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Silent Running: 1970s Environmental Fable Remains Depressingly All Too Relevant
- UncleOxidant 3y ago> Silent Spring had a huge and immediate impact on the American public, which Carson and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had very much expected and prepared for. A couple of things here: 1. Could a book come out now that would have this kind of effect on the public and spur us to action? I suspect not because we're much more divided now than we were in the *early* 60s. (Yes, the divisions would grow quite large in the mid-to-late 60s, but the early 60s was the calm before the storm) 2. They expected that it would have the impact it did? I guess that goes back to #1.
- JohnFen 3y ago> we're much more divided now than we were in the early 60s. I really don't think this is substantially true. I think we're about as divided as we were then.
- UncleOxidant 3y agosee my response to swatcoder in this thread. Most of the division came in the mid-to-late 60s. The early 60s was the calm before the storm.
- JohnFen 3y agoFair enough. But why quibble over a couple of years? The point is that the amount of division we have going on now isn't unprecedented. Lots of people have the last time in their living memory.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoYes, the amount of division now definitely isn't unprecedented. But Silent Spring wasn't released into that very divisive part of the 60s - it was released just prior to it and that's what probably allowed it to have more of an impact. The media landscape was definitely more uniform then than now, information bubbles were much less of a thing - again, I can't imagine any book or film having that kind of impact now, that's my main point. Another example would be the ozone layer: When it became clear in the 70s that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer we were able to make changes to stop that from happening over the course of a decade. Can't imagine us being able to do something like that now.
- brightsize 3y agoHaving grown up in New England in the era, I remember "acid rain" being a big concern too. The polluters fought to keep anything from being done about the problem, but decades later some steps were actually taken by the US government (and others) and apparently there's been a fair amount of success. I agree, now that "corporations are people" in the US it's hard to imagine being able to successfully battle them and force large-scale, cross-industry environmental-health measures to be taken. That is, unless it so happens that such measures maximize short-term profits in some way.
- PaulHoule 3y agoSome book about a problem like that comes out every week now.
- swatcoder 3y agoCritical reflections about the ecological impact/carelessness of modern society was an already booming genre during that time, so the response they were preparing for was surely part of HM's decision to publish in the first place, not just some insight gleaned from how convincing the work felt or whatever. And these books were consistently controversial and politicized at the time, which is why sales and discussion were high yet still lead to our 2020's society being only marginally more ecologically responsible than the that of 1960's (if that). Nothing much has changed. In the way you're referencing, the US was extremely divided in the 1960's and is extremely divided again now. Practiced media companies know how to "prepare" for that by exploiting it for sales, and today's publishers do it just the same -- sometimes on ecological topics like this, sometimes on other controversial topics du jour.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago> Nothing much has changed. In the way you're referencing, the US was extremely divided in the 1960's and is extremely divided again now. The deep divisions mostly came later in the 60s. The early 60s was the calm before the storm. The Vietnam war was barely on anyone's radar in 1962 - there were only ~9,000 US troops there in '62 and these were being referred to as 'advisors' - the vast majority of Americans didn't even know where Vietnam was or that we had any troops there at that point. Kennedy had not yet been assassinated. The Civil Rights movement was in progress, but again, not on the radar for most Americans yet. Most Americans felt that the Soviet Union was the existential threat - not a lot of division about that at the time. Silent Spring certainly seems to have had some major impact at the time it came out - by 1970, eight years later, we had the EPA and Earth Day. Again, it's hard to imagine any kind of book or film coming out today that would have a similar impact on the culture at large since we now have a collection of subcultures each with their own preferred media outlets. In '62 you got your news from your local newspaper and the networks (mostly CBS & NBC at that point, with ABC as sort of the upstart) - while newspapers did often have a political slant, broadcasters mostly all had the same political slant (or lack of one) due to the fairness doctrine. > discussion were high yet still lead to our 2020's society being only marginally more ecologically responsible than the that of 1960's (if that). I think this has more to do with Reagan and the rise of the right wing in the 80s and into the current era. That led to backsliding on ecological progress that was made in the 60s through the 70s. Jimmy Carter was probably our most ecologically-minded president - he even began to sound the alarm on climate change towards the end of his administration.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoNot to nitpick but in the early 60s there was an entire race of people who were systematically marginalized to be Third Class citizens. (White) women were still effectively Second Class. That's pretty fucking divided.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoIndeed POC were still systematically marginalized in the early 60s. That's a division that existed since the founding of the US. Many whites began to pay attention to this after the murder of Emmett Till in '55. But when we talk about political division, were enough whites convinced yet in the early 60s that this was an issue that wasn't just confined to the South? The fault lines were definitely there, and there had been several aftershocks since the big one (The Civil War), the quakes to come were still a few years out. Those fault lines are still there.
- readyman 3y agoThe labor movements of the 20s/30s were very explicitly not segregated. Any segregation in labor was always the work of the bosses, all the way back.
- jhbadger 3y agoNot entirely true. The CIO was pretty open to Blacks, not so much the AFL. Which became an issue in 1955 when they merged to become the current AFL-CIO.
- readyman 3y agoThe AFL was effectively an anti-labor organization and the CIO was not "pretty open". They were explicitly and actively organizing all workers.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoA lot of our political divisions are essentially a reflection of the same issues that led to and pre-dated the civil war. Although nowadays the geography has expanded, you can still easily see the outline of the confederacy in today’s voting patterns.
- mattgrice 3y agoI do not think so. What would it be about? Just like Carson correctly predicted indiscriminate use of DDT would lead to resistance, the corporate 'immune system' has evolved to shut down stuff like this much more effectively.
- xnx 3y agoPreviously: Silent Running: The sci-fi that predicted modern crises https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212975 3 years ago | 60 comments
- xnx 3y agoReading the plot to Silent Running makes me think it had some influence on WALL-E and Interstellar.
- milleramp 3y agoGot to spend a day with Douglas Trumbull in the Mojave desert, so many interesting stories, what an amazing person.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoHow did you happen to be able to do this?
- 0xedd 3y agoA side mission in Fallout New Vegas.
- enduser 3y agoI was his assistant in the early 2000s helping him get his UFOTOG project started. His stories and the level of depth developing custom tech shaped my career. I really miss him.
- PaulHoule 3y agoMy take is that movie is a lot like 2001 A Space Odyssey except instead of a computer going berserk and endangering the mission, a human goes berserk.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoBut the human going berserk in this case is trying to preserve the mission.
- 082349872349872 3y agoSee Peter Watts' Malak for a computer trying to preserve the mission by znxvat n pbzznaq-hanagvpvcngrq vasrerapr ertneqvat "pbyyngreny qnzntr": https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Malak.pdf https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Malak.pdf
- dhosek 3y agoExcept that in this case, the human went berserk not because of contradictory instructions but because the other humans were planning on destroying the last surviving plant life from earth.
- Apocryphon 3y agoCurrently reading The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner and '70s pessimistic eco-dystopias were really onto something.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoMy favorite era of sci-fi films, but I suppose I'm biased having grown up in that era. Make no mistake, I was blown away when "Star Wars" came out like everyone else, but damn, it killed what had been a delicate and thoughtful genre of Hollywood.
- ChoGGi 3y agoThe 70's are my favorite as well (born in the 80's).
- pavlov 3y agoThere was a window after Kubrick’s “2001” and before “Star Wars” when science fiction in Hollywood was allowed to be for adults. Robert Wise’s 1979 “Star Trek” is an interesting and unique transitional case because it retains the 2001-inspired ponderous abstract storytelling but got a Star Wars level budget. Personally I love it for that, but I know most people disagree. (Speaking of Wise, his “Andromeda Strain” is an absolute 1970s sci-fi gem.)
- lproven 3y ago> it killed what had been a delicate and thoughtful genre of Hollywood. Well said. SF was just growing up and maturing into something important and worth having, and then that stupid fairy-tale-in-space came along and blew it all to hell. I still resent it for that.
- discarded1023 3y agoEnjoy it mate, and all the other fat Brunners. (His Stand on Zanzibar is most of Gibson's Neuromancer ... more than a decade before.) Give the thin ones a miss.
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- dhosek 3y agoI saw this movie as a kid and it haunted me. Somehow, when the internet was still in its infancy (pre-WWW), the title popped into my head—I still don’t know how—and I was able to rent it on VHS at the local video rental store. It was startling how much I remembered from seeing it on TV at the age of 6 or 7.
- technothrasher 3y ago> I saw this movie as a kid and it haunted me. Me too. I still to this day have an original theater poster from it hanging in my office, next to my Collossus The Forbin Project one. I do remember as a kid being very confused when the forest ships from the movie showed up in the fleet of ships following the Battlestar Galactica.
- jordanb 3y agoI had a similar reaction seeing Logans Run as a kid on TV (it must have been edited pretty aggressively as the movie is very racy). I had no idea what I had watched but I remember this show about these people who are stuck inside a mall and can never go outside ever. It really affected me incredibly deeply and filled me with melancholy whenever I thought about it. Finally in College I was renting old sci-fi and watching it, and as I was watching Logans Run I suddenly realized that it was the show I had seen as a child about the people who couldn't go outside. A lot of 70s dystopian sci-fi hits pretty hard to be honest. Two more that come off as incredibly prescient are The Network (about a media company that will do anything for viewership) and THX1138 (about people who take drugs to control all their emotions, confess their sins to chatbots, and masturbate to porn every night).
- Sniffnoy 3y agoSo why is it called "Silent Running"?
- rootbear 3y agoThe title refers to the idea of a submarine going silent so it can't be tracked by sonar. In early drafts of the screenplay, the hero wanted to do something similar with the Valley Forge, so he painted the ship black and tried to hide, knowing that Earth would come looking for it. That idea was abandoned but the title remained.
- Sniffnoy 3y agoThank you!
- helf 3y ago[dead]
- nox101 3y agoI don't know if there is a connection but the last shot of Laputa (Miyazaki) looks surprisingly like the last shot of Silent Running.
- djmips 3y agoInteresting! I wouldn't be surprised if there was a concious or unconcious connection. Miyazaki did have a lot of influences in his work like Moebius and I get the feeling he consumed a lot of Western work which inspired him.
- myself248 3y agoThe article opens on Silent Spring, then shifts to Silent Running, without ever explaining the connection between the two. Neither one's wikipedia article makes any mention of the other. Did I miss something?
- themadturk 3y agoIt was a not-too-successful attempt by the author to create an equivalency, I think. Silent Spring was the gateway text to environmental concerns in the early 60s. Silent Running was an environmental science fiction film that had a similar theme and might have had aspirations to have a similar impact.
- fractallyte 3y agoThe third- and second-from-last paragraphs reference a book found beside Lowell’s bunk: a copy of the “Conservation Pledge” from 1946 "when the magazine Outdoor Life held a contest to encourage outdoors enthusiasts to dedicate themselves to the preservation of the America’s natural resources. The winning entry, the one that adorns Lowell’s wall aboard Valley Forge, was submitted by L.L. Foreman, a former ranch hand turned author of pulpy adventure Westerns. "The second-place winner of that 1946 contest? Rachel Carson." So there's a hint that the protagonist of Silent Running had actually read Carson's Silent Spring!
- petermcneeley 3y agoSilent running, while iconic, has nothing to do with our present moment.
- antonvs 3y agoI don't think you can say "nothing". As the article puts it: > "There are a lot of climate crisis stories in modern sci fi, but a great many of them focus, intentionally or not, on the natural world’s utility to humans: we must preserve it or else we doom ourselves. Silent Running argues that we should preserve the natural world even if we can live without it, even if it serves no purpose in feeding the hungry or curing the ill, even if we can find a way to get along just fine." If the idea of the importance of preservation of the natural world were much more widespread, humanity would be in a very different situation now. Dern's character's argument in the movie is just as relevant today, and the general answer today remains the same: the natural world is a secondary concern compared to humanity's unconstrained and unthinking growth.
- hypercube33 3y agoAnyone else have the page randomly scroll to the bottom and offer a capacha challenge while you were trying to read this?
- mnw21cam 3y agoNo, I just get a blank white page instead.
- e40 3y agoI had the paperback with Bruce Dern on the cover. I might have read it before seeing the movie, don’t remember. I remember being mesmerized by the book as a teen. This post brought back memories not accessed in decades.
- southernplaces7 3y agoI really don't see the "prescience". Movies about an apocalyptic future are nearly a dime a dozen and considering how far silent running shot from the mark on almost anything of how our present world is, it's hardly brilliant. The earth is still here and full of life, more of us than ever live on it and despite this, all major metrics of human development are better than they have ever been. Yes, we still have many environmental problems, but solutions are at least possible for them and our planet is far from the hell so many movies and books of the 70's predicted for the early 21st century. Also, in at least some ways, we're even improving certain things in interesting ways, or at least working towards doing so. Climate change is something to worry about constructively, but many of its worst consequences still exist only as predictive models no matter how much many here would like to twist otherwise and by no objective, reasoned measure are we living in an ecological hell that's in any way worse than it was in the 70s, never mind in the fantasy future worlds predicted by literature and film from that era. If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago. I know that a bit of optimism isn't fashionable among a certain segment of the population, but it's if anything at least more realistic and accurate than the ridiculous notion of calling Silent Running prescient. Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.
- pjc50 3y ago> If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago. There's a bit of a y2k issue here: things have got a lot better because a lot of work has been done. But getting the work done required political action, which required scare stories.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- narag 3y agoGood science fiction is often more about the present than about the future: a projection of current problems into an amplified version of reality. Sometimes that device gets overdone: 2004 Battlestar Galactica felt to me carrying much of 9/11 background. Silent Running is far from alone in the pessimist outlook. It's funny that, living in a civilization so much indebted to technology, the stories that we keep telling ourselves about it are so negative. We've accepted that as a given. I recently enjoyed a lot Altered Carbon, that has as a premise a technology that provides immortality for the masses. Well, guess what: that good guys are trying to destroy it. Because reasons. Also the cities seem like a shithole, not sure why.
- chrisdun 3y agoI discovered Silent Running almost backwards when 65daysofstatic played a live re-score of the film many years back. Looks like it’s easily searchable still, comes highly recommended.
- retrocryptid 3y agoAnd the music! I'm not a super Joan Baez fan, but I loved the two songs she did for the movie. And Schickele's score is awesome.
- Isle_of_View 3y agoRelevant? How so?