An Evolution of the Ecological Future

How do we see ourselves and our progression through the art we create?

Something I’ve long been interested in is the evolution of how society has viewed the future, and how that has been present in art and media. It is an interesting thing to examine—how we get from ideas like The Jetsons and Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland to dystopias and destruction as present in things like The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner or Scythe. As wars happen, as generations grow and learn, our ideas of the future change (and apparently tend toward hopelessness). It stands to reason that this concept (the evolution of the view of the future) can be put through an ecological lens as well, so this is sort of what I’ve attempted to do.

This is very obviously not a complete timeline. That would be exhausting to compile, and inevitably something would be left out. Instead, I’ve chosen three works from the past 20 years that I feel have heavy involvement with ecology, human connection, and technology. This is mainly a thought experiment, but I hope it will prove to be interesting and can maybe give us some guidance into how we’re progressing as far as our relationship to an ecological future goes.

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Wall-E (Disney-Pixar)

The environment as abandoned, human connection as forgotten

This is by no means a true “beginning” of the timeline at all. Many, many tales of humanity’s destruction of the earth precede Wall-E, but as it is the example mentioned in Timothy Morton’s Ecological Thought, I thought that perhaps it would be a good (and fairly recent) place to begin!

So to put it plainly, in Wall-E, society’s connection to the environment is totally fucked. Wall-E is a trash collector, and he exists to clean up an earth that humanity has abandoned. To make a whole movie short, Wall-E ends up on the spaceship that humanity has inhabited, along with a plant collected by his robot girlfriend, Eve. Through this plant, they wreak havoc on the ship, disrupting the robotic control held over humanity’s gaze, and forcing the people into interactions with their fellow man, as well as pushing them into a new age of understanding the environment.

So what does this mean? Wall-E is the beginning because humanity’s connection with nature must be reborn. It quite literally does not exist, and the humans in the movie have to re-learn how to interact with each other due to their reliance on technology. But human connection, and the connection to nature, kick off a new line of thinking, and allow the humans to hopefully redeem themselves via their interactions with each other and their desire to (pun not intended) grow. Wall-E starts off as bleak, and is still a little bit bleak if you think about only the beginning of the movie. But it started something. It was placed on this timeline at the beginning quite deliberately.

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

The environment as beautiful but hostile and human connection as exploited

I’ve chosen this image to represent Annihilation because of one of the ways that Morton describes ecology— as “radical coexistence.” Maybe it’s messed up of me, but in this scene, Tessa Thompson’s character Josie (in the book known only as The Astrophysicist) sits down and quite literally becomes one with the flowers (that have previously been shown to have human DNA.) If human connection is what saves Wall-E, then Annihilation is a perversion of that connection. Josie has empathy—too much of it, it is implied, to the point of her own destruction (her character struggled with self-harm and suicidal ideation, and while her eventual entire enmeshment with nature is seen as beautiful, it is also tragic, because she is literally giving up her life.)

“It is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise.” (Morton, 2626)

“That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.” (Vandermeer, Annihilation)

We’ve evolved, in this micro-timeline. Wall-E premiered in 2008. Annihilation was released in 2014. So what does this mean? Have we taken our connection too far? Well, no, because distrust is part of what destroys the group exploring Area X in Annihilation as a whole. But we’re taking steps to better connect with and understand a natural world that has become hostile and overtaking. And while it might ultimately destroy us (I guess?) that destruction will be beautiful, and it will mean something. Josie’s death means something.

Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games and Sony)

The environment in balance, and connection as fractured

We’ve reached the “end” of our evolutional timeline (as far as this post goes, at least). In 2017, Sony and Guerrilla Games teamed up to release a game called Horizon Zero Dawn, which I’m sure they never assumed would be the subject of a fun literature ecology analysis (or maybe they did, that might be neat). In the game, you play as Aloy, as she fights the machines that have been born out of society’s obsession with technology, long long after this obsession has brought society’s destruction. Nature has ultimately taken over, forcing humanity back to the beginning, into tribes that ultimately distrust each other and are born from a lack of connection.

We’ve found the balance between technology and the natural, but, for the most part, we’ve gone the opposite direction from Annihilation, in that connection is fractured between people and machines. There are wars and disagreements, and bandits stalk the roads that should be used for safe travel.

"Change will not come in a single sunrise." – Sun King Avad (Horizon Zero Dawn)

Aloy is different. She originally came from a tribe called the Nora, but she’s an outcast. An outlander. She’s in the unique position where theoretically, she could connect to any tribe, any person—but because of this inherent distrust, they often don’t want to help her. She also has some relatively different ideas about what can be done with the machines, and how they can be utilized (connected) to the humanity that does not trust them.

I won’t spoil the game for you, but I do highly recommend playing it, and I do promise that some connections have been forged by the end of it, by Aloy and her new vision for the future. Many parts of this game are cynical, but Aloy as herself and as representative of the future presents something radically open, hopeful, and willing. (Which is why this game is the end of the timeline…for now…)

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So what does all of this mean? Why did I do all of this? To what end does this evolution develop, and what direction is this all pointing us toward?

I’d like to say that our connection as humans will be repaired, and our balance between technology and nature fully restored. I’d like to say that we dream of a hopeful future and we’ll figure it out and stand, hand-in-hand with our fellow humans and other creatures and acknowledge what we need to do to proceed in a positive manner.

But I don’t know, and if we’re being real, I don’t have that much faith. But art can be just as idealistic as it is hopeful, and, well, Wall-E changed some people’s minds. Maybe in the future I’ll do this from a medievalist perspective too. That could be neat.

This week I leave you with Jeff Vandermeer’s short story, “This World is Full of Monsters.”

It’s best you go in blind to that one, but I think it’s relevant. Just trust me.