SF Fandom blogs and environmentalism

[Michael]

My health and my schedule have prevented me from updating the blogs through most of January but this week I've launched a series of articles that look at science fiction and environmentalism.

The main series is being published on the SF Fandom Wordpress blog but I'm writing a parallel series with what might seem like outtakes on images on the SF Fandom Blogger blog.

The first article is Are the Green Police real enough?. Here is an excerpt:

An environmental frontier is forming on the fringes of our society. People are pushing the edges of our social norms to express their outrage at the excesses of industrial waste and production. They don’t necessarily have to resort to terrorism but they may develop unique and effective methods of disrupting the industrial process in such a way that society itself is harmed.

The self-justification that activists offer for their methods rarely meet legal thresholds of acceptability to society, but society usually waits until it has been harmed before taking collective action against people who argue they would not have taken it upon themselves had society done something in the first place.

Think of Charlton Heston yelling out, “It’s people! It’s people!” in the movie “Soylent Green”. Did anyone listen to him? The audience was left to figure that out for itself — that is, society was left with the choice of listening to one possible future or of ignoring what it had to say to us.

Environmental issues are speaking to us today. We need to develop better systems for addressing those issues so that people (society) don’t allow their fears and concerns to overwhelm their obligations to society. I don’t pass judgement on anyone today. I am talking about the future.

And you can find some pictures I didn't use for that article in How green are your police?. I'm sure the guys will appreciate the girls wrapped in lettuce leaves.

I'll post links to the other articles here after they are published.

[Michael]

And now you can read Galactic green police on the Wordpress blog. Here is an excerpt:

You have to wonder if there will be any environmental issues in the Green Lantern movie (I don’t follow the animated movies but I don’t recall anyone mentioning environmental issues in them). The Guardians of the Universe do actually address environmental concerns on occasion.

In one story, the Guardians asked Superman to deal with a massive ball of yellow spores hurtling through space. Clearly the Green Lanterns would have had a problem with the ball because it was yellow. So Superman constructed a small planet where the spores could impact and develop on their own without harming anything else in the universe.

In that same story one of the Guardians let slip to Superman that he was hindering human social evolution by always saving the day. Superman had to think about that for a while and eventually concluded that maybe he didn’t need to rescue every cat caught in a tree.

There were two lessons to be learned from that story: first, that dealing with an environmental crisis doesn’t necessarily mean we have to sacrifice one part of our biosphere to service another; second, that we can become too dependent on someone else always being there to save the day.

In the 1970s when this story was published there was no Superman for us to turn to, but there was a sense that the government might be able to pull off intervention to keep things going. That is, we had just sent men to the moon and we were beginning to roll out new technologies on a large scale that had been developed for the space program.

Nearly every electronic device we use today owes something to President Kennedy’s commitment to send a man to the man by 1970. Those electronic gizmos we live and play with also owe something to the environmental disasters that our industrial civilization wrought upon itself over the past few centuries. And those disasters were often resolved only through massive government intervention.

And in Green Lantern to the environmental rescue over on the Blogger blog, I shared some of the pictures I thought of using for the Wordpress article but decided not to.

Looks like there are quite a few costumers/cosplayers who now favor the DC and Marvel comics universes.

[Michael]

And today's articles were kicked off by Should man change his environment? on the Wordpress blog. Here is an excerpt:

We have the ability to alter desert landscapes today. The question is, should we? About 14 years ago I proposed to an online friend in Australia that much of the western Australian desert could be made habitable by pumping desalinated water into it through a system of canals. He was a bit put off by the idea. Nonetheless, we can significantly increase the planet’s arable lands and slow the process of shoreline flooding by managing the flow of water on a scale never before attempted.

All it takes is a budget of about $500 billion and a workforce of about 2 million people, not to mention a huge industrial complex dedicated to creating pipelines, digging canals, building new cities, breaking new farmlands, planting new forests, and moving millions of animals and plants around in a controlled fashion.

I’m pretty sure environmentalists would not think of this as a step in the right direction but, frankly, if we’re ever going to get off this planet we WILL have to develop that kind of technology. Otherwise, we’ll have to evolve into energy beings who don’t need birds, trees, and water.

It’s a hard choice that cannot, in fact, be made by an individual. It is only the kind of choice that a society can make — that a society MUST make. At some point we’re going to have face some hard questions and ask ourselves, “Where do we put all these people? How do we feed them?”

The other article, Who are the green police on the Blogger blog, sort of wandered off into a different direction. I was originally thinking of linking to pictures of police cars in science fiction movies but I had a lot of trouble finding such pictures. I'm sure they are out there but I couldn't find them.

Anyway, here is an excerpt:

There is a band called the Green Police. I wonder if they should call their lead singer "Green Sting"? Sorry. You just had to live through the 1980s to enjoy that kind of humor, I suppose.

I want to point out that in my other article I linked to an article I wrote several years ago called "How to steal the planet Venus and make it your own". I just think that is such a really cool concept -- taking ownership over a planet by getting there first.

The other evening I was watching a Star Trek special features Blu-Ray Disc and it included a semi-interactive section where you can watch brief explanations of the planets in the various movies. The commentator used a star chart (as did the interactive navigation) to show you where all the planets are supposed to be.

I get that civilizations might claim worlds, but how do you claim the space between stars? In Star Trek: Voyager the ship was constantly entering someone's space and being challenged. How do you monitor and control the space between star systems on that scale? You're literally staking out a huge 3-dimensional claim in galactic chunks.

[Alvin Eriol]

I was originally thinking of linking to pictures of police cars in science fiction movies but I had a lot of trouble finding such pictures.

Shot of the Blade Runner police "spinners" in flight.

[Michael]

Cool. I wish I had seen that before. The police cars from "The Fifth Element" would have been good, too.

Oh well. Maybe next time.

Since I fell behind in documenting the article series I recapped them all here.

The last, last, final word in the series is this article.