Silent Running: 1970s Environmental Fable Remains Depressingly All Too Relevant
reactormag.com
reactormag.com
Me too. I still to this day have an original theater poster from it hanging in my office, next to my Collossus The Forbin Project one.
I do remember as a kid being very confused when the forest ships from the movie showed up in the fleet of ships following the Battlestar Galactica.
I had no idea what I had watched but I remember this show about these people who are stuck inside a mall and can never go outside ever. It really affected me incredibly deeply and filled me with melancholy whenever I thought about it.
Finally in College I was renting old sci-fi and watching it, and as I was watching Logans Run I suddenly realized that it was the show I had seen as a child about the people who couldn't go outside.
A lot of 70s dystopian sci-fi hits pretty hard to be honest. Two more that come off as incredibly prescient are The Network (about a media company that will do anything for viewership) and THX1138 (about people who take drugs to control all their emotions, confess their sins to chatbots, and masturbate to porn every night).
Woah. Prescient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_and_His_Dog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Ellison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Foreve...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
Same here, a very enduring memory. Although I had largely forgotten about it until I heard a song (well, some sort of psychill instrumental I guess) by Carbon Based Lifeforms, named Photosynthesis, that samples a couple of lines from this movie: https://youtu.be/KQE29az48gM?si=9q3aVxcvV7TLxBa4&t=770
For those who haven't seen the movie, here's a 16 sec non-spoiler clip that gives a little context to the lines in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Xhzo6VAWg
Glad this thread motivated me to finally write down the movie titles.
Make no mistake, I was blown away when "Star Wars" came out like everyone else, but damn, it killed what had been a delicate and thoughtful genre of Hollywood.
Robert Wise’s 1979 “Star Trek” is an interesting and unique transitional case because it retains the 2001-inspired ponderous abstract storytelling but got a Star Wars level budget. Personally I love it for that, but I know most people disagree.
(Speaking of Wise, his “Andromeda Strain” is an absolute 1970s sci-fi gem.)
Well said. SF was just growing up and maturing into something important and worth having, and then that stupid fairy-tale-in-space came along and blew it all to hell. I still resent it for that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212975
3 years ago | 60 comments
A couple of things here:
1. Could a book come out now that would have this kind of effect on the public and spur us to action? I suspect not because we're much more divided now than we were in the *early* 60s. (Yes, the divisions would grow quite large in the mid-to-late 60s, but the early 60s was the calm before the storm)
2. They expected that it would have the impact it did? I guess that goes back to #1.And these books were consistently controversial and politicized at the time, which is why sales and discussion were high yet still lead to our 2020's society being only marginally more ecologically responsible than the that of 1960's (if that).
Nothing much has changed. In the way you're referencing, the US was extremely divided in the 1960's and is extremely divided again now. Practiced media companies know how to "prepare" for that by exploiting it for sales, and today's publishers do it just the same -- sometimes on ecological topics like this, sometimes on other controversial topics du jour.
The deep divisions mostly came later in the 60s. The early 60s was the calm before the storm. The Vietnam war was barely on anyone's radar in 1962 - there were only ~9,000 US troops there in '62 and these were being referred to as 'advisors' - the vast majority of Americans didn't even know where Vietnam was or that we had any troops there at that point. Kennedy had not yet been assassinated. The Civil Rights movement was in progress, but again, not on the radar for most Americans yet. Most Americans felt that the Soviet Union was the existential threat - not a lot of division about that at the time.
Silent Spring certainly seems to have had some major impact at the time it came out - by 1970, eight years later, we had the EPA and Earth Day. Again, it's hard to imagine any kind of book or film coming out today that would have a similar impact on the culture at large since we now have a collection of subcultures each with their own preferred media outlets. In '62 you got your news from your local newspaper and the networks (mostly CBS & NBC at that point, with ABC as sort of the upstart) - while newspapers did often have a political slant, broadcasters mostly all had the same political slant (or lack of one) due to the fairness doctrine.
> discussion were high yet still lead to our 2020's society being only marginally more ecologically responsible than the that of 1960's (if that).
I think this has more to do with Reagan and the rise of the right wing in the 80s and into the current era. That led to backsliding on ecological progress that was made in the 60s through the 70s. Jimmy Carter was probably our most ecologically-minded president - he even began to sound the alarm on climate change towards the end of his administration.
Because TV was ripe and widespread at that point, you can also personally survey talk show and comedy/variety show material of the 1950's and early 1960's to experience the state of the culture. While the fairness doctrine did constrain what could stated by whom and with what kind of counterpoint, capitalists and comedians found plenty of ways to reflect the actual cultural tensions, which (like today) were not small and (like today) were on track to get further heightened.
The election of 1964 (LBJ vs Goldwater) was very conclusive: Goldwater was easy to paint as an extremist - he only got 38% of the vote, it was a landslide for LBJ. (In reality, Goldwater, or at least the Goldwater he evolved into, was nowhere near as extreme as many in his party today - he was more of a libertarian and warned against having religious extremists control the party - the GOP did not heed his warnings)
“World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the 1980s it can’t go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.”
The guy was both wrong and extremely unpopular and defeated by Reagan in a landslide. He was president during a period of unprecedented inflation, multiple geopolitical flubs, unpopular mandates (Like executive orders forcing everyone to set their thermostat at a certain temperature). Don't forget his other legacy, among others Corn-based ethanol, which is both worse for the environment than gasoline, subsidized by our taxes, and has a negative impact on food prices. Carter was a nice guy but a terrible leader.
The other thing to remember is that Carter was warning that being dependent on foreign oil was bad for US national security. This was why he was doing what he could to get us to reduce our energy consumption. As for the thermostats, I don't recall that we were being mandated to turn down the thermostats in our houses and I was there.
As for the inflation, he inherited a lot of that from the wartime spending expansion of his predecessors - Arab oil embargoes didn't help. And he did name Paul Volcker to lead the Fed even though in his interview Volcker told him that the only remedy would be to drastically raise interest rates. Volcker thought that he definitely wouldn't get the job (it was the year before an election year) so he was surprised when Carter picked him. So in that sense, Carter played a key role in killing the 70s inflation (which had been a problem even prior to Carter being elected - Remember Ford's WIN - Whip Inflation Now - buttons?) In the end, Volcker did what he said he was going to do. 10 year treasury rates hit ~15%. The economy swooned and it was a big factor in Carter not winning re-election, but that ended up killing the 70s inflation. He had the guts to pick Volcker even though it would not be good for him politically, but he knew that it would be the best choice for the economy in the longrun.
Also in regards to inflation, it should be remembered that Carter was a fiscal conservative trying to reign in spending, but his own party faught him on this. It's why Ted Kennedy primaried him in the 1980 Democratic primaries: he considered Carter to be too much of a tightwad.
Cute but I'll go with option 2. He "sounded the alarm" to raise demand and price.
Why do you give merit to "members of both parties" opinion in fields of science? Said members choose to whom to listen and whom to ignore according to their agenda. History showed us decades upon decades of corrupt leadership that blatantly lie to their people. And you're here reciting some rehashed propaganda?
C'mon, not everyone has the same motives that you do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
(Note: when he left office Carter had a negative net worth because the blind trust he put his peanut farm in had been mismanaged. He and Rosalynn worked their way out of debt by writing books - about 30 of them.)
Syriana [1] is a pretty good example of the popular zeitgeist as late as its release in 2005. And its portrait of how lobbyism works, how nullified anti-trust was becoming in late Greenspan era, how un-winnable Middle East adventurism was going to play out are all still watching today [2] if you swap the worst of finance and the worst of tech in (neither of energy, tech, or finance are all bad even at the level of individual companies: a few bad apples as usual spoil the bunch in a fractal way).
We’re stuck with policies and capture from the pre-shale era because capture is a wratchet (which should be delivered over a Littlefinger monologue and a montage megacap CEOs chuckling over wrist slap fines at the Battery and SoHo House).
Carter was a bad leader, though I’ve heard from regular people alive then that it was his wimp out on the Iran hostage crisis and the fiasco with the chopper rescue (Eagle Claw maybe? Desert Claw?) that sealed the deal on the Reagan era and the disastrous consequences of that we still live with today. cough Summers cough what was I saying?
Not disagreeing about Carter, but weirdly Nixon was perhaps just as concerned about the environment.
It makes me think it was more of the Zeitgeist of the time — just as Star Wars, Ronald Reagan and wearing your patriotism on your sleeve became the Zeitgeist after.
Don't believe the hype. There were bombings and assassinations in the 60s.
Partisanship has increased in recent memory but we don't come close to replicating the division caused by the ripples of the red scare, a draft for the vietnam war and a burgeoning and sometimes violent civil rights movement.
These days, people talk the talk but they fail to walk the walk like they did then.
That may be because there are no longer large numbers of people protesting the same thing. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter never got organized enough to push through a political agenda. Q-Anon was a hoax. The GOP, having won on guns and abortion, now lacks a coherent issue. Organized labor, once very powerful, isn't organized enough any more to push hard for anything. Nobody has enough mass to form a mass movement.
I really don't think this is substantially true. I think we're about as divided as we were then.
Another example would be the ozone layer: When it became clear in the 70s that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer we were able to make changes to stop that from happening over the course of a decade. Can't imagine us being able to do something like that now.
I agree, now that "corporations are people" in the US it's hard to imagine being able to successfully battle them and force large-scale, cross-industry environmental-health measures to be taken. That is, unless it so happens that such measures maximize short-term profits in some way.
That's pretty fucking divided.
That's what POC stands for. It includes blacks, hispanics and native Americans - all of those groups were/are impacted by white supremacy.
Neither one's wikipedia article makes any mention of the other.
Did I miss something?
"The second-place winner of that 1946 contest? Rachel Carson."
So there's a hint that the protagonist of Silent Running had actually read Carson's Silent Spring!
Climate change is something to worry about constructively, but many of its worst consequences still exist only as predictive models no matter how much many here would like to twist otherwise and by no objective, reasoned measure are we living in an ecological hell that's in any way worse than it was in the 70s, never mind in the fantasy future worlds predicted by literature and film from that era. If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago.
I know that a bit of optimism isn't fashionable among a certain segment of the population, but it's if anything at least more realistic and accurate than the ridiculous notion of calling Silent Running prescient.
Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.
There's a bit of a y2k issue here: things have got a lot better because a lot of work has been done. But getting the work done required political action, which required scare stories.
Sometimes that device gets overdone: 2004 Battlestar Galactica felt to me carrying much of 9/11 background.
Silent Running is far from alone in the pessimist outlook. It's funny that, living in a civilization so much indebted to technology, the stories that we keep telling ourselves about it are so negative.
We've accepted that as a given. I recently enjoyed a lot Altered Carbon, that has as a premise a technology that provides immortality for the masses. Well, guess what: that good guys are trying to destroy it. Because reasons.
Also the cities seem like a shithole, not sure why.
I really recommend you give the trilogy of books in which that story happens a try. They go into a lot more detail about how the Protectorate (all the worlds colonized by Earth's UN government) is and delve a lot into the practical economic details of different characters lives. This includes minor characters. I'm not sure how badly the TV series mangled the essential backstory and plot of the books, since I disliked it nearly from the start, but in the books, nobody is opposed to immortality for the masses and though there are a lot of grim details about life in that future, for most people it's described as being more or less decent. The governments of the different worlds offer social welfare, economic freedom, religious freedom and so forth. There are economic booms and busts but overall life isn't absolutely shitty. People also generally get sleeve insurance (something like health insurance but for having a new body on standby), nanotechnology to conserve health from birth in babies and so forth.
In many ways it's like a futuristic version of life for many in the developed world today, except that governments in the books tend to be self serving, often corrupt oligarchies and the justice systems are often draconian and corrupt too... Oh wait.
Y'know what else is mostly crap? Forgetting that things changec because of projected problems like this. Go look at any movie from the late 1960s showing the LA skyline and just look at the smog. Car manufacturers would never have attended to that problem without being forced to by publically popular legislation. There are many other examples here that have avoided "ecological hell" and post-facto "well, nothing bad happened" analyses are mostly crap because something did happen, except it gets conveniently forgotten by a culture that has the memory of a goldfish.
The Global Living Planet Index graph shows a significant decline in the population abundance of vertebrate species from 1970 to the present, indicating a substantial loss in global biodiversity.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-living-planet-inde...
> "There are a lot of climate crisis stories in modern sci fi, but a great many of them focus, intentionally or not, on the natural world’s utility to humans: we must preserve it or else we doom ourselves. Silent Running argues that we should preserve the natural world even if we can live without it, even if it serves no purpose in feeding the hungry or curing the ill, even if we can find a way to get along just fine."
If the idea of the importance of preservation of the natural world were much more widespread, humanity would be in a very different situation now. Dern's character's argument in the movie is just as relevant today, and the general answer today remains the same: the natural world is a secondary concern compared to humanity's unconstrained and unthinking growth.