When Charlton Heston died the other week, I paid respects by downloading his dystopian trilogy: Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971), and Soylent Green (1973). I hadn't seen them since the 80s, when they were mainstays of weekend programming on Boson's UHF stations. I was curious how they'd look through adult eyes, and wondered if they passed the sci-fi test of holding any precise predictive power.

Of the three, the one that feels the most contemporary is Soylent Green, even if The Omega Man was just remade as a Will Smith vehicle (I Am Legend). Everybody knows that Soylent Green "is people," but more interesting and less commented on is why the U.S. government in 2022 is making the green Cheeze-It-looking wafers in the first place. The reason is climate change. In the film's opening scene, New York City detective Robert Thorn (Heston) listens to his elderly roommate Sol (Edward G. Robinson) kvetch about life in 2022. "How can anything survive in a climate like this?" spits Robinson. "A heat-wave all year long. A greenhouse effect. Everything burning up."

Midway through the film, there are food riots exactly like the ones that erupted from Haiti to Indonesia a week after Heston's death. Various factors, climate change high among them, have in the past year doubled the price of some staple grains. But he echoes of Soylent Green aren't just general: In the film, riot cops are attacked during the food riots; two days ago in Haiti, a UN peacekeeper was shot and killed for his ration. It was the first killing in the four-year history of the UN's current mission in Haiti.

A high-profile Soylent Green scenario was laid out in careful detail in a 2002 World Bank study of current demographic and environmental trend lines, "Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World." The report warned that unless the global economy switched tracks onto a more sustainable path—and fast—the results would be social and environmental chaos during the current generation, with a return to scarcity the defining feature of this dystopia. Five years later the fundamental changes called for in the World Bank report seem as distant as ever, with the Soylent Green reality it warned of coming rapidly into focus.

Charlston Heston was a legendary force in film for a lot of reasons. Now we know he had impeccable timing and a sense for the dramatic even in death. Here's hoping our own Soylent Green, if it comes to that, will at least be made out of potatoes.

—Alexander Zaitchik