Environment and Globalization
The climate of the city of Los Angeles, in A.D. 2019, is very different from today's. It is strongly implied that industrial pollution has adversely affected planet Earth's environment, i.e. global warming and global dimming. Real animals are rare in the Blade Runner world. In Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, animal extinction and human depopulation of the planet were consequent to the radioactive fallout of a nuclear war; Owls were the first species to become extinct. This ties in with Deckard's comment about Dr. Tyrell's artificial owl: "It must be expensive." (cf. post-apocalyptic science fiction)
Given the many Asian peoples populating Los Angeles in A.D. 2019, and the cityspeak dialect policeman Gaff speaks to the Blade Runner, Rick Deckard, clearly indicates that much cultural mixing has happened. Globalization also is reflected in the name of the Shimago-DomÃnguez Corporation, whose slogan proclaims: "Helping America into the New World". This indicates that a mass migration is occurring, as there is a status quo that people want to escape.
The cultural and religious mixing can also be verified at the scene where Deckard chases Zhora. At the streets, we can see people dressed traditionally as Jews, hare krishnas, as well as young boys dressed as punks.
Read more about this topic: Themes In Blade Runner
Famous quotes containing the words environment and and/or environment:
“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others—into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future.”
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