AND WHAT ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT?
by Varda Burstyn

Orwell and Huxley were bleak and pessimistic – no question. Even so, at the time they wrote their novels both failed to fully grasp the dire nature of the environmental crisis that industrial society – however governed – would bring in its wake later in their century. As a result, neither identified the ravages of the biosphere as central to his futuristic nightmare – though Huxley lived a long life, and eventually became an active environmentalist.

In the 1950s, when science fiction was really coming into its own as a cultural genre, the work of optimistic, technology-besotted writers such Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke predicted that humans would create brilliant, miracle-performing, space-traveling technologies that were basically clean machines. But by the early 1960s, MAD magazine had done a feature on pollution that demonstrated a very different idea in the popular imagination. It’s centrepiece was an illustration of the planet as only MAD could do it – a slowly rotating orb out there in space, oozing slime, dripping goop, surrounded by orbiting detritus of every conceivable kind, so covered in crap, in fact, that there was no room left for human habitation or animal life. Since then, whether in satire, in belles lettres or in science fiction, the vast majority of cultural visionaries have projected garbage-glutted, pollution-filled, plutonium- contaminated futures that rival Orwell’s and Huxley’s for pessimism, if not for political sophistication. This film will not neglect this dimension of the current condition of the world, nor its Orwellian or Huxleyan dimensions. Issues such as World Trade Organization trade restrictions that prevent countries and cities from protecting their environments, for example, provide scenarios that are scarily Orwellian in their rhetoric and enforcement, even if in an area not foreseen by Orwell himself.

Today, we grapple with economics, culture, social compliance, food production, disease and human fertility, even war itself, in the midst of an environmental crisis of global proportions. Plant and animal species are disappearing at a rate greater than in any period since the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Sixty hectares -- equivalent to two US football fields -- of rainforest are falling to the chainsaw per minute. This translates into an area larger than New York City every day, and every year, a loss greater than the territory of Poland. The rainforest is the greatest repository of biodiversity on our planet; in turn the basis for a healthy global biosphere. It’s being chewed up by private logging companies and ‘mahogany mafias,’ regardless of the biospherical consequences. The oceans, source of the phytoplankton that provides us with 75% of our oxygen, are being fished and polluted to death. More than 60 species of fish are believed to have become extinct since 1970.

A UN report by 1,100 scientists in 2002 warned that 70% of the natural world could be destroyed over the next 30 years due to over-population, deforestation, pollution, global warming, spread of non-native species, and other human impacts, causing the mass extinction of species and the collapse of human society in many countries. "

“In Canada,” according to the David Suzuki Foundation, “we can expect climate change to bring an unprecedented warming of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. This may appear minor, but scientific analysis has shown that very profound changes will result from this steady rise in temperature." Climate change has already brought us shrinking glaciers, early thawing and late freezing of ice on rivers and lakes, pole-ward shifts of plant and animal ranges, declines of some plant and animal populations, earlier flowering of trees with disruption of pollination and egg-laying in insects and birds, and the spread of pests beyond previous tropical and temperate regions.

What, more than anything, does link this not-specifically-foreseen environmental crisis to the visions of Orwell and Huxley is the way in which science and technology have been harnessed and subordinated to industrial profit -making, to the elites, and not to the advancement of knowledge or the betterment of human life. Today, independent scientists are in the forefront of those who warn of the dire consequences of industrial impacts. They are among the people who have designed technologies capable of greening our industries and utilities. Still, most scientists remain in the employ of the large corporate structures – whether companies themselves, or universities funded by companies, or governments that directly serve those companies – where they continue to work with technologies proven to be harmful to the environment.

As well, though both writers understood how scientific technique was being used to further the interests of powerful elites, neither writer was able to foresee how far the fusion of biology and information technology (bioinformatics) would go. Bill Joy, chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, has seen it. Like Joseph Stiglitz in the field of economics, he was a hopeful architect of phenomena he later saw turn frightening and sinister. In his widely read 1999 article, “Why the future doesn’t need us,” Joy warned of the terrifying consequences of the convergence between genetics, computers and nanotechnology, consequences that could include the creation of intelligent, self-reproducing machines. The box-office hit The Matrix is a movie about a possible scenario in which such machines turn humans into their captive energy source and make the ravaged planet their permanent home. “It’s life, Jim,” one would be tempted to say in StarTrek fashion, “but not as we know it.” As Bill Joy has written, unless we can bring technology and science under the control and direction of pro-human and pro-environmental imperatives, the potential negative consequences of computerized biotechnology will outrival those of nuclear weapons.

One of the great beacons of hope as we make our way through the first decade of the twenty-first century is the rise, the breadth and the scope of the world-wide environmental movement – the movement that has pitted itself against the spreading apocalypse. It ranges from the most local of groups to international organizations; from associations focussed on the law and the courts to those that take direct action and bring heavy pressure to bear on corporations and governments. From global campaigners such as Greenpeace International’s Executive Director Gerd Liepold and Amazon campaigner Ann Dingwall (a Canadian) to the small-town heros who organize to bring solar, wind and water purification technologies to their regions, there are many people and many scenarios to consoider for our film. Barry Commoner, one of the best-known of the 1960s environmentalists, author of The Poverty of Power and latterly a serious opponent of the beliefs and theories underlying today’s genetic technologies, is one possibility.

CONCLUSION - BEYOND ORWELL AND HUXLEY

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley warned us in no uncertain terms: the social, political, scientific and cultural trends that existed in their own time, unless we were vigilant, might well be used by the powerful to make life for the majority an exercise in meaninglessness or horror. As a species, we have not been entirely overtaken by the developments they foretold. But, as this film will demonstrate, we have been overtaken by many.

So if Orwell and Huxley were able to take the existing social conditions of their own times and project them into the future, we’d like to conclude our film with meditations from our commentators on what they think the future holds, projecting their visions on the basis of current conditions. Bill Joy has already gone on record: if we don’t find a way to control our technologies – and the corporations that produce them and the governments that fail, over and over again, to regulate them -- we may very well face species extinction. For many of the other thinkers we’ve referred to in this treatment, we can expect sober projections, but also some rays of light and hope. To the list of possible commentators already assembled here, let us add one more: Octavia E. Butler, Nebula Award Winner, an extraordinary writer, author of The Parable of the Talents, winner of a MacArther Foundation “genius” grant. Butler has been said to do for people of colour and women what William Gibson did for white males in developing visionary projections of the future. According to the Washington Post, Butler “casts an unflinching eye on racism, sexism, poverty, and ignorance and lets the reader see the terror and beauty of human nature.”

Our own survey of Orwell, Huxley, the issues and potential scenarios to date inclines us to think that unless humanity is able to broaden democracy and to radically change the unequal distribution of wealth and the technologies we use to live upon this earth, the fusion of the worst of Orwell and Huxley may yet come to pass. Then the period of ‘democracy-within-the-nation-state’ may appear as a small blip of a hundred and fifty, perhaps two hundred years, growing smaller and smaller as it recedes through the back window of history. With its demise, the beauties and sustaining powers of the natural world may also disappear. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that, unlike the monolithic societies Orwell and Huxley painted, in our own world dissent is still possible Dissent is threatened on all sides, certainly. And there are many countries in the world today where people pay with imprisonment, torture, their very lives for organizing against the prevailing order. But for the time being, in many places, organized opposition is still thriving and sparkling, an irrepressible force that daily finds hundreds of thousands of gestures and actions to challenge the brutality and invasiveness of Big Brother, the deadly banality of Brave New World.

Because we don’t know yet how we’ll bring our themes to life on the screen – which emblematic situations, which characters, which landscapes, which artists we will film -- it is, of course, impossible to say with whom, where and how we will end. But we can promise that we will bring our film to its conclusion by finding a way to show the most hopeful, the most humorous, the most diverse, the most democratic and the most beautiful elements of humanity, and by celebrating their potential to bring us, if not a utopia, then a much brighter world than our authors foresaw. And we’ll find a way to thank them for the inestimable value of their visions and their warnings.