This is the question that is addressed in a recent Hollywood movie entitled “The Day The Earth Stood Still”.

Given Hollywood’s power to shape our culture, it is regrettable that Hollywood seems to be dragging its heels about engaging meaningfully with environmental issues.  This in spite of actors, directors, producers and sundry other claiming to be concerned and committed to environmental issues.

“The Day The Earth Stood Still” (a 2008 remake of a 1951 movie of the same name) does take environmental issues head on.  Here is a brief synopsis:

Beings from another planet land on Earth, sending Klaatu – one of their own in human form (in fact in the form of Keanu Reeves) – to speak to world leaders about the need to stop destroying the planet.  Needless to say, Klaatu doesn’t get a civilized invite to the White House but, instead, is met by bullets, capture, interrogation and other well known welcome methods that humans have adopted for centuries towards anything, or anyone, that is not considered of their own kind.

Finally Klaatu reveals that his mission is to destroy the human race and all that it has created as the only option left to save the planet.  “If you live, the Earth dies.  If you die, the Earth lives”.  There is no other option.

A cloud of tiny robots (nanobots) is released and the destruction begins.  Until the attractive Dr Benson (Jennifer Connelly), persuades him otherwise.  Witnessing the strength of a mother’s love for her son, Klaatu is persuaded that the human race has some merit after all.  He believes that, once we see the edge of the precipice, we will do something about it and mend our ways.  The destruction is halted.

Did Klaatu get it right?

I have to admit, that watching this movie, I wondered about the outcome.  I wondered whether destruction of the human race and all our intrusions on the planet would have been a preferable ending.  I did not really believe that we were capable of turning back at the brink. Would the world be better off without us?

After Copenhagen, what do you believe?  Did Klaatu make the right call or was he had?  Leave a comment with your verdict.

This movie is not the most gripping or best acted movie ever made but it’s a reasonable story line, it is one movie that addresses environmental issues head on and the special effects are great.  You can view a short trailer here.

The background to some of her themes has been explored before but her work, evolving over a number of years, builds, layer upon layer, to create an ever more cohesive vision of where our current trajectories may lead us in the future. Concepts of a living environment that becomes increasingly hostile through desertification or rising waters are nothing new.  However, Mattingly develops her fantasy world further, having all but destroyed their surrounding environment, we see images of a nomadic people living in ‘wearable homes’ crammed with all manner of modern technology. Individuality is eroded and homogenization is the rule. Mattingly’s nomadic people look bemused. They seem surprised that the world around them has somewhow disappeared. They wear their beloved hi-technology but they have nowhere to go.

We can clearly see how this vision of the future is an almost straight line extrapolation of today’s world with its near deification of technological advance and its increasing disdain for the natural world.

Mattingly develops these future visions in extreme detail and then shows us glimpses of them through constructed photographic images, videos and drawings.  Her work becomes thoughtful and provocative when viewed as a complete body of work.

Her web site (www.marymattinglyglobal.org) is intense.  Full of a combination of dense (and occasionally abstruse) text, images, drawings, videos and external links it creates an impression of an artist deeply, almost obsessively, absorbed in the detailed creation of her world of fantasy.

As part of her detailed development of scenarios of future living, Mattingly also founded the Waterpod – “a sustainable, sculptural art and technology habitat, with four artists living on and off it, generating food, water, and power in a contained and self-sufficient environment.”

Mary Mattingly is patiently constructing detailed images of a future that, if one has the patience to persist and work through her body of work, leads us to question the wisdom of our current social, technological and environmental trajectories.