The world is chaos. It always has been. Since the dawn of the natural world necessitated a hierarchy of survival, living things have been… well, fighting for survival. And what rises to meet chaos? Order. Intelligent life finds a way of navigating the perils of what disasters and predators might do to them. Be it by brunt action or philosophical negotiation, we learn to cope with the inexplicable and uncontrollable forces that be—what other choice do we have?
Our day-to-day in the dystopian future that is now is defined by living with chaos of all sorts: personal, political, but especially ecological. That is the truth ever-simmering in the background, between each natural disaster and rising temperature. The climate crisis is the definitional tragedy of our time, a great clock ticking in the proverbial universal corner. For those of us tuned into its taunting frequency, it bleeds into everything we think on and consume, even our pop culture—whether said culture is dealing with it directly or incidentally.
Yellowjackets is a show that invites this kind of deeper ecological read because it’s a show entrenched in the wilderness. The series, about to enter its third season, is a survivalist horror-drama about a team of New Jersey girls’ soccer players who survive a plane crash on their way to a championship. They don’t know exactly where they are, have no means of communication with the outside world, and have the outdooring skills of any suburban teenage kid, i.e. barely any. But survival kicks in, as is nature’s way, and they become resourceful. They find guns to hunt with, a cabin to make camp in, gather water and other food sources that keep them fed just enough to live another day.
But because this is a cable drama, of course there’s more going on here. In the tradition of Lost, the story is split between the past (the crash) and the future, where the survivors now contend with what happened to them in the wilderness those years ago. And it’s all set against the backdrop of a mysterious cult formed by some of the girls, and other possibly supernatural-tinged occurrences. Because survival for them meant a troop of desperate young women imposing meaning on the chaos they were forced to face. Cults and factions formed, interpersonal dramas and betrayals played out, and relationships formed whose tendrils still coil into their present, two decades later.
But beneath the genre undertones of Yellowjackets there is a notable commentary on humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Here, the wilderness is both a provider and a destroyer, a mirror of real-world ecological conflict. Through the characters’ struggles for survival, the show provides lessons on sustainability, community action, and the dangers of ignoring nature’s true purpose. The survivors face starvation, unrelenting (and surprise) winters, and arguments over dwindling resources, just as our real-world climate crisis threatens food security, natural disasters, and cultural and political divide. It’s a window into what happens when we give into the same urges as these girls—we wind up desperate, divided, and at nature’s mercy.
Yellowjackets and the Wilderness as Provider and Destroyer
In the beginning of the series, we watch the basics play out. The girls, bloodied and terrified, feel the panic of circumstance, but slowly shift into “let’s choose to live” mode. Leaders emerge, and not necessarily the leaders you’d expect. Team captain Jackie Taylor is more or less unhelpful in this circumstance without the preselected order of the high school caste system. Her best friend Shauna has an anger inside that presents itself fiercely and necessarily in the woods, where she takes initiate with skinning their food and making tough choices. The other girls like Taissa, Natalie, Lottie, Van, and Misty fall into their various roles, each with inherent skills that together make a strong-enough survivalist team.
For a time, the girls manage to eke out an existence in their new home. They hunt deer, forage berries, and use natural resources for warmth and shelter. In these quieter moments, nature feels benevolent, as if its offering them these means of life. It’s a dynamic recognizable to us in the real world. How our ability to survive as a species is contingent on our ability to harness and make use of natural resources.
But the same wilderness that sustains them is also their number one threat. Animals start to attack. A frigid winter encases them in the cabin they find buried near the lake. Food runs out and the threat of starvation looms. It’s a reminder that for as much as nature provides, it’s also, ultimately, an indifferent force. An encounter with a bear late in the first season embodies this. The bear arrives like a harbinger of death, but when it’s killed becomes their major food source.
It aligns with the existential threat we all face in the midst of climate collapse. Like the recent Los Angeles wildfires, which singed large swaths of the city and shadowed the rest in grief, or the uptick catastrophic floods, as the world grows increasingly unstable, we are forced to confront the consequences of our own inaction as a species. Just like the Yellowjackets, we are at nature’s mercy—we rely on it while ping-ponging between its extremes.
Survival, Scarcity, and Social Order
In the Yellowjackets wilderness, food scarcity is a daily threat, and in the absence of regular nutrition, social hierarchies continue to shift. Power struggles emerge over the crumbs left to fight for. Shauna becomes the team butcherer, a role of significance—whoever yields the knife wields influence. It’s a mirror of the real world, where resource location and the ability to excavate it dictates power.
Yellowjackets is perhaps best known to outsiders as “that cannibal show.” And cannibalism is indeed invited into the fold in season two with the death of Jackie. She freezes to death after a stubborn refusal to accept her powerlessness. The girls mean to cremate her, but a snowdrift swoops in and turns Jackie’s frozen body into a roast. It’s a shocking moment when the girls decide to indulge in her flesh, but it isn’t merely a moment of horror.
It shows what happens when the desperation to survive overrides morality. It’s not so dissimilar from deforestation, overfishing, and other measures we take to provide resources as a terrible cost. We are knowingly but also ignorantly assisting our own collapse, letting desperation dictate our scope of humanity.
The Rise of Ritualism
Yellowjackets isn’t just “that cannibalism show” but is also “that cult show”, an idea teased in the opening minutes of the first episode. We witness what appears to be a ritualistic ceremony, the survivors dressed in hides and furs and masks assembled from animal parts. They watch as another girl runs through the forest barefoot before falling into a trap made of sharpened twigs. Who is this girl? It remains a central mystery, although the pieces are coming together as the show moves forward.
We know that Lottie, the most mysterious of the survivors—a young woman from a wealthy family who suffers from schizophrenia—emerges as a major player in the cult. So much so that she takes it out of the wilderness into the real-world in the present day of the second season. But this idea of ritual, which Lottie invites by leaning into the magic of fate they keep encountering, starts getting weird fast. It’s as if they are mentally tapping into some power source they can’t explain. They use this divine headspace to rationalize their circumstances. The why of why they wound up there in the first place.
This is similar to our own human response to natural disaster. The way religion and “God’s plan” is used to explain away suffering. How conspiracy theories run rampant with their denial. It is hard to face down the reality of our ecological situation. It’s much easier to invite fate and purpose into the conversation. And this isn’t just a modern coping mechanism. Ancient civilizations performed human sacrifices to appease gods, hoping for healthy crop and rain.
Yellowjackets shows that these belief systems can provide structure in a landscape of terrifying wilderness. It’s a balm for the girls who need something to believe in. But it also permits its own kind of suffering as they turn on one another. Their cultish devotion starts to block more rational responses to their circumstances. Sound familiar?
The ritualism also paves way for an almost authoritarian level of control. Parts of the group become dependent on Lottie for guidance. But Lottie is just as likely grappling with her mental illness as she is receiving supernatural guidance. She doesn’t really know what’s going on, but leads as if she does. It’s similar to what we see in the news. There are inept politicians who exploit disasters for their own greed, downplaying the climate crises along the way. We live in our own kind of cult. A cult of personality similar to what Lottie leads, sure to invite a similar downfall.
Yellowjackets Gives Us Lessons for Survival
As much as these comparisons might stoke panic, they should also provide a form of relief. Entertainment can do more than just fill our time—it can be a resource for mapping and understanding the world we live in. There’s much to glean from Yellowjackets, both what to do and what not to do as we face our own ecological threats.
A big one is learning to respect nature’s balance. The survivors in Yellowjackets make the mistake of mishandling this with their poor resource management skills and struggles with parsing out the food they receive. Sustainability is not just a consideration but a tool of necessity in their conditions. Exploiting nature without considering its limits is what creates these hierarchical and ideological divides that cause longterm harm.
Yellowjackets also shows the need for collective action and cooperation as tools for survival. When the girls work in tandem, they successfully create irrigation systems, learn to handle laundry, make meals that feed everyone equally. It’s in their fracturing that they invite in violence. If the world could only learn the same lesson—that we’re all in this together—our problems would surely minimize. No individual country or person can face down climate collapse. But unification can at least initiate a process of mutual survival. Greed seems sure to stomp out many of these opportunities. But fighting for environmental justice and investing in community is a way for us to counteract or at least protest what’s being done to us by our leadership.
It’s through each other, and humanity as a collective, that we can forge through. It sounds almost simplistic to say, because duh, of course. But it’s a principle we must adhere to now more than ever. If there’s one singular slice of hope in these recent disasters, it’s seeing how quickly people will step in to help one another. During the L.A. wildfires, communities came together to give out free food, create clothing drives, and lend shelter to those who lost their homes. GoFundMes and other grassroots crowdfunding measures provided tiny reliefs to those who lost everything.
People want to help each other. People want to save each other. But we have to avoid the pitfalls that spring up to tempt us in the other direction. We have to outright, loudly reject distractions: the misinformation that pops up around climate change, the superstitions that might lure us to woo-woo coping instead of real-world action, reflecting inward instead of stepping into the real world, and getting our hands dirty in the muck of it all. Putting our faith in unscientific solutions, be it religion or capitalist lies, will only escalate our suffering and put our losses on speed-dial.
In this way, Yellowjackets is a cautionary tale. The girls’ struggle for survival is a mirror to our present day woes—our vulnerability to nature’s extremes and our desire to place meaning on its inherent chaos. In the series, we see the consequences of such things. It is baffling how easily our ignorance can lead us into bloody pits or packs of wolves. Without community—not of the cult variety but of the science-forward, reality-facing sort—we are just bear meat awaiting our roast.
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Source: Kiat Media
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