Edward Struzik’s Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future (2017) speaks alarmingly of a future dominated by ‘megafires’, as global temperatures rise, forests become drier and lightning strikes become more common. Warmer temperatures mean longer fire seasons, which in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere, increasing temperatures further. As an example, Struzik discusses the Horse River Fire, which tore through 1.5 million acres of inhabited land in Alberta, Canada, in 2016. Known by locals as ‘the Beast’, it turned 2,500 homes and 12,000 vehicles to ash, and forced 90,000 residents to evacuate. ‘The firestorm was of such ferocity,’ says Struzik, ‘it created its own weather patterns, including lightning strikes that set off smaller fires to herald its approach.’ More recently, bush fires in Australia began burning in September 2019 and grew more and more severe. By March 2020, when the authorities finally got the situation under control, a staggering 46 million acres had burnt, destroying 6,000 buildings, killing dozens of humans and an astonishing 1 billion animals. Somewhere, John of Patmos is nodding his head sagely.
The problem started some time ago. Since the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, humans have been increasingly polluting the planet as the consumption of fossil fuels took off in earnest. At the time, few people noticed or concerned themselves with the effect on the environment, focusing their apocalyptic anxieties on a different fear: overpopulation. The increase in food production had led to a rapid growth in population that some felt was unsustainable. Of particular influence were the ideas of Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth-century British writer who calculated that population growth would always outpace food supply, resulting in starvation on a mass scale for the poorest in society. His controversial theories encouraged some to think the suffering of the poor inevitable, even divinely sanctioned.*
It is a mistake to insist that the global problem is ‘overpopulation’ – indeed, China’s one-child policy made an important dent in that vast country’s burgeoning population without reducing the country’s carbon pollution. Some might even point instead to the global dropping birth rates, combined with the pressures of an ageing society, as being more likely to threaten our societies. Still, concerns regarding overpopulation and the future of our species don’t necessarily track the science. It’s a fear that often informs popular culture.
Take Soylent Green (1973), the cult film directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Charlton Heston, based on Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966). The movie is markedly different to the novel.* Harrison’s overpopulation fable concentrates on the degradation of urban life. It is set in 1999, in a run-down New York so overcrowded that people have to share their apartments with strangers. For everyone except the super-rich, food is no longer delicious and varied; most people subsist upon a product made of soya beans and lentils called ‘soylent’. The plot of the novel is more or less inconsequential, but Harrison’s proposed solution to the problem of global overpopulation is the dissemination of contraception. In the last scene in the novel, the year 2000 begins and a big screen in Times Square announces, ‘Census says United States had biggest year ever, end-of-the-century, 344 million citizens!’† It’s almost an anticlimax.
Adapting this novel into a movie, the screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg made a number of changes (including excising all mention of contraception to avoid alienating Roman Catholic cinemagoers), and added a new twist ending that has become the most famous part of the whole story. In the movie, Charlton Heston’s character comes to a grisly realisation: far from being made from soya and lentils, ‘Soylent Green’ is in fact made from processed human corpses. The film ends with the dramatic climax of a horrified Heston staggering through the city streets, warning his fellow New Yorkers: ‘Soylent Green is people!’
It’s certainly a dramatically effective ending, but it’s not a concept that survives a few seconds of rational thought. Soya and lentils are easy to grow and to convert into nutritious food; human beings are neither of those things, never mind the added expense required in keeping it a secret from the general population. But, of course, we should not judge Soylent Green in terms of its logical plausibility any more than we should The Day After Tomorrow. Its celebrated ending is, on the contrary, a symbolic articulation of a great truth: that we are hungrily consuming our world, devouring our means of subsistence and poisoning our reservoir of resources. The unsustainability is the point. Soylent Green is a metaphorical articulation of environmental disaster. We are Monty Python’s Black Knight, gaily lopping off our own limbs while loudly boasting about our invincibility.
While we’re unlikely to be tricked into eating each other, the question of how we’re going to feed our growing population while climate change challenges our existing practices of production and consumption is a valid one. But the problem isn’t simply that there are more people alive than ever before; the real issue is that those people are no longer content to live primitive, subsistence-level lives. They want the trappings of modernity: central heating (or air conditioning), internet access, cars, air travel, out-of-season fruit. As climate scientists remind us, around each person exists a circle of influence much larger than the individual – I’m talking, of course, about our ‘carbon footprint’. It is the amount of carbon that we’ve pumped into the atmosphere, through the burning of fossil fuels to power our lifestyle that is the biggest culprit, although there are certainly other problematic industries and practices, from fast fashion to cattle farming.
If we carry on in this way, the consequences will likely be dire. The work of thousands of scientists feeds into the reports issued, periodically, by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); most recently the 2018 Special
