The Applied Plant Ecology film festival was a very entertaining and refreshing way to spread news about science. My winning nomination was Extinction: the facts, a documentary narrated by the legendary Sir David Attenborough. My second nomination was the science fictional TV series Snowpiercer.
Snowpiercer is a post-apocalyptic series showing the aftermath of climate change. The premise is that the earth was warming to unsustainable temperatures, then war made the earth hotter and caused a mass extinction. Scientists then wanted to reverse the damage of global warming and they successfully cooled the earth – but cooled it too much. A wealthy entrepreneur turned tyrant, Mr. Wilford, predicated the demise of earth and built a luxury train 1001 cars long that could withstand the forecasted frozen wasteland. Housing the last of humanity, this train circles the globe almost three times per year and relies on its constant motion to fuel itself. Among the trains many cars there are aquatic, seed bank and growing cars that allow passengers of the train to live there for 7 years. The series is about the people living on the train and the trials and tribulations they face.
In the current season, the train is sending out weather balloons across the globe in hope of finding warming temperatures. They are hopeful that one location, the Horn of Africa, is a hotspot with a livable climate.
Although science fiction, this series portrays a plausible outcome of climate change – especially with the recent war between Russia and the Ukraine. If this war turned nuclear, there would be a mass extinction and the land would be uninhabitable… exactly like what happens in Snowpiercer. Whether it be by climate change, nuclear war or depletion of seed banks, if we continue ruining our world we are going to need an ark to save us too. This series indirectly touches upon the extinction crisis, rare plant conservation and impacts of climate change on vegetation – all topics covered in Applied Plant Biology. I strongly recommend you watch this series, as it excellently exemplifies how bad things can get if we do not take care of our world.
Snowpiercer. Created by Graeme Manson and Josh Friedman, TNT, 2020-2022.
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 