Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar presents a serious warning to humanity, and far from simply being a visual masterpiece of science fiction, it raises critical questions about the relationship between society, agriculture and the environment. From the film’s bleak portrayal of humanity’s place in a tarnished near-future version of Earth to their ultimate escape from it, the film touches on topics such as industrial agriculture, overconsumption of resources, and their subsequent impact on society and the environment. Interstellar explores some of these problems in depth and plays them out to the extreme, while alluding to crises caused by industrial agriculture throughout history and extrapolating on those that continue to exist across the world. Most importantly, it presents an alarming and cautionary thought experiment as to how humanity in its current state risks a similar future of extinction should it not wake up and begin to take immediate measures.

Interstellar opens with a series of interviews describing the bleak state of the world, closely reminiscent of historical accounts of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s American midwest. Set in the very same region, the world has now become a sparsely populated, fully agrarian society and as the film progresses through the daily life of the film’s protagonist, former NASA engineer and pilot turned farmer Joe Cooper, the events bringing the world to this point become clearer. Due to a series of worldwide catastrophes coupled with a blight that continues to plague the global food supply, a resulting chaos and worldwide famine has dramatically changed the world, suddenly reducing its carrying capacity to an unsustainable degree (to the point where ideas such as induced intensification were simply no longer possible) and drawing sudden parallels to Malthusian predictions of the perils of overpopulation.

What is not explicitly described in Interstellar is how exactly the blight was able to obliterate so rapidly and steadily the entirety of the global agricultural sector. However, by examining the film’s subtle references to historical cases of agricultural devastation and the subsequent effects on society, it becomes clear that the primary culprit is industrial agriculture and the implementation of monoculture – the practice of planting a single variant of crop over large areas in order to maximize efficiency, yield and profit. This system has become the global standard for efficient crop cultivation and food production, however as suggested by the film it may be an ultimately unsustainable system.

Perhaps the most well-known example of the detrimental effects of monoculture is the Irish Potato Blight of 1840, where in an effort to feed the growing population of Ireland in the early 1800s, “lumper” potato clones were planted in mass as a solution for rising food demand. While initially successful, the lack of genetic diversity made the crops highly susceptible to disease and when the local environmental suddenly changed, this lack of variation allowed a particular pathogen to rapidly spread, devastating crops across the region. Similar to the events described in Interstellar, the resulting food shortage (in conjunction with other controversial factors) led to nation-wide famine and malnutrition, ultimately resulting in the death of one eighth of the population.

Another more recent example (with striking similarity to setting of Interstellar was the “Southern Corn Blight” of the US corn belt. What was originally an attempt to eliminate a “time-consuming, labor-intensive and economically expensive step” in the cultivation of maize crops inadvertently created a vulnerability to a particular fungus known as “ear rot”. Once again, the resulting lack of genetic variety combined with a particularly warm and humid climate allowed the pathogen to rapidly reproduce and ultimately decimate 15% of US corn in 1968. This created a huge economic ripple effect (US was exporting approximately 600 million bushels per year), and much like Interstellar forced the nation to heavily concentrate resources into agricultural recovery.

While not directly touched upon in the film, monoculture also contributes greatly to environmental degradation and in this sense the resulting societal impact can be seen as one of the many intersecting by-products of industrial agriculture. One example is the resulting ecological disruption through the destruction of habitat for farmland (in combination with the reduction of ecological diversity) reducing populations of particular species and eliminating natural predators while creating new habitats for pests to thrive and reproduce as “competitors for food and carriers of disease” [2]. Industrial agriculture attempted to solve this with pesticides which not only affected the health of humans and surrounding species (further eliminating natural predators) but also led to even greater problems, such as the “evolution of super-races immune to those insecticides” [2].

Another example of environmental degradation is the impact of monoculture on soil fertility through intensified cultivation and heavy use of chemical fertilizers, both of which threaten the continued viability of these crops by undermining the conditions necessary to sustain themselves (a clear example of the capitalist contradiction of nature). Chemical fertilizers contribute to soil, water and air pollution (which contribute to climate change and thus sudden change in environmental conditions required by crops), while depleting soil of nutrients and leaving topsoil vulnerable to erosion [4]. As referenced in Interstellar, this was seen in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s where wind erosion caused a series of dust storms, significantly hindering crop growth.

The film also subtly references “the excess and wastefulness of the 20th century” and overconsumption of resources as a major component in the continued problems with industrial agriculture. This can be seen through the disproportionately high consumption of food in the West in comparison with the underdeveloped and more densely populated regions of the world [1] and through energy overconsumption, pushing the world to seek alternatives such as ethanol (requiring exorbitant amounts of maize). Additionally, many industries depend on raw material for production (eg. wheat, maize, cotton, soy, palm oil, etc). Compounded by the nature of capitalist economy to maximize efficiency and surplus value [3], all of these components create intense competition and seriously strain the agricultural industry, driving the need for high-efficiency agricultural production and magnifying their impacts on society and the environment.

While the extremity of the events in Interstellar may appear unrealistic, the ideas are not exactly without merit. Under the current direction of industrial agriculture, many have begun to foresee imminent worldwide crop failures as a result of the intersecting combination of industrial agriculture and climate change; climate scientists predicting that this will begin by significantly affecting maize, rice, and wheat. Certain organizations have projected the possibility of a global economic collapse as soon as 2040 due to arising food shortages, with some even hypothesizing the world’s sixth mass extinction.

Ultimately, through examining historical cases of the perils of industrial agriculture and the continued impacts on the world today, the film presents an incredibly relevant thought experiment, and through extension an environmental and societal ultimatum. If the world doesn’t begin to promptly embrace long-term solutions to these issues whether through advanced farming techniques, ecological modernism, genetic engineering, green developmentalism or others, humanity may soon face chaos, tragedy, and possibly their own demise. As remarked in Interstellar, “we must reach far beyond our own lifespans – we must think not as an individual, but as a species”.

References

[1] Cafaro, P. J., Primack, R. B., & Zimdahl, R. L. (2006). The Fat of the Land: Linking American Food Overconsumption, Obesity, and Biodiversity Loss. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 19(6), 541-561. doi:10.1007/s10806-006-9008-7

[2] Carson, R. (1962). The Obligation to endure. (pp. 16-23) in Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin: New York

[3] Robbins, P. Hintz, J. & Moore, S. [Eds.] (2014). Political economy. (pp.98-118) In Environment and society: A critical introduction. Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford

[4] Savci, S. (2012). An Agricultural Pollutant: Chemical Fertilizer. International Journal of Environmental Science and Development, 73-80. doi:10.7763/ijesd.2012.v3.191