Consensus for future media; a society that incorporates Nature.

Nature; for some it’s magical, for others it’s nightmarish. Unknown creepy crawlies that invade our homes. Interactions with cute, and curious wildlife, An untamed environment with all sorts of dangers, dirty soil, and bacteria ready to infect the smallest of injuries. A place to seek inspiration, the natural world, apart from humans.

Living in a city, filled with first world problems, issues over the latest social media topic, and concerns for wealth, work, and daily chores. We live in a society that’s alien to our world, the natural world. It’s easy from our perspective to not see that the world around us is suffering from us.

The short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ by Ursula K. Le Guin is a metaphor for environmental ethics. In order to have the world we desire, there must be a sacrifice. It’s hidden away, out of sight, and for most of the residents, out of mind. In the story, there are a people who live in utopia. The details of that utopia are left to the reader’s imagination, but it comes with a cost. In a small dirty room is a child. Only through that child’s absolute suffering, a suffering from which there is no respite, can this utopia exist. “…they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.”

Is this not what we do currently? By dumping toxins into the earth, overfishing our waters, and harvesting resources in such a way that makes the land uninhabitable. Is not nature the child we cause such misery upon to build our utopia? From whom were we inspired by to create this, our current world?

We once had a collective idea of what the future would look like. The world’s fair in 1900 had many notable futuristic ideas. Ideas which have inspired our media, marvels of technology that were once unbelievable, became our modern day reality. A YouTube video by ExtraCredits titled “What does Tomorrow look like?” (2016) outlines the history of our collective vision of the future:

• In the 20s and 30s we dreamed of an art deco skyscraper metropolis. Noteable media is the film titled Metropolis (1927).
• The 40s and 50s had a motif of streamlined airplanes and rayguns. Notable comic book inspirations are Buck Rogers (1929) and Flash Gordon (1934).
• The 60s we walked on the moon. Which changed the perspective of humanity. Suddenly, the ‘future’ was no longer distant, but present. Notable media was a Television in 90% of homes.
• The 70’s was faced with the fear of a nuclear war and mutually assured destruction. Our vision of a foreseeable end enabled us to avoid disaster. Notable media entertained a post-apocalyptic world such as MadMax (1979).
• The 80s took on a new direction. We took corporate greed to its extremes. Notable media is the film Blade Runner (1982), and the book Neuromancer (1984).
• The 90s further shaped this technological culture further and took on the name ‘cyberpunk’.

And the vision we have now? Since the 2000’s our collective vision has stopped. Video Games are just a mash of things we’ve already done before. We’re in an age where we’re still advancing technology, yet we’ve no vision of where we’re going next. ExtraCredits asks; where are the books, TV-shows, and video game plots that allow us that new canvas for our modern artists to play in?

To define the last collective vision, ‘Cyberpunk’ is a dark future where the world is run by extreme corporate greed. It’s a dark dystopian setting in a large building landscape, opposite of the bright metropolis of the 20s and 30s. It is a darkened sky with large neon advertising signs and lots of technology. Characters in the video game series ‘ShadowRun’ can wear technological body enhancements at the cost of losing their natural connection with nature. In game terms it means they cannot use magic. While it’s meant to be a setting for entertainment, It bears resemblance to the current plot that we live in now. It is like the story of Omelas where Nature is the child that suffers so that our technological Utopia can thrive.

To put a label on what our current world is. In Elizabeth Kolbert’s book ‘The 6th-extinction’ she writes that Paul Crutzen published a short essay “Geology of Mankind” in 2002 calling this the ‘Anthropocene’ Epoch. “To Geologists an Epoch is a subdivision of a period, which, in turn is a division of an era…” (109) The Anthropocene is the Epoch where humans believe themselves to be the main actor on a stage of their own design. And it is evidenced by the geological records of the Earth itself. Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “…the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they’re put in their own category: the so-called Big Five.” Her book ‘The 6th-extinction’ outlines other species that have gone extinct, or are now endangered. (3)

The consensus fear is that we’re headed towards another great extinction. It’s a message that’s appearing in recent media (PLOT REVEAL SPOILERS AHEAD). Death Stranding (2019) is a mid-apocalypse game set during the world’s next extinction (the sixth), and even outlines the previous extinctions our world has faced. Outer Worlds (2019) is a pre-apocalypse game set in a colony of worlds far from the Earth in which colonists suffer from corporate extremes and unethical human rights, where civilization is on the brink of extinction.

While these games are great in their own right we must ask what is their vision? Are we simply celebrating the end of humanity? Or is there a brighter vision for the future that has yet to reach our collective perspective? Drew Dellinger, in his book titled ‘Martin Luther King Jr. Ecological Thinker’ He quotes King’s Christmas Eve Sermon as one of the best examples of King’s ecological view, “If we are to have peace on earth, we must develop a world perspective… It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated.”

Our media is saturated with tales of a dark future, and within them, heroes overcoming the end of the world. But what does that saved world look like? It needs to be imagined and drawn out. Not just as the happy ending for our entertainment to leave up to the viewers imagination, but as the home of a new generation of stories we want to participate in. We need to move out of the Anthropocene into a new Epoch. One where we have a harmony with nature. Filled with technology that may seem unrealistic now, but is an inspiration for developers of the future. We need to bridge the nightmarish world of nature with the safe world where we build our own homes.

For my own artistic inspiration I turn to Bob Ross. Season 7, Episode 5. This episode featured one of the art masters Ben Stahl. During this episode he says, “ …the main job of an artist is to find the things in nature that the average person cannot see then put them on canvas, but doing a better job of art then nature. Why? Because nature is everything except an artist. Only a human can appreciate art, and only a human can create art. The trouble is too many artists merely copied nature’s work instead of creating art based on nature, based on nature’s rules. And if you study nature not only just what it is, what it looks like, but why it looks that way. And then you paint exactly in the same manner…

…You only learn how to understand what art is all about is by studying great arts and looking at nature. Not so much what she is or what she looks like, but how she works. This is the aspect of nature that artists must imitate most of all. And don’t be conned into believing a painting is good because it has marvelous detail, or slick, clever, and flamboyantly rendered. Remember, a whisper can be more potent than a shout. And that like nature, good art tells no story or at least merely uses story as a means not an end…

… Be creative, try to create new forms. Make everything you paint your own, not nature’s, not somebody else’s, make it your own. If you paint leaves on a tree, make them your own leaves, make them the kind of leaves that nobody ever saw before, but yet everybody will know they’re leaves.”

Using the shadows of my arms and hands I’ve created my own piece of art. It represents the future I see myself being a part of, at one with nature.

Works Cited

Dellinger, Drew. “Martin Luther King Jr. — Ecological Thinker.” drewdellinger.org, https://drewdellinger.org/martin-luther-king-jr-ecological-thinker/. Accessed 28 July 2020.

Extra Credits. “What Does Tomorrow Look Like? — How We Envision the Future” YouTube.com, 16, Mar. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEIPfpxFrlg

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. United States, Henry Holt and Company, 2014.

Le Guin, Ursula K.. The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas. United States, Creative Education, 1993.

Ross, Bob. “Portrait of Sally (Season 7 Episode 5)” YouTube.com, visiting artist Ben Stahl, 27 Feb. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHJB0IBnuD4