Award-winning actor Charlton Heston passed away yesterday at the age of 84. From Ben Hur to Planet of the Apes, Heston was a Hollywood legend and an actor who could always be counted on to play larger-than-life characters.
Not only was he a great actor, but he was a tireless campaigner for human rights, from marching with Martin Luther King, Jr to campaigning for the rights of gun owners as president of the NRA.
Mitch Berg has a wonderful memorial to Heston’s life and career.
RIP
Hopefully, Heston’s death will provoke some discussion of his camp classic “Soylent Green”, made in 1972 and serving as a precursor to the global warming debate. The message of the film perfectly dispels the right-wing talking point that “global cooling” was a consensus position in the scientific community in the 1970′s just because a couple articles in Time and Newsweek mentioned the possibility. The reality is that the “greenhouse effect”, as discussed in “Soylent Green”, was the consensus position even in the early 1970s.