Environmental Ethics: Wall-E

Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Wall-E

Posted for Shay Linell:

Wall-E- released in 2008, directed by Andrew Stanton

Wildly popular: $533.3 million worldwide on a $180 million budget

Oscar Best Animated Feature Film of the Year

Golden Globes Best Animated Feature Film

Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Animated Feature

People’s Choice Award for Favorite Family Movie

BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film

Please click on the link to watch the official trailer below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alIq_wG9FNk

And a slightly sarcastic video of Wall-E’s plotline and general themes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y6jc1mLT-8

General synopsis:

In another universe, and what could become of ours if we let it, humanity has fled Earth’s uninhabitable surface in 2105 aboard BNL’s Axiom Starliner, a huge spaceship meant to sustain human life comfortably until the Earth is cleaned. What was supposed to be a 5 year clean-up plan has turned into 700 years of complacency and dependency on technology. Humans are vastly changed from when they first left in the Axiom Starliners. Due to unhealthy eating habits, sedentary lifestyles, “micro-gravity”, and their over-reliance on technology such as hover-chairs and video screens, humankind has become infantilized and extremely obese, hardly able to walk at all.

Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-Class (aka Wall-E) seems to be the only working robot of his kind, left behind by the company Buy-N-Large to clean up humanity’s mess, literally. Every day he diligently works to clean up the garbage that covers Earth’s surface. Over 700 years, Wall-E has developed a personality, and falls in love with an Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (aka EVE) probe from the Axiom whom was deployed to find signs of life (plants) so the humans can re-colonize Earth. One day, Wall-E finds a plant and shows it to EVE, and a wild ride to return humans to their rightful home on Earth ensues. Unbeknownst to the robots and even the humans on board the ship, Axiom’s automated system, named AUTO, has secret directions to prevent humans from returning because of the belief that Earth is uninhabitable forever. With the help of the ship’s captain, McCrea, and a horde of rogue robots, EVE and Wall-E are able to shut down AUTO. The ending shows humans and robots working together to restore the Earth to its former glory.

Questions:

What does WALL-E stand for?

How many years have humans been in the Axiom?

True or False: McCrea does not want humans to return to Earth.

What was EVE looking for?

2.12 billion tons of waste is generated globally each year. If all this waste was put on trucks they would circle the world 24 times! 99% of the stuff we buy is thrown out within 6 months- The World Counts

The average person generates 4 pounds of trash every day and around 1.5 tons of solid waste per year. - DoSomething.org

Discussion questions:

Is the depiction of trash in WALL-E extreme? Do you think it’s possible to get to those levels of pollution?

Is compacting the trash with robots a good way to get rid of trash? Are there better methods? *Remember that, for Americans, 75% of trash is recyclable but only 30% of our trash is recycled. 87% of Americans have some access to curbside or drop-off paper recycling. -DoSomething.org*

Can the efforts of a few still make a change?

Who does pollution affect the most?

1 comment:

UnknownOctober 3, 2018 at 11:12 AM
I think that pollution affects wildlife before it would dramatically affect people, because they have no protect form the outside and they are fully dependent on what the earth provides while we can produce food even in the harshest times. I do believe that the efforts of a few can make a change because they could spark a change in others that grows until it becomes a movement which can change the world.
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First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.”
― John May, The Greenpeace Story

“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

	Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) http://michaelpollan.com/
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Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Wall-E

1 comment:

Peripatetics