Recently James Lee made national headlines when he entered the Discovery Channel building, took hostages, and threatened to kill them and blow up the building. Thankfully the situation ended with the hostages escaping unharmed and the only loss of life came with the gunman at the hands of law enforcement. In the wake of the event the news media is now reporting that the gunman was an environmental militant. As ABC News states:

In a rambling manifesto on Lee’s website, believed to have been written by Lee, the writer rails against “disgusting human babies,” “parasitic infants,” and says people should “disassemble civilization.” The manifesto also calls on Discovery to “broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet.”

This got me thinking about similar ideas found in pop culture. The idea that human beings are a threat to the planet, and that as a result some change in the size of the human population needs to take place, is one found in science fiction over the years. The idea is stated very clearly in The Matrix as Agent Smith shares his observations about humanity from the perspective of the race of machines with a drugged Morpheus:

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.”

As noted previously, this bleak assessment of humanity has been expressed in science fiction before, but the reasoning behind it has changed over time, and some of the recent expressions of this idea reflect our changing views of ourselves, perceptions of our ability to change the course of civilization, and our relationship to the environment.

In Planet of the Apes (1968) the ape Scriptures quote the Lawgiver who warns apes to “Beware the beast man” who, he warns, will make the homes of human and ape alike a desert. In this film humanity is regarded as dangerous, but this warning comes within the narrative context of an evolutionary scenario where humanity’s self-destruction aids the upward evolution of the ape to a position of cultural dominance. This functioned as a cautionary tale for humanity in the midst of the Cold War.

Moving into the next decade, in 1976 Logan’s Run tells the story of a futuristic society where human beings were not allowed to live past the age of 30. This act of population control takes place within a narrative context wherein the characters are living within a city dome that shields them from some unexplained post-apocalyptic event. As a result, there are limited resources and a need for youthfulness to keep the city viable. Therefore, those entering their thirties either submit to an attempt for “renewal” so that they are permitted life beyond thirty (although no one is granted renewal, only incineration), or flee as “runners” and end up hunted and executed by a special force of “sandmen.” Among other things, Logan’s Run expressed fears of apocalyptic and humanity itself as it relates to overpopulation and population control.

Moving into the first decade of the twenty-first century the idea of humanity as plague and the resulting need for some kind of population control develops further in its connection with nature and the influence of the environmental movement. Perhaps the best example of this is M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008). In this film a wave of mass suicide washes over the population, and over the course of the film’s storyline we come to learn that this is because the planet is releasing a toxin that results in human self-destruction since the Earth considers human beings a pest to be exterminated. The narrative context for this film is one where the environmental movement has played a significant part, including the idea that the earth is a living, sentient organism. This film may contain traces of a cautionary tale in the hopes of facilitating change in humanity in regards to nature, but it seems to emphasize more of a sense of judgment by nature against human parasites.

Avatar develops the idea of humanity as plague, softening it somewhat. Its indictment comes against those segments of the human population that plunder the environment through capitalism, militarism, and environmental degradation, rather than rending a critique of humanity as a whole. With the expulsion of the humans who do not seek solidarity with the Navi (and with them, the planet) at the film’s conclusion it leaves room for the possibility of the healing of the human disease if modern technological society adopts tribal ways.

Avatar and The Happening provide examples of a shift from earlier science fiction in depictions of humanity in terms of what they pose a threat to. The stories move from cautionary tales of humanity as a threat to itself to humanity as a threat to the planet that must be eradicated, either by the planet or by those in harmony with it.

What are human beings, and what should be their relationship to the environment? Is the occasional critique of science fiction correct that we are a plague, a virus, a cancer on the planet? If so, what should be done in response? Science fiction and the broader realm of the fantastic can provide us with venues in which to reflect on these important questions.