page_title: Human uses of living things
section_title: In literature and film
hierarchical_section_title: Human uses of living things / Symbolic uses / In literature and film
caption_attribution_description: Illustration from a collection of short stories Just so stories (c1912) Garden City, NY&#160;: Garden City Pub. Co.
context_page_description: Human uses of living things, including animals plants, fungi, and microbes, take many forms, both practical, such as the production of food and clothing, and symbolic, as in art, mythology, and religion. The skills and practices involved are transmitted by human culture through social learning.
  Plants provide the greater part of the food for people and their domestic animals: much of human culture and civilisation came into being through agriculture. While many plants have been used for food, a small number of staple crops including wheat, rice, and maize provide most of the food in the world today. In turn, animals provide much of the meat eaten by the human population, whether farmed or hunted, and until the arrival of mechanised transport, terrestrial mammals provided a large part of the power used for work and transport. A variety of living things serve as models in biological research, such as in genetics, and in drug testing. Until the 19th century, plants yielded most of the medicinal drugs in common use, as described in the 1st century by Dioscorides. Plants are the source of many psychoactive drugs, some such as coca known to have been used for thousands of years.
context_section_description: Both animals and plants appear in literature and film.
  Animals as varied as bees, beetles, mice, foxes, crocodiles and elephants play a wide variety of roles in literature and film.
  A genre of films has been based on oversized insects, including the pioneering 1954 Them!, featuring giant ants mutated by radiation, and the 1957 The Deadly Mantis.
  Birds have occasionally featured in film, as in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 The Birds, loosely based on Daphne du Maurier's story of the same name, which tells the tale of sudden attacks on people by violent flocks of birds.  Ken Loach's admired 1969 Kes, based on Barry Hines's 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, tells a story of a boy coming of age by training a kestrel. Parasitoids have inspired science fiction authors and screenwriters to create disgusting and terrifying parasitic alien species that kill their human hosts, such as in Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien. 
  Plants too, both real and invented, play many roles in literature and film. Plants' roles may be evil, as with the triffids, carnivorous plants with a whip-like poisonous sting as well as mobility provided by three foot-like appendages, from John Wyndham's 1951 science fiction novel The Day of the Triffids, and subsequent adaptations for film and radio. J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world Middle-earth features many named kinds of plant, including the healing herb athelas the yellow star-flower elanor which grows in special places such as Cerin Amroth in Lothlórien, and the tall mallorn tree of the elves. Tolkien names several individual trees of significance in the narrative, including the Party Tree in the Shire with its happy associations, and the malevolent Old Man Willow in the Old Forest.
  Trees feature in many of Ursula K. Le Guin's books, including the forest world of Athshe and the Immanent Grove on Roke in the Earthsea series, to such an extent that in her introduction to her collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters, she admits to "a certain obsession with trees" and describes herself as "the most arboreal science fiction writer". James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar features a giant tree named Hometree, the sacred gathering place of the humanoid Na'vi tribe; the interconnected tree, tribe and planet are threatened by mining: the tribe and the film's hero fight to save them. Trees are common subjects in poetry, including Joyce Kilmer's 1913 lyric poem named "Trees". Flowers, similarly, are the subjects of many poems by poets such as William Blake, Robert Frost, and Rabindranath Tagore.
  The bacterial disease tuberculosis played a role in culture, associated for some reason with artistic creativity. It was known as "the romantic disease". Many artistic figures including the poet John Keats, the composer Frederic Chopin and the artist Edvard Munch either had the disease or were close to others who did. Tuberculosis played prominent and recurring roles in diverse fields. These included literature, as in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, set in a sanatorium; in music, as in Van Morrison's song "T.B. Sheets"; in opera, as in Puccini's La bohème and Verdi's La Traviata; in art, as in Monet's painting of his first wife Camille on her deathbed; and in film, such as the 1945 The Bells of St. Mary's starring Ingrid Bergman as a nun with tuberculosis.
caption: "How the elephant got his trunk" in Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, 1902. Below the main image, a parade of animals go two by two into Noah's ark.
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