Soylent Green, Grim but Relevant

https://news.asu.edu/20220411-global-engagement-did-1973-movie-soylent-green-get-2022-right 

Soylent Green is a classic dystopian film set in the then-futuristic world of 2022 New York City—a place overcome by pollution, climate change, food shortages, and extreme wealth inequality. Now that we’re sitting in 2025, it’s easy to look back and say, “Well, none of that really happened.” True, we are not being fed human wafers, and the world didn’t collapse in quite the way the movie predicted. But brushing it off as an outdated or over-the-top would be missing the point. The movie still lingers in our cultural memory because the anxieties it tapped into are very real—and they are still with us.

Take wealth inequality and overpopulation. The film paints a society where the elite live in luxury, while the masses fight over crumbs—literally. Today, billionaires are racing to space while entire communities lack clean water or access to decent housing. Sure, we haven’t reached Soylent Green levels of collapse, but the gap between rich and poor is widening, and that’s not science fiction. There is data:

https://public.tableau.com/views/Averagewealthbywealthgroup1983-2019/Dashboard1?:language=en-US&:sid=&:redirect=auth&:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link

Then there’s climate change. In Soylent Green, Earth is dying, the oceans are barren, the temperature unbearable, and nature has all but vanished. One of the most emotional scenes is when Sol Roth chooses assisted suicide and is treated to a final montage of what Earth once looked like—lush forests, open meadows, clean oceans, thriving wildlife. Thorn, the detective who finds him, is overwhelmed with emotion; it’s the first time he’s ever seen such beauty, only ever hearing about it.

This scene really resonated with me. It reminded me of early 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, when people started worrying about how young children would grow up in a world suddenly stripped of “normal.” Would they ever know life without masks, without fear of illness? Would they learn how to socialize, how to play outside, how to be kids? Now, years later, much of that fear has faded—but not completely. People are still more alert to outbreaks, masks are commonplace, and we’re more conscious of how fragile our systems really are. We have become, in some ways, like Thorn—learning to appreciate a version of life we didn't realize we were losing.

https://avaada.com/7-secrets-about-causes-of-climate-change/ 

That brings us to another central part of Soylent Green---the government and food systems. In the movie, a massive corporation and the government work hand in hand to hide the horrifying truth: the miracle food feeding the public is made from people. The most chilling part is not the revelation itself—it is the lack of reaction from the public in the final scene. There’s no mass hysteria, no uprising. Just quiet resignation. It suggests that if a society becomes desperate enough, if things are bad enough for long enough, even the unthinkable can become routine. Normalized. That message feels especially relevant today. We are bombarded by horrific news daily—wars, humanitarian crises, environmental disasters—and barely blink. Desensitization is real. 

Soylent Green's warning remains powerful: when survival is the only thing left, what are we willing to accept? What do we risk losing—not just physically, but morally? Soylent Green isn’t “realistic” in a literal sense. But it’s not meant to be. It’s a metaphor, a cautionary tale. And nearly 50 years later, it still remains relevant.