One of the other movies that I had considered nominating was the movie Wall-E, released in 2008 by Disney. The movie touches on a wide variety of topics discussed within applied plant ecology, like the loss of plant biodiversity/plant extinction crisis caused by human ignorance of the effects of pollution on the environment, and habitat loss due to pollution of the environment. Wall-e is set many years in the future, where robots are the only inhabitants of Earth. The reason for why there is no humans on Earth any more is because of the massive amounts of waste that seemingly prevent natural life (apart from cockroaches, of course) from appearing or surviving. This changes when the film’s protagonist and the namesake of the movie, Wall-E discovers a sprout while performing his job, cleaning and “cubing” up trash. This leads to a series of events that lead to humanity’s return to Earth. The ways that this movie relate to the aforementioned topics are quite simple – the planet is uninhabitable in the first place because of the mountains of trash created by humanity. This situation has resulted in a great loss to plant life, as shown by only a singular living plant being shown early in the movie, and thus an extremely high level of biodiversity loss. As virtually no plants or animals exist in the world, one can assume that the accumulation of trash across the planet has also led to high levels of habitat fragmentation, and subsequent habitat loss, which may have occurred afterwards.
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 