In his latest movie Interstellar, Christopher Nolan tells the story of an American farmer family desperately trying to keep its maize harvest safe from the constant dust storms. The dust plague destroys all agricultural fields, turns everyday life into a sandy, coughing, itchy nightmare and thus puts the survival of humanity in danger. Hunger and health problems are the long term consequences anticipated by the population of the unnamed American town. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is an educated NASA-pilot and engineer. He is forced by the environmental circumstances to be a farmer and a single father of Murphy, a 10-year-old, and her five years older brother Tom Cooper (Mackenzie Foy, Timotheé Chalamet). His father-in-law (John Lithgow) helps him raising his two children. Climate change or the direct connection between industry or exploitation of natural resources and environmental crises, which dust storms and drought indicate, aren’t referred to directly and thus stay blurry.
Not Anthropocene, but Americocene: An Interplanetary Travel between Environmental Narratives and the Nation State
A couple of new publications about natural catastrophes and environment in literature and movies (such as the latest books by Ursula Heise and Eva Horn) and a series of events at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin gave me the idea to see the latest Hollywood Sci-Fi-drama through Anthropocene glasses.