For our film festival assignment, we had to choose three movies and explain why we chose one of them. The main movie I chose was a documentary called Parched and it was about the ongoing water crisis. One of the other movies I chose to nominate was the movie Wall-E. On the surface, it is cute children’s Disney movie that is about a little waste-collecting robot (WALL-E) and how he fell in love with a reconnaissance robot named EVE. Wall-E had deviated from his initial job to clean the earth to follow EVE back to the spaceship where the humans live. The movie does an excellent job at giving attention to the impact of climate change due to human actions (and inaction). Earth had become so unstable that human, animal, and plant life will not survive (obviously until the EVE robot takes a sample of a plant that had survived). According to the movie, the ecological collapse was due to the amount of waste on the planet, and it stayed inhabitable for a very long time. Humanity escaped the dying planet 700 years prior to the events of the movie. This relates to plant ecology because plant life is vital to the survival of the majority of life. Should, plants die off due to environmental instability, the same will happen to most living creatures. I say most because there are many species that can survive really harsh conditions such as tardigrades. However, we are seeing environmental instability, the loss of biodiversity and the extinction of so many species in real-time. This movie gives an insight of how the planet could potentially be like should we continue ignoring this crisis.
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 