Escape Is Not An Option

I heard an interview on the commute in this morning with Jason Mark, editor of the environmental quarterly Earth Island Journal, about his 12/9/14 op ed in the New York Times entitled What ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Snowpiercer’ Got Wrong.

The op ed piece is here.

The gist of the article and the interview is that it is dangerous to bank on an escape from our environmental misdeeds a la worm holes or moon/mars colonies and that Hollyweird movies may be enabling the escape idea with movies like Interstellar. 

Take in this paragraph from the op ed:

Movies, of course, are based on the promise of escape. Illusions are fun, until they slide into delusion. A scant 536 people have slipped the surly bonds of Earth. Which means we won’t squish the human race through a wormhole anytime soon, nor establish a colony out among the stars for anyone but a lucky, stranded few. Escape is not an option, at least not in a time frame relevant to our current environmental predicament.

Mr. Mark said in the radio interview: “culture is powerful,” intimating that these cli-fi movies could be doing harm to our ultimate plan for dealing with our climate if we start to believe these movies and think we can escape to Mars.

Now go a little bit deeper, where it is colder and darker. At bottom, in the Heideggarian sense of the term, what this all boils down to is salvation. Culture is indeed powerful and the majority of the culture promises salvation, knows how to get it, knows you need it, knows you want it…salvation. Be it from a dystopic earth or a polar ice cap melted water world or from mortality itself, salvation can be yours.

But, in the words of Mark, “escape is not an option.”

There is no salvation, no escape from your own most possibility that cannot be outstripped.  

What if our powerful culture recognized this truth and lived accordingly, authentically?

Maybe that would be heaven on earth.