Assisted suicide and corporate-driven cannibalism aside, the thing that disturbs Dr. Mark Meisner about the dystopian future portrayed in the 1973 movie “Soylent Green” is the absence of nature in the lives of ordinary people.
“The loss of nature is soul-destroying,” said Meisner, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and coordinator of the undergraduate option in environmental communication and culture.
“Soylent Green” depicts a bleak world in 2022: The villains are overpopulation and pollution. The victim is the natural world, which most people have never seen. Meat and produce are available only to the wealthiest people; everybody else survives on processed wafers produced by the gigantic Soylent Corp.
Charlton Heston plays a police detective who investigates a homicide and discovers Soylent Green wafers are made from the flesh of dead humans.
“The movie is meant as a warning,”Meisner said. “It addresses food shortages, global warming and increasing gaps in income, along with that isolation from nature. And, of course, all of these are things that we see in our world now. They are not as extreme as portrayed in the movie, but are present today nonetheless.”
One of the most poignant scenes, in Meisner’s eyes, is when the character played by Edward G. Robinson (in his last movie) discovers what really goes into Soylent Green wafers. In his despair, he chooses euthanasia at a government facility. As he is dying from a fatal injection, he is shown images of an idyllic forest: trees, running streams and animals.
“For 20 minutes, he watches movies about nature,” Meisner said. “It evokes the complete absence of nature from people’s lives. It’s only in death that they have some access to a mediated vision of nature. How sad is that?”
“Soylent Green” exemplifies producers’ attempts to use film to make a point about environmental issues, Meisner said. It’s a film in which scientific accuracy and advocacy are in tension, much like Roland Emmerich’s “The Day After Tomorrow,” which portrays the apocalyptic effects of sudden climate change.
“Did they get the science right? Maybe not,” Meisner said, referring to “The Day After Tomorrow.” “Did they get it right from the point of view of making an exciting movie? Did they get it right from the point of view of raising awareness of the issue? If it raises the issue in the minds of the people, they advanced their goals.”
Meisner, founder and director of the Environmental Communication Network, maintains a filmography of nature and environmental movies on his ECN Web site. At last count, there were nearly 200 movies on it, ranging from “Babe,” featuring a talking pig on a sheep farm, to “A Civil Action,” based on the true story of a Massachusetts town whose water supply was contaminated by pollution.
The environment appears in movies in roles such as villain, savior, victim or obstacle. It can be sentimentalized, as in “Free Willy,” featuring an orca rescued from a shady amusement park owner by a disadvantaged teenager.
“The movie is meant as a warning,” Meisner said. “It addresses food shortages, global warming and increasing gaps in income, along with that isolation from nature.”
There is the nature-as-mutant approach. (See “Prophecy,” page 19) There is the man-vs.- wilderness approach, in movies like “My Side of the Mountain,” based on the Jean Craighead George novel in which a boy from New York City takes off to the Catskills and lives alone in the trunk of an old hemlock.
But, despite the producers’ efforts, do feature films really affect what people think? “We can’t easily say one way or the other,” Meisner said.
Despite the box-office appeal of blockbusters like “The Day After Tomorrow,” which grossed more than $500 million worldwide, Meisner said studies show feature films do not usually have a significant measurable impact on public opinion.
One exception is “The China Syndrome,” the 1979 film that featured a barely contained accident at a nuclear power plant in California.
The movie opened just 12 days before a reactor overheated at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, outside Harrisburg, Pa. Compounding the coincidence was a line in the movie that said a nuclear meltdown could “render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.”
The movie’s timing amplified the public’s anxiety about nuclear power, Meisner said, and familiarized viewers with some of the terminology used at nuclear power plants.
Although not 100 percent accurate regarding the science of such facilities, the film helped fuel the no-nukes protests of the early 1980s.
For a scientist’s look at some other feature films, read on. But beware: Spoilers lurk.
Share
Staff Favorites:
Fall 2008
‘Soylent Green’ Co-stars Nature in the Role of Victim
Much like a human drama queen, the mansion that stars in “The Money Pit” overacted a bit. But despite the old house’s histrionics, one of ESF’s resident construction experts said the basic premise of the 1986 comedy was realistic.
“The overall intention of the movie — to indicate you can walk in and think the place is great and then once you start pulling things apart, heaven knows what you’ll find — is certainly good,” said Kenneth J. Tiss, a lecturer in the Department of Construction Management and Wood Products Engineering.
However, the details that provide comic moments as the characters, Walter and Anna, played by Tom Hanks and Shelley Long, try to tame a series of nightmares in their dream house had Tiss shaking his head.
“There’s that one scene where one appliance after another is blowing up, it goes in a line right around the kitchen: first the toaster, then the microwave, then the others, right around the room. That’s not going to happen,” Tiss said. “Electrical fires happen deep within the wall and lots of times, nobody even notices them at first.”
It’s possible nobody will notice a hole in the floor, either, if it is covered with a rug.
In “The Money Pit,” Hanks’ character, Walter Fielding Jr. gets wedged in a gaping hole hidden under an area rug.
The presence of a hole at a work site is realistic, Tiss said, because a builder might leave an open spot in the floor for later construction of a stairway or, during a renovation, to make it easier to dispose of debris. In fact, it’s common enough that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, with which Tiss serves as an outreach instructor, has rules governing how such holes are treated on a construction site. But those rules do not include hiding holes with area rugs, as happened in the movie.
A spectacular collapsing-scaffold scene also took some liberties, Tiss said. Scaffolding is typically made of metal, not wood. In the rare event of a collapse, a scaffold does not go down in an eye-catching, progressive fashion as does Walter and Anna’s. A scaffold would have been secured to the house. And perhaps most significantly, if a scaffold did collapse, there is little chance that all the people who tumble down would walk away unscathed.
“Normally, when scaffolds collapse, people get hurt big time,” he said. But the challenges of renovating an old house, managing a budget and sticking to a schedule are realistic, as experienced by anyone who has ever tackled a home improvement project. As the house continues to fall apart, Walter and Anna continually ask the contractors how long the next repair will take. The answer becomes a running gag: “Two weeks.”
“That is so true,” said Tiss. “It’s the old adage: Buyer beware.”
“The movie was dramatically exhilarating!” said Dr. Theodore Endreny about “The Day After Tomorrow.” And what it lacks in meteorological accuracy it makes up for in special effects as climatologists race to save as much of North America’s population as possible before an abrupt climate shift ushers in a new ice age.
In a speech before the United Nations Conference on Global Warming, paleoclimatologist professor Jack Hall warns that global warming is a serious problem and a new ice age could happen in 100 to 1,000 years if action isn’t taken now. But polar melt has disrupted the warm North Atlantic
Current and is affecting weather systems worldwide. The massive climate change and new ice age are now only weeks, if not days, away. Hall knows this because his team of crack scientists ran weather forecast models that told them about weather systems and their exact locations for weeks into the future.
“(Weather) forecast models are pretty accurate three or four days out, but beyond that because of chaos they degrade and become worse,” said Endreny, who taught meteorology in ESF’s Department of Environmental Resources and Forest Engineering. “So being able to predict where and when the storms emerge 16 weeks ahead isn’t going to happen.”
That is, unless you have Professor Hall’s modeling program.
“The model he used was another treasure in the movie,” said Endreny. Hall uses a paleoclimatological model based on variables such as past records of pollen and ice core temperatures, and then he asks one of his team to “incorporate storm scenarios” into the model. “Storm simulations are very difficult. If you had a million dollars in National Science Foundation funding and months to put it together you might get something, but they’re able to do it in 48 hours,” said Endreny.
“They probably had NOAA (National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration) climatologists drooling for his (Hall’s) code,” he said. “I’d like to have that team join us as post-docs at ESF.”
Naturally, the situation is worse than everyone thought. The world doesn’t have 16 weeks, it has seven to 10 days as the super storms batter the globe before the big freeze arrives. Tornadoes are ripping apart Los Angeles, hail is falling in Japan, it’s pouring in New York City, and Northern Europe is experiencing record storms and snowfall. And there are three super-cell hurricanes moving over major population areas.
“The special effects capture the force of nature accurately,” Endreny said, “but there are a number of flagrant inaccuracies that would only concern scientists or engineers.”
If one ignores the laws of conservation of mass, then the storms might all take place. But since these super storms need equal amounts of air going up as coming down, so many storms close together — like the multiple tornadoes that destroy Los Angeles — would rip each other apart and cancel each other out, Endreny said.
A disaster movie just isn’t a disaster movie if the Statue of Liberty doesn’t take one on the chin. Here, Lady Liberty is up to her waist in ice. But for the water to get that high in New York Harbor, Endreny said, all the ice in the Arctic would have to melt, which would take 2.5 years of all the sun’s energy, which means “you’d have to tip the earth to do that.”
In one tension-filled scene, Hall’s son and a friend are racing through the famed New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, where they have taken refuge from the storm.
They’re running from a massive cold front. It’s so cold — and so fast — that it is freezing the marble floors behind their footfalls.
“If the cold air is chasing them, what would cold move quicker through? Marble or air?” asked Endreny. Pesky science aside, in the movie, the cold moves through the marble faster, creeping along the floors, up the columns and across the walls as our heroes rush to the safety of a room with a fireplace.
“The weather in the movie is so powerful it just started tearing logic apart,” Endreny said.
“Prophecy,” a nature’s revenge tale from 1979, hits all the high points: big business polluting the waterways, a clash between cultures, commentary on reproductive rights, the plight of the poor and, of course, a mutant she-bear terrorizing a small Maine town.
The big business is the local papermill, which, it is discovered, is discharging mercury into the water. On the plus side, boy, the fish sure are biting and are they ever big! On the bad side, it’s making people crazy and mutating bears into frothmouthed killers.
“Mercury is used in the production of caustic soda,” said Linda Fagan, project staff associate in the Department of Paper and Bioprocess Engineering, but “most mills claim the water going out is cleaner than the water going in.”
Fagan said there was a time when people living near a paper mill would claim they could tell what kind of paper was being made by the color of the water coming from the mill. “It sounds heinous now, but everyone lived that way,” she said. “It really is so much better now. In 1970 we had Earth Day and the EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) soon after, and things changed.” These days, paper mills go to great lengths to improve the processes. Mills have environmental engineers on staff, and the mills must have permits for discharge.
“Today mercury is so tightly regulated that all suppliers go through stringent testing before their product is allowed in the mills,” said Fagan.
The movie isn’t completely off base, though. In one scene the mill manager says, “People think that the paper industry is using up all of the forests. We plant a seedling for every tree harvested.” Said Fagan, “We’re doing even better than that in 2008.”
According to the Abundant Forest Alliance, “The wood and paper industry more than makes up for what it harvests by managing forests and planting more than 1.7 million tree seedlings every day — more than 600 million tree seedlings a year. Since 1952, when national statistics were first reported, forest growth in the United States has exceeded the rate of harvest. On commercial forestland, net annual growth surpasses
the rate of harvest by almost 50 percent.” “As Tom Amidon (PBE faculty member) would say, ‘Growing trees is a solarpowered enterprise. Renewable and sustainable,’” Fagan said.
There was one more thing “Prophecy” got right, according to Fagan. The costume designer nailed the look of the mill manager. “I know that guy,” she said, “right down to the hair and the contrasting plaid outfit.” Fagan’s one-sentence review: “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, but I can’t imagine that I would recommend it.”
Playing the part of the she-bear is the brown bear, ursus arctos, from ESF’s Roosevelt Wildlife Collection. The bear, minus the foam, is on display in the lobby of Illick Hall.
‘The Birds’: A ‘Great Movie’ Flies in the Face of Science
Maybe it was a depiction of the revenge of nature or a metaphor for the fear of abandonment. It could have been a comment on the inevitability of chaos or the fragile state of humans’ existence on Earth.
Dr. Guy Baldassarre, an ornithologist in ESF’s Department of Environmental and Forest Biology, has his own take on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 masterpiece thriller, “The Birds.” “It’s Al,” he said, putting himself on a first-name basis with the iconic filmmaker. “Al’s great. It’s his imagination.”
Baldassarre’s EFB colleague Dr. William M. Shields considered that Hitchcock might have been warning his viewers to care for the environment, lest the animals unite and strike back. “Even back in the ’60s, Alfred might have been thinking that,” Shields said. “Or maybe he just thought birds looked scary.”
The presence of actual science in “The Birds,” which features mobs of agitated avian creatures inexplicably attacking the clueless residents of a Northern California town, was quickly dismissed when Baldassarre, ESF’s current ornithology professor, and Shields, who teaches animal behavior, got together to talk about the movie.
“Basically, it’s all hocus-pocus,” Baldassarre said. “They would never attack people.” “Never, ever, ever,” Shields continued. “They are more likely to defecate on people.”
But that doesn’t stop the two educators from admiring Hitchcock’s 119 minutes of menacing gulls and evil-eyed crows: “Great movie, though,”Baldassarre said.
“Hitchcock picked the smartest and dumbest of birds,” Shields said. “Crows are exceptionally intelligent, and sea gulls are extremely stupid. So it’s very interesting that he picked one of each. Or maybe he planned it that way.
I don’t know.”
“What species of gulls?” Baldassarre wondered.
Shields: “California.”
Baldassarre: “Probably.”
Shields: “Not many people distinguish between species of gulls, you know.”
Baldassarre: “I’ve never looked to see if he has different species mixed in there. I don’t think so.”
There is a bit of truth in the movie, they said, but it stretches reality. Both crows and gulls will fly at a human interloper and peck at the person’s 
head, but only to protect a nest occupied by live young. And one crow might be seen on a beach near a flock of gulls, scavenging for the leftovers from a vacationer’s lunch, but you won’t see flocks of both species lined up on power lines together, looking sinister.
Hitchcock’s winged stars went from sinister to downright terrifying, pecking their way into houses so they could aim their beaks at the occupants.
But the only bird that could survive such an attempt is the aptly named woodpecker. The built-in shock absorbers in its head would prevent it from literally beating its brains out on a wooden shingle.
“Take that little bird that doesn’t weigh very much and have it try to peck its way into a house,”Shields said, pointing at a mounted crow he and Baldassarre had brought along for a photo shoot.
“Its brain is going to go bang!, bang!, bang!, bang!, bang! inside its head. That’s called subdural hematoma and death for a crow.”
He gave the film another moment’s thought and concluded: “It’s not inconceivable that a suicidal bird and its compatriots could peck its way into a house and attack people. It’s not inconceivable at all, in imagination. Just in reality.”
Standing in for the California gull of Hitchcock’s Northern California town is a herring gull, borrowed from the Roosevelt Wildlife Collection at ESF. The birds join Guy Baldassarre, left, and Bill Shields.
‘Cars’ Speeds through the Issues to Arrive at a Happy Ending
Disney/Pixar’s animated feature movie “Cars” is about a rookie race car who, through an encounter with the residents of a forgotten town along Route 66, learns there’s more to life than winning races. From an ESF standpoint, it’s also about the revival of a once-prosperous community.
The arrival of Lightening McQueen, the aforementioned race car, to the town of Radiator Springs ultimately results in the town’s rebirth. In reality, it takes more than “a hotshot race car” to revive a town.
In “Cars,” McQueen returns to Radiator Springs and makes it his racing headquarters.
With the race car comes money, resources and tourists. ‘Cars’ ends with a silver bullet, but the CCDR often doesn’t get that,” said Cheryl Doble, director of the Center for Community Design Research. “We have to look at the resources available and build upon that.”
The CCDR, an outreach program within the Department of Landscape Architecture, works in partnership with communities and other academic programs to provide technical assistance, educational programs and research projects that build a community’s capacity to manage sustainable futures.
“Radiator Springs’ new life comes as a result of the individual hero coming back,” said Doble.
In reality, revitalizing a town takes many people and much thought. “The residents have to understand what they value, describe the vision that they hold for their community and identify the actions that they can take to achieve their vision.”
Doble notes that “Cars” does accurately portray aspects of life in such towns. Radiator Springs was once a thriving town on the much-traveled Route 66. When the interstate bypassed Route 66 and the towns along the way, those towns began to wither.
Rural villages throughout New York have experienced a similar fate, she said. Once thriving downtowns and Main Streets have disappeared as major highways allow people to travel around towns rather than through them. Doble said this has been particularly true in Northern New York, where cars zoom past towns on the highway, and while the residential core of the community often maintains its integrity, its commercial centers have disappeared with the advent of the highway.
“It (the movie) was interesting because it illustrates a common phenomena; a lot of communities have been bypassed as a result
“The movie is meant as a warning,” Meisner said. “It addresses food shortages, global warming and increasing gaps in income, along with that isolation from nature.”
of new highway construction,” said Doble. “It’s complicated when a community goes through change.” In the case of Radiator Springs, it is a once-prosperous tourist town that hasn’t found a way to recapture its past glory.
“Clearly at one time it (Radiator Springs) was a happening place,” said Doble. “And now in spite of its economic decline, it has an interesting collection of residents that have no intention of leaving.” Doble said a group of die-hard residents is common in such situations.
“People who have lived there all their lives stay. Some — like Sally, the Porsche — come to get out of the rat race and are able to find the beauty of the place and try to stimulate something to happen. Others, like Mater the tow truck or Flo the show car, stay out of loyalty.
“This is something we see a lot of with the CCDR,” said Doble.
Doble said a former student once did a study of a rural community, like Radiator Springs, and often found “people who had lived there for years and feel a real sense of loss. The empty storefronts and boarded-up homes were hard for them to accept. The study looked at how that sense of loss affects the ability to plan for the future.”
Doble added, “It’s hard to plan for a new future when you want the past to return.”
The fact that the movie was produced by Disney also interested Doble.
“At Disney World and Disneyland they’ve frozen and celebrated the idea of Main Street, and to see Disney present a movie that portrays the loss of the vitality, and then revival, of a main street is interesting.”