We took the kids to see Hoppers, the latest Pixar movie. It has some spiritual similarities to The Population Bomb (1968), whose author recently died. Stanford University prof. and Ivy League graduate Paul R. Ehrlich was famously wrong about human population growth leading to famine within his lifetime, but Hoppers shows that his philosophy remains alive.
The movie opens with a noble Japanese-American girl visiting with her grandmother at a single-family house with immediate access to an unspoiled natural area (i.e., something that is impossible for the average person who lives in a heavily populated country). It is access to nature, we’re told, that enables a human to be calm (urban “teens” who can’t access nature, thus, are guaranteed to be violent).
Population pressure and growth, as Prof. Ehrlich described, drive the plot of the movie. The humans are working to take away all of the animals’ habitat, something that they might not have done if the U.S. had stopped growing after reaching 150 million circa 1950.
Was Ehrlich actually wrong? He did say that we might “stretch” and increase food production by trashing the Earth and that is kind of what we’ve done here in the U.S., e.g., heavily fertilizing the Midwest and dumping runoff into the Gulf of America, thus creating dead zones:
The Dead Zone develops, somewhat ironically, as a result of the nutrients that fuel the high productivity in the Gulf’s surface waters. As dead plant material falls from the surface through the water column deeper into the Gulf, bacteria consume it using oxygen. This lack of oxygen creates the Dead Zone in bottom waters on the Texas-Louisiana shelf throughout warm summer months. This occurs when there are fewer storms and strong winds to mix the warm, oxygenated surface waters and the cooler, deeper waters. At other times during the year, winds, weather fronts and storms in the area mix the water, replenishing the oxygen used by the bacteria in the deeper water.
Nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorous, are essential for an abundant food supply, but crops take up on average just 40% of the nitrogen that is applied each season. The excess can run off into waterways, leading to a high nutrient load in the Mississippi River. Many efforts are underway throughout the Corn Belt to improve fertilizer efficiency and increase adoption of practices like cover crops and buffer strips that protect water quality.
See Book that explores the biggest issue of our age for a discussion of the tension between those who think we need six Earths total for the current batch of humans and those who think we can innovate enough to use just one Earth.
How was the movie? The boys (10 and 12) didn’t love it. Maybe because they don’t identify as either female or Black, the only two kinds of humans who are smart enough to be scientists and engineers. There is, of course, one white male character and he occupies the environment-destroying villain role. The movie involves mobile robots that are created by the intelligent female scientists. Said robots have no apparent solar cells and yet never run out of power. Speaking of miracles, the population in the unnamed U.S. city (Pacific Northwest?) is booming, which is why the humans want to take all of the animals’ habitat. The humans come in a rainbow of skin colors, consistent with U.S. population growth being entirely driven by immigration. And yet… nobody in the movie speaks with a foreign accent.