Seeing The Day After Tomorrow as a youth was probably the first time I was exposed to the idea of climate change. And 17 years later, this film remains one of the only major Hollywood productions to explicitly engage with the topic. For this special episode of Stories for Earth, I chatted with Dr. Yanas Kisten, a scientist and host of the podcast Geekoscopy, about one of our favorite disaster flicks: The Day After Tomorrow, directed by Roland Emmerich.

• Buy or rent on YouTube: https://youtu.be/K_xwj9bHZm4

Special guest: Dr. Yanas Kisten, host of the Geekoscopy podcast

For this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Yanas Kisten, a South African scientist and host of the Geekoscopy podcast, which explores “…the intersection between science, story, and play.” Yanas is a postdoctoral researcher at Nelson Mandela University in Eastern Cape, South Africa and is interested in science communication. He examines the many different ways that geek culture can help science reach a broader audience through his podcast.

• Website: https://www.geekoscopy.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/geekoscopy
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/geekoscopy/

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1. About Roland Emmerich
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Roland Emmerich is a German film director and producer known for movies like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Independence Day (1996), and The Patriot (2000). Educated at the Munich Film and Television School, Emmerich’s career began with his student film, The Noah’s Ark Principle (1984), opening the 1984 Berlin Film Festival. The film was a success, paving the way for him to make his Hollywood directorial debut with Universal Soldier in 1992. Roland Emmerich lives in Los Angeles where he runs the film and television production company Centropolis Entertainment.

Official website: http://www.centropolis.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rolandemmerich

Transcript

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*Coming soon*

Recommendations

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Article: “The lingering influence of ‘Day After Tomorrow’” by Michael Svoboda in Yale Climate Connections

Interview: Stories for Earth! GKSP101 EP030: Forrest Brown

Video: Everything Wrong With The Day After Tomorrow from CinemaSins

Podcast: “Gun Island” and “The Great Derangement” by Amitav Ghosh: Summary & Analysis from Stories for Earth

• Transcript
• Listen on Spotify
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• Listen on Stitcher

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The post A Discussion of “The Day After Tomorrow” with Dr. Yanas Kisten appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Okja is a 2017 film from South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho. The film premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a four-minute standing ovation. It was later released on Netflix on June 28, 2017.

Okja tells the story of Mija, a young girl from South Korea, who raises a genetically modified pig named Okja on her grandfather’s small farm in South Korea. After the evil Mirando Corporation takes Okja to be slaughtered in America, Mija embarks on an epic quest to save Okja and return her to the farm in South Korea.

Jump to

1. About Bong Joon Ho
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Bong Joon Ho is a filmmaker from South Korea known for films like Parasite and Snowpiercer. Born in Daegu, South Korea in 1969, Bong attended the Korean Academy of Film Arts at Yonsei University, graduating in 1995. After working on other projects for several years, Bong Joon Ho released his directorial debut, Memories of Murder, in 2003. Since then, he has created some of the most successful films in South Korea and has been named one of the greatest film directors of the 21st century by Metacritic.

Transcript

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I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a podcast about everything climate change in pop culture. Today, we’ll be talking about the 2017 film Okja, a Netflix-exclusive movie from the creator of Parasite and Snowpiercer, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho.

In our last episode, we talked about US poet laureate Joy Harjo and about the importance of rekindling our relationship with the land and restoring rights to indigenous people. These are important steps the world needs to take, both from a social justice and environmental perspective, and today, we’ll be diving a little bit deeper into some of the ways we can restore our bond with the Earth.

If you like what you hear today, please consider supporting us on Patreon. I say “us,” but Stories for Earth is a one-man show, and I currently cover all the costs of producing the show and maintaining the website out of pocket. You can become a patron at patreon.com/storiesforearth to make a recurring, monthly donation, or you can go to the “Support us” page on our website at storiesforearth.com/support-us/ for other ways to help keep the show going. Again, those links are patreon.com/storiesforearth for Patreon and storiesforearth.com/support-us/ for other ways to contribute. We’re also on Instagram and Twitter if you want to keep up with us on social media.

This is a really hard time for everyone, so please only donate if you’re in a position to do so. I certainly appreciate any way you’re able to support the show. And speaking of the show, let’s get to it. I hope you enjoy.

“Okja” isn’t trying to convince you to go vegan

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I was first seriously introduced to the idea of veganism several years ago. And before I go any further, here’s a disclaimer: this episode is not about veganism. Anyway, I had a car back then, and I had accidentally run over a nail, which was kind enough to stick around in my tire. Bored, sitting in the waiting room at the mechanic, I downloaded an ebook copy of Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer on a whim. I don’t remember how long I sat there, but I read a sizable chunk of Eating Animals that day, and what I read disturbed me.

Startling statistics about the amount of carbon dioxide and methane that comes from beef production. Convincing arguments about the ethicality of killing another intelligent form of life for no real reason other than taste preference. The fact that pigs are smarter than dogs. Glimpses inside factory farms where the author actually broke into farms at night with animal rights activists. Crazy stuff.

Prior to this I had experimented with going vegetarian. Not for any environmentally or ethically motivated reasons—I was a broke college student, and meat is expensive. But after reading part of Eating Animals, I was ready to go vegan for what you might call the right reasons. And I tried to, multiple times! Perhaps it was a lack of cooking know-how, time, creativity, or money, but by the time I graduated from college, I had been a vegan at least several times, resigning myself to failure by the time I had my diploma in hand.

I don’t follow any kind of strict diet now, though I do eat far less meat and dairy products than I once did. But recently watching the movie Okja from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho made me seriously think about going vegan again.

“Okja” plot summary

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Okja is the story of a young girl from South Korea named Mija. Mija lives in the countryside of South Korea with her grandfather and her pet pig named Okja. Except, Okja isn’t any normal pig. Unlike past pig-flicks that feature porkers who herd sheep, talk to spiders, or predict the future, Okja is special for being genetically modified and enormous.

In fact, Okja isn’t really a pig—she’s a creation of the Mirando Corporation, a giant agrochemical company based in New York City. If you already noticed how similar its name sounds to Monsanto, you might have an idea of where this is going. Mirando created a bunch of animals like Okja and sent them to small, family farms all over the world to be raised. This was somewhat of a beta test to see how the animals would fare, and at the end of several years, Mirando would send a company representative to each of the farms to check in on the animals. The biggest, healthiest animal would win, and it would be taken back to New York City as part of a parade Mirando would throw to make the announcement.

Mija and her grandfather’s farm was one of the ones to receive an animal from Mirando. Once the animals were mature, the company representative—played by Jake Gyllenhaal—visited every farm. When he got to Okja, he was blown away and declared her the winner. But Mija didn’t know this meant Okja had to leave. Without her knowing, her grandfather arranged for Mirando to take Okja back, paying him a nice sum of money for raising such a fine animal. Worst of all, Okja would be turned into GMO bacon.

Once Mija realizes what her grandfather has done, she’s furious, and she runs away to Seoul to try to catch Okja before she can leave South Korea. The rest of the movie follows Mija’s journey to save Okja with the help of an eco-terrorist organization known as ALF—the Animal Liberation Front. Thanks to ALF, Mija manages to break into a factory farm where Okja is taken to be slaughtered, eventually buying Okja back from Mirando, paying for her with a miniature pig statue made of solid gold.

How “Okja” treats greenwashing

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This film hits on a lot of important environmental themes—industrial farms versus traditional, family-owned farms, overconsumption of meat, runaway capitalism—but the most obvious issue it touches on from the beginning is greenwashing.

Greenwashing is a marketing strategy companies use to make their products seem more sustainable or environmentally-friendly when they are, in fact, not. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this recently comes from the oil company Shell. There is a Shell station near where I used to live, and back when I had a car, I stopped there to and from work whenever I needed gas. Last year, maybe when they finally realized a lot of people really hate them for the work they’ve done to destroy the Earth, Shell decided to launch a new marketing campaign focused on planting trees. This gas station was covered in little signs advertising that if you pumped gas with Shell, you were planting trees. Cute, right?

As it turned out, there are at least several Shell stations in Nashville, and the one where you could find all these tree-planting marketing materials was in a very affluent part of town, right across the street from a Whole Foods. Interestingly, the other Shell station near my apartment didn’t have any of these ads, nor did the one near my old office. There could have been many reasons why this single Shell station across from Whole Foods—which also had perpetually out-of-order pumps for biodiesel—had marketing materials advertising how buying their gasoline helped plant trees. But being a marketer by trade myself, I have to wonder if Shell was trying to target a certain demographic.

In Okja, the Mirando Corporation engages in greenwashing as well. The film’s opening scene shows a lavish conference-type event set in what appears to be an old factory in New York City. It’s a big to-do with lots of seemingly important people who are eagerly awaiting a speech from the CEO of the Mirando Corporation, Lucy Mirando, played by Tilda Swinton. When Lucy finally takes the stage, she’s met with applause before she begins her big speech. She strides confidently across the stage with a headset microphone and presentation clicker, reminiscent of Steve Jobs at a past Apple Worldwide Developers Conference preaching about the life-changing wonders of new consumer technology.

Lucy Mirando tells a similar story of life-changing technology, except she talks about biotechnology—a genetically modified animal that produces more delicious meat for the rapidly increasing human population while requiring less food and water from our parched and overworked planet. On top of that, animal rights’ activists would be happy to know that the animals would be raised on sustainable, family-owned farms. They would be happy and live in pastures, just as God intended. Through an Elizabeth Holmes-esque grin, Lucy Mirando proclaims, “We needed a miracle, and then we got one.”

But of course, the animals Mirando created were nothing like this, and they would not live on cutesy Charlotte’s Web-type farms. They would be raised in environmentally-disastrous factory farms, living out their short and miserable existences among huddled masses in a slaughterhouse yard—so-called pastures that have more in common with the yards of a concentration camp than a farm. Hearing Lucy Mirando’s speech, you would never know this. It is the dirty secret behind the Mirando Corporation’s glossy, progressive public image.

The ugly side of capitalism

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Lucy Mirando took the helm of the Mirando Corporation for a reason—she wanted to turn around its nasty reputation after years of negative brand perception from previous leadership. The previous CEO, Lucy’s cold, meanspirited twin sister Nancy, ran the business like an old-school industrialist à la Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood—a practical machine operator hell-bent on maximizing production efficiency and shareholder returns at any environmental cost. Even before Nancy Mirando drove the company’s public image into the ground, the company’s founder, Grandfather Mirando, didn’t do much to win the company any ethics trophies.

But Lucy is supposed to change all of that, betting on her genetically modified animals project to paint Mirando in a new light. It’s one of many plot devices Okja uses to convey the message that a lot of time with modern capitalism, what you see isn’t what you get, that you are both figuratively and literally being fed a lie. This ties back into greenwashing, but it’s a much more pervasive problem that goes beyond blatantly misrepresenting what a product is. In every industry, companies sell attractively-marketed products that seem harmless or even good for bargain prices. One of the best examples of this comes to us from the industry at which Okja takes aim—agriculture in general and the meat industry in particular.

In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture is one of the biggest emitters by sector. According to the IPCC’s fifth Assessment Report (AR5), 24 percent of the global emissions in 2010 were linked to “Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use.” This puts agriculture in second place for most greenhouse gas emissions by sector—one percentage point behind electricity and heat production from burning fossil fuels. Many factors go into this sector. GHGs like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane are produced from various land management techniques, and clearing forests to make room for more farmland destroys invaluable carbon sinks.

Not to mention the other negative effects of modern industrial farming. The U.S. Geological Survey reports that in 2005, irrigation for crops accounted for roughly 63 percent of freshwater use in the United States. We get most of our freshwater in this country from surface water sources, but we also get a significant amount from groundwater. Groundwater is stored in aquifers—essentially giant underground lakes—and we are using it up at an alarming rate. Granted, a lot of our drinking water comes from underground aquifers, but pumping that water up to irrigate crops uses the majority of it. And just like many of the gifts from nature we rely on, we are using up groundwater faster than it can be replenished.

We have to water crops for people to eat, but we also have to give drinking water to the livestock we raise for meat and dairy products. According to PETA, it takes nearly 700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of cow’s milk and more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. That’s a lot of water. Raising animals—especially cattle—for meat also produces an incredible amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Project Drawdown says that if cattle were their own nation, they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. For this reason, switching to a vegan or vegetarian diet is often cited as one of the most impactful steps you can take to reduce your carbon footprint.

Regenerative agriculture as a promising solution

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Veganism or vegetarianism are what is called demand-side solutions to mitigating climate change. But what about production-side changes?

Our current method of industrial farming is destructive and deadly, as Okja explores. We not only raise animals for slaughter in shockingly inhumane and filthy conditions, but we are also killing the nutrients in the soil that allow us to grow food for the world’s increasing human population. According to Scientific American, humans have already degraded about one-third of the Earth’s soil, mostly from destructive farming practices. If we continue at this pace, we will be completely out of arable land by 2050. That would be very bad, to put it lightly.

Modern farming practices like tilling and compacting dirt with giant tractors, killing thousands upon thousands of insects with pesticides, poisoning the ground and water with nitrogen-based fertilizers, and reducing biodiversity through monoculture are still widely believed to be necessary evils for feeding a world home to billions of people. But maybe that’s not true.

One solution to our ecological crisis that’s quickly gaining in popularity and awareness is regenerative agriculture. As its name implies, regenerative agriculture seeks to restore or regenerate the land used for farming instead of extracting from and effectively killing the land, as our current system generally does. Instead of relying on enormous, corporate-owned farms, regenerative agriculture emphasizes small, family farms that practice permaculture and organic farming. It also includes farming techniques like crop rotation, composting, conservation tillage, and growing cover crops to put nutrients back in the soil and create healthier farms and communities.

The major selling point of regenerative agriculture is that it doesn’t lead us toward a future where the Earth no longer supports growing food while simultaneously producing plenty of food to keep us from starving. But it also has other great benefits, like increasing biodiversity, helping farmers earn living wages, and improving human physical and mental health. That last part is especially important given the current suicide crisis facing farmers in America.

But farmers aren’t only struggling in the United States. While preparing for this episode, I came across a short documentary on YouTube about an Australian farmer named Charles Massy who wrote a book about regenerative agriculture called Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth. The documentary is called “From the Ground Up—Regenerative Agriculture,” and it shows how Massy and his farm workers were able to reverse desertification, increase crop yields, and also increase profits. You should watch it. It’s astounding to see how drastically regenerative farming turned things around for Massy on his farm.

Charles Massy also spoke about regenerative agriculture at a TedX event in Canberra, the capital of Australia. For me, the most moving part of his presentation came when Massy shared an anecdote about his then seven-year-old grandson, Hamish. This was before Massy started practicing regenerative agriculture. One Saturday morning, as they were driving down the road on their way to a soccer game, Hamish looked out the car window at a farmer spraying pesticides and asked, “Grandpa, why do we have to kill things to grow things?”

This question, Massy said, was a wake up call. He had been farming using modern industrial practices, and it was getting him into a lot of debt, destroying native Australian grasslands, and ruining his farm’s top soil. Massy ended up going back to school to study regenerative agriculture, and today, he is a major advocate for this different approach that he believes can feed the world, save the planet, and improve human physical and mental health for his grandson and future generations.

Another farmer echoes Massy’s message. In his non-fiction book The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry writes, “But the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.”

The meaning of the end of “Okja”

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Spoiler alert, but at the end of Okja, Mija and Okja return to their small farm and to an apologetic grandfather in South Korea. There, they live happily ever after, but getting to this point wasn’t easy. To rescue Okja, Mija had to go undercover into the factory farm where Mirando intended to slaughter Okja along with thousands of others of her kind. Mija snuck into the farm with the help of ALF, and saved Okja’s life by paying for it with her miniature golden pig statue.

I think a lot of people find this scene to be cynical. The whole movie is about a little girl who risks her life to save her best friend, Okja, whom she loves more than anything. The people helping her in the Animal Liberation Front are also incredibly passionate about their mission to save Okja and other animals, and there are a couple times in the movie where ALF’s leader, played by Paul Dano, sheds tears through heartfelt words about why this mission matters so much. Yet, the only tactic that ends up saving Okja in the end is purely transactional.

By this point in the film, Nancy Mirando—the all-business half of the evil Mirando twins—assumes control of the Mirando Corporation after her sister Lucy suffers a nervous breakdown. Nancy only sees dollar signs when she looks at animals like Okja, and Mija’s golden pig is the only thing that convinces her to keep from killing Okja at the factory farm. This scene really plays up the fact that Mija makes a business agreement with Nancy, so much so that you almost expect Nancy to ask Mija if she wants a copy of her receipt. With her life now paid for, Okja is free to leave with Mija, even though the other animals at the farm will still be slaughtered.

I’m honestly still on the fence about this ending. On the one hand, I think it’s kind of brilliant. In a lot of stories, the hero triumphs over the bad guy by killing or banishing them at the end. In others, the bad guy has a change of heart and turns out to not be so bad after all, just damaged. But in Okja, neither scenario happens. The bad guy keeps on being bad, and they’re actually revealed to be just as bad or worse than we suspected.

I don’t know if Bong Joon Ho was trying to say anything specific with this scene or if he’s just a really good study of human character. But the way I interpret it, the ending of Okja says corporations only speak one language: money. We can pen impassioned essays, march in protests, and even vandalize, trespass, and commit felonies to try to change our food system, but the most powerful tool in our belts might just be our place in this capitalist system as consumers.

I am not advocating that we cease writing impassioned essays or protesting or even breaking into factory farms like Jonathan Safran Foer did for his book to expose the heinous acts being committed inside. But I do want to remind you that you are powerful. I believe you are much more than just a consumer. I don’t think your identity should be or has to be tied to what you do or don’t consume. But that doesn’t mean you can’t leverage the weight of this identity society has assigned you to push for positive change.

That can start with choosing to buy less meat or to buy no meat or animal products at all. It could mean spending just a little more than you normally would to support farmers who raise their food lovingly and responsibly. It could even mean buying seeds to grow some vegetables and herbs for yourself. Whatever that looks like for you—and it does not have to look like going vegan—remember that it does make a difference, no matter how small it feels. It may be one transaction, but one transaction repeated multiple times by millions of people equals big change. If we want to change the world, maybe we can start by changing how we spend our money.

Outro

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Stories for Earth is written and produced by me, Forrest Brown. The intro and outro music is also by me. If you want to learn more about what we’re up to, you can find us on Instagram at @storiesforearth and on Twitter at @stories4earth. That’s the word “stories,” the number “4,” and the word “earth.” Our website is storiesforearth.com, where you can also find links to support us financially through Patreon and through our Bookshop.org page.

Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you’ll tune back in next month for season two, episode four.

Recommendations

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Book: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

→ Buy USED on Better World Books from $6.48 (affiliate)
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $16.55 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Book: The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry

→ Buy USED on Better World Books (affiliate)
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $15.59 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Film: Snowpiercer from Bong Joon Ho

Documentary: Kiss the Ground from Josh and Rebecca Tickell

→ Visit official website

Like what you see? Become a Patreon member today for as little as $1 a month.

The post “Okja” From Bong Joon Ho appeared first on Stories for Earth.

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Overview

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a 2012 film from director Benh Zeitlin and Court 13 Arts. Originally released in New York and Los Angeles, the film was later sold to Fox Searchlight Pictures and distributed worldwide. The film enjoyed mostly positive reviews from critics and viewers alike, and it features an Oscar-nominated performance from Quvenzhané Wallis, who played Hushpuppy. Director Benh Zeitlin co-wrote the screenplay with his screenwriter friend Lucy Alibar, basing the movie on Alibar’s play Juicy and Delicious.

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1. About Benh Zeitlin
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

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Benh Zeitlin is an American writer, director, and composer who is best known for his 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Born in New York City and raised in various boroughs and suburbs, Zeitlin is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Connecticut and a co-founder of Court 13 Arts, a “…film and multi-disciplinary arts organization” that works to advance filmmaking in New Orleans, Louisiana. Zeitlin co-founded Court 13 shortly after moving to New Orleans in 2008 to make his first short film, Glory at Sea. In October 2019, Zeitlin revealed work on his next feature-length film Wendy, a modern adaptation of Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie.

Transcript

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I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a climate change podcast about stories that can teach us lessons of resilience for fighting the climate crisis. For a transcript of today’s show, further recommended reading and viewing, articles, and more, visit our website at storiesforearth.com. We’re on Instagram and Twitter, and you can also support our show via Patreon with a recurring, monthly donation. Click “support us on Patreon” from our website, or visit patreon.com/storiesforearth to become a patron.

Today’s show is about the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the movie before, as I’ll tell you everything you need to know about it for our discussion. If you’d rather find out for yourself, stop the podcast right now, go watch the movie, and come back when you’re done. There are lots of spoilers ahead.

Regardless of whether you’ve seen the movie or not, I hope you enjoy today’s show.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” plot summary

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Beasts of the Southern Wild is the story of Hushpuppy, a little girl who lives with her father Wink in a fictional southern Louisiana town called the Bathtub. The Bathtub is a sort of utopian anarchy. It’s a secluded and wild place on the frontlines of sea level rise, separated from the rest of civilization by a massive levee that holds back the encroaching salt water.

The people who live there are whimsical and free, and they all take care of each other for the greater good of the community. Hushpuppy lives with Wink in a trailer home on stilts, and when she’s not at school, she spends her time playing in the woods around their house and learning lessons from Wink.

Wink seems like a bad father at first. In fact, many viewers might think he’s abusive. He threatens, screams, and shouts at Hushpuppy, and he lets them both live in nothing short of squalor. But Wink loves Hushpuppy more than anything, and he’s hard on her because he’s afraid he won’t be around for long. He wants to prepare her for life.

The movie never says what it is, but Wink seems to have some sort of heart problem that causes him a lot of pain and even makes him pass out from time to time. He’s worried about what will happen to Hushpuppy when he dies, and he especially wants to train her for what Hushpuppy calls “the Big One.”

The Big One is a powerful storm that will bring about the end of the world. Hushpuppy describes it best:

“One day, the storm’s gonna blow, the ground’s gonna sink and the water’s gonna rise up so high ain’t gonna be no Bathtub, just a whole bunch of water…But me and my daddy, we stay right here. We is who the earth is for.”

And the Big One definitely comes. One night, Hushpuppy and Wink get into a fight, and Hushpuppy hits Wink in the chest. This seems to trigger Wink’s heart condition, and he collapses on the ground, appearing to be dead. But something else happens here. We see shots of Arctic ice sheets breaking off into the ocean, unleashing ancient pig-like beasts called aurochs and sending the Big One. Wink regains consciousness just before the storm hits and gets Hushpuppy to safety, but not everyone is so lucky.

In the morning, once the storm has subsided, Wink and Hushpuppy survey the flood damage from their makeshift boat made of an old truck bed with an outboard motor. The survivors soon discover that the salty flood water has contaminated the Bathtub’s fresh water, so Wink and a few other men hatch a plan to blow up the levee separating the Bathtub from the mainland.

Wink and his friends build a pipe bomb and successfully destroy the levee, draining the Bathtub just before FEMA comes to force everyone to evacuate to a hospital on the mainland. The hospital represents everything the Bathtub isn’t, and the Bathtub survivors have a hard time trying to adapt. Wink gets surgery to try to fix his heart condition, but at the first chance, he breaks out and frees the others so they can escape.

Once they arrive back in the Bathtub, Hushpuppy must confront the aurochs before they trample over everything. She’s brave and defiant, and she tells the aurochs, “I have to look after my own.” They seem to understand her somehow, and they turn around to leave. This fulfills something Hushpuppy said earlier in the movie:

“Everybody loses the thing that made them. It’s even how it’s supposed to be in nature. The brave men stay and watch it happen, they don’t run.”

Wink dies shortly before the aurochs leave, and Hushpuppy lights his funeral pyre. In one of the final scenes, we see Hushpuppy marching down the beach in a sort of rag-tag parade with the other residents of the Bathtub, boldly meeting her future and reclaiming her home.

Making the film

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Beasts of the Southern Wild was not made the way most Hollywood films are made. Director Benh Zeitlin and his production studio, Court 13, made the entire movie in a southern Louisiana town called Montegut, of the quickly eroding Terrebonne Parish. Court 13 worked out of an abandoned gas station throughout production of the film, and they built all the sets for the Bathtub using found materials in the area. I don’t know if it gets more authentic than that.

Zeitlin calls Court 13’s approach to filmmaking “community-based,” and he uses words like “utopia” when describing how they work together. This way of creating collaboratively worked better in New Orleans than in any other city, according to Zeitlin, which makes sense to me based off what I think I know about New Orleans. I’ve unfortunately never been.

When I watched interviews with members of Court 13 to prepare for this episode, I got the sense that they were just as much a crew of pirates as they were a crew of filmmakers. They seemed totally immersed in the process, but they’re hardly the only ones.

None of the actors you see in the movie were professionals—they’re real members of the community in Louisiana, which actually makes them better than professionals. Dwight Henry owned a bakery in New Orleans before playing the role of Wink, and the unforgettable Quvenzhané Wallis was only five years old when she auditioned to play Hushpuppy. Five years old! She went on to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress after the film’s release, making her the youngest person ever to be nominated in that category.

Beasts of the Southern Wild blew audiences and critics away all over the world, and it’s easy to see why. The people who tell the story of the Bathtub aren’t some actors from out of state. They actually lived the story of the movie. They know what it’s like to go on the roof to escape hurricane flood waters. They knew what it was like to almost have their home completely annihilated yet choose to rebuild it and stay anyway.

Above all else, this film is a love letter to the joyful, resilient people of southern Louisiana and to the home they hold so dear. And just like Hushpuppy loved her dying father and refused to give up on him, these people love where they’re from even while the ocean slowly takes it back.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” and Hurricane Katrina

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You can’t talk about Beasts of the Southern Wild and not talk about Hurricane Katrina. The film is a response to the hurricane, particularly to the way people from outside of the affected area reacted to it. Director Benh Zeitlin said it himself in one interview I watched, talking about the reactions he’d hear from people who couldn’t believe residents of New Orleans would want to move back. I remember hearing these takes too.

People would say things like, “That’s what you get when you build a city below sea level.” It was like they were blaming the people of New Orleans for what happened to them. “Of course your city was destroyed,” these people seemed to say. “You people were dumb enough to put it right in front of a hurricane.”

Zeitlin left this out of his interview, but I heard much worse reactions. Perhaps you did too if you ever watched any Fox News around this time. A lot of the Christians in my life growing up tried to compare the destruction of New Orleans to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible. This is the story from the book of Genesis, chapters 18 and 19 in the Old Testament in which God destroys the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone because the cities were so wicked. Abraham, an Old Testament patriarch, begged God not to destroy the cities if he was able to find even ten good people there. God agreed to Abraham’s terms, but he still sent two angels to the cities to destroy them in the end.

Abraham lived elsewhere, so God sent the two angels to warn Abraham’s nephew Lot to evacuate along with his wife and daughters. God was so mad at Sodom and Gomorrah that he even instructed Lot and his family not to look back as it was being destroyed. Lot’s wife famously looked back anyway, and God turned her into a pillar of salt for her disobedience.

It was the same situation with New Orleans, supposedly. A girl I went to school with even told me about her dad, a preacher, who spent an entire sermon series talking about why New Orleans got what was coming to them. To this day, I don’t really know what exactly New Orleans was supposed to have done wrong. Was it the voodoo? The large queer community? The partying and gambling on Bourbon Street? I honestly don’t really care to hear about it.

But Beasts of the Southern Wild is a direct rebuttal to that line of thinking, in my mind. The Big One or God or climate change or whatever you want to call it destroys the Bath Tub, and what does Hushpuppy do? She looks back. Hell, she goes back—everyone does, including the dying Wink. Their home was already destroyed by the hurricane, and even with the aurochs on their way, the people of the Bath Tub go back. Why? It has everything to do with love and with standing up for what’s right.

Throughout the movie, Wink’s health gradually deteriorates. From the beginning of the movie when we first see evidence of his heart condition, we can tell his days are numbered. But does Hushpuppy give up on him? No. They have a tumultuous, even traumatizing relationship as father and daughter, but Hushpuppy still doesn’t leave him. For the characters in the movie, Wink is a symbol of the Bath Tub—both he and the Bath Tub are dying. One has a heart condition and one is slowly drowning. But this is no reason to give up on them. Even as Wink’s funeral pyre goes up in flames and the Bath Tub lies in ruins, Hushpuppy confronts the aurochs to defend her people. For her, it’s not a question. Wink was her father and the Bath Tub is her home. For Hushpuppy, it’s simply the right thing to do. “The brave men stay and watch it happen, they don’t run.”

It’s the same story for the people of New Orleans and southern Louisiana in general. They didn’t give up on their home just because a hurricane tried to blow it away. A lot of the people who were lucky enough to evacuate, maybe most of them, went back. I’ve heard people describe the ones who didn’t go back as some of the first climate refugees in America. But those who did go back helped rebuild their city, and today, New Orleans is doing okay.

Climate change is making hurricanes stronger

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That isn’t to say recovering from Katrina was easy by any stretch of the imagination. In 2010, a group of researchers from Princeton University, Washington State University, the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and Harvard University published a paper about the long term mental health effects of Hurricane Katrina on 532 low-income mothers in the New Orleans area. The researchers started surveying people in 2003, two years before the storm hit in August 2005, and they followed the same people for nearly five years after the hurricane.

And what did they find? The mothers’ mental health never really returned to baseline. In other words, after Hurricane Katrina, these people were never the same. Four years after the storm, about 33 percent of the mothers still showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, and another 30 percent suffered from psychological distress. While the researchers saw the worst effects on mental health during the first 11 months after the hurricane, many more people suffered for years afterward.

These people had lost their homes and loved ones, and they had to go for stretches of time without knowing if they would have food or clean water. They were also scattered across 23 states immediately after the hurricane. They were refugees—of course their mental health suffered. But studies like this one are sadly rare.

The researchers who published this paper got kind of lucky. Their paper started out as a study of low-income adults enrolled in community colleges around the US. It just so happened that three of those colleges were in New Orleans, and the researchers had the good sense to draw the study out even longer to fill a knowledge gap in what we know about the mental health impacts of natural disasters.

Hurricane Katrina was just one storm. Imagine how other natural disasters around the world might be affecting people there. I think back to March 2011 when a horrible earthquake and tsunami killed hundreds of people in Japan and nearly caused a nuclear meltdown. As recently as October 2019, a typhoon hit the very same region, testing Japan’s resilience and recovery progress over the past eight years.

A month before this typhoon hit Japan, Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas as a category 5 storm—the strongest category designation for hurricanes. The storm essentially sat on the country for three days, killing 70 people and causing nearly 300 people to go missing. The total cost of this disaster tallied up to $3.4 billion USD. For a country with a GDP of about $12 billion USD, this is an unfathomable cost to rebuild.

According to Yale Climate Connections, the verdict is still out on whether or not climate change will cause more hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones. But for now, scientists feel confident that climate change will make hurricanes that send more rain and cause more destruction. These storms will be beastly—pun intended—and we should be putting in work now to develop the emotional resilience we’ll need to face them head-on and recover from them afterwards.

What are the beasts in “Beasts of the Southern Wild?”

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Resilience is not so uncommon. We humans are a resilient bunch, and we’ve so far done a pretty good job of recovering from everything history has thrown our way. Take, for example, the Black Death pandemic in Europe during the Middle Ages.

In just four years, the Black Death killed about 25 million people, nearly a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century. Even before the Black Death, a 6th-century plague pandemic called the Plague of Justinian killed nearly half of Europe’s population. During this plague outbreak, nearly 10,000 people died every day in Constantinople. Yet somehow, Europe made it through plague outbreaks like these, and the period of European history between about 900 and 1300 was “…one of the longest periods of sustained growth in human history,” according to The Great Courses Daily.

And this is only one example of humanity’s ability to bounce back from major setbacks. We’ve been doing this ever since we started walking upright. In fact, we nearly went extinct in the year 70,000 B.C. after the eruption of the supervolcano Toba. I could keep listing examples, but the bottom line is this: we are hard to kill. This fact served as one of the main points of inspiration for the aurochs in Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Director Benh Zeitlin said in an interview with Pop Omnivore that his idea to use aurochs came from cave paintings he’d seen in France of cavemen fighting them off. Zeitlin said:

“The young girl in the film, Hushpuppy, sees herself as the last of her kind, on the verge of extinction. ‘How are people going to look back on my civilization?’ she wonders. And she sees herself as being in the same position as cavemen: We look back on them and understand them by their paintings. So it’s that parallel that inspired us to use the aurochs. What Hushpuppy sees as coming to destroy her is literally what a caveman painted.”

If you’re looking for a metaphor to represent the beasts we face today in the climate crisis, I can’t think of a better one than aurochs. Aurochs weren’t just made up for the movie—they were once real animals until they went extinct about 500 years ago. Unlike the porcine animals in Beasts of the Southern Wild, real-life aurochs were more like extremely aggressive bulls. Hushpuppy’s world is about to end because fossils come back to life. Sound familiar?

I suppose you could interpret this in a number of ways, but to me, aurochs have to represent fossil fuels. And just like Hushpuppy stood up to the aurochs to save her home, we must stand up to the fossil fuel industry if we want to survive. Life and death are two sides of the same coin, but in the case of drilling for oil, it’s better that some things remain dead. Hushpuppy teaches us that we can stand up to such agents of chaos. And maybe, if our convictions are strong enough, we can win.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

That’s it for our discussion of Beasts of the Southern Wild and climate change. Be sure to hit subscribe if you enjoyed today’s show, and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts if you feel so inclined. Doing so will help us reach more listeners who could benefit from our message.

Visit our website at storiesforearth.com for transcripts of every episode as well as additional content, and become a patron at patreon.com/storiesforearth if you want to support further production of the show. Until next time, I’m Forrest Brown. Thanks for listening.

Recommendations

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Article: “Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast“

Author: Elizabeth Kolbert

Film: Okja

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Film: Glory at Sea

Director: Benh Zeitlin

Book: Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island by Earl Swift

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The post “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Hurricane Katrina, and Climate Change appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Spirited Away from Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese animated fairy tale film released in 2001. The movie tells the story of Chihiro, a young girl on a mission to rescue her family from the evil witch Yubaba, who turned them into pigs. Widely considered to be a coming of age story about the importance of staying true to yourself, Spirited Away also incorporates many environmental themes through characters like the Stink Spirit, Haku, and No-Face.

Overview

Spirited Away is one of Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s most-loved films. Originally released in Japan in 2001 by Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, Walt Disney Studios brought it to the United States in 2002. This is one of the most financially successful films in Japanese film history, and in 2017, The New York Times named it the second-best film from the 21st century so far. There are many different ways of interpreting this film, but for this episode, we take a look at the film’s environmental themes. We explore the meaning of various characters and look at what they can teach us about fighting climate change.

→ Buy the DVD on Bookshop from $19.96 (affiliate)

Jump to

1. About Hayao Miyazaki
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

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Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese animation director. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest living animated filmmakers in the world. Born in Tokyo in 1941, Miyazaki is famous for classic films such as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke. Though he retired in 2017, he is reportedly working on a new movie for his production studio Studio Ghibli.

Transcript

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Hello. I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a climate change podcast about stories that can teach us strength and resilience in the era of the climate crisis. Today we’ll be talking about Hayao Miyazaki’s classic film, Spirited Away. But first, we have some basic housekeeping to take care of.

Two things: first, we have a website at storiesforearth.com. There you can find transcripts of the show, articles about the stories we discuss, and recommendations for further reading, among other content. We’re also on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube if you want to follow us on social media.

The second thing is Patreon. We want to provide this show for free, and you can help us do that by supporting us through our Patreon. To make a recurring, monthly donation to Stories for Earth, go to patreon.com/storiesforearth, or visit our website and click “Support us on Patreon” from the navigation menu.

Now, without any further ado, let’s get on to today’s episode. And don’t worry, if you haven’t seen Spirited Away before, I’ll fill you in on all the details so you can still get something meaningful from our discussion.

“Spirited Away” plot summary

Spirited Away is the story of a young girl named Chihiro who gets stranded in a spirit world after she and her parents wander into an abandoned Japanese amusement park. They’re in the process of moving to a new town, and they find the amusement park after Chihiro’s dad tries to take a shortcut on a dirt road through the woods.

Chihiro’s time in the spirit world begins with her parents eating enchanted food, which turns them into pigs. To turn her parents back into humans and to escape from the Spirit World, Chihiro has to get a job at the local bathhouse, which is run by a witch named Yubaba.

If you’ve ever seen a movie from Hayao Miyazaki, you’ll instantly recognize this as a signature Miyazaki story. Miyazaki’s movies usually feature young—often female—protagonists who have to overcome some sort of great evil to save the day, and there are usually many fantastical or fairy-tale like elements involved.

For example, in another one of Miyazaki’s films called Howl’s Moving Castle, a young girl named Sophie is transformed into an old woman by an evil witch, and the only way for Sophie to break the curse is to work for a wizard named Howl in his enchanted castle.

Along the way, Sophie meets a scarecrow who turns out to be a cursed prince, and she winds up having to keep two kingdoms from going to war on behalf of Howl. Sophie succeeds in turning back into her younger self, and she breaks the prince’s curse, restoring him to his human form and averting the war.

Howl’s Moving Castle is heavy on a theme Miyazaki is known for playing with in most of his films: pacifism. This doesn’t come as much of a shock when you look at his personal life. He was born in Tokyo in 1941 and lived through World War II when Japan was part of the Axis Powers along with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Miyazaki experienced some horrors of war firsthand, like firebombings, and he of course witnessed the aftermath of America dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians.

Against this apocalyptic backdrop, I can’t blame Miyazaki for being a pacifist and for promoting pacifism. But in addition to the human suffering war causes, Miyazaki also realized its capacity for tremendous environmental destruction, especially from pollution and nuclear weapons.

Spirited Away doesn’t depict a nuclear war, but it does focus heavily on the pollution aspect, which Miyazaki sees as an adverse result of consumerist greed and industrialization.

We see this the most in the movie through three different characters. The first is called the Stink Spirit.

The Stink Spirit

The Stink Spirit appears after Chihiro first starts working at the bathhouse. Also, it’s important to note that after getting a job at the bathhouse, the witch who runs it, Yubaba, gives Chihiro a new name: Sen. I’ll talk about the significance of this in a little bit, but for now, just keep in mind that when I say “Sen,” I’m talking about Chihiro, our protagonist.

The Stink Spirit looks like a giant sludge monster, and based off the way the characters in the movie react to its presence, you can tell it really stinks. The other bathhouse workers try to keep it from entering, but it trudges forward, insistent on getting a bath.

Naturally, no one wants to take care of the Stink Spirit, so Yubaba makes Chihiro do it as a sort of hazing or initiation task. Chihiro, never one to be stopped, carries out the work of bathing the Stink Spirit dutifully. In fact, she works so hard to get it clean that she accidentally falls in the bath with it.

And it’s in this scene, while Chihiro is struggling to get out of the bath, that she feels something pointy coming out of the Stink Spirit’s side, like a thorn. Once she gets back out, Chihiro enlists the help of the bathhouse staff to pull this thing out of the Stink Spirit. But when they’re finally able to yank it out, Chihiro realizes the thorn is really a bicycle handlebar, and pulling it out releases a deluge of trash and pollutants.

With the pollution gone, all the sludge surrounding the Stink Spirit dissolves to reveal a River Spirit. People throwing pollution into the river made it a Stink Spirit, but Chihiro saved it, and it thanks her by giving her a ball of medicine before leaving.

Shintoism in “Spirited Away”

In some ways, this story really happened. Miyazaki got the idea after working on a river cleanup when he pulled a bicycle from the river.

Hearing this made an impression on me because it sounds like animism, which is the belief that everything—including plants, animals, so-called “inanimate” objects, and natural phenomena—have souls. And of course, animism is central to the ancient Japanese religion Shinto, or Shintoism.

Practitioners of Shintoism, usually called Shintoists, believe in supernatural beings called kami. Kami inhabit the landscape, and they can either be benevolent or malevolent towards humans, depending on whether or not humans honor them properly. In Japan, there are shrines to kami all over the place, and you can also see them in the opening scenes of Spirited Away.

In an interview with Robert Epstein from The Independent in 2010, Miyazaki said, “I do not believe in Shinto…but I do respect it, and I feel that the animism of Shinto is rooted deep within me.”

But Spirited Away pays homage to another important aspect of Shintoism as well: the purifying power of water. In Shintoism, cleanliness is very important. It’s just like that old saying in English, “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Yubaba’s bathhouse, then, is a place where spirits can come to be purified. It just so happens that a number of these spirits turn out to be nature spirits, like rivers.

The importance of Haku

There’s another important river spirit we meet in Spirited Away, though we don’t realize what it is at first. Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the movie, but I’m talking about Haku, a young man who helps Chihiro when she realizes she’s stranded in the spirit world. Haku is the one who tells Chihiro she must get a job working at Yubaba’s bathhouse, and he also teaches her the importance of remembering her name after Yubaba gives her a new one, warning her that if she forgets it, she’ll be stuck in the spirit world forever.

Haku, it turns out, has firsthand experience with this. He’s really the spirit of the Kohaku River, but he can’t escape the spirit world because he’s forgotten his name. Near the end of the movie, Chihiro realizes she met Haku several years before when he saved her from drowning in the Kohaku River. Now, Chihiro says, the river has been filled up to make way for apartment buildings.

Harnessing the power of rivers

Japan is a beautiful country full of mountains, lakes, and streams, though its rivers are known for being shallow and short due to the country’s mountainous topography. Rivers hold historical significance for supplying drinking water and for creating alluvial plains, which are perfect environments for growing rice. But in modern times, Japan builds a lot of hydroelectric dams on rivers to generate power.

This is common practice all over the world. Where I grew up in the United States, I lived near the Buford Dam just north of Atlanta, Georgia. And while it doesn’t generate electricity, it does hold back water from the Chattahoochee River to create Lake Lanier, a giant reservoir that supplies drinking water to Metro Atlanta. Out West, we have the famous Hoover Dam, which straddles the Nevada-Arizona border on the Colorado River.

This giant hydroelectric dam supplies power to nearly 8 million people across Southern California, Southern Nevada, and Arizona. But even it pales in comparison to a hydroelectric dam in China called the Three Gorges Dam, which is located in the Yangtze River Basin. The Three Gorges Dam cost $31 billion to build, and it produces roughly eight times the electricity of the Hoover Dam.

Oh, and it also holds the unique distinction of being both the world’s biggest dam and the world’s biggest power station. The reservoir it created is bigger than Lake Superior in the American Midwest. It’s extremely difficult to overstate the sheer enormity of this dam.

As you can imagine, the Three Gorges Dam didn’t come without resistance from scientists and environmentalists who were concerned about the potentially devastating effects the project could have on the local environment. Not to mention the effects it would have on the 31 million or so people who lived in the area.

According to a Scientific American article from 2008, construction of the dam required about 1.2 million people scattered across two cities and 116 towns to relocate, and scientists were concerned that building the dam would cause an increase of landslides and waterborne diseases, which would further impact the people who didn’t have to relocate.

These fears turned out to be true after construction of the dam was complete. The Chinese state-owned China Yangtze Three Gorges Development Corporation began raising the water level in 2003, triggering a landslide that created waves big enough to kill 14 people. Years later, increased pressure on the land from raising and lowering the water level led to a landslide that swallowed a bus, killing 30 people.

At one point in 2007, residents of a nearby village watched as a giant crack in the earth spread 655 feet wide just behind their homes. The crack was so huge that concerns for public safety led Chinese officials to evacuate the town, forcing villagers to camp out in a mountain tunnel for three months.

The worst part of all of this is that landslides were only part of the problem. Building the Three Gorges Dam also led to decreased rainfall and water shortages in other cities and towns, and building the reservoir caused great harm to endangered species of plants and animals in the extremely biodiverse areas surrounding the Yangtze River.

But fixing these problems won’t be as simple as demolishing the dam and trying to put everything back the way it was before. China spent tens of billions of US dollars building this dam, and tearing it down would surely be just as destructive as building it in the first place. Plus, the Three Gorges Dam was, at the time of its construction, an important piece in China’s plan to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

China relies heavily on coal for electricity generation, and the Three Gorges Dam was a huge effort to source more electricity from hydro, which is a renewable energy source. Cutting reliance on coal is important, but I think—and I’m sure you would agree—that China didn’t go about this in the best way with the Three Gorges Dam project.

No Face and self-destructive greed

We’ve already talked about the environmental implications of the Stink Spirit and Haku, but I can’t help but thinking of another character here. And honestly, what would a discussion of Spirited Away be without mentioning one of its most iconic characters: No Face.

No Face comes to the bathhouse after the Stink Spirit leaves. It’s been raining for a long time, and Chihiro sees him outside in the garden. She feels sorry for him, so she lets him in.

Now, just after No Face enters the bathhouse, Chihiro has to attend to a sick Haku, so she doesn’t really get to know anything about No Face. But No Face almost immediately starts wreaking havoc, offering the bathhouse staff huge amounts of gold nuggets for all the food they can bring him. In the process, he actually eats several staff members.

The bathhouse staff remain undeterred by this, and they keep bringing him food to get more gold. When Chihiro finally returns and tames No Face, all the gold turns into mud. The bathhouse staff were risking getting eaten alive for a kind of fool’s gold.

I thought of this when reading about the Three Gorges Dam because the No Face incident seems like the perfect metaphor for what happened in China. Some people see an opportunity for wealth and power, and even though it will cost others their lives, they decide to keep building, keep bringing more resources to feed the monster. We aren’t quite there yet, but what will happen when all the gold we get from projects like the Three Gorges Dam turn to mud, so to speak? Will it have been worth it?

Chihiro’s relationship with Haku

Before we wrap up our discussion, I want to go back to Chihiro’s relationship with Haku. Yes, Chihiro winds up saving Haku by remembering his name, but Haku actually helped Chihiro remember her name first.

In the beginning of the movie, just after Chihiro gets the bathhouse job and Yubaba gives her her new same, Sen, Haku reminds her of her real name and warns her never to forget it. Frightened, Chihiro confesses she had already forgotten her real name and thanks Haku for reminding her.

This is significant because of who Haku really is, the spirit of the Kohaku River. And whether you believe in kami or stink spirits or animism in general, there’s no denying that what we do to the natural world has consequences, and these consequences can be dire. Water is precious for its life-sustaining and purifying qualities, but when we pollute it, it can become a source of disease and destruction.

We see this with the Stink Spirit and No Face, but Haku shows us how water and nature in general give back to us. Chihiro only knows Haku’s real name because he saved her from drowning as a young girl. And Chihiro may have even forgotten her name if Haku hadn’t reminded her.

This is what the natural world does for us. It provides us with the resources we need to live, and it even helps us remember who we really are. As humans, it’s easy to forget our identities amid our grand aspirations and innovative new ideas, but nature brings us back down to earth, so to speak, reminding us of our place in the universe. In a way, it helps us to remember what makes us human to begin with.

In terms of climate change, Chihiro’s relationship with Haku shows us that if we care enough and try hard enough, we can save the things we love. We’ll need all the help we can get along the way, sure, but sometimes saving someone or something starts with remembering their name—who they are and who they’re supposed to be.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

That’s it for our discussion of Spirited Away. If you like what you heard today and want to learn more, visit our website at storiesforearth.com for more episodes, articles, and recommendations for further reading.

If you got real value from today’s show, please consider supporting us through Patreon so we can keep doing it. You can find us at patreon.com/storiesforearth.

Until next time, I’m Forrest Brown. Thanks for listening.

Recommendations

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Film: Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind from Hayao Miyazaki

Film: Princess Mononoke from Hayao Miyazaki

→ Buy the Blu Ray on Bookshop from $29.95 (affiliate)

Film: The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness from Mami Sunada

Article: “Animating child activism: Environmentalism and class politics in Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fox’s Fern Gully (1992)” by Michelle J. Smith and Elizabeth Parsons

Essay: “The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki: A Retrospective on Four Fantastical Worlds” by Isaac Yuen in Orion Magazine

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