The Myth of Control: Matthew I. Thompson on Cinema, Ecology, and Environmental Crisis

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Jessica DeWitt: On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) is a book that brings together 1970s eco-dystopian science fiction films with the popular environmental discourse of the time. How did you find your way to this topic and what came first? Your interest in the films? Or an interest in 1960s-70s environmentalism?

Matthew I. Thompson: I have been both an environmentalist and a big fan of science fiction since I was a kid. I grew up camping and canoe tripping in northern Ontario and Quebec, and that really shaped my relationship to nonhuman nature. I also grew up watching and reading classic sf, but I wasn’t exposed to the films I talk about in On Life Support until grad school. During my MA at Brock University I worked closely with Sherryl Vint, and she introduced me to the cycle of dystopian films from the 1970s. When I started watching them, something clicked into place. I felt like I had found a way to join my love of the wilderness and nonhuman nature to my academic interest in science fiction cinema.

On Life Support Cover

DeWitt: In the introduction, you advance an idea of a “cinematic ecosystem.” I had never thought of film in this way and really appreciated the way in which it enriched my reading of the films in the book, but also my understanding of films going forward. Can you explain this concept and how it interplays with the films in the book?

Thompson: One of the central themes of the book, as indicated by the title, is the idea of a life-support system. Life support systems like spaceships or fallout shelters are designed to mimic our planet’s biosphere in miniature. They provide the necessary conditions for life, either organically or through engineered substitutes. During the 1950s and 60s, the field of “cabin ecology” gained popularity as scientists tried to figure out how to support human life on the Apollo spaceships. I argue that the cinema can also be thought of as a life-support system. Films contain and preserve a world, an ecosystem, that can be accessed at will by loading a projector or pressing play on a streaming service. Environmentalists in the 60s and now seek to preserve and protect nonhuman nature by containing it in life-support systems like zoos, aquariums, wilderness preserves, and, I argue, natural history programming. This gives rise to the fantasy that we can recreate the biosphere completely separate from the Earth. In turn, this fantasy creates a false sense of mastery (take the experiment of Biosphere 2 as an example) and leads us to have outsized faith in our ability to effectively implement environmental control.

Don Davis, Stanford Torus Interior View. 1975. Oil on board. NASA Ames. From: Public Domain Works Done for NASA, https://www.donaldedavis.com/PARTS/allyours.html (accessed December 9, 2013).
Don Davis, Stanford Torus Interior View. 1975. Oil on board. NASA Ames. From: Public Domain Works Done for NASA, https://www.donaldedavis.com/PARTS/allyours.html (accessed December 9, 2013).

The Apollo missions, and in particular the images they brought back of the earth floating in the void, gave rise to the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth.” This environmental metaphor encouraged people to think of themselves as astronauts on board a massive spaceship flying through space. From this perspective, we are behaving on Earth in ways that would be considered insane on a ship. While effective, the problem with this metaphor, I argue, is that it imagines we are the designers and pilots of the original life-support system. The truth is, we are not in control of the environment here on Earth, and never have been.

“The truth is, we are not in control of the environment here on Earth, and never have been.”

I think all films can be thought of as cinematic ecosystems, but there is one movie I talk about in the book as a particularly good example. The film is Silent Running (1972) and it takes the metaphor of Spaceship Earth and turns it into a science fiction dystopia. The film takes place onboard a spaceship, called the Valley Forge, where the last remaining Earth ecosystems are preserved. Contained within dome-shaped greenhouses attached to the exterior of the ship, these ecosystems visualize the idea of Spaceship Earth. The biodomes onboard the Valley Forge demonstrate the desire lurking within the figure of Spaceship Earth to contain and control nonhuman nature within a human-designed piece of technology. The Valley Forge and the film Silent Running are therefore both life-support systems that perpetuate the myth of human mastery over nature.

Silent Running 1972 movie poster

DeWitt: You last contributed to NiCHE back in 2021 with your “Overpopulation, Cannibalism, and Racist Fear in Soylent Green” post, which is connected to Chapter 5, “An Immodest Proposal: Can Cannibalism Solve Overpopulation?” in the book. The 2021 post continues to get steady readership and had a noticeable uptick in traffic after the death of Paul Ehrlich in March. I saw some on social media argue that there are few people who have had a more damaging and violent impact on the world than Ehrlich. Would you agree? And does Soylent Green flip the script on Ehrlich’s overpopulation by providing an ecological identification with “the Other”?

Thompson: I don’t think I would agree that Ehrlich was that damaging, in the grand scheme of things. That being said, I do think he promoted a panic around overpopulation that both drew on, and contributed to, racist fears of people from the Global South. Ehrlich was a classic liberal in that he simultaneously argued against overt racism while allowing racist fears to inform his political claims. For example, he was active in certain de-segregation efforts during the civil rights era, but he also advocated for the forced sterilization of men from India who had had more than three children. I think the fear of overpopulation during the 60s is understandable, as the global population had doubled in thirty-five years. At the same time, too often overpopulation discourse is used to argue for closed borders and the reduction of foreign aid. The wealth of the colonized nations with low birth rates was extracted from formerly colonized countries who have the right to demand a redistribution of resources.

I think a straight reading of the film Soylent Green shows that it hews closely to both the source novel by Harry Harrison and Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. After initially reading it this way in the book, however, I pivot to read Soylent Green against the grain. The film is set in the year 2022 where the population of New York City has risen to forty million. In the grimy and overcrowded streets people vie for a dwindling supply of freeze-dried Soylent wafers. Soylent Green, the most popular wafer, is (spoiler alert) secretly made out of human flesh. When Charlton Heston’s unlikable detective discovers the hidden ingredient that is keeping millions alive at the end of the film, he bellows the famous line “Soylent Green is made out of people!” The key to my alternate reading of the film is that all of the other characters who learn of the essential wafer’s secret ingredient before Heston’s detective remain quiet about it. This is most obviously in service of preserving the horrifying reveal at the end of the film. Somewhat perversely, however, I imagine that the other characters remain mute about the rampant anthropophagy because they realize that, despite violating an eternal taboo, cannibalism is actually an ingenious solution to overpopulation. There are voluntary euthanasia centers in the city where the elderly can give up their life in the crowded city and unknowingly be turned into crackers. This simultaneously reduces the population while increasing the food supply. Cannibalism not only solves the twin concerns of the neo-Malthusians, but also abolishes the ecological boundary humans set up between edible and inedible creatures.

DeWitt: Quite coincidentally, I watched DEEP DISCOG DIVE: Stevie Wonder right before diving into the chapter on “Exposing Plant Secrets.” In the video, Mic the Snare describes The Secret Life of Plants as “fine” and the end of Stevie Wonder’s classic era. I found this meh reaction to the album interesting in comparison to your read of it, which was fascinating. I loved how you connected Wonder’s album to very early environmental justice. 1960s-70s environmentalism was overwhelmingly white. How does race show up throughout the book?

Thompson: I mean, compared to Talking Book (1970), Innervisions (1973), and Songs in the Key of Life (1976), Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants (1979) is sort of “meh.” But this is exactly why it is such an interesting album to think about. Why did Wonder, at the peak of his fame and creative talent, devote three years to scoring an obscure, pseudo-scientific documentary about telepathic plants? I argue in the book that Wonder, who was very active in the civil rights movement, saw the connection between the abuse of marginalized people and the abuse of nonhuman nature. In the score, and the film, the neglect of the amazing capacities of plants is compared to the neglect of toxic inner city environments inhabited by Black Americans. In this way, Wonder’s album prefigures the environmental justice coalition that formed between civil rights activists and the largely white environmental movement in the 1980s.

Race is important throughout the book precisely because in the 1960s and 70s the environmental movement and Hollywood science fiction films were so white. At the same time that Carson and Ehrlich were writing their influential books, the civil rights movement was winning some of its most important battles. Why did it take until the 1980s for the two movements to cross-pollinate? I think the environmental movement failed to maintain its widespread appeal past the 1980s because it was overly concerned with issues related to the interests of the white middle-class like wilderness preservation and charismatic megafauna. For environmentalism to build meaningful political coalitions capable of enacting real change we need to think of the human as a fundamental part of the ecosystem and work on protecting the environments in which humans live. We need to stop making people feel guilty about their individual consumption and start demanding that the billionaire class take responsibility for the marginalized and vulnerable people that produce their wealth.

DeWitt: In my research on parks, I’ve traced how technophobia during this era drove a lot of park and conservation activism. However, in On Life Support, you solidly demonstrate that the films and the environmental discourse behind them evince a clear thread of technophilia. Can you describe this philia? And as we live through an era where we are navigating environmental crises alongside rapid changes in technology, are there any lessons to be learned from this earlier era that may assuage our collective anxiety or is this past era just a preview of the real eco-dystopia to come? In other words, where are you finding hope? Or are you firmly pessimistic about our prospects?

Thompson: One of the main resonances between science fiction and environmentalism is that both often blame technology for some problem, and then turn to technology for the solution. Take Silent Running, for example. In this film there is no nonhuman nature left on Earth due to anthropogenic climate change. Human technology has caused complete ecological devastation. And yet, the human-designed technology of the spaceship is also nonhuman nature’s salvation. In fact, the conclusion of the film takes technophilia one step further. The ship’s ecologist, realizing that the ecosystem in the last remaining biodome will soon be destroyed by his superiors, jettisons the dome with a little robot onboard to tend to the garden. The close of the film is sadly hopeful; it implies that without the interference of humans the ecosystem and the technologies of dome and robot will enter into a cybernetic symbiosis.

We can see the same thing playing out in contemporary environmental discourse with proposed geo-engineering solutions to climate change. The technology of fossil fuel energy has had the unintended consequence of warming up the atmosphere, and we are now looking to technology to fix this issue. For example, some suggest we should spray aerosolized particles out of airplanes into the stratosphere to reflect the sun’s rays and decrease the earth’s temperature. This technology doesn’t get at the root problem of CO2 in the atmosphere, and shortly after we stopped spraying the Earth’s temperature would warm back up. We also don’t understand what new unintended consequences this high-tech bandaid solution would produce. That being said, it will probably become a necessary step in mitigating the effects of climate change for the Earth’s most vulnerable people.

“Despite all of this, I am actually hopeful. One of the strange effects of spending a lot of time reading historical literature that was sounding the apocalyptic alarm, is that you can see all the ways that disaster did not come to pass.”

Despite all of this, I am actually hopeful. One of the strange effects of spending a lot of time reading historical literature that was sounding the apocalyptic alarm, is that you can see all the ways that disaster did not come to pass. Yes, we are doing irreparable damage to the environment (including ourselves), but the environment is resilient and adaptive. We need to learn to trust it, to give up on our sense of control. The thing that gives me the most hope is abandoning the neoliberal discourse of individual responsibility for ecological disaster. The less guilt we feel, the more anger will take its place. We can then direct that anger into political action targeting those who profit most from the destruction of our natural world.

Matthew I. Thompson is interested in exploring how media influence our perceptions of and assumptions about nonhuman nature. As an assistant professor in the Film Department at the University of Regina, Matthew teaches courses like “Ecological Film and Media” and “Food on Film.” Before coming to Regina, Matthew was a sessional assistant professor at York University, where he taught in the Cinema and Media Arts program. He earned his PhD from the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Matthew’s book, On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), investigates how the environmental politics of the 1960s found themselves expressed in the dystopian science fiction films of the following decade. Other areas of interest include Indigenous futurism, critical animal studies, artificial intelligence, and film philosophy. Matthew has published in the journals Spectator, World Picture, and The New Review of Film and Television Studies.

Feature Image: Credit: Nasa.
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Jessica DeWitt

NiCHE Editor-in-Chief, Social Media Editor at Jessica M. DeWitt: Editing and Consulting
is an environmental historian of Canada and the United States, editor, project manager, consultant, and digital communications strategist. She earned her PhD in History from the University of Saskatchewan in 2019. She is an executive member, editor-in-chief, and social media editor for the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). She is the Managing Editor for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines and Associate Editor for Environmental Humanities. Closer to home, she is the President of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society, a Coordinating Team member of Showing Up for Racial Justice Saskatoon-Treaty Six, and a Conservation Advisory Committee member for the Meewasin Valley Authority. She focuses on developing digital techniques and communications that bridge the divide between academia and the general public in order to democratize knowledge access. You can find out more about her and her freelance services at jessicamdewitt.com.

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