Contaminated Environmentalism: The Visual Rhetoric of 1970s Ecocinema

During the 1970s a spate of ecologically-themed science fiction films were produced in North America. Films like The Planet of the Apes (1968), Silent Running (1972), Soylent Green (1973), and Logan’s Run (1976) transformed the concerns of the rapidly expanding modern environmental movement into dystopian narratives and imagery. This dissertation reads examples of science fiction ecocinema from the 1970s alongside the key environmental texts that inspired their production, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968). This comparative reading strategy uses science fiction film as a prism through which to view North American environmental history. By placing these films, which may at first seem derivative, alongside the books that inspired the modern environmental movement it becomes possible to expose rhetorical patterns that shape how we think about nonhuman nature. By crystallizing the environmental rhetoric of authors like Carson and Ehrlich into cinematic narrative, essentially turning their doomsday predictions into future worlds, these films put so much pressure on the tropes of the environmental movement that cracks in their logic become visible. This dissertation explores these cracks, demonstrating that the contradictions they reveal lie deep within the environmental movement, continuing to plague it into the present. One such contradiction, or crack, is so prevalent that it structures the dissertation. It is the nearly ubiquitous tension between the environmentalist desire to contain and control nonhuman nature in order to preserve it on the one hand, and the fear of a contaminated environment on the other. While containing, preserving, and archiving the environment may at first seem the best way to protect nonhuman nature from devastating anthropogenic effects, it perpetuates the myth of mastery that placed nonhumans in danger in the first place. An emphasis on contamination, which seems like the opposite of an environmentalist policy, is a more effective way of representing the always chaotic and interconnected environment. The cinema is the perfect medium for exploring this ecological contradiction as it simultaneously contains, and is contaminated by, the profilmic environment.Ph.D