[HN Gopher] Silent Running: 1970s Environmental Fable Remains De...
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Silent Running: 1970s Environmental Fable Remains Depressingly All
Too Relevant
Author : colinprince
Score : 182 points
Date : 2024-03-21 17:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (reactormag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reactormag.com)
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > Silent Spring had a huge and immediate impact on the American
| public, which Carson and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had
| very much expected and prepared for.
|
| 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.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Critical reflections about the ecological impact/carelessness
| of modern society was an already booming genre during that
| time, so the response they were preparing for was surely part
| of HM's decision to publish in the first place, not just some
| insight gleaned from how convincing the work felt or whatever.
|
| 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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| swatcoder wrote:
| McCarthy's red scare, rising resistance to the oppressive
| Hollywood production code, Beat and motorcycle culture,
| Brown v Board of Education, the pre-1962 NY Times
| bestseller lists, etc all suggest deep division through the
| 1950's that would only _crescendo_ during the Vietnam War
| and disperse for a while afterwards.
|
| 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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| McCarthy was roundly discredited by about '56. He was out
| of office by '57. By the early 60s he was largely viewed
| as an extremist.
|
| 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)
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Carter was repeatedly wrong about environmental issues,
| some quotes.."Unless profound changes are made to lower oil
| consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the
| world will be demanding more oil than it can produce."
|
| "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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| It wasn't only Carter who thought we had hit or were
| close to hitting peak oil production. There were members
| of both parties who thought it likely. Also, you cite
| this as an example of him being wrong about an
| environmental issue, but that was more of an economic
| issue. I'm surprised you didn't cite his opposition to
| nuclear power as an example of where he was wrong on an
| environmental issue - yes, in hindsight we now know that
| wasn't the way to go, but we have to remember that in the
| 70s anti-nuke _was_ the environmental position, while
| they were starting to know about climate change, they
| didn 't yet have the idea that nuclear power (which was
| becoming increasingly unpopular) would be a good way of
| avoiding that.
|
| 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.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Thermostat lowering wasn't mandated, but there was a big
| push with public service announcement ads about turning
| it down and wearing a sweater
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Yep, and fireside chats with Carter wearing a cardigan
| sweater next to a fireplace.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| That's very different.
| 0xedd wrote:
| Option 1 - Saint leader with no ties to money. Option 2 -
| Corrupt leader with ties to money.
|
| 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?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Yeah, the dude obviously made bank working on all of
| those Habitat for Humanity houses. And all that supposed
| oil arbitrage resulted in his _huge_ $9M net worth[1].
|
| C'mon, not everyone has the same motives that you do.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_t
| he_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.)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| the political environment was deeply reeling from the Oil
| Shock embargoes and OPEC. People now probably do not know
| about gasoline rationing at that time.
| boringg wrote:
| People nowadays don't know much about the world except
| the last 10 years. Destined to repeat our mistakes. I
| hope we aren't entering another dark ages - which would
| be rich given how able our technology is.
| benreesman wrote:
| We were _all_ wrong about domestic energy independence
| until the big shale finds /feasibility work in Texas and
| the Dakotas in the 2000s.
|
| 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?
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriana
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/apM0d3M-sps?si=Ip7P2FD9s15B47HD
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Jimmy Carter was probably our most ecologically-minded
| president
|
| 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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Yeah, it was Nixon who gave us the EPA. But Reagan wanted
| to gut it about a decade later.
| parineum wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| tremon wrote:
| I'm not sure what argument you're making, but if you
| measure social division purely by looking at public
| displays of violence you're going to miss all the warning
| signs until it's too late.
| Animats wrote:
| _" 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > we're much more divided now than we were in the early 60s.
|
| I really don't think this is substantially true. I think we're
| about as divided as we were then.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| see my response to swatcoder in this thread. Most of the
| division came in the mid-to-late 60s. The early 60s was the
| calm before the storm.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Fair enough. But why quibble over a couple of years? The
| point is that the amount of division we have going on now
| isn't unprecedented. Lots of people have the last time in
| their living memory.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Yes, the amount of division now definitely isn't
| unprecedented. But Silent Spring wasn't released into
| that very divisive part of the 60s - it was released just
| prior to it and that's what probably allowed it to have
| more of an impact. The media landscape was definitely
| more uniform then than now, information bubbles were much
| less of a thing - again, I can't imagine any book or film
| having that kind of impact now, that's my main point.
|
| 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.
| brightsize wrote:
| Having grown up in New England in the era, I remember
| "acid rain" being a big concern too. The polluters fought
| to keep anything from being done about the problem, but
| decades later some steps were actually taken by the US
| government (and others) and apparently there's been a
| fair amount of success.
|
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Not to nitpick but in the early 60s there was an entire race of
| people who were systematically marginalized to be Third Class
| citizens. (White) women were still effectively Second Class.
|
| That's pretty fucking divided.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Indeed POC were still systematically marginalized in the
| early 60s. That's a division that existed since the founding
| of the US. Many whites began to pay attention to this after
| the murder of Emmett Till in '55. But when we talk about
| political division, were enough whites convinced yet in the
| early 60s that this was an issue that wasn't just confined to
| the South? The fault lines were definitely there, and there
| had been several aftershocks since the big one (The Civil
| War), the quakes to come were still a few years out. Those
| fault lines are still there.
| readyman wrote:
| The labor movements of the 20s/30s were very explicitly
| _not_ segregated. Any segregation in labor was always the
| work of the bosses, all the way back.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Not entirely true. The CIO was pretty open to Blacks, not
| so much the AFL. Which became an issue in 1955 when they
| merged to become the current AFL-CIO.
| readyman wrote:
| The AFL was effectively an anti-labor organization and
| the CIO was not "pretty open". They were explicitly and
| actively organizing all workers.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| A lot of our political divisions are essentially a
| reflection of the same issues that led to and pre-dated the
| civil war. Although nowadays the geography has expanded,
| you can still easily see the outline of the confederacy in
| today's voting patterns.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Really? POC? A huge and extremely complex and diverse part
| of American society gets neatly categorized into a limp but
| politically correct acronym for the sake of what reason?
| It's really that difficult to say people of color, or say,
| African Americans, or blacks? Assuming you're not referring
| to many other types of people of color here, though a whole
| bunch of different ethnicities could fit into that strange
| way of categorizing so many human beings.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > It's really that difficult to say people of color
|
| That's what POC stands for. It includes blacks, hispanics
| and native Americans - all of those groups were/are
| impacted by white supremacy.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Some book about a problem like that comes out every week now.
| mattgrice wrote:
| I do not think so. What would it be about? Just like Carson
| correctly predicted indiscriminate use of DDT would lead to
| resistance, the corporate 'immune system' has evolved to shut
| down stuff like this much more effectively.
| xnx wrote:
| Previously: Silent Running: The sci-fi that predicted modern
| crises
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212975
|
| 3 years ago | 60 comments
| xnx wrote:
| Reading the plot to Silent Running makes me think it had some
| influence on WALL-E and Interstellar.
| dhosek wrote:
| I think it made an impact on just about every filmmaker who saw
| it as a kid/young adult.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Add "Soylent Green", "A Boy and His Dog", "Rollerball"....
| milleramp wrote:
| Got to spend a day with Douglas Trumbull in the Mojave desert, so
| many interesting stories, what an amazing person.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| How did you happen to be able to do this?
| 0xedd wrote:
| A side mission in Fallout New Vegas.
| enduser wrote:
| I was his assistant in the early 2000s helping him get his
| UFOTOG project started. His stories and the level of depth
| developing custom tech shaped my career. I really miss him.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My take is that movie is a lot like _2001 A Space Odyssey_ except
| instead of a computer going berserk and endangering the mission,
| a human goes berserk.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| But the human going berserk in this case is trying to preserve
| the mission.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| See Peter Watts' _Malak_ for a computer trying to preserve
| the mission by znxvat n pbzznaq-hanagvpvcngrq vasrerapr
| ertneqvat "pbyyngreny qnzntr":
| https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Malak.pdf
| dhosek wrote:
| Except that in this case, the human went berserk not because of
| contradictory instructions but because the other humans were
| planning on destroying the last surviving plant life from
| earth.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Currently reading _The Sheep Look Up_ by John Brunner and '70s
| pessimistic eco-dystopias were really onto something.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| My favorite era of sci-fi films, but I suppose I'm biased
| having grown up in that era.
|
| 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.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| The 70's are my favorite as well (born in the 80's).
| pavlov wrote:
| There was a window after Kubrick's "2001" and before "Star
| Wars" when science fiction in Hollywood was allowed to be for
| adults.
|
| 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.)
| lproven wrote:
| > it killed what had been a delicate and thoughtful genre of
| Hollywood.
|
| 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.
| discarded1023 wrote:
| Enjoy it mate, and all the other fat Brunners. (His _Stand on
| Zanzibar_ is most of Gibson 's _Neuromancer_ ... more than a
| decade before.) Give the thin ones a miss.
| wombatpm wrote:
| _Jagged Orbit_ fits in there as well.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Brunner in general is kind of proto-cyberpunk. Especially
| _The Shockwave Rider_.
| piltdownman wrote:
| TIL. Not sure how I missed this on my trawl of Hugo
| Winners/Seminal 20th Century Sci-Fi.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I'm baffled by any discussion of Brunner (on HN no less!)
| that doesn't start and end with The Shockwave Rider.
| antonvs wrote:
| Make sure you read _The Shockwave Rider_ if you haven 't
| already.
| verisimi wrote:
| They were either into something, or suggesting something that
| we have picked up and run with.
| dhosek wrote:
| I saw this movie as a kid and it haunted me. Somehow, when the
| internet was still in its infancy (pre-WWW), the title popped
| into my head--I still don't know how--and I was able to rent it
| on VHS at the local video rental store. It was startling how much
| I remembered from seeing it on TV at the age of 6 or 7.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > I saw this movie as a kid and it haunted me.
|
| 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.
| jordanb wrote:
| I had a similar reaction seeing Logans Run as a kid on TV (it
| must have been edited pretty aggressively as the movie is very
| racy).
|
| 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).
| jamiek88 wrote:
| >about people who take drugs to control all their emotions,
| confess their sins to chatbots, and masturbate to porn every
| night
|
| Woah. Prescient.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| And, of course, being a film school movie by George Lucas
| if I recall correctly.
| ildjarn wrote:
| A Boy and His Dog is another one.
| chasil wrote:
| ...which was written by author Harlan Ellison, also notable
| for the Star Trek (TOS) episode known as "The City on the
| Edge of Forever."
|
| 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_Forev
| e...
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I keep calling it "A Dog and His Boy."
| antonvs wrote:
| > I saw this movie as a kid and it haunted me.
|
| 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
| namaria wrote:
| Oh wow I've been listening to this song my whole adult life
| and never new where that line came from! That's an incredible
| connection, I love haunting scifi movies from the 70s, and
| Carbon Based Lifeforms! Thank you for this!
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| What a thread. I am enjoying the movie recommendations as
| well, and too like Carbon Based Lifeforms.
|
| Glad this thread motivated me to finally write down the
| movie titles.
| Angostura wrote:
| Same. I watched it on TV probably aged about 10 and was I think
| one of the first films that made me cry
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| So why is it called "Silent Running"?
| rootbear wrote:
| The title refers to the idea of a submarine going silent so it
| can't be tracked by sonar. In early drafts of the screenplay,
| the hero wanted to do something similar with the Valley Forge,
| so he painted the ship black and tried to hide, knowing that
| Earth would come looking for it. That idea was abandoned but
| the title remained.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Thank you!
| nox101 wrote:
| I don't know if there is a connection but the last shot of Laputa
| (Miyazaki) looks surprisingly like the last shot of Silent
| Running.
| djmips wrote:
| Interesting! I wouldn't be surprised if there was a concious or
| unconcious connection. Miyazaki did have a lot of influences in
| his work like Moebius and I get the feeling he consumed a lot
| of Western work which inspired him.
| myself248 wrote:
| The article opens on _Silent Spring_ , then shifts to _Silent
| Running_ , without ever explaining the connection between the
| two.
|
| Neither one's wikipedia article makes any mention of the other.
|
| Did I miss something?
| themadturk wrote:
| It was a not-too-successful attempt by the author to create an
| equivalency, I think. _Silent Spring_ was the gateway text to
| environmental concerns in the early 60s. _Silent Running_ was
| an environmental science fiction film that had a similar theme
| and might have had aspirations to have a similar impact.
| fractallyte wrote:
| The third- and second-from-last paragraphs reference a book
| found beside Lowell's bunk: a copy of the "Conservation Pledge"
| from 1946 _" when the magazine Outdoor Life held a contest to
| encourage outdoors enthusiasts to dedicate themselves to the
| preservation of the America's natural resources. The winning
| entry, the one that adorns Lowell's wall aboard Valley Forge,
| was submitted by L.L. Foreman, a former ranch hand turned
| author of pulpy adventure Westerns.
|
| "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_!
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Silent running, while iconic, has nothing to do with our present
| moment.
| antonvs wrote:
| I don't think you can say "nothing". As the article puts it:
|
| > "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.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Anyone else have the page randomly scroll to the bottom and offer
| a capacha challenge while you were trying to read this?
| mnw21cam wrote:
| No, I just get a blank white page instead.
| e40 wrote:
| I had the paperback with Bruce Dern on the cover. I might have
| read it before seeing the movie, don't remember. I remember being
| mesmerized by the book as a teen. This post brought back memories
| not accessed in decades.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| I really don't see the "prescience". Movies about an apocalyptic
| future are nearly a dime a dozen and considering how far silent
| running shot from the mark on almost anything of how our present
| world is, it's hardly brilliant. The earth is still here and full
| of life, more of us than ever live on it and despite this, all
| major metrics of human development are better than they have ever
| been. Yes, we still have many environmental problems, but
| solutions are at least possible for them and our planet is far
| from the hell so many movies and books of the 70's predicted for
| the early 21st century. Also, in at least some ways, we're even
| improving certain things in interesting ways, or at least working
| towards doing so.
|
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now
| cleaner and greener in many places than they were several
| decades ago.
|
| 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.
| narag wrote:
| Good science fiction is often more about the present than about
| the future: a projection of current problems into an amplified
| version of reality.
|
| 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.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| > I recently enjoyed a lot Altered Carbon
|
| 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.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| chrisdun wrote:
| I discovered Silent Running almost backwards when 65daysofstatic
| played a live re-score of the film many years back. Looks like
| it's easily searchable still, comes highly recommended.
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