On Life Support Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s

Finding strategies for today’s environmental movement in classic science fiction films

What can science fiction film tell us about the course of the modern ecological movement? On Life Support traces how the environmental concerns of the 1970s were embedded in the eco-dystopian cinema of the era—and considers its implications for ecological thought and activism today.

Illuminating the patterns that shape our thinking about nonhuman nature, Matthew I. Thompson pairs iconic films such as Soylent Green and Silent Running with the transformational environmentalist texts that inspired them and kick-started the modern environmental movement, including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Thompson examines this confluence of literature and cinema to show how, as they translated environmentalism for Hollywood’s audiences, these movies distilled the movement’s concepts into a form that revealed their inherent contradictions.

A sensitive analysis of the tensions that complicate environmentalist praxis—especially between desire and fear in the activist impulse—On Life Support offers a timely critique of the politics of environmental containment and control, calling instead for a politics of interconnection and contamination. It is, after all, by inviting complexity and chaos that we