Eco-Tainment #14: Green Mansions

Environmentalism is often written about as though it were a purely recent phenomenon. While this is indeed true for the most part, there are also a handful of older works that express what might be considered environmental sentiments had they been created today. One of the very first of these is William Henry Hudson's 1904 novel Green Mansions, later made into a movie starring Audrey Hepburn.
The protagonist of Green Mansions is an unnamed narrator who travels to the rainforests of Venezuela. There, he settles in a native village whose inhabitants speak of a mysterious young woman named Rima who can communicate with birds. At first the narrator is skeptical, but he soon encounters Rima himself. Rima is treated as an outcast by the others in the village where she lives because of her connection to animals (especially birds).
Rima insists that he help her return to her people's homeland, which her mother left long ago. They succeed in locating Rima's homeland, but when they arrive they find that her people have already been massacred by raiders, who also destroyed the surrounding forest. This leaves Rima as the only person in the world with her gifts, and at the end of the novel she too is killed.
Needless to say, there are aspects of this book that have not held up well. The depiction of the Native Americans, though intended to be in a positive light, would likely come off as racist by today's standards. However, it does shine an important light on a belief that has permeated environmentalism since its beginnings--the so-called "Noble Savage" myth.
The premise of this idea is that people in the distant past, or in non-technological societies today, live in "harmony with nature." This concept, the idea that humans are peaceful and nature-loving in their primal state, makes for a pleasant sentiment, but there is little reality backing it up. It still appears in modern-day fiction, such as the movie Avatar that I previously reviewed. All throughout history, supposedly "primitive" people have killed of numerous species, often while armed with nothing more than stone weapons and fire.
Green Mansions was notable at the time it was written for being one of the first novels with any sort of environmental themes. But the way those themes are presented has not aged well.

                                              
Green Mansions was one of the first environmental-themed novels ever. While its general premise is still valid today, the cultural stereotypes and outdated scientific beliefs it contains have made it troublesome

Eco-Tainment #13: The Day After Tomorrow

There's something to be said for subtlety. If you harp on about a single point forever, you run the risk of dulling your audience's sensitivity to the subject and causing them to grow bored. Unfortunately, Hollywood movie directors have rarely understood this. When presented with a controversial or polarizing subject, their usual agenda is to be as unsubtle as possible. Roland Emmerich's 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow is no exception.
As with Emmerich's other works--Independence Day, the 1998 remake of Godzilla, and 2012-- the plot of The Day After Tomorrow is thin and serves mostly to provide excuses for famous buildings and monuments to be destroyed spectacularly. The dance, in this case, is a sudden drop in the Earth's temperature brought about by man-made climate change, which results in a new ice age. The movie was a box-office success and made climate change a hot topic in popular culture. Unfortunately, the way it is portrayed in the movie is flawed.
While it is true that the Earth will eventually enter another ice age (in fact, it is technically more accurate to say that we live in an ice age now, but during a warm spell) this will not happen for thousands of years. Indeed, the Earth's polar ice caps are actually disappearing at an alarming rate. While the movie succeeded in putting the dangers of climate change in the public consciousness, it also gave many people the wrong idea of how they work.
You might well respond, "It's a movie. It's not supposed to be taken seriously!" That would be true, if The Day After Tomorrow were not specifically advertised as being based on real science. If a movie claims to be based on modern science, but presents it in an inaccurate manner, the inaccurate version is what the viewers remember
                                                  . 
    In The Day After Tomorrow, man-made climate change results in a global ice age. Despite the movie claiming to be solidly grounded in science, no scientists take this scenario seriously.

Banana, Bat, and Bacterium

For most people, there is an inexplicable creepiness about bats that is hard to explain. Even once it is pointed out that they do not carry disease, that they do not deliberately get tangled in people's hair, and that almost none of they drink blood, many people approach bats with a degree of uneasiness given to few other mammals. It is precisely this uneasiness that is a significant obstacle to the conservation of bats.

In 2006, a parasitic fungus was observed on colonies of bats in eastern North America. The disease caused by the fungus, which was soon given the rather cutesy name of "white-nose syndrome", has resulted in the deaths of over 5.7 million bats of various species. There is concern, therefore, that if the disease spread around the world it could potentially wipe out bats that are already endangered. 
Fortunately, a possible cure has arrived--from an unexpected source. That source is a bacterium called Rhodococcus rhodocrous, which is commonly found growing on fruit. It releases chemicals that kill off fungi around it, and for this reason it is often used as a food preservative. In trials on bananas, for example, the bananas not only ripened later but had a much lower amount of fungi than those without the bacterium did. Scientists wondered if Rhodococcus might have the same effect on the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome.

The scientists decided to test this idea by treating a sample of 150 bats with Rhodococcus, then releasing them. These bats, when recaptured and studied again, were seemingly cured of their white-nose syndrome. However, it is still far too early to tell if a definitive solution for this disease has been discovered.

                        

A little brown bat displays the characteristic white patches on its face caused by white-nose syndrome. This disease kills thousands of bats annually.

A Ghost Town Under the Sea

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the most iconic natural phenomena on the planet, as well as the world's largest coral reef. At more than 1400 miles long, it was visible from space and home to thousands of species of sea life. But that was in its prime. Today, the Great Barrier Reef is a shadow of its former self--so much so that some would argue that has reached a point of no return, where no amount of conservation effort will ever be able to fully restore it.
The reasons for the reef's decline is due to a variety of factors. Certainly water pollution and the overfishing of local sea life have played their parts, but the biggest factor by far is the increase of water temperatures due to global warming. Corals, such as those that make up the reef, cannot tolerate such drastic shifts in temperature. This is because most corals live mutualistically with algae, which feed on sunlight and in doing so provide nutrients to the coral. If the temperature is too high, the algae die, leaving the coral "bleached" and starving to death. As of the most recent survey, more than 50% of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef is completely dead, and 93% of the coral shows at least some signs of "bleaching." Small pockets of healthy coral do remain, but they are unlikely to last for much longer, especially if temperatures continue to rise.
The result of all this is essentially an underwater ghost town: the dead, pale husks of the coral remain attached to the seabed, but most of the other animals that once depended on this for food and shelter no longer live there.
Is it too late to save the Great Barrier Reef? That depends on who you ask and what you mean by "save". Since the Great Barrier Reef is a vast, complex ecosystem and not a single species, there is no single point at which it goes extinct, and no one in-situ conservation plan that works for every component. However, we do have a good idea of what the issues plaguing it are, and if we change our lives to reflect that and cut down on global warming, the Great Barrier Reef may yet rebound.

                                              
The coral on the left in this picture is healthy. The coral on the right has had all of its algae die, and has become "bleached".

A (Parasitic) Fungus Among Us

It's not often human witness the passing of a species. The simple odds of probability are against it. But today, scientists are fairly sure they have indeed witnessed the final moments of a species, just as they did in 1914 when the last passenger pigeon died, or in 2012, when Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island giant tortoise died. This time, the species in question was the Rabb's fringe-limbed tree frog. Last seen in the wild in 2007, a single male fringe-limbed tree frog nicknamed "Toughie" was retained in the Atlanta Botanical Garden, until his death this morning.
The reason for the frog's likely extinction is the spread of chytridomycosis, a disease caused by a fungus that grows parasitically on frogs and other amphibians. Originally confined to the tropics, chytridomycosis has spread around the world and made dozens of species of amphibians extinct, or nearly so. The reason for its spread is thought to be global warming due to greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere by humans, which create a more benign environment for the fungus.
Other species affected by chytridomycosis, which may or may not be extinct, include the Australian gastric brooding frog, the spiny-kneed leaf frog, and the golden toad. All of these lived in tropical regions where global warming made chytrid fungus even more widespread than it already was.
Chytridomycosis attacks its victims by clogging the pores in their skin. Since most amphibians breathe through the skin (few have lungs), this results in death from lack of oxygen.
If there is a silver lining to any of this, it is that perhaps the Rabb's fringe-limbed tree frog may not be extinct forever. Cloning technology has already been tested on another type of frog, the African clawed fro, and viable embryos have been created. Perhaps one day, one genetic engineering has matured enough, the Rabb's fringe-limbed tree frog will make a comeback.

Eco-tainment #12: Godzilla vs Hedorah

Everyone is familiar with the character of Godzilla, if mostly through satire and parody at this point. Its story has been told multiple times in dozens of movies-- nuclear testing in the Pacific ocean awakens a gigantic reptilian beast that proceeds to destroy Tokyo and other cities and later becomes involved in fights with other monsters. It seems a rather odd vehicle for an environmental message, but therein lies a tale.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Japan quickly rebuilt its economy after it was destroyed during the Second World War, eventually becoming the second-largest economy in the world. This economic growth occurred at breakneck speed, and naturally, there were consequences. The city of Yokkaichi became exposed to toxic levels of sulfur oxide, resulting in thousands of people becoming ill. This was one of many incidents that fed into the general growing trend of environmental awareness in the 1960s, and ultimately inspired Godzilla vs Hedorah.
The titular Hedorah is an alien micro-organism transported to earth on a meteorite, which then grows into a colossal sludge-like monster upon being exposed to the polluted air and water of Earth. By the climax of the film it has become a skyscraper-sized mound of toxic ooze and is more than capable of putting up a fight against Godzilla, something few other monsters in the entire series accomplish.
The fear that polluting the earth's ecosystems will create monsters--whether literal or metaphorical--is a pervasive one in environmental fiction. Indeed, it seems to be common practice in such stories to do away with the complexities of real environmentalism and reduce the antagonists to one-dimensional "monsters" whose sole reason for being is to pollute the earth. Obviously, including such complex aspects in the movie would have made it far less enjoyable.
This, in turn, brings up an important point about what using monsters like Godzilla and Hedorah to represent real-life problems says about us psychologically: We want monsters to be real, so our problems will have an obvious source.


Movies like Godzilla vs Hedorah may be entertaining, but real-world issues are reduced to the complexity--and subtlety-- of rubber-suit monsters stomping on miniature sets.

Something Rotten in Rio

Every four years (or every two, depending on your perspective), athletes from all the nations of the world gather in a single city to compete in the Olympics. This year, that city is Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. While the Olympics themselves have deservedly received a great deal of publicity, attention has also been drawn to a much more disturbing fact: the heavy levels of pollution in Rio's waterways.
Analyses of the water even before the games began showed that the water in Guanabara Bay, where the Olympic sailing events will be held, is so full of toxic waste that it is dangerous to swim in without special safety gear. Much of the waste in these waters is runoff from local factories, hospitals, and hotels, which line the Brazilian coast.
In addition to making the water hazardous for Olympic athletes and tarnishing Brazil's international image, this pollution has catastrophic effects on local aquatic life. Many sea creatures that live along the Brazilian coast are now endangered thanks to the poor condition of the water, such as the La Plata dolphin and the daggernose shark, the latter of which is virtually extinct.
Fortunately, the state of affairs in Brazil does appear to be turning heads and sparking discussion elsewhere. However, that discussion is usually only in the context of what can be done to solve the problem for the Olympics themselves. Often little attention is paid to the fact that the people who live in brazil are also affected by this pollution, let alone to its effects on native wildlife.
Ideally, the nation and city that hosts the Olympics would be required to do so in a sustainable, environmentally conscious manner. Unfortunately, as is often the case with events like the Olympics,  education and sustainability take a backseat to public showmanship. It may be too late to do anything about what is happening in Rio in the 2016 Olympics, but perhaps we can hope for something better when the 2020 Olympics happen in Tokyo.  
                               
             

A discarded baby doll joins thousands of tons of garbage clogging the Guanabara Bay along the coast of Brazil. As Brazil's waters become more polluted, its native sea life is choked to death.

Vote "Green", but not Green

Elections occur every year in the United States, but for most Americans there is only one that truly matters--that of the President, which takes place every four years. This year, the contest is between Democrat Hillary Clinton (the first woman ever to be nominated for this office) and Republican Donald Trump (a reality-show host and real-estate salesman with no political experience whatsoever). Needless to say, many voters have taken environmental aspects into consideration when they vote. However, there is a catch to doing this.
As well as the traditional Democratic and Republican parties, there also exists a separate Green party, represented this year by Jill Stein. The Green party entire platform revolves around environmentalism, which makes it attractive to many people who have such ideals. However, as a third party, the Green party is not actually intended to be capable of winning an election, but simply of drawing votes away from one or both candidates. This was what happened in 2000, when Green candidate Ralph Nader indirectly contributed to Democrat Al Gore's loss to Republican George W. Bush.  Most of those who voted for Nader were left-leaning citizens who might ordinarily have voted for a  Democrat but thought Nader embodied their ideals better.
So if you intend to vote this year, and wish to vote on environmental issues, take this into account. I know that Stein is tempting, but voting for her ultimately accomplishes nothing and eventually may do more harm than good. Hillary Clinton's environmental policies may not be as clear-cut as Jill Stein's, but if she is elected they have a much greater chance of actually being put into action.

Chew On This

As anyone who's ever stepped or sat in it knows, chewing gum is a major source of litter. As a matter of fact, it's the second-most-frequent source of litter in the world, behind only cigarette butts. Not only that, but when gum does get thrown away, it generates more landfill waste than the tire industry. There's a reason for that: tires can be recycled, while gum cannot be. See, modern chewing gum is made out of a petroleum byproduct that doesn't decay, which means it does nothing in a landfill but take up space. Incidentally, this means it's actually better for the environment for you to swallow your gum, since it can be harmlessly digested (the idea that it takes seven years to digest gum is a myth).
But on a more serious note, what's a habitual gum-chewer to do? That's what Anna Bullus of England wondered. She invented the GumDropBin, a specially designed recycling bin for chewing gum, as well as a chemical procedure that would break down the gum and rework it into a moldable, plastic-like material (which the GumDropBins are made out of). The bins are meant to be installed in public areas, along with trash cans and recycling bins, and are periodically emptied and taken to a special recycling plant to be rendered and molded into the new material.
So far, this new method has not been widely adopted. But if it were to be, it would cut down significantly on one of the world's most persistent litter problems.

                                                             
                           No one likes stepping on chewing gum, but if an interesting new idea is implanted, that might become a lot less common.

Pet Smart

Pets have been part of the human experience for thousands of years. And while most people are content with cats, dogs, hamsters, fish, and other typical pets, there remain a small but significant subset of people who are interested in more unique animals. This is how the exotic pet industry thrives.
Technically, the word exotic means not native to a given area. Exotic pets, however, are defined not by where they come from but by the fact that they are not domesticated and often belong to species that are endangered in the wild. Keeping them as household pets rarely ends well, and worse still, encourages a trade in these animals that reduces their population. This in turn often encourages poaching to fuel that demand, since legal means of supply usually cannot.
For example, you have probably seen many cute videos on the internet of slow lorises being played with and tickled. These big-eyed primates from southeast Asia are in hot demand by the exotic pet industry, especially in China and Japan, where the laws governing animal trade are relatively lax. However, these lorises are not bred in captivity, but taken from their rainforest homes. Furthermore, the slow loris is unique among primates in that it is "venomous" after a fashion; it secretes a chemical from glands on its wrists which it mixes with its saliva to give it a toxic bite. Pet lorises must therefore have their sharp front teeth painfully removed.
Another issue comes when exotic pets' owners decide they can no longer afford to care for them. Often this results in the animals being turned loose far from their native land. In some cases, the newcomers have managed to fit in quite well with the local ecosystem, but in others--such as the infamous pythons of the Florida Everglades-- they have all but taken over.
The obvious thing you can do about this phenomenon is to simply not buy exotic pets. It may look impressive to have an endangered macaw in your living room, . But unless you really think you can care for a bird that can live for seventy years, is intelligent enough to get bored and escape, and costs thousands of dollars to feed, you're probably better off with a canary.

                                   
A slow loris peers out of a cage at a pet store. With seemingly no end to the demand for exotic pets like lorises, prospective pet owners should be advised against falling for the allure of such animals.

Pondering Post-Naturalism: Part Two

In one of my recent posts, I discussed the notion of post-naturalism, the idea that "nature" is not inherently valuable for its own sake but rather for the value it provides humanity, be it for economic reasons or mere aesthetic pleasure. I personally think that this philosophy is not objectively "better" than naturalism, but it does leave open an interesting question: what to do with species that don't have any such value?
A classic case in point is the guinea worm of Africa. The guinea worm is a parasite that breeds exclusively in the bodies of humans, which it enters by being ingested along with water as a larva. The adult female guinea worm can grow up to thirty inches long, and can lay thousands of eggs. When she is ready to do so, she emerges from her host and releases them into the nearest source of fresh water. Infection with a guinea worm is rarely directly fatal, but it is extremely painful and can cause malnourishment and starvation. In the 1980s, former US president Jimmy Carter began a program to eradicate the guinea worm completely, and as of 2016 the species is believed to be near extinction.
But is this really a good thing? After all, the guinea worm is an animal that is being driven to extinction by humanity-- under the Endangered Species Act, it would seem logical to have it declared a threatened species and protected as such.
The problem with this, of course, is that the guinea worm, and other parasites like it, have no alternate hosts. They cannot live as they are and do otherwise. This is one of the biggest dilemmas of the environmental movement--where does one draw the line when protecting biodiversity. If one decides that a species deserves to be driven extinct simply because it is a "pest" with no redeeming value to humanity, this reopens some old wounds that the Endangered Species Act was designed to heal. Many now-extinct animals, like the thylacine (a wolflike marsupial from Tasmania), were killed off simply because they were seen as useless pests. Today, we consider them tragic losses.
How is the guinea worm any different?

Earth Day: A Retrospective

Today is April 22nd--in other words, Earth Day, a day that was dedicated in 1970 to environmentalism. Over time, the environmental movement has expanded and shifted in scope, but Earth Day has always been something of an iconic moment for it. What most of us seldom think about, even as we buy t-shirs, mugs, bumper stickers, and other products with tacky eco-friendly slogans, is where this tradition of dedicating one day a year to environmentalism came from.
Earth day was the brainchild of Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson. Nelson was a proud supporter of the environmental movement, which was in its infancy at the time, and suggested having a day when environmentalists like himself could gather and conduct what he called "teach-ins"--that is, events when they could educate the public about conservation.
1970 also saw the passing of major amendments to the Clean Air Act and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, ushering in what I often call the "fad years" of environmentalism: the environmentalist frenzy of the 1970s. Similarly, Earth Day's 20th anniversary in 1990 was also marked by a major increase in environmental sentiment.
But has the establishment of Earth Day actually affected the protection of the world's ecosystems in the grand scheme of things? That's a complicated question. There's no denying that the first Earth Day in 1970 definitely increased environmental awareness; the fact that it happened during the hippie movement and the protests against the Vietnam War probably helped as well. The concept of ecology--the study of organisms and inorganic factors in an environment and how they affected one another--also became mainstream around this time. The first Earth Day played a significant role in making these things known to the world. But as time went on, Earth Day itself seemed to decline in importance. Today, it is seen more an a marketing opportunity than anything else, a chance for corporations to show off how "eco-friendly" they are.
The effects of the original 1970 Earth Day, however, are still being felt, and if anything that is what we should be celebrating.

Eco-tainment #11: Under the Dome

I can't believe I'm saying this, but the Eco-tainment review series is almost over. After I finish 15 reviews of environmental-themed works of fiction, I'm going to conclude it with a two-part blog essay on what themes we can generalize about how environmentalism tends to be portrayed by writers, and what direction they should take in the future to communicate their message better. For the moment, though, here is the 11th review in the series.
This one is a rather odd nomination--Stephen King's novel Under the Dome. The premise is simple--a mysterious dome seals the town of Chester's Mill, Maine off from its surroundings and traps the citizens inside. A power struggle soon erupts, with Jim Rennie, a used-car salesman, becoming the de-facto leader. Rennie is portrayed as a stereotypical greedy, scheming, sexist, and racist Republican whose sole motivator is obtaining power. In fact, he could easily be compared to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, were it not for the fact that the book was published in 2009.
A far more serious concern, however, is the pollution from the town, which condenses under the dome and causes the air within it to become toxic. The dome fills with smog and poisonous gas, and the people trapped underneath choke to death in the polluted air. By the time the dome is destroyed at the end of the story, only a few dozen of the thousands of people in Chester's Mill are still alive.
Toward the end of the story, the nature of the dome is revealed--it is the creation of aliens who are using it to trap humans under "glass" and watch how we act, much as a human child might do with insects.
The environmental message in Under the Dome is rather blatant, especially for a work by Stephen King, and as a villain Jim Rennie is fairly two-dimensional and without redeeming aspects. Many of the protagonists are similar, being little more than mouthpieces for left-leaning political statements. None of this is necessarily bad per se, but it does make the story significantly more predictable than it might otherwise be. I have great respect for Stephen King as a writer, and while from a purely literary standpoint I enjoyed Under the Dome, from an environmental perspective it was rather clumsy with its message.

                                                  
Under the Dome is, as usual for Stephen King's work, an excellent piece of writing, but it falls victim to overused stereotypes and cliches when it tries to deliver its environmental message.

Pondering Post-naturalism

It goes without saying that I like technology. Without it, how could I write this blog? But there's an important question that I--and every environmentalist--have to think about when it comes to technology. The central premise of environmentalism, after all, is preserving organisms and ecosystems in as close to an undamaged state as possible. For most people, this means doing away with the destructive influence of human technology. This belief--the belief that nature is best left alone and attempts to alter it are always destructive--is called naturalism.
On the other side of the spectrum you get the idea or belief that intelligent life forms are the central force in the universe and have a moral status or value higher than that of all other organisms. This is called post-naturalism. From a post-naturalist perspective, the view of nature as inherently valuable for its own sake is flawed, and it is acceptable to change nature if it suits humanity's greater needs. 
Which of these views is the "right" one? From a purely ecological perspective, the answer would appear to be the naturalist one--it gives us an objective view of the world and all of the ecosystems it contains. But rejecting something simply because it is not "natural" has its pitfalls. For example, many otherwise reasonable environmentalists rail against the proliferation of genetically modified vegetables, for no other reason than that they are "not what nature intended." While it is true that genetic engineering is a field that is not well understood, there is no good reason to shun it like that. The same is true, as I mentioned in a previous post, of nuclear power. It seems that many people who care about nature really only care about looking natural. This phenomenon-- the dark side of naturalism--has been termed "nature woo" by some writers.
On the other hand, the worldview espoused by post-naturalism is not without its own issues. Chief among these is the fact that it emphasizes the idea of humanity having a higher moral ground than all other species. Taking this to its logical conclusion, then, would mean that preserving nature for its own sake is not merely unnecessary but inadvisable. 
In an ideal world, the two sides would be able to reach some form of compromise. Naturalists would be able to accept that in many cases human technology is the solution they are looking for. Likewise, post-naturalists would be able to acknowledge that simply because something is not immediately useful, it doesn't necessarily lack value. 


                                           
             Genetically-engineered crops are a source of contention between those who think that humans should not tamper with nature and those who think we have a right to. However, this need not be the case.

The Boy who Cried Global Warming

Picture this: a respected U.S. government official gives an impassioned speech about the effects of humanity on the Earth's climate. He cites the rising average temperature since the industrial revolution and the greenhouse effect as proof that human activity can have a devastating negative impact on climate. Despite the clear evidence that he gives, the politician's words fall largely on deaf ears, and human-caused global warming continues to get worse.
You probably think I'm talking about Al Gore and his award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, and I might as well be. But I'm not. I'm actually talking about George Perkins Marsh, who is sometimes considered to be the first true environmentalist. Marsh gave the speech described above in 1847, at a time when preserving nature, if it was thought of at all, was thought of strictly in terms of visible and tangible benefits. The idea that humans were harming the Earth in ways that they could not see was something that bordered on pseudoscience for most people in the 19th century (and, sadly, still does for many people today).
Marsh even correctly pointed out that human causes of climate change were not limited to heavy industry (which at the time was mostly limited to Europe). He noted that "the climate of even so thinly peopled a country as Russia was sensibly modified by similar causes". We now know, of course, that the felling en masse of large tracts of forest to make way for agricultural land can contribute to global warming just as much as greenhouse gases emitted by industry.
Marsh, sadly, never came up with any sort of solution to the problem he proposed. And those scientists who might have paid no attention to his warning. It would ultimately be nearly 150 years before the idea of global warming as Marsh imagined it became accepted scientific orthodoxy.

                                              
                   George Perkins Marsh was possibly the first person ever to make the connection between human activity and global warming, as far back as 1847.

Eco-Tainment #10: Changing Nature (Dinosaurs TV series finale)

Whether we know it or not, we all love Jim Henson. From Sesame Street to The Muppet Show, his characters have etched a permanent place in the hearts of millions of people. But there's one creation of his that not many people talk about these days--Dinosaurs. This was a TV show, a sitcom actually, revolving around a family of anthropomorphic dinosaurs with the last name Sinclair. For the most part, the show was rather light-hearted, though its humor was aimed at a somewhat older audience than the other Muppet series. For the most part, that is, except the final episode.
Titled Changing Nature, this was the show's attempt to have an environmental message, as was par for the course in the early 1990s. At first, the plot is nothing new; The Sinclair family is awaiting the arrival of the Bunch Beetles, which come every year to breed and eat the cider poppy plants. Unfortunately, the WESAYSO company, where Earl Sinclair (the father) works, has destroyed the swamp where the Bunch Beetles breed, and only one Bunch Beetle appears. With no baby Bunch Beetles to eat them, the cider poppy plants grow out of control--and then the episode veers into uncharted territory.
The CEO of WESAYSO, B. P. Richfield, decides to deal with the cider poppy infestation by poisoning them. Unfortunately, this results in the death of all plants. Desperate to make amends, he suggests generating rain to grow new plants by producing clouds from volcanoes. Unfortunately, this only succeeds in causing a "nuclear winter" and freezing the dinosaurs to death. The episode ends on that note.
Although characteristically surreal, Changing Nature actually captures many of the finer points of environmentalism and ecology. As the Bunch Beetles and the cider poppies show, the absence of one species can have unexpected effects on the population of another, and attempts to control those effects often don't work. While the simple environmental message is most obvious, there is another, more hidden, one: misguided efforts at conservation can do more harm than good.

 
Despite starring a cast of dinosaur puppets, Jim Henson's Dinosaurs managed to have one of the most well-thought out environmental messages of any TV show of its time.

Big Chill or Big Kill?

It goes without saying (at least to those of you who have been following this blog) that human activity is the single greatest threat to Earth's biodiversity today. Species are going extinct at a rate several times greater than the projected "background" rate--the greatest rate of extinction ever recorded since that of the dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic. This much, experts can agree on. What experts cannot agree on, however, is how long ago this modern-day mass extinction began.
The primary point of contention for people holding these different points of view is the extinction of the so-called "Pleistocene Megafauna"--the large mammals and birds that inhabited most of the continents up until about 10,000 years ago, but today persist mainly in Africa. There are two main hypotheses for why they died out, one being that they were unable to adapt to a changing climate, and the other being that they were killed off at least indirectly by humans. Both have their advantages and drawbacks.
The hunting hypothesis suggests that humans, after arriving on a new landmass, generally wipe out the local large herbivores and top predators. It's hard to argue with this from a strictly statistical standpoint, because many of the extinctions do indeed coincide (within windows of thousands of years, of course) with the arrival of humans. However, critics of the hunting hypothesis point out that  the weapons and technology of early humans may not have been sophisticated enough, and their populations not great enough, to kill off the megafauna.
The other hypothesis is the climate hypothesis. Most of the megafauna extinctions occurred during a time when the Earth was getting warmer, a trend that continues to the present. As stated above, this fits both with the time and with the idea that humans may have been unable to kill off these animals. It should be remembered, though, that there was more than one "ice age". There were actually several, separated by warm periods like the one we live in now, called interglacials. The Earth had been through several interglacials recently before the present one began, and if the climate hypothesis were true then it is certainly odd that the megafauna were able to survive these unharmed.
Most likely, as with all things in life, the answer is not black and white. The highly specialized creatures of the ice ages certainly would have declined as the climate warmed, but that alone need not have killed them off--after all, they had survived interglacials before. But in their weakened state, they could not survive one species that had begun to flourish. They could not survive us.

Eco-Tainment #9: Tokyo Mew Mew

My very first Eco-Tainment review was for Hiyao Miyazaki's anime film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I'm not going to repeat what I said about it here, but suffice to say it was one of the precious  few works of environmental fiction that conveyed its message in an even-handed, sophisticated manner. Unfortunately, most of Miyazaki's fellow Japanese animators have not been nearly as nuanced in their environmental messages as he is.
 Tokyo Mew Mew, which aired from 2000 to 2003 in Japan and from 2004 to 2010 in the United States  (under the alternate title MewMew Power),  is a case in point.The program revolves around five teenage girls who each receive the power to transform into a respective animal--an Iriomote wildcat, a blue lorikeet, a golden lion tamarin, a finless porpoise, and a Humboldt penguin-- and become the guardians of the Earth and its ecosystems. This setup is reminiscent both of other series in the Japanese "magical girl" genre, such as Sailor Moon, and of American environmental cartoons like Captain Planet and FernGully. 
The antagonists, on the other hand, are alien invaders who seek to accelerate and use humanity's pollution of the Earth for their own ends. While this admittedly avoids many of the unfortunate implications of having a villain who pollutes simply out of greed or malice, it still falls short of the layers of subtlety that real-life environmental narratives possess. Tokyo Mew Mew is probably better than Captain Planet or FernGully, but it is nowhere near the standard set by truly skilled storytellers.
If there is one thing that can be learned from this, it is that perhaps the superhero genre is inherently unsuitable for giving viewers environmental messages. After all, a hero needs a villain to fight, and the often abstract concepts of environmentalism seldom make for good or marketable villains.

                                                     
                   On a show like Tokyo Mew Mew, a subtle, realistic depiction of environmental issues takes a backseat to a dramatic conflict between good and evil. While this is fine from an narrative perspective, what does it say about how we actually perceive environmentalism?

The N Word

There are some things we can all agree are bad for the environment. Driving an SUV when we could walk, leaving the lights on when we go on a long trip, buying produce that isn't organic--those sorts of things. And there are plenty of things we can all agree are good for the natural world (or at least look good), like recycling, not littering, and riding a bike or walking when we need to go somewhere nearby. But then there are things whose environmental effects people really can't agree on. And the most polarizing of all of these is nuclear power.

Most people, including many otherwise knowledgeable environmentalists, see nuclear power as dangerous and unreliable. They give a variety of reasons for this, including radiation emissions, proliferation of nuclear waste, and the potential for the creation of nuclear weapons by terrorists. While some of these reasons are indeed valid, many of them are not supported by sound science, or even by common sense. Indeed, many people seem to only be familiar with nuclear power from old sci-fi B-movies and episodes of The Simpsons.

Nuclear power plants, for example, cannot explode in the manner of a nuclear bomb, nor do they continuously emit dangerous levels of radiation. They are not exceptionally accident-prone compared to coal- or oil-fired power plants; indeed, they are much less so, given the rigorous safety tests they must pass. While there have been fatal accidents involving nuclear power plants (Chernobyl and Fukushima spring to mind) they are by their very nature unusual. Finally, nuclear power plants do not emit greenhouse gases. This is demonstrated by France, which gets most of its electricity from nuclear power--it has surprisingly little greenhouse gas emissions for a developed country of its size. 

Nuclear power by itself won't solve the world's energy problems. But people serious about alternatives to fossil fuels should stop demonizing it, and realize it might be part of the solution they were looking for all along.