by Garay, Lucía Mariel & Laprovitta, Anahí
"Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticide grain, for strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, and hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea." — George Carlin.
Every now and then there is a naive belief that our civilization as well as life in earth is endless. A common picture of our days is to see people throwing litter on the street, pouring water carelessly or overusing means of transport as well as energy consumption. Something to highlight is pollution, which affects over a billion people around the world and it is one of the most dangerous ecological problems society has. Despite this, some seem to neglect what is happening around them as if they were immersed in some kind of nebula. Some people focus on superfluous issues like having the latest clothing or eating the food which is best advertised, rather than focus on a liveable earth or on a healthy life. It’s accurate to say that society is beginning to regret and will regret its careless actions. At present, rising awareness about ecological issues is an important matter. So, how to do it? How can society begin to create awareness about ecology or healthy lifestyles? Those questions were, in a way, answered when days ago we watched a movie called “Wall-E” that depicts some flaws of our chaotic time on a futuristic perspective. What the film portrays is what would happen to earth as a consequence of the lack of ecological awareness and how these would affect not only the earth as a proper place to live, but also the way in which humans interact among them.
Wall-E is a robot and the only inhabitant of the earth since humans were sent in a ship to space waiting for the earth to be habitable again. Its main function on earth is to clean up garbage that humans have left behind. Natural resources are gone and no life remains but tonnes of trash. The film shows what society has left behind after centuries of mistreating the earth. Meanwhile, miles away from this rotten earth a spaceship full of people are portray in the movie, as individuals absorbed by advertisements and technological devises. Communication among people doesn’t exist and they do minimum physical movements because everything is controlled through machines. People in “Wall-E” are depicted as lazy, fat and consumerists, features that remind nowadays society characteristic.
Following this further, have you ever thought about what consequences might have your actions? It is well known that pollution is a dangerous threat but have you thought what severe consequences derive from it? When talking about pollution’s effects, we are not referring just to trash and waste in our soil, we are referring also to what it does to our social and personal lives. So, let’s start by creating a parallelism between Wall-E’s reality and our reality. The world in the movie is full of unusable elements as result of over consumerism, for example one the most common things Wall-E stocks up is a firelighter of a particular trademark. Allow me to ask you how many times have we bought unnecessary items and then just throw them away? Times are changing and the thought can be easily summarized with a phrase of the author Vicki Robin’s “if you live for having it all, what you have is never enough.”
Moreover, the fiction world depicts humans as not able to communicate among each other, what make us wonder have you realized that nowadays it is more common to be in touch with others through mobile phones, e-mails, texts and so on, rather than facing other individuals in real communication? In the film this flaw is presented in an exaggerated manner. People in the movie speak using screens even when they are physically in the same place or next to each other. As regards communication, there is an overuse of information known is real life as information pollution. A perfect example of this issue is people constantly exposed to advertisements which make them feel as if their lives depended only on those things that are advertised. Does that kind of pollution ring you a bell? There are many wrong habits our culture has adopted like naturals, but it is time to inquire ourselves is it something worth doing?
The cute robot Wall-E provide us with the idea that a change must be done. People have to alter their way of living, change habits, take care of others, be in contact with others, enjoy nature and take care of nature. The most important thing is that people should listen to the wakeup call the earth is making to us. We should listen so that people wake up from what could be, in a time from now, the end of our society as we know it. The message in Wall-E is very clear, the key point relies on paying attention to the small things like the robot does, if we don’t amend our flaws, even a robot would be more human than a human itself.
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