Hard to imagine that this film was shocking in 1972. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had been out for 10 years (note the name), the Deep Ecology Movement's creed

Hard to imagine that this film was shocking in 1972. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had been out for 10 years (note the name), the Deep Ecology Movement's creed coincided with Silent Running when Arne Naess formulated what became "Environmentalism". People were exhausted and horrified at the end of the Vietnam War after the whole shitshow descended into chemical warfare of mass defoliation using Agent Orange. In the UK, the "self-sufficiency" movement was in full swing and where I lived we grew more than half of our food. In the film Freeman Lowell murders his crewmates rather than destroy trees and flowers, hence the label as a "counter-culture" movie and surrounding controversy. I was too young to be allowed to watch it on TV when it screened around 1976, but I sneaked a look through the door. A year later I was watching the mass murder of evil imperial stoomtroopers at the cinema. No problem with that. The idea that some humans might choose to put the lives of other humans second to plants and animals remains problematic to this day. "Eco-terrorists" are always "crazies". Yet a young person said to me just this week that the next war the USA fights should not be with Russia, but with Brazil, because "more is at stake". Not sure what to make of that.