Blog Action Day 2009 – Climate Change in Pop Culture

I’ve never been much of an activist and hold that many awareness ploys are positively inane and could have their funding spent in much better and effective ways (Earth Hour, anyone? Ugh); however, there are some issues and events that are worthwhile because they’re accessible and are a good (read: free) way of raising people’s awareness of critical issues.  Blog Action Day is one of the events I can get behind, and this year’s topic is climate change.

So keeping with the theme of my blog, I want to point out some examples in pop culture of why we need to do our part to regulate Earth’s relative temperature.

• The Day After Tomorrow.  This might be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, but it makes my point.  If we don’t do something about the world’s climate now, the world will ice over and cause strangers to start living together in the New York Public Library and fighting arctic wolves on a Russian freighter in the middle of the streets. And who wants that?
• 2012. While the movie has yet to be released, I anticipate that much of its global disaster theme is going to revolve around how we, as humans, have screwed with the environment enough to cause global catastrophe.  Based on the Mayan calendar that conspiracy theorists claim predicts the end of the world in 2012, I vote that we do something to prevent this movie an d what it portrays from ever taking place.  I mean, do we really want to know what a 3000 year old “I told you so” feels like?
• The Happening.  M. Night Shyamalan told us the story about what happens if we don’t respect the environment in this pseudo-thriller.  What I gleaned from this movie is that we have to do something to stop hurting the world’s climate because I know that I don’t want to go crazy like Mark Walberg and yell at plastic trees because the real ones are trying to kill me.  Just doesn’t sound fun.
• Waterworld. And oldie and not necessarily a goodie.  In this post-apocalyptic cautionary tale, the polar ice caps have melted through global warming, thus flooding the world and causing people to live on floating cities and travel on rafts and poorly made boats.  If there were ever a warning we need to heed, it is the one from Waterworld.  It was expensive, boring, and Kevin Costner drank his own urine.  I’d rather turn off my lights when they’re not being used than end up drinking my own pee.  But maybe that’s just me.

But seriously.  Climate change is a real problem, even if we don’t all agree on how.  I’m not entirely sold on global warming yet (nice try, though, Al Gore), but I have no doubt that our species has affected this planet in unprecedented ways due to our ever-growing presence.  I don’t often stand on a soapbox and talk about this kind of thing (and to be completely honest, it’s not often that I take the time to care), but Blog Action Day made me think about it, and for what it’s worth, I think it’s a good cause.  If you don’t do anything but throw your water bottles in a recycling bin, you’re still helping.  And it’s small actions that affect big, sweeping changes that keep the situations in these kind of ridiculous movies from ever becoming a reality.