Columns In this Climate
‘Star Trek’ Failed to Reckon with Our Greatest Threat: Climate Change
Humanity appears to have succeeded at solving the climate crisis and eliminating capitalism. But how? And at what cost?
This is In This Climate , a column by Amy Brady on climate change and childhood nostalgia.
I don’t remember the moment I fell in love with the man I’d eventually marry, but I do remember the first time he made me laugh. It was the night I met him. Over cheap beers at a dive bar in Kansas City, he told me, “I dance like I’ve just been taken hostage.” I laughed so hard I knocked over my drink.
We fell for each other quickly, but we didn’t marry until seven years later; each of us had graduate school to complete and careers to jumpstart. But we began talking about our future together early on. Neither of us dreamed of big houses or big cars. We loved words and music and theater and art. As long as our lives had those things in it, we told each other, then we would be happy. We also discussed the possibility of having children, but were always on the fence about it.
“I could be a parent if you wanted me to be,” he told me in the rare moments when the subject came up.
“Same,” I always said back. Since neither of us seemed too keen about the prospect, we never felt compelled to think much more about it.
When we finally married in 2012, I had just started writing my doctoral dissertation on government-funded art. A year later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change committee began to read, my heart started pounding so hard I could feel it in my skull. My vision alternately blurred and cleared as I imagined scenes of heat and fire and flooding conjured by the report. The baked planet I was envisioning looked like something out of a science-fiction movie. But the visions weren’t make -believe—they were real possibilities predicted by some of the world’s best scientists.
Later that night, I told my husband about what I’d read. It introduced a new dimension to the question of starting a family; a conversation that continued as the months that followed brought even more devastating news reports about climate change: The oceans were acidifying at unprecedented rates, and the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere had just surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. Such news led, finally, to a straightforward decision: We would not be bringing kids into the world. How could we?
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I don’t remember the first time I saw Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS), but I do remember the first time I saw my favorite episode, “Balance of Terror.” I was ten years old. Dad and I sat side-by-side on the couch, a Bud Light in his hand, a glass of apple juice in mine. We spent most of our Saturday afternoons watching the series in syndication. My dad had been a fan since he himself was ten, and I was happy to accept the fandom he passed on to me. The show was corny as hell, even by my ten-year-old standards, but its vivid characters and imaginative planetary landscapes tugged at the dormant sci-fi fan within me and yanked it into being.
Such news led, finally, to a straightforward decision: We would not be bringing kids into the world. How could we? This particular episode followed a single battle between a war-hungry dictator of a race called the Romulans and James T. Kirk, the twinkly eyed human captain of the starship Enterprise. The episode marked the first time anyone on the Enterprise had seen a Romulan , a humanoid being resembling the Enterprise’s Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock: Both had pointy ears, arched eyebrows, and short black hair cut into the shape of a bowl.
The episode featured the characteristic chintz of a 1960s-era science-fiction battle: Fountains of bright sparks and smoke spewed in the background while actors threw themselves, arms first, to somewhere just off camera to suggest a torpedo’s impact. But it also frankly addressed war-time bigotry as, one by one, the crew turned against the show’s most beloved character. Unnerved by Spock’s resemblance to the Romulan dictator, the crew grew suspicious of their shipmate and hinted that Spock might be an enemy spy. He wasn’t, of course, and to drive the point home, the episode concluded with Spock rescuing his most outspoken opponent from a poison-filled room and certain death.
The series was often on the nose, but its progressive depiction of racial tensions stood in stark contrast to the era’s other popular TV shows—like The Lone Ranger , which featured a Native American sidekick named “Tonto” (“ stupid” or “fool” in Spanish)—which frequently relied on stereotypes. ( Star Trek also relied on stereotypes, but would occasionally challenge some of them as well .) Such moral directness appealed to my dad, who clicked off the television when the episode ended and asked me if I’d learned anything. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I know it had something to do with not judging people by how they looked. Dad nodded, satisfied, his parental duty done for the day. In his stoic, Midwestern way, he made it clear that bigotry was wrong—a moral imperative that I like to think I would have passed on to my own children had I decided to have them.
From my earliest viewings, the show exerted an enormous influence on me. When I got my first cat, I named him Spock. A year later I got a second cat (who didn’t like the first one much) and named him McCoy after TOS’s wry doctor, whose comically uneven relationship with Spock peaked with something like begrudging tolerance. But more significantly, the show—and its even stronger successor, Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)— shaped how I saw and responded to the world. Its spirit of exploration, collaboration, and hope left me with a deep-set optimism and a desire to strive for equality, even when everyone I knew—myself included—sometimes fell short of that ideal.
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I’ve revisited both series several times over the years, and watching them usually elicits a comforting sense of nostalgia. But as news about climate change continues to color everything in my life—including my relationship with favorite television shows—a recent re-watch left me feeling unsettled. I still marveled at Star Trek ’s utopian universe, and especially at the idea of a planetary federation guided by the tenets of socialism and ecological balance. But for the first time, I wondered why none of the characters ever reference a history fraught with struggle to achieve such things. Humanity appears to have succeeded at solving the climate crisis and eliminating capitalism. But how? And at what cost?
To be fair, TOS premiered in 1966, when the news portrayed nuclear war as the planet’s biggest threat. And TNG premiered in 1987, a year before Dr. James Hansen gave his televised congressional testimony about the threat of greenhouse gasses—a watershed moment that significantly raised public awareness of global warming. What’s more , TNG aired its final episode on May 23, 1994, two full decades before the first People’s Climate March. During the 1990s, if the mainstream media covered environmental issues at all, they focused on pollution in general and the hole in the ozone layer—not climate change. It just didn’t seem to be a big deal yet.
The unfortunate result is that the franchise has aged badly, in a way that’s harder to forgive than mediocre 60s special effects. Its characters, who live in the 23 rd and 24 th centuries, are technically descendants of people who must have lived through hell—and it’s distracting that no one on the show seems to remember that. The franchise’s fourth movie, The Voyage Home (released in 1986 and featuring TOS’ cast), hints that time travel may have had something to do with averting catastrophic climate change: Kirk and his crew travel back to the late twentieth century to save humpback whales from extinction. Perhaps they were able to travel in time to fix an even larger crisis? But neither in this movie nor any of the others does anyone seem to harbor memories of just how bad the climate crisis got on twenty-first century Earth, a time in which our planet is on literal fire in some areas and flooded to the brim in others.
It’s not that Star Trek never addressed the environment at all. It occasionally did through allegory. In the third season of TOS, an episode called “The Mark of Gideon” explored the problems of overpopulation. In the seventh season of TNG, the “Force of Nature” reveals that warp drive propulsion systems found on all starships—an analogue to our fossil fuels—were ripping holes in the fabric of space. The episode even features a scientist presenting the Enterprise crew with scientific models that could predict the degree of damage that humans and other starship-flying races would inflict on the natural world if they didn’t curb their warp-drive use. Both are entertaining allegories, but allegory isn’t the same as world building. An allegorical episode is a one-off, a fleeting acknowledgment of a contemporary problem that the characters will never have to consider again during the arc of the series. Instead, we need stories that weave climate issues into the very fabric of the world the characters inhabit, so that they become everyday concerns.
Stories like that might remind viewers how catastrophically—and how quickly—climate change has altered the planet. I am often stunned by the warp-drive speed at which we entered the climate crisis. More carbon has been spewed into the atmosphere in the last thirty years than in all of human history, causing the planet to warm at a faster rate than many scientists predicted. Put another way: Earth’s climate was still stable when my dad was watching TOS for the first time. Things went haywire in a single generation.
Instead, we need stories that weave climate issues into the very fabric of the world the characters inhabit, so that they become everyday concerns. And we may never correct course. Even if we halt all carbon emissions today, Earth’s feedback loops will continue to heat the planet, raising global temperatures close to—if not past—the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius. What happens after that point is hard to predict, but if the fires in Australia, the floods in Indonesia, and the hurricanes that ravage the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico are any indication , things could get very, very bad .
Star Trek was optimistic because its creator, Gene Roddenberry, had the luxury of optimism—climate change was only a distant possibility in the 1960s. But in 2020, even the title “The Next Generation” sounds depressingly naïve.
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I don’t remember my sister telling me outright that she worries about how climate change will shape her children’s future. But I sense her unease, telegraphed through dark offhand comments, almost every time we talk. The last time I saw her was over Christmas . We had just finished dinner at our dad’s house, and her kids, ages one through ten, were playing in a back bedroom. We opened a bottle of cheap Kansas wine I’d found in the garage and brought the bottle and a couple of glasses to the living room. As I poured, I asked what she thought her kids would study in college––I guessed the sciences (they’re so curious!), but maybe art. My sister just stared at the bubbles in her glass.
“If they make it to college,” she said. Startled, I asked what she meant. She gave me a hard look. “Things are kind of a mess out there.” She made a circling motion with her free hand. “Not just people. The whole planet is screwed up.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not really.”
Experts have documented the phenomenon “psychic legacies” in the descendants of those who lived through slavery, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, and the Second Sino-Japanese War. Such legacies, writes Dr. Molly S. Castelloe Ph.D. in Psychology Today , “are often passed on through unconscious cues or affective messages that flow between adult and child. Sometimes anxiety falls from one generation to the next through stories told.” Some researchers argue that climate change will result not only in psychic legacies but an entirely new form of trauma , one that doesn’t just induce psychological pathologies but pervades every aspect of our lives. This is one of innumerable reasons why more and more people—including my spouse and me—have decided not to have children. The next generation will inherit not only a broken Earth but a host of psychological wounds that will be passed on for decades to come.
According to a 2017 report issued by the American Psychological Association, climate change has already increased instances of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, general anxiety, and suicidal ideation among the general public; statistics are higher among those who’ve been directly impacted by climate-related disasters. Organizations like the Good Grief Network have formed to help. This particular organization offers a ten-step program for building resilience to despair and eco-anxiety. “Does species extinction or climate change keep you up at night?” asks the Network’s founders on their website.
That’s one way to put it.
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Last year, I made my husband watch an episode of Star Trek for the first time. It was the pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , where we are introduced to the character of Quark, a Ferengi barkeep. I had already warned him that the Ferengi can be read as a collection of anti-Semitic Jewish stereotypes (yet another aspect of the franchise that didn’t age well), but the makeup on the actor who played Quark—outlandishly large ears, tiny pointed teeth—sent him into a fit of laughter. “No,” he said, while catching his breath and pointing at the screen. “I am not watching that.”
We didn’t finish the episode, but he did join me in watching one of the franchise’s latest spin offs, Star Trek: Discovery, which premiered on September 19, 2017. Set approximately ten years before TOS, Discovery , which is poised to start its third season this year, continues the show’s tradition of progressive storytelling. Two of its leads are queer men, and two others are women of color. The series has already addressed the devastation of war and bigotry. But surprisingly absent is any commentary—allegorical or otherwise—on climate change.
Unlike its predecessors, Discovery was created at a time when climate change is a part of public discussion in the media and on political debate stages. And while war remains a painful reality for many people around the planet (including Americans), climate change is no less a threat. I still love the Star Trek franchise dearly , but this oversight verges on irresponsibility. Science fiction—with its focus on the future—provides space for imagining a more socially and ecologically just world. And in an age of climate change, when humanity is facing its largest existential threat ever—a threat perpetuated by capitalistic greed and distributed unevenly along lines of race and class—conversations about how we got to such a state, and how we will get through it, are vital.
I won’t be passing on my memories to biological children, but I often think of the pain and trauma that the next generation will inherit. It won’t be the stuff of science fiction. But I wish it were.
