End of World Subcategories: Ecotastrophe!

This subcategory is smoking hot right now, and I mean smoking…HOT…pun intended because we are quite literally in the beginnings of it RIGHT NOW, we ARE the frogs hanging out in that boiling point. Call it what you want. Climate change. Global Warming. “Cli-Fi”. I’ve also seen it lumped into the clumsy catchall of “slow apoca-lypse”. And if you google it, you’ll find more references to what’s actually happening in the natural world right now, than you will anything regarding fictional television, film or literature. Because, despite the fact the current administration is denying it, we are already in the primary stages of this right now, and though it may be slow and gradual, less immediately tangible than, say, nuclear annihilation, the threat is highly real and even probable unless we drastically and promptly change our collective behavior.

But, I digress, since I am here mostly to discuss & define the Ecotastrophe as it exists in fiction (at least for the time being…there will be plenty of opportunity to examine the reality of it in the near future). Probably the piece of ecological fiction I’ve been most influenced by in recent years is Earth 2100, a futuretrip mockumentary that aired on the ABC network back during the summer of 2009. I’ve used this fake history as the jumping off point in two plays I’ve written now, as it follows the events in the life of a fictional character, Lucy, who was born in 2009 and lived through to the next century to witness the effects of climate change and the dominoes that ensued to eventually lead to total collapse.

The thing that fascinates (and terrifies) me is that with climate change, you get several directly relevant situations that will result from this. It’s not just, “Oh, wow, summer is really hot now”. It’s the entire globe getting warmer as a whole. It’s the melting of polar ice caps, which in turn causes severe change with regard to weather patterns (Super hurricanes, anyone? Intense drought?), not to mention flooding and rising tidelines. We mention the “Seattle Archipelago” in the play (feed\back) I’ve been working on this summer, as the various hills of this city become a city of islands. And when coastlines get eaten and drought occurs, flooding ensues most beachfront property is destroyed, crops fail. Then: stagnant water often leads to new, bacterial diseases we don’t necessarily have vaccines for. People move inland. Famine and border skirmishes occur. Mass extinctions of several species of insect and animal, severely affecting the food chain. The dominoes fall, one after the other into one giant chain reaction.

And then there are other things we are doing/have done that probably help this along: oil spills, meltdown of nuclear power plants (us older kids probably remember 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl – more recently, Fukushima in the 2011 earthquake/tsunami sucker punch that hit Japan and is even now contaminating the Pacific Ocean), and let’s not forget fracking, which is even NOW beginning to cause small earthquakes in historically non-seismic areas, like Oklahoma.

As fictional “what if” fodder, it’s awesome! …but I think we are getting to a place in reality where that fodder is becoming a highly possible cautionary tale I would love for us to avoid. What are your thoughts? I realize this is potentially a hot-button topic…

Books: The Death of Grass by John Christopher, New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson, Glimmering by Elizabeth Hand

Movies: The Core, The Day After Tomorrow, Interstellar, Earth 2100, Snowpiercer

TV: I can’t remember any series dealing with ecological collapse as the main catalyst for the series…not fictional ones anyway, there are several documentary-type series such as Nat Geo’s Years of Living Dangerously. There have been episodes of Star Trek that have dealt with it, as well as Black Mirror. Fringe’s alternate universe had some shades of it, as did SyFy’s Defiance, 12 Monkeys, and to a greater degree, Incorporated.