in people, and as a result of the informed, godlike decisions they make. It will come as people take responsibility for the cumulative consequences of their life-choices, as their efforts perfected, "after all they can do," by the grace of God.
This is the story I'm telling myself, anyway.
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