Under the Dome, Environmental Nostalgia, and the Power of Structure

Under the Dome, Environmental Nostalgia, and the Power of Structure

Chai amplifies this trope with images of a child staring outside and the words of her daughter asking, “Mama, why do you keep me shut inside?” As Diana S. Powers explains in aJournal of Public Health review, “Each morning she consults the air quality index to decide if the air is clean enough to take her daughter outdoors, and about half the time it isn’t” (98). According to Chai, all her research this year “is to answer the questions her daughter will ask her in the future. What is smog? Where does it come from? What can we do with it?”

These three questions provide the organizational structure for Chai’s documentary, but they also reinforce the environmental nostalgia underpinning its rhetoric. Chai answers these three questions for her child, highlighting how the problem that darkened China’s urban skyline can be solved. But Chai also seeks answers, so she and her daughter can go outside and enjoy clean air and natural wonders Chai enjoyed as a child. Chai’s solutions draw on both individual and collective environmental nostalgia, since clearing the air will allow not only Chai and her daughter but also the large audience watching her lecture to see the blue skies and white clouds Chai remembers so fondly. 

To answer the first question, what is smog, Chai incorporates an animated video depicting how pollution affects humans, breaking down immune systems and sometimes causing cancer and heart attacks. Graphs illustrating increases in deaths caused by air pollution substantiate the cartoon’s claims. Although this segment is primarily evidence-based, it also recalls Chai’s daughter and the environmental nostalgia connected with her. Of the 500,000 deaths per year caused by air pollution, for example, infants and children are the most susceptible, Chai explains. To reinforce the emotional appeal a child’s welfare broaches, Chai spends time focused on how parents attempt to address the dangers children face when subjected to smog. She discredits arguments that children can cope better with smog if exposed to it with evidence from an American scientist showing clear evidence that children do not adapt to air pollution. Yet we still see children playing basketball outside on smoggy days. Chai shows a video of a woman with lung cancer, nodes blackened from inhaling coal dust, to illustrate the extensive damage caused by breathing such toxic air. 

Chai’s slideshow also documents evidence that smog produced by coal has polluted China’s cities since at least 1976, increasing lung cancer by 46.5%. But environmental nostalgia again adds weight to the data on display. Instead of only highlighting smog and its causes, Chai remembers spring breezes and sunshine, winter snows, nature, and the beauty of life as both memories and goals underpinning the Air Pollution Prevention plan of 2012 and the solutions broached in the documentary. The documentary emphasizes these goals by universalizing the causes of smog and illustrating how other cultures overcame it. For example, London’s great smog of 1952 killed 12,000 people but also led to the Coalition for Clean Air. By the 1960s, the UK had their smog problem under control. Developing countries like China and India face similar problems, Chai explains, but can solve them by enforcing environmental laws and moving away from coal and oil. Chai provides multiple images and videos to substantiate the lack of compliance with environmental rules by government-controlled heavy industries. 

These images also point to answers to Chai’s third question, what can we do about it, and the most effective motivation for implementing the answers: environmental nostalgia. The desire to enjoy nature rather than just watching it through the window again is broached as the chief reason for sustainable urbanization. And a video montage of solutions to environmental degradation is reinforced by nostalgic images of the greenery surrounding the Forbidden City. Experts who substantiated evidence for smog and its causes remember the clean cities of their past. We can return there by cutting pollutants, getting back to blue skies, they claim. Although Chai does note that the low carbon path can transform an economy and increase employment, as it did in the U.S. and the UK, environmental nostalgia serves as the most powerful reason to embrace the Environmental Protection Bureau and decrease fossil fuel use. As Chai explains, she will do whatever it takes to protect her child. Her daughter loves nature and animals but cannot enjoy them outdoors. Now she can only offer her a flowerpot and pet snail to assuage this need. For Chai, the rivers, skies, and land belong to them and must be protected.