Huey, Dewey, Louie, and Lowell live on a massive space freighter circulating somewhere in our solar system. Huey, Dewey, and Louie are gardening droids, and Lowell is a frazzled botanist (Bruce Dern), tending the earth's vegetal heritage. A nuclear war has stripped the planet's surface of flora and now the remaining samples spin in orbit, waiting for the day when reforestation can begin. But then the corporate suits get involved, and they can't see the profit for the trees. The whiz behind many of 2001's effects, director Douglas Trumbull has fashioned a highly effective fable of a man-made Eden as mankind's last stand-of trees, along with bunnies and deer. Jettisoning his astronaut attire for the white robes of a nutty Noah, Lowell becomes a monster of his own making, defending the garden against bottom-line barbarians. Spaced-out but poetic, Silent Running professes a higher good that demands you take the lawn into your own hands.