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
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    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.