Brook Wilensky-Lanford interviews Ari Handel, screen writer for the movie, Noah, on the environmental issues that some are calling eco-whacko, at Religion Dispatches. On Noah being an “environmental film”:
Well different pieces of it came about at different times. When we first sat down with the text, you known God asks Noah to get two of every animal onto the Ark, and we said, well that’s a conservationist notion. He didn’t say every cute animal, or anything, but every single animal has value. To God. And that was appealing to us, because we believe that. There’s a line in the movie, “if any of this is destroyed, then a little piece of creation would be lost forever.” It’s a deep value created explicitly in the text.
You know we didn’t make Noah a vegetarian because we wanted to add that “message.” It says in Genesis that you are allowed to eat green plants, and that’s it, and then after the flood suddenly now you are allowed to eat meat.
A real reading of Genesis is toward stewardship. In the Garden of Eden, God says he gives man the earth to “tend and keep it,” so to not have those ideas in there…it’s like a weird editing job. We believe those things and we are oriented that way, but it’s not like it’s artificially grafted onto the story.
Read more here.
More on the film on Episcopal Café Daily Episcopalian here.