SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!
SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!
Okay, with the warning out of the way, the twist in M. Night Shyamalan's film “The Happening” is that all the trees (or at the very least, all vegetation) in the Northeastern United States are releasing a poisonous gas because we humans have polluted the planet and the trees are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore.
Funny how this is happening here in the United States and not, say, oh, China [2] or India [3] (which, funnily enough, never signed the Kyoto Protocol [4], yet you don't hear the main stream media blasting them as much as they blast us for not signing---nor do you hear the main stream media blast the Clinton Administration for not getting it passed, but I digress).
It's even funnier when you realize we've cleaned up the environment tremendously since the 50s; our environment is cleaner now than it was back then (thank you Iron Eyes Cody [5]). There's even more trees now in New England than there were a century ago [6].
Sheesh!
Besides, I would think trees would love the dramatic increase in CO levels---CO is what they breath, afterall, and they would be thanking us, not killing us.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0949731/
[2] http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0319/p09s01-coop.html
[3] http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12919
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol