Wall-E’s World Is No Place For a Family Vacation
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
I took my son Zephyr to see Wall-E this weekend. Like most kids his age, he concentrated most of his attention on the central love story; the greater message was a bit over his head. But what a message it was: the world is effectively going to hell in a handbasket!
I think I deserve a gold star because my favorite part of the movie also happened to be the most important: the discovery of the plant inside the refrigerator. That simple splash of color introduced into such a bleak landscape came at just the right moment. If I had to stare at those brown mountains of trash any longer, I may have given into Zephyr’s request that I let him run up and down the stairs inside the theater.
For all the power of the movie’s message, I doubt it’s going to change our society’s twisted view of the environment all that much. At the latest G-8 Summit in Japan, the world’s most powerful nations devised an incredibly weak response to the increasingly urgent problem of global warming, establishing a goal of halving greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050.
“At this rate, by 2050 the world will be cooked and the G-8 leaders will be long forgotten,” said Antonio Hill, spokesman for Oxfam International. “The G-8’s endorsement of a tepid 50 by 50 climate goal leaves us with a 50-50 chance of a climate meltdown. Rather than a breakthrough, the G-8’s announcement on 2050 is another stalling tactic.”
Perhaps instead of sitting around sipping bottled water and patting each other on the back, these so-called world leaders should have spent the afternoon watching a kid’s movie. They might have learned something.