In his book, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, Paul Kingsnorth states,” With climate change changing, with the sixth mass extinction well underway, with the ocean swimming in our industrial refuse, with our chemical backwash in our breast milk and bloodstreams” (32). It is sad to say this but it is the truth, pollution, global warming, trash, deforestation, and other environmental topics are talked about and discussed every day, looking at things right now, they are not looking too well and just seem to be getting worse each day. People hear, see, or read something to indicate that the environment has not been doing well. Luckily, there are some people out there who care enough about the environment trying to make a difference; environment organizations are getting more involved, and surprisingly even common people try to do their part in reducing and fixing their contributions to the mess of the environment. The advanced world people now live in has not been ignoring this issue and has gotten involved the best it could. Many feature films and documentaries address the issue, even if the film about the environment was not the main plot they at least addressed it as a theme of the film. What people hope for these films is that these films will raise awareness. The film Wall-E is an example of a film depicting what trash will eventually do to the earth and human beings' lazy. The film begins with a look into a distant future, it looks like humans have left and abandoned Earth due to Earth being filled with too much trash. WALL-E – a small waste-collecting robot – lives alone on the planet with a pet cockroach. Looking at the film, people could assume that Wall-E is a collector and has many collections such as lighters, a working iPod, a small ring box, and the last living plant. A spaceship arrives on Earth and drops off a sleek and dangerous robot named Eve to search for the living plant, later as the movie goes on WALL-E falls in love with her. WALL-E gives Eve the plant because he loves her, which will then make EVE go into sleep mode.
The spaceship came back to Earth to take EVE back, and WALL-E decided to go with her. During the trip with Eve, Wall-E went on an adventure, he aboard the Axiom, where people move on moving chairs and eat liquid food, which they suck up through a straw. Due to laziness, the people on the ship have become so fat that they are unable to move. The history behind the plant was that when an auto-pilot computer, acting on hastily-given instructions sent many centuries before, tries to prevent the people of Earth from returning by stealing the plant, WALL-E, EVE, the portly captain and a band of broken robots stage a mutiny. The film Wall-E effectively argues the themes of questionable ethics and environmental concerns surrounding the big issues of the effect of trash and human laziness.
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Destruction and Dystopia
The film starts after the destruction of life on Earth. It is not being shown explicitly what happened, but there were signs that there was some kind of large-scale environmental degradation. Later in the film, it mentions rising sea levels for a brief moment, so it looks like humans didn’t get a chance to handle climate change before it destroyed the planet. Earth became a desolate place with no nature, just mountains of piles of trash. The intelligent robot Wall-E has to recycle the trash and clean up the dystopia. This showed an alarming warning of what will happen if humans continue with the take-make-dispose economic model and keep acting like this.
All nations around the world have one thing they all have in common, one of the most unsettling issues the world is facing is a waste problem, which affects public health, pollutes the environment, and threatens to drown some poor countries in toxicity. Many people are unaware of it because they’re not seeing it, they think it’s not a problem. In his book, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, Paul Kingsnorth states, “ The purpose of delusion is to comfort us, and our space age delusions comfort us on a civilizational level. The best way around them is probably to examine our mental maps-and thus our minds-and try to deflect them as they come” (40). People are creating delusion that the trash they are throwing is not a big issue and that everything is not as bad as it seems. They do not want to hear or see the harsh truth so instead they create this delusion that the issue is not as big as it seems. Darryl Fears From The Washington Post states, “More than 9 billion tons of plastic has been produced since 1950”, and the vast majority of it is still around” (1). The threat of waste to the environment, health, and safety is huge. In the movie Wall- E there was a scene in which the earth was filled with too much trash, and humans had no choice but to go somewhere else. That scene showed just how much humans did not care about Earth and were ignoring the trash problems on Earth, they were all just eating and relaxing not caring about the issues on Earth. to Pollution runs into rivers and seeps into groundwater. Flooding is caused by garbage clogging drains, and the atmosphere can be poisoned by the toxic discharge from trash. Garbage such as plastics it turns out, is a much worse and more immediate problem for ocean life than climate change. It’s clogging waterways, leading to flooding in many countries. It’s killing birds and fish who consume it. By the way, getting concentrated in the body of the fish we end up consuming. Trash is a huge problem and it is time people realize that.
Consumerism
The film manages to make a deep point about human’s relationship with the Earth. It showed exactly how humans do not care about the earth at all and just basically made it impossible for humans to live. Kingsnorth states, “Stephen Hawking, probably the world’s most famous pop-scientist, recently insisted that ‘we must continue to go into space for humanity… we won’t survive another thousand years without escaping our fragile planet’. Physicists and astronauts can be excused from their daydreams, but they are no longer alone. News strands have been woven into the optimistic space rhetoric of earlier times, and one of the most common is the suggestion that colonizing other worlds will provide new space for humans to expand and, perhaps crucially, may offer new resources for the toys, gadgets, and machines we are mining our planet to death to get hold of “( 33-34). In the film, this is exactly what happened to humans, in the scene where it showed humans having to go live in this big rocket in space due to too much trash on Earth. Humans throw too much trash and it becomes too dangerous for humans to live. They made the earth too fragile and eventually had to leave it. In the film, the humans are all overweight and passive, they all spend all of their time sitting on a kind of slow leisurely roller coaster which keeps them entertained while they eat and drink. In the scene where one falls off his mobile couch, he is too unfit even to get up off the floor. The docile humans just do whatever the advertisers say, as if in a trance. They don’t look or act like normal humans. It looks as if they are being controlled by someone. The spaceship is no utopia. They are alive but not well. Their humanness is tied to the Earth they left behind. This is another warning for humans, if humans do not change their ways on earth this could be the future they are looking at.
In conclusion, human activity is causing environmental degradation. The effects of global warming or littering have caused much damage to Earth, if humans are not able to change the way they are right now, they are in big trouble. The film Wall-E has done a good job of showing viewers what the future could be if humans do not care about the environment.
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