Hollywood Utopia

152 Hollywood Utopia
produces the richness, beauty, integrity and dynamic stability of (its) component
parts’ (Attfield and Belsey 1994: 22-6).
Marshall McLuhan went even further by connecting this planetary evocation of
nature to the birth of ecology and observed:
When Sputnik (1957) went around the planet, the planet became programmable
content, and thus became an art form. Ecology was born, and Nature was obsolesced
(cited in McKibben 1990: 80).
Bill McKibben in his best-seller The End of Nature coincidentally reiterates
McLuhan’s idea and further suggests that there is ‘no such thing as nature
anymore’. We have ‘killed off nature - that world entirely independent of us which
was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society’
(McKibben 1990: 86-9).
Human nature could finally be scientifically visually codified and recognised as part
of a planetary eco-system. Some idealistically suggest that this realisation will
become as revolutionary, in its intellectual effects, as previous revolutions which
continue to promote ‘outdated’ concepts, especially endless material growth and
destructive nationalism. This form of ‘interplanetary ecological holism’, clearly
signalled in the closure of The Incredible Shrinking Man, might eventually teach
humans their symbiotic relationship with all other sentient beings, together with
the stewardship demands of conservation and protection. Particularly for
environmentalists,
the NASA photographs represented not just a view of the world but a world view, one
in which humanity was destined to destroy the earth and itself unless it mended its
ecologically unsustainable ways and finds common ground for working and living
together on this frail and finite planet. The environmentalists attempted a revision(ing)
of the earth, appropriating the image from outer space as a means for
changing the way people visualised the planet and thus conceptualised their relationship
with it
(Bryant 1995: 44). 9
William Bryant, however, regards these ‘essentialist’ visions and sentiments as
‘naive idealism’, which may simply be misplaced. Bryant in ‘The Re-vision of
Planet Earth: Space Flight and Environmentalism in Postmodern America’
(re)constructs an oppositional position to this apparently ‘progressive vision’,
which tries to appropriate the beautiful blue photo-image of our planet to endorse
continuous exploration and the conquering of nature ‘in an evolutionary journey