Another movie I would like to recommend that is related to applied plant ecology is Princess Mononoke. When I watched this movie as a child, I didn’t fully understand the point the movie was trying to make, and I was scared by some fantastical and scary scenes in the movie. The movie describes a story that humans came one day to the forest inhabited by the gods of nature and other beasts, started to build a steel mill, and planned to carry out human production and development by developing a large amount of forest mineral resources. But the heroine Sang as the representative of the beast race vowed to defend the home, not allowing humans to take away the ownership of the forest so a series of struggles with humans. Finally, with the help of Mononoke and the hero Ashitaka, the god of nature restored natural life, but also awakened the concept of human beings to live in harmony with nature.
I think this movie is a concentrated expression of Miyazaki’s environmentalism, in this movie, the conflict between human beings and nature finally rose to the level of warfare. The creatures in the forest hate the humans who destroy their homes, while the greed and desire of humans drives them to plunder more resources from nature. The depiction of these scenes directly reflects the theme related to applied plant ecology: the sustainability of forests and their ecosystems. When trees, minerals, and other natural resources are exploited in an uncontrolled manner, the survival of the local species that depend on them is severely affected, to the point that they gradually fail to cooperate with each other to support the ecosystem’s value of service provision, which leads to human interests being affected as well. Another point worth mentioning is that I think the nature god in the movie represents the ecosystem itself, because it highlights that the rebirth and death of things are cyclical and self-purifying. As a tiny part of nature, human beings cannot influence the decay of the earth, but only our own survival time, and the purpose of protecting the environment is to save ourselves.
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 