Alien: Earth, Ep 1 - Climate Report Card

[labingi]

I enjoyed episode 1 of Alien: Earth. It seems a pretty good show, but for this post I'm just going to evaluate its performance on addressing climate breakdown. I've only seen this ep. once and wasn't taking notes, so feel free to chime in with what I missed.

Baseline: the show is set in 2120, about 100 years from now, i.e. in the middle of dealing with either a) voluntary radical change in how civilization lives on the Earth and/or b) involuntary climate breakdown, with much of the Earth being uninhabitable. How is the show doing with that reality?

* Handicap point: It's trying to maintain continuity with Alien's timeline, which is from the 1970s. (+1)

* Massive technological advancement with no sign of climate impacts on industrial infrastructure, etc.: -1

* Paradisal, verdant island forested with mature trees many of which are probably over 100 and no signs of climate damage or commentary (that I caught) on how this can be: -1

* Community that looks like it has adjusted to significant sea-level rise: +1

* Metropolis with flawless skyscrapers, greenery and no sign of climate damage or slowdown in materials extraction. (To match physical reality, it must have one or the other.): -1

* Massive department stores with many aisles of clothing and splashy ads suggesting that marketing-driven, fast-fashion culture has persisted unchanged for over 100 years without resulting in biophysical ruin for much of the Earth. -3 (This is projection grotesquely out of step with all realistic projections.)

TOTAL: -4

For research I'm drawing on, see the first two sections especially of this bibliography.

Comments

[bookwyrme]

Something I think you're not taking into account: With the exception of one exterior shot when the ship crashed (where IIRC, we saw dust ? ), we're seeing the people on top: Neverland--that forested island--is owned by one of the 5 rulers of the world. Given that wealth has this tendency to be passed down, it may well have been a centuries long bio-haven given who knows what extra attention. The city we saw, with the lovely sky scrapers was the corporate headquarters of Yutani, again, the richest of the rich. The ordinary? lower class? people we've seen have been in brief, indoor shots where they're in smaller sub-structures. I'm not sure about the ads we saw incessantly playing at one point--whether they were upstairs in the wealthy area or down in the less-so. The official podcast says they're aiming for a perpetually hot and humid earth, FWIW.

[bookwyrme]

I'll add, though, that the trees we saw on the zoom in to Neverland and the trees we saw in the close-up of Lady Sylvia and her husband talking were not the same trees or tree kinds--the ones they were under were jungle-types, more suitable for the "wet and warm" while the tree-covered island was deciduous, so it's possible--probable, even-- we were just not meant to notice the discrepancy there, just like we were not meant to notice that Regina's "Honeycrisp" apples were Red Delicious in Once Upon a Time.

[labingi]

Good call on detail. Yes, I suspect we are not supposed to notice a lot of that stuff. :)

[labingi]

You make a good point and are undoubtedly right that we're absolutely seeing the privilege of the .0001%. But I'm still going to argue that's not good climate commentary on a couple levels.

1) Storytelling: by analogy, if you had a show set during a war that showed rich people living it up and one or two shots of soldiers marching past, dusty and bloody, and said this show is illustrating the horrors of war and how the upper echelons use their money to avoid having to face them, I'd say, "No, it's not. If it were illustrating the horrors of war, it would illustrate the horrors of war."

2) Realism: This is set just about 100 years in our future (which isn't plausible, but okay, the timeline's from the 1970s). It posits 100 years of the same trajectory we're on now of the .0001% getting richer at everyone else's expense. If we stay on that trajectory and don't address climate change meaningfully (which we physically cannot if we keep growing the economy and giving the rich more and more), we will be in a "hothouse Earth" in 100 years; we'll be, like, over 3C of heating easily, and that's at tipping points that really will make most of the Earth uninhabitable.

Even the .0001% can't control the weather (or this series is not giving a plotline that they can), and while I suspect it's mathematically possible that this trillionaire lives on a tropical island that has not suffered damage from any hurricane and doesn't experience any significant wet bulb temperatures and has been carefully husbanded at the cost of billions of dollars so trees are continually being replanted from other parts of the world to keep pace with the changing temperature/biome needs, it's really irresponsible to show that without any commentary on it because the default reading is "Things are fine," at least for the rich, and they won't be. On that trajectory, we will all be screwed. The very rich might be living in a biodome that's kept all pretty under "glass," not in the open air on an island paradise.

For citations, see the "biophysical" and "capitalism" sections my bibliography, notably Trust et al.

[bookwyrme]

Are they claiming to be talking about climate change? I wasn't expecting to watch this, so I didn't pay attention to much of the run up. I think they are most interested in monsters with a side order of "What makes a monster?" and "What does it mean to be human?"

[bookwyrme]

Obviously, you can grade them anyway, I just wondered if they had made claims soliciting the grade.

[labingi]

I don't think they've made any claims about wanting to engage with climate change, but I personally think we're at a point where, if you're going to set a story more or less in our real world in a time frame and economic scenario that would put you smack in the middle of climate ruin, you have a responsibility to acknowledge that.

For context, our cultural default is still to pretend climate change isn't/won't be a problem, to be silent. Weather reporters get death threats for mentioning that a hurricane was likely worsened by climate change. No government in the world is taking effective actions to mitigate it.

Emissions are not only not falling, but annual emissions are still rising. Not only are annual emissions still rising, but they are beginning to accelerate again. This is due in a large part to AI, a fact almost never discussed outside of "climate" circles. I just took a cybersecurity training today on the pros and cons of AI. We were encouraged to use it; they assured us it wouldn't take our jobs. Not a word about emissions or water use. Ditto at my "progressive" college: hand-wringing about whether/when AI is pedagogically helping/hurtful, no word about climate.

No sustainability plan at all - our "progressive" five year strategic plan has one word about sustainability: it is "sustainability" at the dead bottom of a list of values, attached to no goals, initiatives, key performance indicators, or benchmarks.

This is like if a TV show were about a Jewish family in Germany in the 1940s and had no mention of anti-German sentiment except maybe a small piece of anti-Semitic graffiti in the background on a wall. And if that show's position was, "Well, this show isn't about the Holocaust," my response would be "The Holocaust is there, and your failure to address it is tantamount to Holocaust denial, which is not okay, whether or not you purport to be about the Holocaust or not."

I know I'm tripping off into a rant mode here, but we're talking about the impending deaths of hundreds of millions of people and a Permian-level extinction event looming--soon, the deaths, if not the full extinction, within our middle-aged lifetimes.

On our current trajectory, by 2025 (that's 25 years, when we're in our 70s), Haiti (where my kids' birth family lives) will probably be effectively uninhabitable due to 100+ wet bulb heat days per year. Many, many Haitians will die. Many more will be climate refugees (and we can already see how that's going for people). Their culture will probably be mostly wiped out within a generation due to fragmenting by diaspora. Multiply that by much of the Earth's surface.

Media has a responsibility in this, most particularly left-leaning media that purports to be critiquing our current cultural excesses, which Alien: Earth does well in other respects.