The Land in Crisis – William Bake COLUMN: Politicontiki – Phoebe Levin |

The Land in Crisis:

The Unsustainable Political System of The Land Before Time.

WilliAm bAKe (he/him) thinks he is ‘like George Orwell but cooler’

Art by PAige bentley

The Land Before Time, for those of you uninformed about this behemoth of a film franchise, is a series of films set around a fictional – and possibly post-apocalyptic (no, I will not elaborate) – universe in which dinosaurs possess sentience. The first film entails the main character – Littlefoot – going on a journey to the ‘Great Valley’ after being quite brutally orphaned. The rest of the franchise’s fifteen films are all based around Littlefoot, his friends, and the adventures they have in the Valley.

I, being the unemployed bum I am, unfortunately had the time to watch all these films (there’s also a TV series but my supplies of alcohol ran out). I would urge anybody considering doing this not to – there are far more enjoyable things to do with your life (i.e. going outside, touching grass, etc.).

What I found was that the entire political system of The Land Before Time (TLBT from this point onwards) is constantly on the edge of collapse, and in need of desperate reform.

Classifying the PolitiCal system

For the ideology aficionados among us, I would describe the Valley’s political system as anarcho-soiokracy with nativist characteristics.

The system is anarchist as it is not organised around central leadership. Instead, the Valley of TLBT is governed by individual families (hence Soi - Greek for family, and Krata/okracy - Greek for power) who make decisions based entirely on their own interests. At times we do get a hint of some sort of broader state, for example briefly in the eighth film, The Big Freeze, where an elder dinosaur is seen teaching the children of the Valley collectively in what resembles a public education system.

The Valley also has an undercurrent of xenophobia and racism, with constant references made to the wall that protects and surrounds the Valley. Additionally, various racist remarks are made to other dinosaurs, such as the Tri-Horns (Triceratops) constantly telling their children to not play with dinosaurs of other species, or Littlefoot’s Mother telling him that the different species are supposed to keep to themselves. Hence, there are nativist characteristics.

ResPonding to CRisis

This system is also consistently unable to properly respond to any sort of crisis. The fact that the children of the Valley are the ones who are routinely solving the constant crises speaks volumes about the organisational structure and governance in place.

A perfect example of this can be seen in the third film The Time of the Great Giving. In it, the Valley’s waterfall is blocked and a water shortage takes place - a crisis that could be easily solved by sending out a team to find the bottleneck, unblock it and return. Instead, the entire film is spent with adults bickering and bursting into musical numbers about water usage and water rights, rather than solving the problem at hand. Eventually, it’s the kids who are the ones who have to solve the blockage and restore water, but not before a wildfire manages to pillage most of the Valley. While this fire is spreading through the Valley, disagreement about evacuation routes and muster points leads to the multiple families of the Valley being separated, leading to some of them almost dying.

This highlights one of the biggest problems with this system: no central governance means no central authority and no way to effectively coordinate and organise responses to crises. There are numerous examples throughout the series where adult inaction leads to their children having to solve problems, and where

these problems could’ve been overcome if they didn’t spend every film bickering.

In the fifth film, The Mysterious Island, plagues of locusts come to the Valley, depleting the usually plentiful resources. In response, the Tri-Horns adopt a straight up socialDarwinist approach, saying it’s “every herd for itself”. In the eighth film, when snow causes food shortages, it is the children who, while adults bicker about whose fault the snow is, are the ones who manage to discover hot springs and plants that ultimately solve the crisis.

a BRief ePilogue

The entirety of this political system is in serious need of a revamp and change. It will only take one crisis that can’t be solved by five children before the Valley faces devastation and societal collapse.

But how different is our political system really?

Constant climate strikes and protests organised by the youth in our country and globally remind us that it is in fact often the young who have to deal with the problems that should be solved by bickering adults. When one looks at our current government’s trajectory with continued climate inaction it feels perhaps we are not too far removed from the chaos of TLBT.

The entire third film’s conflict about water seems almost too similar to the ongoing debates about water usage in the MurrayDarling river system in the east. The rise of populism in Europe and America is similar to how the Tri-Horns seem to respond to every problem by adopting fascist tendencies. Even right now, with the current failure of the vaccine rollout, we see bickering between our politicians while people suffer.

We like to imagine, in our liberal democracy, that the politicians or adults of our society know what they are doing, that they are doing what’s right and what’s best to solve the crises of our time. But are they really? Or do they too just spend their entire time just bickering? Are we, too, just another land in crisis?