Good Gardeners of Planet Earth? The Vision of Silent Running (1972)

Looking at the 1972 film 'Silent Running' which imagined gardens in space, this lecture asks 'Are humans fit to be gardeners of this planet?'. A lecture by Jim Endersby, Visiting Professor of the History of Science 23 March 2020 6:00pm UK Time https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-an... Are humans fit to be gardeners of this planet? Today’s biotechnology companies promote themselves in distinctly utopian ways, but increasing numbers of people find their claims difficult to reconcile with the daily evidence of the damage that technologies like intensive agriculture have done to this planet. This lecture explores these notions through an examination of the film Silent Running (1972), which imagined gardens in space, in which the last remnants of Earth’s vegetation are preserved aboard gigantic spaceships.