Riders of the Whistling Pines: A Post-World War II Film Addressing a Contemporary Environmental Disaster

In what looks like an anticipation of a 2008 eco-disaster, a lodgepole pine beetle infestation in the high country of New Mexico and Colorado, Riders of the Whistling Pines comes close to fulfilling Joni Adamson’s environmental justice aim to find a middle place between traditional environmentalism and environmental jusetice but is limited by its reliance on solely mainstream environmentalist views. The film “discusses differently situated human practices and perspectives on nature” (Adamson xv) and arrives at a contingent and localized consensus on how best to protect forests. In Riders of the Whistling Pines Gene Autry illustrates earnest, but potentially deadly, attempts to save a forest by spraying it with DDT. The remedies applied in the film seem effective until assessed, understood, and critiqued in relation to our current context, a context that demonstrates that this use of chemicals serves as one of Daggett’s “failed remedies” with long-term detrimental consequences for water, soil and wildlife in the Pacific Northwest. With its mainstream environmentalist message, Riders of the Whistling Pines falls short because it valorizes only one view—that of the park rangers who act as environmentalists working to save a forest in spite of possible detrimental consequences to both humans and their domesticated animals.

This same valorization of mainstream environmentalist views contributed to the 2008 pine beetle eco-disaster in Colorado. According to Stephanie Simon, “The mountain pine beetle has killed tens of millions of trees in Colorado alone and has destroyed forests from New Mexico to Canada. Across the Rocky Mountain West, iconic postcard vistas are vanishing as sickly mountainsides turn first a sickly shade of rust, then a ghostly gray” (A2). Simon asserts that “The beetle is expected to kill virtually every mature lodgepole pine in Colorado, or five million of the state’s 22 million forested acres” (A2).

The devastation is on par with an environmental disaster and will have dire long-term consequences, including fires and fallen trees destroying power lines, roads, trail, campgrounds, and fencing (Simon A2). Solutions from turning dead trees into fuel pellets for wood-burning stoves, to converting lumber into ethanol have been proposed, but long-term solutions will require policy changes by environmental groups. Although factors like climate change and drought contributed to the problem, according to Simons, “foresters pin much of the blame on management practices. Decades of fire suppression and logging restrictions left the forests densely packed with towering, century-old lodgepole pines, which happen to be the beetles’ favorite food” (A2). To avoid future infestations, mainstream environmentalists must take the advice of scientists and public citizens to implement strategies that promote “the ideal forest” where “old-growth trees would stand 20 feet apart from one another” (A2) and, as Todd Hartmann suggests, forests “have a better mix of tree species, as well as more age diversity, making it unlikely the beetles will find as many suitable hosts as in the pure 80-plus year-old lodgepole stands it has favored.”

An ideal forest would require thinning of trees through controlled fires and controlled lumbering. In Riders of the Whistling Pines, such strategies are constructed as bad for the environment. Instead, the forests must be preserved no matter what the cost. The tussock moths infesting the forest must be destroyed, so a lumber company cannot steal the rotted timber for themselves. In the film, forest ranger Gene Autry discovers that moths are destroying a large swath of federal lands. Lumberman Henry Mitchell (Douglass Dumbrille) has made the same discovery and wants to see the infestation continue, so the land will be given to him to be harvested. Autry’s proposal to use DDT to kill the moths and save the forest will foil the businessman’s land grab. When Mitchell overhears townspeople discussing the potential dangers of DDT, he hires someone to spray powerful chemicals to kill animal life and frighten farmers, so they will believe that DDT is the cause and will stop the rangers from saving the forest.

After Mitchell discusses the livestock and wild animal deaths during a camp meeting with concerned ranchers and blames them on DDT, Autry and another ranger find Mitchell’s stronger chemicals and ride to the airstrip to stop Mitchell and his gang. Ultimately Mitchell and his henchman are killed, and the Rangers return to their mission to spray the forest with DDT, kill the moths, and save the trees. The lumberman has been defeated, and spraying can continue, so the forests will survive, according to the film’s narrative. Yet the consequences of maintaining forest growth no matter the cost and of such widespread spraying of DDT are not explored, chiefly because, it would seem, the film was released in 1949, and DDT was still seen as a wonder chemical.

In 1945, however, years before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1960, the seminal work that warned us about the dire consequences of widespread DDT and other pesticide use, the United States government restricted the use of DDT, complicating Autry’s position and, perhaps, valorizing Mitchell’s and the townspeople’s. According to Edmund P. Russell III’s “The Strange Career of DDT: Experts, Federal Capacity, and Environmentalism in World War II,” the United States had “apprehensions about the insecticide’s effect on wildlife and ‘the balance of nature.’” Russell explains that the U.S. policy asserted that “while it may be necessary to ignore these considerations in other parts of the world, in the United States such considerations cannot be neglected” (770). Representatives from the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Public Health Service and other federal agencies restricted the use of DDT to rare circumstances because it harmed wildlife, caused cancer in humans, and passed through mothers’ milk to their infants (Russell 770).

At the same time, however, DDT was hailed as “the War’s greatest contribution to the future health of the world” (Russell 770-71). Russell explains that after its “release to civilians in August 1945, public health officials, farmers, and homeowners snapped up the wonder chemical to kill insects that caused disease, attacked crops, or created a nuisance” (771). According to Russell, “in 1948, DDT developer Paul Muller received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine” (771). Russell attempts to reconcile these two views of DDT by exploring the history of its usage during and after World War II. He suggests that the pesticide met certain needs during the war like quelling insect-borne diseases among the troops (774). When control of DDT passed from military to civilian hands in August 1945, the 1945 U.S. policy no longer applied to DDT usage. According to Russell, free and widespread use of DDT continued until scientists like Rachel Carson joined with environmental groups and pressured the U.S. government to ban DDT. The ban occurred in 1972, two years after the first Earth Day and the establishment of the EPA.

In 2008, more than 35 years after the DDT ban, Colorado State Foresters suggested using insecticides to ward off the bark beetle infestation only “on high-value trees, such as those that provide shade or ornamental value” (Hartman). But the problems in the Wyoming and Colorado forests are “fueled in part by uniformly older lodgepole forests” (Hartman), there because, according to Jim Robbin, “fires have been suppressed for so long.” Attempts by environmentalists in Colorado and Wyoming to preserve forests failed because they relied on only one perspective—that of mainstream environmentalists. By foregrounding use of DDT as the only environmental solution and valorizing the preservation of all trees in a forest, Riders of the Whistling Pines also highlights strengths and weaknesses of mainstream environmental views and reinforces the need for a “middle place.”

Evolutionary Narratives in Jurassic Park

Although CGI may have helped move the stop-motion animation used in the film to possible extinction, Jurassic Park’s (1993) narrative demonstrates how community and, perhaps, family, might help us survive. Even though most critics see the film’s focus on family as diluting the ethical argument against genetic experimentation, we see this focus as moving the narrative beyond bio-ethics toward a comic view of evolution, an evolutionary narrative which might, as Leslie Paul Thiele suggests in “Evolutionary Narratives and Ecological Ethics,” “inform moral reasoning and facilitate the cultivation of certain moral sentiments [and] might legitimate an ecological ethic” (7-8). Thiele explains, “The point, as Daniel Dennett says of his own work, is not to deliver human behavior over to a ‘Darwinian science’ but to make sure of ‘merely philosophical realizations’ that can be gleaned from the ‘transfer’ of certain biological concepts to humanistic concerns. In the end, we do not so much discover values in nature as read values into nature” (8). 

From this perspective, Jurassic Park follows two evolutionary narrative patterns. The first is driven by a critique of genetic engineering and sees humans as only exploiters of the natural world, a theme many critics find diluted in the translation from novel to film. Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and, to a certain extent, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) initiate and push forward this narrative during the first act of the film. The second, however, which comes into play when John Hammond’s grandchildren visit the park, builds toward a comic view of evolution that sees family, accommodation, and adaptation as better responses to nonhuman nature. The last two acts of the film illustrate this narrative: In the second act Dr. Alan Grant transforms from child hater to father figure and protector. In the third act, the family unit is reunited, but nature’s life cycle, not human retaliation, ensures their survival.

Tragic and comic evolutionary narratives and their roots in organismic, chaotic, and economic approaches to ecology are broached as the film introduces each of the characters in relation to the film’s conflicts. Jurassic Park begins and ends on Isla Nublar, an island near Costa Rica where John Hammond has built his dinosaur theme park. Characters that will modify the tragic narrative on display there, however, are introduced with the first conflict of the film: a raptor kills a worker and the company lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) hears about it while inspecting an amber mine in the Dominican Republic. Wishing to protect the park’s assets, he tells Hammond, “If two experts sign off on the island, the insurance group’ll back off” to halt a $20 million lawsuit. 

Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler are hired as the experts who will join Dr. Ian Malcolm and provide the credibility the theme park needs. Malcolm’s role as a chaotician, here aligned with chaotic approaches to ecology, and Grant’s disdain for children and relationship with Sattler, pointing toward interdependence and an organismic approach to ecology, are introduced almost immediately, as well. The scientists represent comic narratives, then, either rooted in chaotic or organismic approaches to ecology. The park and its owner, however, embrace a tragic evolutionary narrative rooted in economic approaches to ecology that, according to the film’s narrative, are doomed to failure.

A second conflict that catalyzes the disruption of Hammond’s tragic evolutionary narrative is broached in a café in San Jose, Costa Rica, where Dennis Nedry agrees to sell fifteen species’ embryos from Jurassic Park for $1.5 million. Nedry’s decision has catastrophic results, but it also makes possible the movement from a narrative focused on a critique of genetic experimentation to a comic evolutionary narrative focused on community.

Dr. Malcolm provides an argument against Hammond’s genetic experimentation early in the scientists’ tour of the island and its visitors’ center. According to a film they view, all of the plants and dinosaurs they have seen result from cloning based on DNA found in blood samples extracted from pre-historic mosquitoes preserved in amber—petrified tree sap. According to Hammond they plan to maintain control by breeding only females in a lab and imprinting new hatchlings to humans, especially Hammond himself. Malcolm opposes Hammond’s mission as a blow to evolutionary narratives: “John, the kind of control you’re attempting is not possible. If there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories. It crashes through barriers. Painfully, maybe even… dangerously, but… well, there it is.”Ellie agrees, arguing, “When people try to control things that are out of their power... It’s anti-nature.” Hammond’s attempts to control nature are also rooted in a tragic evolutionary narrative.Malcolm even disdains the work Hammond has accomplished at Jurassic Park because of its lack of creativity. According to Malcolm, the park and its creatures “didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done, and you took the next step. You patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a lunchbox, and now, you’re selling it.” When Hammond argues that he’s preserving species, Malcolm counters, “Hold on—this is no species that was obliterated by deforestation or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot. Nature selected them for extinction. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.”

            

Malcolm offers multiple arguments against the experimentation Hammond has put into play, all resting on Hammond’s disruption of a comic evolutionary narrative. Hammond disrupts that narrative first by attempting to control nature, exploiting it for his own gain, an exploitation resting on tragic visions of evolution that see humans as pioneer species “dedicating themselves to survival through the destruction of all our competitors and to achieving effective dominance over other forms of life” (Meeker 162). Malcolm also notes that Hammond has disrupted the narrative further by cloning animals nature had selected for extinction, since, as Meeker explains, “the welfare of individuals is generally subordinated to the welfare of the group” (162). Dinosaurs’ extinction, then, can be seen as a means to sustain the welfare of other species, so their return disrupts the evolutionary narrative in play.

            

Ultimately both Sattler and Grant agree that Hammond can have no real control over either the plants or animals he has cloned. Sattler argues against Hammond’s ability to control plant life he has cloned, saying, “you have plants right here in this building, for example, that are poisonous. You picked them because they look pretty, but these are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they’re living in and will defend themselves. Violently, if necessary.”And Grant agrees, asserting, “Dinosaurs and man—two species separated by 65 millions years of evolution—have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we have the faintest idea of what to expect.” As Malcolm contends, Hammond’s “scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The mayhem that erupts on the island when Nedry shuts down security around the island demonstrates the dangerous consequences Hammond and the others face because he disrupted the comic evolutionary narrative.

These consequences, however, also provide the catalyst for the second evolutionary narrative, a comic narrative that provides a space for humanity to accommodate and adapt in order to survive as part of the natural world. As Ellie Sattler asserts when faced with the destructive force of unfettered dinosaurs, “I was overwhelmed by this place, but I made a mistake, too. I didn’t have enough respect for that power, and it’s out now. The only thing that matters now are the things we love: Alan and Lex and Tim. John [Hammond], they’re out there where people are dying.” Alan Grant, however, must learn that lesson before the family unit is forged. His transformation parallels a comic evolutionary narrative where heroes succeed only through collaboration.     

The distance Grant must travel to gain this knowledge is illustrated by multiple scenes, in which he shows disdain for familial connections. In one scene early in the film, Grant even threatens violence when a child scoffs at a Velociraptor, calling it a “six-foot turkey.” Grant grabs the boy and demonstrates the raptor’s hunting prowess with a six-inch retractable razor-like claw, while telling him: “He slashes at you here… or here… or maybe across the belly, splitting your intestines. The point is, you are alive when they start to eat you. So you know, try to show a little respect.” By the end of Grant’s demonstration, the boy is nearly in tears, but Grant shows no remorse. That distaste for children continues when Hammond’s grandchildren arrive and are ushered into jeeps for the park tour. In an exchange with Sattler, Grant exclaims, “Kids! You want to have one of those?” and points toward Hammond’s grandchildren. And when Sattler says she thinks one of their offspring “could be intriguing,” Grant disagrees: “they’re noisy; they’re messy; they’re expensive…. They smell…. Some of them smell…. Babies smell!”

Grant’s attitude changes, however, when Nedry’s plan disables all electric barriers, leading to an attack on Grant, Gennaro, Malcolm, and the children, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello). While Malcolm is injured and Gennaro is dead, Grant saves the children, willing to sacrifice himself to do so. While they all huddle together in a tree waiting for dawn, for example, Grant seems to have been adopted into Lex and Tim’s family. Now seeing Grant as “Dad,” Lex nestles up next to him, and Tim tells him dinosaur jokes. When Lex asks Grant, “What if the dinosaur comes back when we’re all asleep?” Grant answers, “I’ll stay awake.” Lex is skeptical: “All night?” she asks, and Grant agrees, “All night.” Most importantly, he lets a claw like the raptor claw he’d used to threaten the boy at his dig fall to the ground, explicitly illustrating his change of attitude toward family. 

The next day, while Grant leads Lex and Tim over a fence and toward the safety of the visitors’ center, Ellie Sattler volunteers to turn the power back on manually when the system responds slowly to a “reboot,” so Grant and the children can climb the electrified fence without injury. They all succeed because of their community efforts. Sattler is able to turn on the power manually because Park Ranger Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck) fends off raptors on the hunt. Tim is able to jump from the electrified fence because Lex and Grant cheer him on, and Grant catches Tim and revives him, so they can enter the park’s visitors’ center. Later Lex and Tim work together, as well, escaping from raptors hunting them in the park’s cafeteria. They escape into the kitchen and trap one raptor in a freezer before racing out to find Sattler and Grant. Once they are reunited, they all work together to survive. When Sattler cannot reboot the system to secure the doors and fences, Lex, a computer “hacker,” intervenes, rebooting the system and locking the raptors out of the control room. Lex’s hacking repairs the security system, and the phone rings to confirm her success. Ultimately, Sattler, Grant, Lex, and Tim become a family and, along with Malcolm and Hammond, escape the island by helicopter. The message of Jurassic Park is explicit here: By building community—adapting and accommodating—they have survived, so a comic evolutionary narrative can continue.

Enviro-toons of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s

Most viewers would agree that the best animated films “offer the greatest potential for expressing a variety of divergent points of view, while at the same time accommodating a dominant paradigm of established social meaning” (Wells Animation and America 13). This perspective includes the enviro-toon, animated shorts and feature films with ecology at their center from the 1930s to the present.

Although most of the enviro-toons from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s demonstrate the power of nature over the human world, some of the period’s animated shorts respond to human, organismic, and economic approaches to ecology by critiquing human exploitation of the natural world and illustrating the consequences of rampant consumerism that serves as a sign of progress—devastation of the natural world. Instead of looking at nature from the skewed perspective of a speeding car, enviro-toons from the post-World War II era, including Porky Chops and Lumber Jerks show us what’s wrong with what Wilson calls “the cultural taming of the American Wilderness” (34) and provide real reasons for embracing Aldo Leopold’s conservation aesthetic.

For example, Hare Conditioned (1945) seems to illustrate Aldo Leopold’s view of recreation gone wrong. Hare Conditioned takes the artificiality of outdoor recreation to an extreme, when a camp scene turns into a department store window display. Here outdoor recreation is not only mechanized (as Leopold argues). It’s an illusion. As in other Bugs Bunny cartoons, in Hare Conditioned, Bugs ends up outsmarting his opponent—this time, the store manager—avoiding a more deadly artificial display of nature: the manager attempts (and fails) to add Bugs to his stuffed animal display in the taxidermy department. Putting nature on display here highlights what Dana Phillips calls representation rather than presence. Hare Conditioned shows us nature—and outdoor recreation—in a showroom like the living room where Carl Hiaasen’s protagonist, Dennis Gault, in the novel Double Whammy lays out his bass tackle. According to Phillips, the display window and the stuffed woods animals in Double Whammy act as “monuments to a disappearing natural world” (209), just like those on display in the taxidermy section of Bugs’s department store. These two examples seem to spring directly from Leopold’s aesthetic philosophy.

By 1953, however, Jack Warner “ordered the animation units [temporarily] to close down, to make way for 3D movies” (Klein 206). Television became a new dominant media, and fewer movie screens were available for audiences. All of these factors led to what Klein calls a “stripped-down” version of cartoons. Klein argues that a “mixture of ebullience and paranoia can be seen very clearly in fifties cartoons, in the stories and the graphics” (207). According to Klein, this mixture “is particularly evident in cartoons about consumer life” (207). The conflict between humans and machines consumerism has bred is explored in cartoons like Porky Chops, Boobs in the Woods (1950) and Lumber Jerks and extended to include the natural resources necessary to create consumer goods.

Porky Pig in Porky Chops focuses on destruction of a forest caused by need for lumber resources. In Porky Chops, the less anthropomorphized animal—a bear that appears first on all four legs in a hollow log—takes control and ends the clear cutting of a forest by Porky Pig. The bear’s college letter sweater, however, suggests that human intervention both potentially destroys and domesticates wild nature. Boobs in the Woods critiques outdoor recreation in more subtle ways than Hare Conditioned, while also making a statement about the loss of wild nature. In Boobs in the Woods, Daffy disrupts Porky Pig (as usual), but Daffy’s aim seems to be to stop Porky from painting a natural landscape. Porky camps out in his trailer in a “wilderness” so tamed that it looks more like a golf course than a wild forest, but he fails to capture the scene on canvas. A simple critique, perhaps, of increasing outdoor recreation after WWII, but here the conflict is unresolved.

        

   

Of the cartoons from the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s we viewed, however, the one most clearly an enviro-toon is Goofy Gophers and the Lumber Jerks. Lumber Jerks seems to emanate from an attitude in 1950s America that Klein calls “Consumer Cubism” (210), “an obsession with the efficient, angular plan.” The faster a consumer could gain access to goods, the better. Klein claims “individualism and democracy were being redefined in terms of consumer desire. The homogeneous surface, open and ‘free,’ came to stand in for America’s imperium” (210). These attitudes were reflected in both narrative and aesthetics of cartoons after 1954.

Like Porky Chops, Lumber Jerksfirst focuses on saving one tree in a forest—but the conclusion differs dramatically. Two cheerful gophers scurry toward their home tree, but when they go up into the hollow of the tree, they find it has been cut down and carried away. The two gophers take steps to retrieve their tree—what they call their property—tracking it to a river and then picking it out of the hundreds of logs floating on the water. They climb on their tree and row away but cannot fight the current and nearly go over a waterfall. Once they escape, one gopher exclaims, “I’m bushed,” and the two fall asleep, waking up only after entering a lumber mill, surviving a saw blade cutting their tree trunk in two.

After seeing the devastation around them, the gophers state the obvious about the repercussions of consumerism. One of the gophers explains, “It looks like they are bent on the destruction of our forests,” and the scene shifts to the mill’s workings. One “shot” shows trees ground into sawdust being made into artificial fireplace logs. Another shows an entire tree being “sharpened” to produce one toothpick. Then the gophers discover what had happened to their own tree: “They’re going to make furniture out of our tree,” states one.

But the idea of ownership of consumer goods extends to the gophers and their tree home. They wish to reclaim their property, their own possession, so the other gopher exclaims, “That is definitely our property. We must think of a way to repossess it.” The gophers siphon the gas out of the furniture truck and, when it breaks down, “steal” their tree’s furniture from the truck. They build a tree house with the furniture, adding branches for good measure and topping the tree off with a television set. The cartoon ends with one of the gophers telling the other, “Isn’t our home much better than it was before ….[we have] Television… and just think how much better it will be with electricity!” 

As Klein asserts in his discussion of Tex Avery’s Car of Tomorrowand The Farm of Tomorrow, consumers may become “victimized by the very machines that promise an easier, more extravagant life” (211). After all, the consumer goods that make up the trunk of one tree were built from the trees of an entire forest. Lumber Jerks, especially, reflects an increasing ambivalence toward technology and post-World War II progress in an increasingly more complex (and anxiety-ridden) nuclear age. Here the Goofy Gophers successfully negotiate between the wonders of modernism and its impact on both natural and human worlds Paul Wells discusses. But it’s a negotiation that’s impossible in the world outside cartoons.

The Aesthetics of Oxygen in No Blade of Grass

The Aesthetics of Oxygen in No Blade of Grass

In Red Desert (1964), director Michaelangelo Antonioni's constructed world dominates the film's narrative. Combined with an outstanding and eerie electronic sound-scape, the film’s female protagonist Giuliana (Monica Vitti) and the contemporary viewer become trapped in a world that is overwhelmed by industrial waste, noise and fear. The natural world becomes pushed to the edges of the frame. This world is filled with ghostlike freighters that dock with quarantine flags run up their masts. Her two competing lovers, husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) and Corrado (Richard Harris), walk past polluted lakes laughing about how people now complain that their food tastes of oil. In another scene, Corrado and Giuliana walk past a lone fruit and vegetable vendor. His outdoor display is full of ghostlike fruits and vegetables that have turned ashen and gray. Giuliana's son asks why birds avoid the smoke pouring out of factory smokestacks. "It's poison," Giuliana exclaims, and we see a bright yellow smoke streaming into the sky, a clear reference to the human costs of toxic air and a lament to loss of our most important basic need.

From ancient Rome to the contemporary world, clean air is a requirement for human and nonhuman life. It is a basic need we require and, perhaps without our knowledge, purchase, or, when unobtainable, suffer the consequences of a toxic atmosphere. Although recent political struggles in the United States over cap-and-trade legislation and changes to the Clean Air Act highlight this dilemma, filmic representations of these struggles, which draw on human approaches to ecology, may be the most dramatic and effective arguments for clean air.

Films with atmospheric pollution at the center underscore the costs of both clean air and its absence. Lumiere views of factory emissions and oil well fires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and films from the 1960s and 1970s such as Red Desert (1964) critique industrial waste with their narratives and/or aesthetics. Recent documentaries and animated films argue against air pollution and its negative climate change consequences in similar ways, as do the critically acclaimed documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the eco-drama, Safe (1995), and the animated features, WALL-E (2008) and Happy Feet 2 (2011). But the messages of atmospheric pollution and climate change merge most powerfully in a little-known science fiction film from 1970, No Blade of Grass. Despite its pre-climate change debate context, this film provides a compelling look at the dire costs of human’s exploitation of the natural world, places blame for the Earth’s health squarely on humanity, and maps out explicitly the consequences of humans’ disastrous choices.

No Blade of Grass sheds light on not only the economic costs to limit emissions and climate change, but also the human costs when these limits fall short. Unlike films showing pollution without commenting on human consequences, such as How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Molly Maguires (1970), or documentaries concentrating primarily on environmental rather than human disasters resulting from global warming, as in An Inconvenient Truth, explorations of toxic air in science fiction films demonstrate the importance of clean air as a basic need that must be met to reduce harmful effects on human and nonhuman nature. They also reveal the continuing truth of Ellen Richards’ 1908 assertion: “The essentials of public health are recognized as clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean and wholesome food. When people crowd into a limited space these must be secured by cooperation” (The Cost of Cleanness49-50).

Based on the 1955 John Christopher novel, The Death of Grass, No Blade of Grass provides a blatant and bleak picture of the costs of a toxic atmosphere to human and nonhuman life that brings to mind post-apocalyptic films such as Silent Running (1972), Soylent Green (1973) and The Road Warrior (1981). Reinforcing Richards definitions of human ecology, the film powerfully illustrates the human causes for the disaster they now face: Because humans have polluted the Earth’s air, water, and soil, a strange new virus has appeared, which only attacks strains of grasses such as wheat and rice, and the world is descending into famine and chaos.  When the virus reaches London, architect and former military officer, John Custance (Nigel Davenport), escapes the city with his wife, Ann (Jean Wallace), daughter Mary (Lynne Frederick), and Mary’s boyfriend, Roger (John Hamill). Together with those who join them along the way, they fight their way to John’s brother’s farm where survival seems possible.  Despite this hopeful road film narrative, however, the film maintains its fierce critique of humanity’s destruction of the natural world.

As in films such as Soylent Green, No Blade of Grass opens with a montage of polluted scenes: factories spewing smoke, dead birds, arid land, traffic jams, and armed masses of people while in the music soundtrack, Roger Whitaker sings, “gone with the dawn.” An image of Earth from space pans into a crowded football stadium, and a voiceover explains, the environment has been destroyed. More scenes of dilapidated cars, factory smoke, car exhaust, and crowded city streets lining a smog-filled city of high rise apartments and human masses prove the narrator’s claim. And these shots are reinforced by another montage of industrial waste water, toxic smoke emissions, pesticides, strip mining, oil spills and red tides killing water birds, starving children, thousands of cars in an airport parking lot, and a nuclear explosion. “It’s the end of life,” the soundtrack tells us, and after a focus on the explosion, the camera pans back into space while the narrator exclaims, “And then one day, the polluted Earth could take no more.”

Because the eco-disaster has reached London, the military plans to close the city, so John and his family pack to leave, and a flashback reveals the reason for their departure. In a restaurant a year before, John and Roger share a lunch while a television in the background broadcasts images of famine in Southeast Asia and a message about a grass disease killing all the world’s grain. This famine contrasts blatantly with the plentiful plates of food in the restaurant. In the scene we learn that the world’s ecology has been poisoned by pollutants and pesticides in the soil and atmosphere, causing a grass disease that can be contained only by fire. In some world regions, martial law has been invoked to control the chaos. These dire warnings are juxtaposed with images of Londoners eating large forkfuls of food. One woman who is oblivious to the real eco-disaster around her even suggests that the disease is caused by the Chinese because they “fertilize everything with human shit.”

In the film’s present, the Custance family comprehends and fears the environmental destruction that has now reached London. As they leave, they hear on the radio that starvation deaths have reached 600 million, an astronomical human cost of a toxic atmosphere. After a series of mob and police incidents, they  do escape the city, taking another couple, Pirrie (Anthony May) and Clara(Wendy Richard), with them from a gun shop to the Custance son David’s (Nigel Rathbone) school. As they drive through the country, the landscape is brown and dying and festooned with dirty water full of industrial waste and smoking factories. Now in two cars, the Custance family and their friends kill for survival along the road.

They kill soldiers to get through military barriers and a group of rapists at a railroad crossing, but the polluted environment outside the car window is even more horrifying than this human violence. More polluted rivers and industrial smoke stacks provide the terrible backdrop for a truth exposed by the boy, David, who explains, “Earth gets warmer because of pollution,” and he maps out the aftermath of melting glaciers and polar ice causing flooded coastlines and cities, “so we all drown,” he exclaims. Humans have created the toxic atmosphere that bred a grass disease that may destroy mankind. According to radio broadcasts, it has caused cannibalism in Africa, Asia and Europe and uncontrollable panic in England because they fear they will be slaughtered with nerve gas. They must fight to live in this poisoned world. The human costs of this manmade environmental disaster are great, but the environmental losses are massive. Every animal that feeds off the diseased grass dies: calves, cattle, sheep, birds, deer.

Even when the group combines with a community that has lost their village and the accompanying score crescendos with hope, the tragic tone continues, with multiple scenes foreshadowing violent events amplifying the film’s sense of dread. As the group walks through a dying field, they pass an ancient Roman aqueduct that contrasts with lines of electric wires along a road. Ultimately the group must win two more battles for the chance to survive, one against a motorcycle gang called the Huns and one against John’s brother and his community within a gated pastoral fortress. After both John’s brother and Pirrie are killed, the last battle ends and the communities combine, but the film ends here without a sense of hope for humanity’s future. Instead, the film’s voiceover explains, “This is not a documentary, but it could be,” and Whitaker’s song of eco-disaster ends the film, highlighting the film’s connection with a human ecology that studies humans’ surrounding environment and its effect on their lives. In No Blade of Grass, those effects include both atmospheric pollution and deadly climate change.

           

No Blade of Grass complicates issues of atmospheric pollution, not only because of its genre (science fiction), but also because it explicitly connects global warming (climate change) with poisoning the air. Again, however, the film takes a human ecology approach to atmospheric pollution and clearly blames humans for the eco-disaster they now face. It also focuses on humans when illustrating the effects of environmental degradation. No Blade of Grass showcases a family’s attempts to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. It illustrates the toxic environment created by humanity, but it purveys only a message of humanity’s preservation, not a biotic community. Ultimately, however the film draws on human approaches to ecology, perhaps demonstrating more effectively the costs of a toxic world.