Doctor Who, the looooong-running TV show I used to be obsessed with, was ecologically-minded from the start.
In the second story [broadcast from December 21, 1963] the Doctor (a Time Lord, from the planet Gallifrey, though we didn’t know that at the time) and his companions land on a planet that has had a nuclear war. The plot is driven by the need for the Doctor and his human fellow-travellers to get hold of pills to deal with the radiation. In the truly anvilicious second season story Planet of Giants a shrunken Doctor et al. are menaced by a thinly-veiled DDT pesticide.
Most people who know about these things (older than me) would say the single most “eco-aware” Doctor Who story came 10 years later, at the height of the “Limits to Growth/Blueprint for Survival” wave of eco-concern. They’d point to Doctor Who and the Green Death, where the Doctor and his companion battle an Evil Multinational that is polluting Wales. It is also anvilicious (1).
Other candidates for most eco-story exist. Doctor Who and the Invasion of the Dinosaurs (eco-nuts in the British Establishment have a time machine and they… oh, never mind). Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom (a rip-off of The Thing, involving plants wanting to do to Earth what Europeans did to the New World). And on and on.
But, upon reading some pages in the middle of the new book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, I’ve decided the most eco-Doctor Who story of all time is…
drum roll please…
wait for it…
Logopolis, the 1981 story best remembered (cough cough) for being the last Tom Baker story and the first Tegan story.
Never mind this is the one in which large chunks of the Universe get obliterated by the Doctor’s evil twin “the Master.” No, this is the one where it turns out that the heat death of the universe has already happened and is only being kept at bay by some clever mathematics (“entropy, entropy, they’ve all get it entropy”…). To quote from Wikipedia
The Monitor quickly explains that their calculations were used to power Charged Vacuum Emboitments (CVEs) which were used to funnel off excess entropy from this universe to prevent its approaching heat death; without the CVEs, entropy is taking over. The Monitor urges the Doctor to use their program to create a fully stable CVE, before he disintegrates.
And basically, the same is going on on planet Earth, if not in reality, then at least in what passes as ‘reality’ in the climate game. Rather than cope with the need for a) a sharp reduction in rich nations’ emissions and b) allowing poor nations to have a carbon budget for their growth, the rich countries (especially the EU, for reasons Malm and Carton go into), allowed themselves to believe that you could overshoot a temperature target (2 degrees, and more latterly 1.5) and then use as-yet-not-invented technologies to come back down. And to give all this the patina of respectability (you know, graphs, footnotes, etc), you’d feed this into various “Integrated Assessment Models.”
IAM, CVE, CDR, OMFG, OECD, IEA, SMN, GHG. At least we knew the latter was pure fiction in a children’s TV show.
Fuck me, what a species we are.
Footnote
(1) I was at a prep school in southern England at the time, and had run out of Doctor Who books to read. I quite reasonably therefore read the excellent novelisation of it about 6 times on the trot. This may explain a few things about me. Dunno.
marchudson.net 
Doctor Who — sometimes portrayed as an adventurer-at-large — was more regularly portrayed as a thinker, an intellectual. He is, after all, a doctor. That intellectualism of the show was sometimes negligible, as in a number of the Dalek episodes. (“Ex-ter-min-ate!”) Despite the liberalism of the show, it was sometimes regressive in its handling of social issues until the end of the twentieth century came along. Then it became seamlessly progressive.
A lot of the criticism directed at the show has been that it’s too “British.” Well, James Bond is also British and nobody complains about that. Perhaps it’s because science fiction seen through a British lens acquires a more definite cultural patina than does spy fare.
Doctor Who searches the cosmos for trouble, righting persistent wrongs, and he rarely seems to “get the girl.” That, to my mind, is a bigger failing of the show than its Englishness. After all, if you can’t get poontang, what good are you?
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