The Urgency of Sustainability

By Camryn Schatzlein

While watching Wall-E for the 5th time in my life, the parallels seen between the movie and our own world don’t change. The mistrust within the government, the drastic need for environmental change; these themes throughout the story all match with what we are experiencing in our own lives. Within the COVID-19 pandemic, we are still seeing a drastic amount of misinformation floating around the internet and news feeds like whether it is safe or not to get vaccinated against COVID (please do get vaccinated btw) and the handling of the spread of information about how to stay safe against the virus. The government has not come forward with a united front. People in the US are divided between politicians who believe that their google-search-pseudo-science can account for real scientific study and those who have followed the guidance of doctors and Infections Disease specialists with correct information about how to best care for our health and safety. This parallels a theme in Wall-E where the Axiom has taken control to keep the people in space and not return to Earth despite any new findings of sustainable life on the planet.  The ship’s original captain hid that from its people and his successors. As a result, the captain could not make informed decisions about the safety and security of his people. After 700 years in space, placing the health of its inhabitants in danger, the Axiom’s captain is able to make an informed decision that is best for his people and returns to Earth upon finding that Earth can now sustain life.

In addition, environmental change has been a necessity for a really long time. This movie is important to our cultural history because it allows environmental change to be put into a fun story that kids can understand. In this story, the people face an environmental crisis, much like how we are facing one in real life. Earth cannot sustain life anymore so the people decide to leave the planet and orbit Earth until it heals itself. I can’t help but feel as if we are headed in that same direction with the rate at which we are using up our natural resources. We are not creating regenerative, sustainable systems and we are doing very little to help the environment regrow from the damage it has sustained by supporting human life. Wall-E serves as a reminder as to what we are likely to face if we do not make drastic change in our lives to renew our resources, reduce our waste, and begin to heal the Earth. While the movie has shown that we need to reduce, reuse, and recycle, we also need to drastically change the way we produce and analyze whether our current systems of supply match our environmental goals for the future. We do not want to inherit a world that we have to resort to living on a spaceship for 700 years (sorry Elon Musk).