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.
Jim is Visiting Gresham Professor in the History of Science.
He is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Sussex and specialises in Victorian natural history and the modern genetics and has presented programmes for BBC Radio 4.
Professor Endersby's lecture series are as follows:
2020/21 Darwin's Descent: Monkeys, Orchids and Myths
2019/20 Utopian Gardens
All lectures by the Visiting Professor in the History of Science can be accessed here.
