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.