Water Here, There, and Nowhere
The climate change apocalypse (and the politics of it in film) is already here
Transgender artist Anohni’s “4 Degrees” (I assume Fahrenheit, since 4ºC = 12ºF) from 2015
A big theme in my upcoming book Spinning Sage’s Gold is the disaster that the climate change apocalypse will bring to bear on the globe over the next century or two. I try to put most of the damage well into the future. One where I am long dead, as species die out, billions of humans end up either dead or displaced, food and arable land and potable water become scarce, and governments start wars and collapse under the weight of the deluge.
I have watched and fallen asleep to enough BBC Planet Earth episodes with David Attenborough as narrator and numerous other documentaries to cite the worst effects of climate change without the need for additional sources. A six-meter (20-foot) rise in ocean waters. Most of the remaining forests and non-polar glaciers on the planet just gone. Half of the world’s human population either dead or climate refugees. The air so toxic from volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, severe flooding, severe drought, constant forest fires, massive mudslides (not to mention the ever-growing threat of nuclear or other WMD wars over reduced resources) that wearing a mask all the time is perfectly normal.
In October 1983, USA Today and a bunch of other newspapers reported on an EPA study of all the research done on global warming up to the early 1980s. They rang the alarm that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane had built up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Even if the world suddenly stopped burning fossil fuels all at once, humanity had locked the planet into a “changing climate” for the next 100 years, with all the calamities humans have witnessed in the 40-plus years since. I was 13 years old when the EPA disseminated that report and it made front-page, in-color news, with charts and graphs, too, all USA Today-style back then.
It’s sad that there are still millions of Americans who have denied that the global ecosystem is changing for the worst, and that human activity is the main and virtually only driver of this change. These deniers fall into two groups: the willfully ignorant, whose narcissistic cognitive dissonance will remain until climate change kills them dead or destroys their way of living; and rich fat cats who use denialism to make money and hold on to power while building themselves a bunker to wait out the worst of this apocalypse. They are the vilest of people.
Our popular culture already reflects the effects of climate change. There have been innumerable documentaries and docuseries on global warming, climate change, the flooding of the oceans, the fresh water droughts and floods, and mass extinctions. Movie franchises like Mel Gibson’s Mad Max series (1981-1985), The Hunger Games (2012-2015), Divergent (2014-2016), and The Maze Runner (2014-2018) made nuclear war and climate change its main themes, including the scarcity of food and water, the collapse of governments, and massive fights over the most basic of life’s resources. Too often, movie runners and writers bury these themes with actors chewing the scenery, bad and improbable clothing choices in a peri-apocalyptic landscape (the late Tina Turner in Mad Max: Thunderdome comes to mind), and gratuitous violence. They provide little context for how quickly and easily civilization can fall apart and humans can descend into savagery. That has always been disappointing.
But most documentaries are disappointing, too. They are devoid of systemic, political, and ideological contexts. They assume a “What can you do as an individual to fight climate change?” (or, as the 1970s PSA bear would say, “Only you can prevent forest fires?”) mentality, as if individualism-turned-collective-narcissism isn’t how the West and the world go to be this way in the first place. As long as the West refuses to tax megacorporations in the trillions of dollars to offset climate change — including the need for a systemic approach to climate control — the world is facing flood, drought, fire, and war, now and for the foreseeable future.
I recently watched the upcoming film The Protector (its official release is Friday, May 23). Starring First Nations Canadian actor Graham Greene (of Dances With Wolves, Thunderheart, and the tv series Longmire fame) as the character and the movie’s narrator Marguerite Moreau as Key, Raul Gasteazoro’s work is yet another foray into a world in the midst of the climate change apocalypse. But the worldview Gasteazoro provides is more intentional than the typical mashup, a successful mesh between the chaos of Mad Max and the pessimism of James DeMonaco’s The Forever Purge (where the annual murderous purge turns into full-scale civil war in the US in 2048). What is also intentional is the sacredness of human bonds beyond blood and beyond the political, the need to succeed and survive in the midst of pandemics, sterility, climate change, near total water scarcity, and the collapse of government in the US Southwest in the 2040s.
The Protector is far from perfect. There isn’t enough context for how the US West became a wasteland (yes, every major scientific report has the Colorado River and most reservoirs from California to Texas drying up by the 2030s, to be sure), and a lawless one at that. The economic, ideological, and political decisions that allowed for such violence and chaos are barely touched on. I personally tire of seeing white folks centered as critical to “saving the planet” (white allies are necessary, of course, but…). Still, that theme of collaborating with strangers to save water, resources, and at least a small portion of one’s world (and one’s humanity with it) is something Gasteazoro does well in this film.
Collectivism is also a big theme in my allegorical essays, as is its opposition, Western civilization’s (and the US’) obsession with itself and the individual self. The reason the world in 2025 will likely look like some form of The Protector or The Forever Purge in 20 years is because no one with money and power wants to take responsibility for the hell-on-Earth they have helped create. Few with the power to begin to fix the damage human-made climate change has wrought want to engage in deep collaboration, work that would require sacrifice. Especially sacrificing beliefs in white/Western superiority, and putting aside one’s narcissistic tendencies.
I, for one, think that the future, post-Western world will look back in horror at how evil and unwilling today’s folks have been at destroying the world and the people in it for profit and for the sheer joy of causing people pain. I also think they will be happy to see the new world order of 2025 collapse under its own weight.