The other film that I thought about nominating was WALL-E, which was directed by Andrew Stanton. The main character of this movie is a robot named WALL-E, which was designed to pick up and clean the trash that humans leave by hand, mainly through littering. As you may already guess, from these pieces of information, it will not turn out nice for Earth. As time goes by, humans in the movie (and real life) continue to litter since they have grown lazy into thinking that WALL-E will always clean up the trash they throw away. However, this takes a turn as these robots are not capable of keeping up to pace with the humans littering rates turning Earth into an inhabitable planet due to all the trash on the ground. This situation forces humans to leave Earth for an outer space cruise allowing the robots to clean their mess. However, the humans never end up returning to Earth leaving the planet abandoned. This movie relates to plant ecology because it can show what can happen to environments around the world when they are constantly being polluted with waste. In movie, Earth is left in a toxic condition, which killed all plant life (including animals) on the planet. Without plants, the world would not be able to function as they are responsible for producing heaps of oxygen we breathe. I believe if we keep heading down this path of constant littering, this movie may become reality.
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 