Star Wars is a sci-fi fantasy movie series set in a galaxy not too far away.

The larger
overarching story is centered around the eternal struggle between two monastic orders that can
harness seemingly magical like powers thanks to biology: the Sith, who rule the Galactic Empire,
and the Jedi, who live in the perpetual counter-culture movement known as the Rebels. Most
assume that the Empire is evil due to the fact that most of their screen time is dedicated to the
organization’s comically villainous leaders. What we are not shown is the Empire serving its
purpose as a stable form of government that keeps normal civilians safe from the apparent
plethora of smugglers that exist in every dimly lit cantina. However the stark difference between
the Empire and the Rebels lies not in their allegorical WW II reenactment, but in their
environmental record.

The Rebels may talk big about how the force connects all living things like a complex
tapestry that we must protect, but they have yet to put their sermon into practice. All too often we
have seen Jedi knights cutting open tauntauns in order to stay warm or enlisting tribal ewoks -
armed only with spears- to go and fight highly trained soldiers carrying laser rifles. In the latest
movie in the series, The Last Jedi, we see a group of rebels led by the characters Fin and Rose
release a non-native species from a different planet into the local environment. This wasn’t the
byproduct of some cinematic explosion either; this act of eco-terrorism was done intentionally
because one of the protagonists did not want to see an animal caged up. They did not stop to
consider the fact that habitats near cities tend to be extremely degraded causing many species to
live on the precipice of extinction. To introduce a species that has no natural predators and
potentially carries a litany of diseases the locals have no defenses for is to sign a death warrant.

A second incidence of the rebels lacking any concern for the environment occurs later on
in the same movie. On an abandoned planet made of salt we find the impossible: life. High doses
of salt will draw all of the moisture out of a cell causing it to die of hypertension. Only bacteria
specially suited for the environment can survive, but only barely. Yet in the movie we see rabbits
frolicking among the wasteland otherwise devoid of all life. If these creatures evolved naturally,
we should see some other creatures living amongst them, yet they are alone. The only conclusion
we can draw as a viewer is that they are genetically modified organisms released into the
environment by the Rebels when they made their base there. You can’t even bring a genetically
modified goldfish into the state of California let alone release one into the wild because, much
like before, the act could cause irreversible damage to an ecosystem.

The Rebels are hypocrites. They claim that life needs to be protected right before they
gun down an endangered species. Chewbacca may have had a slight moral dilemma about eating
a porg right in front of its family, but never forget that Luke Skywalker drinks unpasteurized
space milk straight from the source which puts both him and the occupants of the island he lives
on at risk for space TB. Yes, the Empire once destroyed an entire planet, but they attempted to
make up for that loss in ecological diversity by building a new planet for things to live on. The
Empire has perfected cloning technology is it could very well be that they were able to
reintroduce all of the species they made extinct from biological samples they collected over time.
Who was the one to make all of those species go extinct again though? The Rebels.