farmdoc's blog post number 8

I live more than 70km from the nearest cinema, and so via a subscription to Bigpondmovies, each month I receive by mail four DVDs that I pre-select from their online catalogue. Last Friday night I watched Soylent Green which is a classic I hadn’t previously seen. Starring Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson, it is a science fiction movie set in New York City in 2022. And though it was made way back in 1973, it is prescient in relation to global warming and the resultant food and water shortages, overpopulation, and therefore the breakdown of the fabric of society. Whilst in 2008 first-world and second-world countries have not reached the level of deprivation and depravity depicted in Soylent Green, I predict that by 2022 the grim tenor of this film could be pretty accurate. It is remarkable, to me anyway, that writers can produce reasonably accurate 50-year predictions. I would like to believe that writers in collaboration with scientists can conjure the miracles needed to prevent Soylent Green, or something similar, from becoming a reality. But I doubt it will happen – not because the writers and scientists lack the intellectual capacity, but because greed, selfishness, jealousy, power, politics and, yes, religion, will thwart them at every turn.