The Happening

The Guardian newspaper, on June 24th 2008, has an article by Sue Hartley about her views on the film “The Happening” and its plot of a Mother Nature attack on humanity. It says,

In The Happening, nature strikes back at mankind by releasing a toxin from trees that causes people to commit suicide.

The Happening suggests, correctly, that vegetation can react to attack. For instance, there are some plants that protect themselves from herbivores trying to eat them by releasing volatile compounds to attract wasps - which then attack the herbivores.

However, these airborne signals don't go very far. For small plants, the furthest a signal can travel is 15 to 30 centimetres. From trees, it's perhaps 10 metres - but that's still not enough to provoke an epidemic.

People are very keen on the idea of some kind of unified force of nature, a "Gaia force" that keeps the world in balance; but there is no real evidence for this.

There is a tiny grain of scientific truth in The Happening, diluted by a massive amount of utter fantasy.

Sue Hartley is a professor of ecology at the University of Sussex.

This film is more propaganda by the climate change people who want to force you to love the planet as a god and worship it. They see people as a cancer on the earth and if Mother Nature kills a million here or there then good, it is just her way of keeping mankind in its place. They seem to love nature more than people.