This, in turn, increases greenhouse gas emissions and fractures the four pillars of food security: availability, access, utilisation and stability of supplies. The throw-away society we currently live in wastes about one-third of the food we produce, according to the IPCC report. It acts as a condemnation of a consumerist culture which eventually begins to consume itself. This cannibalism trope is however used to shock us into action against environmental degradation and gradual resource depletion. But, as Charlton Heston discovers in the end, "Soylent Green is people." It is not a combination of soy and lentil, or extracted from ocean plankton. Among the three wafers, Soylent Green is the most in-demand due to its high-protein content. In a world with no visible plant life or livestock, food thus becomes utilitarian: an eat-what-you-get meal. There is a yellowish-green fog that blankets New York in the film, and there is no sign of trees or other animals, all victims of human-induced climate change. This is evident even in the opening montage: a how-we-got-here collage of man and nature, and how the former's destructive agency becomes more and more insatiable with industrialisation and technological progress. The film explicitly singles out the greenhouse effect to be the chief cause behind this world falling apart. In a shocking scene, these rioters are picked up and cleared with a front-end loader, like something out of a Holocaust documentary but with living, breathing, screaming people.
While the wealthy enjoy the comforts of a warm, home-cooked meal and clean water for drinking and showering, the poor riot over the rationed food, which come in wafers of three different varieties - red, yellow and green. The investigation takes him to the contrasting world of the one-percenters, who have cordoned themselves off in high-rise, air-conditioned apartments that come furnished with "furniture" - young attractive women offered to the men as an amenity. One of these public servants is NYPD detective Thorn (Charlton Heston), who is brought in to investigate the murder of a top executive of Soylent Corporation, the state-sanctioned monopoly which manufactures and distributes food rations for the common folk. Those fortunate enough to have their own apartments, like lowly public servants, must power their homes by cycling on stationary bikes, like in Black Mirror's Fifteen Million Merits. The extreme poverty has resulted in an overspill of homeless people, who sleep on staircases and hallways of tenements, and inside unserviceable cars on the street. Set around two years from now, Soylent Green shows us a 2022 New York where unchecked population growth and an endless heatwave have resulted in a near-exhaustion of natural resources. Loosely adapted from Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room!, the 1973 film warns us that continuing on our current path will most certainly lead to catastrophe. Richard Fleischer's Soylent Green presented a grim vision of a world on the brink of collapse following decades of environmental neglect. Even their parents are rallying behind them as climate change represents an existential threat to all of human civilisation.Īs always, science fiction gave us an advance notice. She has turned what was previously just a background noise into a relentless refrain as more and more youth mobilise to demand action against climate change.
Greta Thunberg has every right to be angry. Yet, the most powerful elected official in the world, who once called climate change a Chinese hoax, continues to downplay all the warnings. Moreover, we know the Earth's getting warmer as July 2019 was the hottest month on record. An IPCC report links this food security crisis to global warming and the damage it has caused to virtually every ecosystem. That's one in nine people around the world who suffered from chronic hunger in 2018. Words by Prahlad Srihari | Art by Trisha Bose and Sharath Ravishankar | Concept by Rohini Nair and Harsh PareekĨ21.6 million. As we embark on a new decade, how do visions of the 2020s - imagined in books like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, films like Soylent Green, or even manga like Ghost in the Shell -match up against our reality? In this series, we look at seven pop culture artefacts from the past that foretold the future, providing a prophetic glimpse of the decade we’re now entering.
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