Earth 2100: Looking Forward from 2009 & Back from 2100 in 2021

 

20009 ABC News production

 

A tweet from Rick Perlstein. 

A tweet from David Wallace-Wells.

In response to a couple of tweets (above) I'd seen recently that remarked that no film or television presentation had triggered the response to the threat of climate change comparable to the effect that "The Day After" (1983) had upon popular perceptions of nuclear war. I can attest to the powerful effect "The Day After" had on me and the public at the time of its first airing. As a child of the Cold War and with the memory of the Cuban Missle Crisis etched permanently into my memory, I didn't need a push to comprehend that horrors that a nuclear war would entail. Indeed, about fifteen or so years before I viewed "The Day After," I'd seen "Dr. Stranagelove" (1964 release) and "Fail Safe" (1964 release). I didn't need any coaxing to appreciate the perils that we faced. (I still vividly recall my horror at the moment when I first experienced the screech in "Fail Safe.")

As the tweets indicated, perhaps the single most well-known and highly regarded film about climate change, Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" (2006), didn't catalyze public opinion the way that many--including me--would have hoped. Of course, it made a splash in some circles, and it won an Academy Award. But the circles that acknowledged its message were all too small. This was the time of the second W. Bush administration and climate change was off the list of approved topics for that administration.

Thus the wish for a "The Day After" for climate change.

But I contend that such a story was created and done well. The story that I'm referring to is "Earth 2100," produced and aired by ABC News in June 2009. In short, the program used a graphic story to tell the tale of "Lucy," born in the U.S. in 2009, as she lives her life through the effects of climate change. The graphic story about a possible future is interwoven with interviews of persons knowledgeable about the effects of climate change. Some of the names were (and are) unfamiliar to me while some were well-known to me at the time or since then. Interviewed participants include Jared Diamond, Thomas Friedman, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Van Jones, former Clinton chief of staff and Obama advisor John Podesta, Michael Pollen, Jeffrey Sachs, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and E.O. Wilson. And perhaps more importantly to me, I was introduced to three thinkers I'd not known of before: Thomas Homer-Dixon, who's become one of the most important thinkers about climate change in my library (I write about this first encounter here; later references to Homer-Dixon in my blog are too numerous to catalog); Joseph Tainter, an anthropologist, whose work The Collapse of Complex Societies provided a gold mine on that topic by way of careful theory and abundant empirical evidence; and James Howard Kuntsler. Kunstler's work is a bit more polemical and speculative than the other two I mention here, but his voice continues to demand attention. (See Kunstler's The Long Emergency (2005) & his update, Living in the Long Emergency (2020) and this interview about the newest work). (A full list of participants in "Earth 2100 is here.)

A quick brag: in writing about my "discovery" of Thomas Homer-Dixon via "Earth 2100" in 2009, I mentioned that "Earth 2100" reminded me of "The Day After," although I didn't name that title. I'm not a visionary, but I am consistent.

I highly recommend watching this 2009 special. (Watch here via Youtube.) Why watch a news special from 2009? Am I recommending watching something that could only be termed an historical curiosity? No.

In the story depicted and the interviews interspersed throughout the story, we encounter a severe drought in the U.S. southwest, armed violence over dwindling resources, an Atlantic storm that inundates and cripples New York City, and an outbreak of a pandemic respiratory virus (whose image looks an awful lot like a coronavirus to me). I'm not saying that this program "predicted the future." I'd rather buy a share in the Brooklyn Bridge or land in Florida before I'd buy that someone can predict the future out much further than a few days, at least without a lucky guess. But what we can do--and what this program does--is to postulate events that hold some substantial degree of probability given the circumstances then existing. The program's extrapolations and imagination prove prescient.

And, this being network news and a hot topic, the final segment is about how all of this needn't happen (true enough); it needn't because of our (then) current efforts to ameliorate climate change. But those efforts up to 2009 and all the efforts since then haven't proven sufficient to alter our dire trajectory. In short, many of the dire forecasts of what might happen are manifesting in reality today.

The danger in watching this 2009 program now is that it could lead to despair. The ability of the American political system to deal with big problems that will require us to make significant changes in our economy and culture is nearly nil; the good intentions of the Biden Administration and Democrats (and all too few Republicans) notwithstanding. It's a sobering thought, but then we as a nation, as a world, need to sober-up. In less than two hours of viewing, this program provides a great incentive to start creating the cure.

P.S. What a local (Colorado Springs) newspaper wrote about this program at the time. COS perhaps hasn't changed much (with some very happy exceptions).