I had been wondering what Paramount Pictures could be thinking in its choice to spend $125 million on Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, with Russell Crowe in the title role. If Hollywood invests that much money in a film about a Biblical character, they’ve got to have something up their sleeve.

Now I think I know what that might be. The Hollywood Reporter quotes an unnamed source who attended a test screening and came away complaining about the film’s anachronistic focus on “modern-day problems like overpopulation and environmental degradation.” Ah hah. In other words, the story has been updated. The theme is God’s, or perhaps simply the planet’s, war on humans. And this time the devastating flood is a response less to moral than to environmental crimes — or that’s my guess, anyway.

The film is out March 28, and that’s almost right on time because next week we’re looking forward to the release of the Discovery Institute documentary The War on Humans accompanied by Wesley Smith’s e-book of the same name.

Fantasies about how the Earth strikes back at humanity for overpopulating our world and degrading the environment are great favorites with the folks that Wesley writes about in the book and reports about in his National Review blog, “Human Exceptionalism.”

As he says in The War on Humans, they relish the prospect of the “profound ills to fall upon the human race as a matter of the Earth’s self-defense.” More:

Most notoriously, University of Texas evolutionary biology professor Eric R. Pianka was accused of yearning for an ebola or similar viral pandemic with a 90% kill rate to cure human overpopulation. Pianka denied the charge, claiming he actually predicted that potential catastrophe, rather than hoping for it to come to pass. Since the speech was only partially recorded, we will probably never know whether he hoped for human near-extermination or merely warned that it was coming.

Yet, even in the published version of Pianka’s speech, he clearly advocates the deconstruction of modern civilization (my emphasis):

Our economic system based on continual growth must be replaced by a sustainable system where each of us leaves the planet in the same condition that it was in before we were born. This will require many fewer of us and much less extravagant lifestyles. We won’t be able to move around so freely (airplanes will become a thing of the past) and we will have to go back to walking and riding horses. In addition, humans will have to be more spread out, living without big cities. Before it is all over, we are going to have to limit our own reproduction, un-invent money, control human greed, revert back to trade and barter, and grow our own crops, among other things.

Again, shades of The Day the Earth Stood Still: Pianka’s anti-technology advocacy would cause billions of human casualties.

Aronofsky has previously said:

I think it’s really timely because it’s about environmental apocalypse which is the biggest theme, for me, right now for what’s going on on this planet. So I think it’s got these big, big themes that connect with us. Noah was the first environmentalist.

An “environmental apocalypse” with humanity all but wiped out because of “what’s going on on this planet.” Noah is the “first environmentalist.” There you go.

The documentary premieres online, and the e-book goes on sale, on February 17. Find the trailer below, and the Noah trailer — which also admittedly looks pretty cool — immediately below that.

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