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English Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of

11-1-2015 Ecology 101 Gerry Canavan Marquette University, [email protected]

Published version. SFRA Review, Vol. 314 (November 2015): 16-25. Permalink. © 2015 Research Association. Used with permission. Feature 101 is the cash nexus; 2. It doesn’t matter where something goes as long as it re-enters the circuit of capital; Ecology 101 3. The self-regulating market knows best; 4. Nature’s bounty is a free gift to the prop- Gerry Canavan erty owner. (120)

In this use of the word “ecology,” it is intended to distinctions between environmentalism as an um- suggest as a matter of scientific determination that [1]brella THERE term HAVEfor a seriesBEEN frequentof interrelated, attempts usually to draw re- no environmentalist reform of capitalism is or could form-liberal political movements and ecology as an ever be viable, and that a new economic order will - ing the web of relations and interconnections be- social system is what Foster and others call ecoso- tweenostensibly organisms neutral and field their of scientific environments. inquiry concern cialismbe required, or what for genuine Kim Stanley sustainability; Robinson this (borrowing proposed [1.1] In practice, however, such distinctions have a term from agriculture) has called permaculture tended to collapse in the face of the overawing eco- (see “Comparative Planetology”). In both cases, the logical crises with which humanity has been con- proposed alternative system is to be one that does not degrade or undermine the conditions for its own centuries. Ecological apprehension of late capitalism continuation, as both industrial and agricultural infronted the contemporary in the late twentieth- moment andis far early from twenty-first politically systems do under capitalism; as Robinson puts this neutral, and tends in a contemporary context to be proposition elsewhere:

Justice becomes a survival technology. […] therather use fiercely of “ecology” anticapitalist, and “ecological” in ways thatby humanities frequently scholarsgo significantly on the left beyond to describe liberal reformism.their own work (Indeed, has has desperate people stripping away forests typically denoted a deliberate attempt to go beyond andReal soiljustice in much would of alleviate the world, the andpoverty it would that “mere” environmentalism, in the name of something reduce the hyper-consumption of the rich, more radical.) [1.2] “The realms of ecology and capitalism are op- resources and excessive in carbon burn. The posed to each other—not in every instance but in onlywhich possible is equally road or toeven sustainability’s more destructive neces of- their interactions as a whole,” John Bellamy Foster - writes in Ecology Against Capitalism (7). In an ear- avan, Klarr, and Vu 213). lier work, The Vulnerable Planet, Foster points to the sary carbon neutrality involves justice. (Can “four laws of ecology” as proposed by Barry Com- [1.3] For this reason, ecological knowledge is often moner in The Closing Circle in 1971, as a means of understood to logically entail anticapitalism by mak- distilling the ecological worldview into its core ele- ing visible what K. William Kapp once called capital- ments: ism’s “economy of unpaid costs” (231). “To call for capitalism to pay its way”—to demand, that is, that 1. Everything is connected to everything else. capitalism take into full account the natural world 2. Everything must go somewhere. from which it draws its resources and into which it 3. Nature knows best. dumps its by-products and refuse—is “to call for the 4. There is no such thing as a “free lunch.” abolition of capitalism” altogether (Moore 145). (118) ecology and leftist politics must ultimately come un- Foster’s proposed “four laws of capital,” in turn, sug- der[1.4] some However, revaluation, even with this regard easy equation both to anticapi between- gests the extent to which ecology and capitalism talist or anti-Western political movements that are - or, indeed, fully anti-ecological in their political necessarily find themselves in inevitable and irre agenda—asonly superficially well asor recognitionopportunistically of the “ecological”— various ways solvable1. The conflict: only lasting connection between things that the property rights that undergird Western cap- 16 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 17 italism have sometimes led to greater conservation and types of growth within systems. and environmental protection than would have been [2.2] As Richard Grove shows in his 1995 Green Im- possible in their absence. As will be discussed below, perialism, however, it would be incorrect to say that the ecological history of human civilization does not ecology only emerges as a concern this late in histo- necessarily yield simplistic or unidirectional politi- ry. In fact, many of the intellectual developments we cal conclusions. now associate with ecology actually have their ori- [1.5] From this perspective, however, we can cer- gins in European imperialism, as Europeans in set- tainly say that all ecology is in some sense political - ecology, in terms of its application to real-world situ- ations and cultural institutions; in practice ecology environstler colonies in the in thename tropics of creating frequently viable attempted and sustain sci- necessarily implies some evaluation of human social ableentific colonies. management Grove of notes and interventionthat much environmen within their- relations as either ecologically salutary / sustainable talist rhetoric has its origins in these kinds of colo- / rational / desirable or else destructive / irrational nized spaces, a noteworthy and unacknowledged / unsustainable / undesirable. But neither the right nor the left should be understood to have some total also traces the importance of the spatial topoi of the or undisputed claim on the political implications of gardencase of andthe “periphery”of the island influencingto early ecological the “center.” thought, He ecological thought. as well as the devastation that the imperialists often [1.6] In what follows I will primarily be discussing brought with them to these island through improper management and invasive species, which ultimately cultural, and literary-aesthetic implications. I hope came to premediate a fully global devastation that is thisecology piece as will a scientific serve as phenomenona useful companion with political, to simi- lar “101” pieces that have run in this space, perhaps around the corner. But Grove also destabilizes the most directly Eric C. Otto’s “Environmentalism 101” familiaryet to come postcolonial but seems narrative to us, today, of villainsto be always and justvic- (also available in the eBook SF 101: A Guide to Teach- tims by noting that the imperialists were sometimes ing and Studying Science Fiction.) While some over- more ecologically “rational” than native groups, and lap is unavoidable, I have endeavored to focus here that the legal absolutism of the imperial state often less on political movements and more on ecological unsettlingly allowed for conservationist policies in science’s use within humanities discourses as a cog- the colonial sphere that were possible neither under

troubled) interconnections between organisms (es- under the entrenched free markets of Europe. peciallynitive standpoint human beings) that highlights and their the environments, (at times quite es- the[2.3] precolonial David Mazel’s status tour-de-force quo of the Global chapter South “Ameri nor- pecially as that standpoint manifests within contem- can Literary Environmentalism as Domestic Orien- porary SF. talism” in The Ecocriticism Reader (1996) similarly [2] The term “ecology” was coined (as Ökologie) by - Ernst Haeckel in 1866, drawing together the Greek sire for ecology as a neutral ground from the ideo- roots for “house” and “study”—the etymological ori- logicaldemonstrates construction the difficulty of terms of likedisentangling “wilderness” the that de gins thus again suggests the tension between “ecol- are always embedded in political and historical as- ogy” as a pure science and “ecology” as a theory of sumptions about property rights, utilitarianism, best practices for domestic management, whether white settlement, gender, and the state. Just as Mazel - notes that environmentalism is always both resis- tance to power and the exercise of it, so too we have thethat deliberate management intervention reflects of the human unconscious, actors (which, auto already seen it is with ecology, which is always both again,matic consequencesare to be evaluated of evolved as either animal adaptive behaviors or mal or- a tallying of mankind’s crimes against the environ- adaptive for the various organisms involved). ment as well as, precisely through that tallying, the [2.1] Now another strong internal tension within blueprint for continued human domination over the the idea of ecology becomes visible as well: ecology planet. is at one and the same time the principle of mastery [2.4] As David Harvey has warned the Left in such that allows agents in an ecological system to control works as The Enigma of Capital (2011) and else- that system and the principle of hard limit that con- where, anticapitalists neglect the “blueprint” com- strains mastery and makes impossible certain levels ponent of ecology’s relationship with capitalism to 16 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 17 their peril, as capitalist innovation has repeatedly of whack. turned seemingly impenetrable limits into mere [3.1] This observation returns us to Foster’s obser- boundaries to be leaped. Perhaps the most emblem- vations about the inevitable relationship between atic recent case is the discourse around Peak Oil, ecology and anti-capitalism, a relationship that can which for a time in the early 2000s seemed to be an be traced back to Marx’s horror in Capital, Vol. 1 at indisputable, silver-bullet argument against capital- the “metabolic rifts” produced by capitalist indus- ist sustainability but which has now utterly vanished trial and agricultural practices. Marx’s analysis of as a salient political argument in the face of improved agriculture in Capital is an early articulation of the negative ecological futurity that now dominates eco- that now seem to promise enough oil to last beyond logical analysis of the future: “All progress in capi- anyoil sand, of our oil lifetimes. shale, and That deep-sea these drillingnew oil-extraction efficiencies talistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only technologies are themselves incredibly ecologically of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all destructive to any lifeforms living nearby has been progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the last- calculus governing their use, not nearly enough to ing sources of that fertility” (638). As Foster himself prohibita relatively their small development component and of spreadthe quasi-utilitarian across North shows in Marx’s Ecology, Marx derived his apprecia- America and, increasingly, around the world. Indeed, tion of this ecological crisis in the making from the in many cases an ecological claim has been made on work of Justus von Liebig, whose work in soil ecol- the side of the hydrofrackers, to argue the technol- ogy led to the development of chemical fertilizers to ogy is not only mostly safe but less globally and cli- matologically harmful than a turn to coal would be. management necessary for the continuation of ag- [3] While ecology was an increasingly important ricultureartificially at replenish the time thebut soil—a which, practicein two hundreds of scientific of - years since, has now contributed to the destabiliza- tury, it was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s tion of the entire planet’s nitrogen cycle. And the ni- anti-pesticidefield of scientific Silent inquiry Spring in thethat early catapulted twentieth ecology cen trogen cycle is only one of any number of ecological to the forefront of public consciousness in the indus- stabilities that industrialization and global capital trial West, as well as launched the environmentalist have disrupted, the most famous of which is surely the carbon cycle that is now producing rapid anthro- - pogenic climate change. lemic.political Carson’s movements text is that an exemplarywould frequently one in manydraw reon- [3.2] Traditionally, the environment was been gards,scientific not ecological least of all analysisfor its demonstration as evidence and of the as linkpo viewed as a potentially hazardous space of danger between ecology (as a means of thinking about the that was to be transformed, through settlement, into - empty, homogenous space for use by human be- tain life) and futurity - ings—especially in white-settler colonies like the tionsinterdependent of the bad futureflows betweenthat contemporaneous organisms that social sus United States that have been so structured by the and agricultural practices through were bringingher frequent about. invoca “How ideology of the frontier. The rise of ecology as a sci- could intelligent beings,” she asks, “seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contami- now the environment is not cultivated and made nated the entire environment and brought the threat usefulentific bycategory settlement, inverts but this is ideologicalrather destroyed formulation: by its of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this settlement. Rather than a threat that must be tamed is precisely what we have done” (8-9). Ecology’s fo- cus on evolutionary processes, feedback loops, and the environment is primarily seen today as that tipping points necessarily produces a temporality whichby being is broughtthreatened into by the capital, flows ofin human need of commerce, whatever that—especially in our time—suggests the possibil- ity of radically apocalyptic, even extinctive change if [3.3] At the same time, ecology is understood to ecological cycles become disrupted, distorted, or de- partial or fitful protection is possible from it. - stabilized. In the late twentieth century an ecological talist modernity cannot transcend: it is the thing to mindset has thus been closely linked to notions of represent a final limit point past which technocapi apocalyptic futurity: once-stable (or stable-appear- ing) systems crashing, collapsing, being thrown out theorizationwhich capitalism of capital is ultimately at all stages: and the finally beginning subject. of Thus, ecology represents a key figuration in our 18 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 19 capital (in the primitive accumulation of early settle- tedness” between organism and environment that ment or frontier life), the middle stage of capital (in cannot really be supported by how actual ecologies work) are highly unstable, and prone to rapid change and the end stage of capitalism (as mounting ecolog- and catastrophic collapse. the conflict between expansion and conservation), [4.3] A similar intellectual moment has been un-

ical[4] pressures As much force of the the examples system to thuseither far significantly discussed - havereform suggested, or else finally ecology collapse). as a discourse (especially cism’sderway fondness in a recent for harmonystrain of andecocriticism unity in favor frequently of the in the hands of nonexperts, like ecocritics in the hu- called “dark ecology,” which rejects literary ecocriti manities) can be rhetorically hard to disentangle strange, the ugly, the ironic, and the grotesque. The moralistic assumptions about the beauty of nature, Ecologyfigure most without closely Nature associated (2007) withhas been this devotedmovement to andfrom about closely the heldsupremacy Romantic of the and natural frequently world quiteover articulatingis Timothy Morton, a vision whose of ecology work that since is his distinct influential from the old, no-longer-workable notion of “Nature” as an is taken to be the ultimate source of value—almost immanent and stable totality. This ecology is mul- aeither replacement human artificefor God—as or social well institutions. as the guarantor Nature tiple, unknowable, never fully traceable in human of sustainability and stability. Nature is posed as a place of harmony, unity, and balance that human than with the attractive charismatic we beings degrade, disrupt, and ruin—in almost theo- typicallyterms—more associate at home with with environmentalist squids and cave conserva lichen- logical terms. Human beings oppose nature, the sug- tion and preservation movements. This formulation at times almost seems to put ecology someplace be- nature is thereby ideological posed both as what is yond politics altogether, somewhere in the realm of threatenedgestion would by mankindconsequently but also be, towhat their will great soon peril; rise Goth, punk-rock, or emo aesthetics instead. up and punish a mankind who has failed to heed its [4.4] When this line of philosophical speculation warnings. returns, in the end, to the realm of the political, as it [4.1] James Hansen’s famous “Gaia hypothesis” does in Morton’s later Hyperobjects (2013), it is ecol- sees this sort of poetic valorization raised to the ogy in the mode of radical unknowability rather than

planet itself is refashioned as a kind of homeostatic, capitalism) so “massively distributed in time and level of scientific proposition, wherein the entire spacescientific relative certainty—structures to humans” that (likewe are the barelyclimate, able or a very bad cancer (humanity). The radical political to cognize them at all. In Steven Shaviro’s own ap- movementself-regulating often superorganism called deep ecology currently suggests fighting a revi off- propriation of the term, SF actually becomes one of sion of our social and technological behaviors so as the best tools available for attempting to partially, to minimize any and all deviation from that natural harmony, at times teetering on the edge of out-and- socio-technological cartography” that “traces our out misanthropy. incompletely think such hyperobjects: a “psycho- [4.2] As Dana Philips argues in The Truth of Ecol- threaten to overwhelm us” (4). ogy (2003), these formulations are often predicated place alongside, and within, these hyperobjects that-

is [5]both Still, more the majorreductionistic uses of ecologyand more in SFconcretely have re on a transcendent vision of the Earth as a unified- political,flected a andmore traditionally down-to-earth both sense apocalyptic of futurity and that an- caltotality science. that Inis actuallyfact, our significantly attraction to out such of syncvalues with as harmonythe last fifty and to balance a hundred (and years our desire of practiced to use ecologithem as genre—ranging from a complex, polyvocal work like - Johnticapitalist. Brunner’s The majorwonderfully texts inhorrifying the eco-apocalyptic The tionship to actual ecologies on this planet, which are Sheep Look Up (1972), modeled on John Dos Pas- farweapons less stable, in a political self-regulating, fight) bears or well-ordered little or no relathan sos’s USA Trilogy, or Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and the typical “bumper sticker” use of environmental Crake series (2003-2013) and Paolo Bacigalupi’s metaphors in politics and culture would seem to al- The Wind-Up Girl (2009) and The Water Knife (2015) low; in fact ecological niches (a term itself that mis- to pulpy big-screen thrillers like Silent Running - (1972), Soylent Green (1973), The Day after Tomor-

18 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 leadingly suggests a relationship of “perfected fit SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 19 row (2004) and Snowpiercer (2013)—have tended the application of limit (especially environmental to understand the ecological in almost exclusively - negative terms. Drawing freely from the tropes of layed. As Donald Sassoon notes in One Hundred Years post-nuclear and post-plague scenarios now almost oflimit) Socialism to socialist, the earlyand leftistGreens critique were generallywas quite con de- two centuries old— see Mary Shelley’s The Last servative, and that rhetoric around limits and “zero Man growth economics” appeared very reactionary at the is now so familiarized and habitual that nearly all time of the 1973-1974 oil shock, when the collapse , from 1826—apocalyptic ecological critique of growth rates meant widespread unemployment aegis, including such radically non-ecological narra- and suffering especially in traditional left constitu- tivescontemporary as The Walking science Dead fiction (comic falls 2003-,under itsTV general2010-) encies like industrial workers. Sassoon notes that and World War Z typically read in ecological terms (epidemic; inva- the idea of zero growth economics, as it was seen as sive species; the (book symbiotic 2006, relationshipfilm 2013), which between are “preparingthe 22nd congress for a future of theof penury PCF “explicitly and restrictions”; rejected” predator and prey; the view from its president, George Marchais, said that “growth is and “the world without us”), even though the zombic - “ecologies” they posit are purely fantastic. [5.1] Undoubtedly this sense of the ecological as againnecessary that toan meet optimistic, the requirements progressive of futurology social and and na inherently or inimically negative has something to ecologicaltional progress” reasoning (qtd. arein Sassoon somehow 676)—suggesting fundamentally incompatible. [5.3] Indeed, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger sug- Age)do with has the itself larger been history a largely of science anti-ecological fiction, which genre, in imagingits more optimisticfantastic technological flavors (especially devices in itslike Golden zero- is a sense in which ecological thinking has tended to - gests in his 1974 “Critique of Political Ecology,” there ciency recycling machines precisely in order to “get the purposes of conservativism and reaction (as in around”point-energy the constraints engines, replicators, that the ecological and perfect-effi poses. manybe specifically ecological repurposed, readings of or J.R.R. misappropriated, Tolkien’s legend for- This Star Trek—or perhaps, more directly, Jetsons— arium); as Enzensberger writes, “The bourgeoisie future encounters the ecological as an unwelcome can conceive of its own imminent collapse only as interruption of what is attractive about futurologi- the end of the world. In so far as it sees any salvation - at all, it sees it only in the past” (17). Enzensberger son Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Force ofcal Nature”fantasy in(1993), the first where place—as the crew in the discovers seventh-sea that like Paul Ehrlich in The Population Bomb (1968) with the warp drive on which the entire Federation (and thejuxtaposes anti-limit, the optimistic neo-Malthusian futurology arguments of Fidel of Castro: people the interior narrative logic of the entire franchise) depends is actually tearing apart the very fabric of In certain countries they are saying that space. (The solution is the imposition of a Warp-Five only birth control provides a solution to the speed limit in the name of spacetime preservation problem. Only capitalists, the exploiters, can which is, itself, hastily abandoned by the time Star speak like that; for no one who is conscious of Trek: Voyager what man can achieve with the help of tech- need to deploy some “ecological cheat” to get around nology and science will wish to set a limit to the unhappy factspremieres that wouldjust a fewotherwise years later.) taint This the the number of human beings who can live on fantasy become especially necessary in the case of the earth . . . That is the deep conviction of extraplanetary colonization, to be discussed below. all revolutionaries. What characterized Mal- [5.2] The sense that ecology might “ruin the fu- thus in his time and the neo-Malthusians ture” was, interestingly, also the mood with which in our time is their pessimism, their lack of environmental propositions were originally re- trust in the future destiny of man. That alone ceived by many leftist political movements during is the reason why revolutionaries can never the moment of their earliest articulation in the po- be Malthusians. We shall never be too numer- litical mainstream in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite ous however many of us there are, if only we my above remarks about the seemingly natural af- all together place our efforts and our intelli- gence at the service of mankind, a mankind finity20 SFRA between Review ecology 314 Winter and 2015 anti-capitalism, in fact SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 21 which will be freed from the exploitation of survive the trip without civil war, famine, and man by man. reigns of terror?

[5.4] Reactionary fear of overpopulation, ecologi- We can recognize the central problematic of this cal devastation, and competition over energy sourc- thought experiment as sustainability, in two senses: es—of a future in which the fantastic economic and technological growth that characterized postwar within which the limited resources available to the prosperity becomes impossible—is everywhere we first, the need for a renewable material environment- maining available to humans as the voyage contin- have already mentioned Soylent Green; we can think ued;asteroid and at second the start the of need the journeyfor a sustainable could recycle, cultural re look in science fictionLogan’s from theRun 1970s, which and maintains after. I form, an ideology in the Althusserian sense, that a glittering palace of technoutopian futurity at the could survive and reproduce itself within those tech- herecost ofjust universal as easily suicide of the day you turn 21. In Lar- ry Niven’s novel The Mote in God’s Eye (1974) the say, we need a natural ecology, and in the second we logic of overpopulation is transformed into the soci- needno-natural a political constraints. one. And In so the it wasn’t first case, very we long might be- ety of the Moties, who (without any biological abil- - ity to check their reproduction) endlessly repeat a line: we are already, alas, in precisely this situation, cycle of civilization, overreach, crisis, and collapse. onlyfore thewe livecommentators atop our planetoid figured and out notStross’s inside punch it. In ’s The Gods Themselves the energy [6.1] The notion that the Earth can itself be thought crisis is solved by the invention of a miraculous so- of as a vast “spaceship” long predates the immense lar “pump” that would be the perfect green energy geodesic dome at the center of Disney’s Epcot Cen- source if only it weren’t leeching its free energy from ter (that theme park’s most famous, most iconic the universe next door. I have suggested elsewhere structure). Perhaps the earliest reference is Herman that even cyberpunk should be read as a kind of re- Melville’s Moby Dick, in which Ahab speaks of a “frig- active backlash to ecological thinking, insofar as the ate earth” that “in her murderous hold … is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned” (249). In place inside the computer can itself be read as an at- Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879), where temptrapid 1980s to circumvent relocation the of “reality the object principle” of SF desire of ecolog to a- the “ship” is imagined as a sea-faring galleon: ical scarcity by positing an interior cybernetic world where such limits no longer apply. It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which [5.5] To the extent that twentieth-century sci- we sail through space. If the bread and beef - above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open limited, techno-optimistic future of Promethean a hatch and there is a new supply, of which world-transformation—providedence fiction historically imagined we a radicallydon’t, say, un before we never dreamed. And very great nuke ourselves in the meantime—ecological science command over the services of others comes has therefore tended to function not as a licensor or to those who as the hatches are opened are guarantor, but as its bad conscience. [6] Despite this seemingly antagonistic relation- Thepermitted best known to say, reference “This is mine!”today (243)(outside Epcot) may be R. Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual othership, however, direction, science in the fictionalservice of thought ecological experiments polemic. for Spaceship Earth (1968), which ecologically in- Nothave long quite ago, commonly for instance, often SF beenauthor deployed Charles inStross the vites us to reimagine the spaceship/planet as “an in- tegrally-designed machine which to be persistently “Charlie’s Diary”: successful must be comprehended and serviced in posed a simple question to the readers of his blog, total” (52). (Contrast Fuller’s biopolitical vision with James Lovelock’s similarly totalizing Gaia hypoth- have embarked on a 1000-year voyage esis, in which the Earth is a machinic superorgan- aboardYou, and a hollowed-out a quarter of aasteroid. million What other sort folks, of ism that homeostatically services itself.) For Fuller, governance and society do you think would as for George, the ship is well provisioned, designed be most comfortable, not to mention likely to as such so that human beings (originating in igno- 20 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 21 - exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, tions and proper maintenance: which is characteristic of open societies. The rance) could have sufficient time to learn its opera closed economy of the future might similarly I would say that designed into this Space- be called the “spaceman” economy, in which ship Earth’s total wealth was a big safety fac- the earth has become a single spaceship, tor which allowed man to be very ignorant without unlimited reservoirs of anything, for a long time until he had amassed enough either for extraction or for pollution, and in experiences from which to extract progres- sively the system of generalized principles a cyclical ecological system which is capable governing the increases of energy managing ofwhich, continuous therefore, reproduction man must offind material his place form in even though it cannot escape having inputs of employment of those generalized principles energy. (209) inadvantages rearranging over the environment. physical resources … Objective of en- vironment seems to be leading to humanity’s The echo of Fredrick Jackson Turner’s 1893 “frontier eventually total success and readiness to cope thesis” is unmistakable; a once-open, once-free fron- with far vaster problems of the universe. (54) tier of expansive possibility, which previously drove American history, has now slammed forever shut. [7] This central insight—an ecological one—makes of Earth, however, is purely retrospective; against visible certain contradictions that were program- George’s[6.2] The cornicopian quoted reference nineteenth-century to the “total use, wealth” the matically obscured by the “space empire” fantasies Spaceship Earth metaphor tends in the twentieth so beloved by Golden Age writers of SF. In stark con- century to be associated not with abundance but trast to the untold riches they are imagined to pro- with scarcity, fragility, and limit. In the next chapter vide, distant space colonies—whether on inhospita- of Operating Manual, Fuller notes that necessarily markers of deep, abiding, and perma- the abundance of immediately consumable, nentble moons scarcity or orbiting far-flung planets—are in fact- obviously desirable or utterly essential re- out any waste of resources for any hope of survival. until now to al- From an earthbound, requiring perspective, careful management the colonization with low us to carry on despite our ignorance. Be- of space appears wildly expansive, a “New Frontier” sourcesing eventually have been exhaustible sufficient and spoilable, they that opens up the entire universe to human experi- ence and exploitation—but from a perspective inside moment. (58, emphasis mine) one of these spaceships or colonies, life is a state of have been adequate only up to this critical fragile and even hellish enclosure, at constant risk From this point forward, then, scarcity prevails, of either deadly shortages or deadly exposure to the - void outside. listic thinkers, rationally managing every aspect of [7.1] Ecology today remains the unhappy visitor, andshipboard humanity operations, will require to keep careful the plannersmachine runningand ho or the poisonous supplement, to any number of fa- smoothly. [6.3] In his essay “The Economics of the Coming well, but it is perhaps most radically destructive of Spaceship Earth,” published two years before Full- thismiliar fantasy contemporary of extraplanetary science fictionalcolonization. scenarios The col as- er’s Operating Manual in 1966, Kenneth E. Boulding (the cofounder of the Society for the Advancement of itself as the perverse solution to the discovery that General Systems Theory) characterizes this “critical theonization environment of outer of spaceour planet has frequentlyis under threat presented from moment” as the transition from a “cowboy economy” the unknown or unacknowledged by-products of to a “spaceman economy”: human activity—the idea being that we might be able to bootstrap our civilization into orbit and out into the larger galaxy before the terrestrial environ- to call the open economy the “cowboy econo- ment crashes. But in contemporary works like Kim my,”For the the sake cowboy of picturesqueness, being symbolic Iof am the tempted illimit- Stanley Robinson’s recent far-reaching novel Aurora able plains and also associated with reckless, (2015), that logic reverses itself entirely: we now 22 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 23 know too much about ecology and evolutionary bi- ble future of human extinction. What the ecological ology to take seriously the idea that we could ever promises in our context is not safe-in-God’s-hands live there. Ecol- reliability or stability, but a world of rapid and radi- ogy becomes the despoiler of that greatest of science - simply go to another planet and just selves or die (and most die). In the archive of recent - SF,cal Octaviaflux to which E. Butler’s life forms various must space either colonization adapt them sto- fiction dreams, the conquest of the stars; even if we - decide to brave the centuries-long journey to an ables series of the 1990s, “Amnesty” in the 2000s— greetedother star, by anda counter-ecology even if we are luckywith which enough we to cannot find a mayries—Xenogenesis speak most directly in the 1980s,to the depressivethe unfinished sense Par of biologicallyhabitable planet interact there, or weco-exist, are likely much to findless ourselveseat or in- incipient, irrevocable doom that permeates contem- terbreed with. In Aurora the toxic particle is as small porary life, as well as offer grim visions of the sorts as a tiny prion, but all the same it renders the new of biological and ecological transformations that (we planet utterly uninhabitable to us, in effect dooming our dreams of space altogether. [7.2] Other recent works about extraterrestrial andhope) even will grab be better for themselves than the species tiny pieces just dying of those out travel end more happily, though typically with some entirely. Her characters find a way to adapt, and live, sour ecological note. In Interstellar, the astronaut to us to have fallen out of our civilization’s grasp— - albeitolder, betterat very science-fictional great cost. futures that now seem mensional time-travel shenanigans to get a viable [7.4] The alternative to the sort of vexed self-trans- off-worldheroes take colony advantage started—but of a wormhole the last andshot fifth-di of the formation we see in Butler, or in something like Mar- garet Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, is rather the world of universal death posited by Atwood in her “Time standsfilm reveals silent, the miserable settlement guard. as More a tiny typically, encampment how- Capsule Found on the Death Planet,” written in 2009 ever,in an theicy heroes’hellhole, reward over which at the a end single of the American narrative flag is alongside the Copenhagen climate talks. Human his- to be allowed to return to Earth, to live here instead of tory, per “Time Capsule,” is a progressive history that there. The Martian sees its titular hero (barely) able to survive being stranded on Mars, hacking together creation of a universal desert, characterized by spac- a temporary ecology of oxygen, water, feces, and po- esarrests where itself nothing in the grows, final age until through “at last the all industrious wells were tatoes that is able to get him just enough food, for there was no land left to grow food.” At this point At- that he doesn’t have to keep living on Mars, but gets wood’spoisoned, unnamed all rivers narrator, ran with implied filth, all to seas be thewere last dead; hu- tojust come long home—asenough to thebe rescued.characters His do, happy to one ending extent is or another, in other recent space operas like Jupiter her message: Ascending, Battlestar Galactica, and WALL-E. Space, man alive, turns to the person who will someday find alas, is no longer the place. Even a nominally techno- You who have come here from some distant optimistic novel like Neal Stephenson’s recent Sev- world, to this dry lakeshore and this cairn, eneves (2015)—ostensibly devoted to proving the and to this cylinder of brass, in which on the indomitability of human ingenuity and creative po- last day of all our recorded days I place our tential even in the face of the end of the world—pos- its an incomprehensibly terrible nightmare future Pray for us, who once, too, thought we could in horrid cramped, starvation-ridden satellites in its final words: attempt to argue that we might realistically live any- where else but Earth. Herefly. again, as in Butler’s and Robinson’s later sto- [7.3] Not that home is looking so great either. If the ries, the dream of outer space turns toxic, a narra- ecological poisons dreams of escape, it also poisons tive for some other, better version of the human race dreams of our continued survival down here, as wit- rather than ourselves; our species, we feel, seems nessed both through the incipient mass extinctions somehow to have missed its chance, and fallen into of animal life in the present and, via the prolepsis of the deep gravitational well of its doomed planetary - ecology instead. wards-looking cognitive standpoint from an inevita- [8] Back in the real world, and real human history, the suddenly ubiquitous “Anthropocene,” the back 22 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 23 the human species seems at the dawn of the twenty- Fuller, R. Buckminster. Operating Manual for Space- ship Earth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer- in which technoindustrial modernity is struggling to sity, 1969. evenfirst century acknowledge to be at the a key problems inflection of point:climate a moment change, George, Henry. Progress and Poverty. New York: Rob- ert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1929. Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expan- evenocean as acidification, each of these overfarming, crises seems antibiotic-resistant to be crossing sion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Envi- organisms, ubiquitous pollution, and megadrought,- ronmentalism, 1600-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge - University Press, 1996. points-of-no-return.ibly urgent and unspeakably The findings dire, and of ecologicalseem to augur sci Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises aence near-term and related future fields of deprivation are, in our and moment, suffering incred if not of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kapp, K. William. The Social Costs of Private Enter- ragingout-and-out on multiple mass death fronts and everywhere extinction. A across five-alarm the prise. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. planet—andfire, all our ecologicalSF, like so many knowledge of our screams, cultural institu is now- Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, tions, is still struggling to catch up. 1976. Mazel, David. “American Literary Environmental- ism as Domestic Orientalism,” in The Ecocriticism Works Cited Reader, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 137-146. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, Atwood, Margaret. “Time Capsule Found on the Dead 1995. Planet.” (25 September 2009): Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: W.W. Norton http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/ & Company, 2001. . Moore, James W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecol- Canavan, Gerry, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu, “Science, ogy and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: sep/26/margaret-atwood-mini-science-fictionJustice, Science Fiction: A Conversation with Kim Verso, 2015. Stanley Robinson.” Polygraph 22 (2010): 201- Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethink- 218. ing Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Harvard University Press, 2007. ---. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the “Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Min- StanleyMifflin, 2002.Robinson.” bldgblog.blogpost.com (19 nesota Press, 2013. December 2007): http://bldgblog.blogspot. Otto, Eric. “Environmentalism 101.” SF 101: A Guide com/2007/12/comparative-planetology-inter- to Teaching and Studying Science Fiction. Ed. Ritch view-with.html. Calvin, Doug Davis, Karen Hellekson, and Craig - Jacobsen. Science Fiction Research Association, cal Ecology.” Tr. Stuart Hood. New Left Review 2014. Enzensberger,(March–April Hans 1974): Magnus. 3-31. “A Critique of Politi Philips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, Foster, John Bellamy. Ecology Against Capitalism. and Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford Univer- New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002. sity Press, 2003. ---. Marx’s Ecology. New York: Monthly Review Press, Sassoon, Donald. One Hundred Years of Socialism. 2000. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010. ---. The Vulnerable Planet. New York: Monthly Re- Shaviro, Steven. “Hyperbolic Futures: Speculative Fi- view Press, 1999. nance and Speculative Fiction.” The Cascadia Sub- Boulding, Kenneth E. “The Economics of the Com- duction Zone (April 2011): 3-6. ing Spaceship Earth.” Rpt. in The Environmental Stross, Charles. “Designing Society for Prosper- Debate: A Documentary History, with Timeline, ity.” Charlie’s Diary (November 12, 2009): Glossary, and Appendices. Ed. Peninah Neimark http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-stat- and Peter Rhoades Mott. Amenia, NY: Grey House ic/2009/11/designing_society_for_posterit.html. Publishing, 2010. 24 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 25 Suggested Additional Reading Wark, McKenzie. “Critical Theory after the Anthro- pocene.” Public Seminar (9 August 2014): http:// Baratta, Chris, ed. Environmentalism in the Realm of www.publicseminar.org/2014/08/critical-theo- Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. Newcastle: ry-after-the-anthropocene/#.U-gwi4BdXs4. Cambridge Scholars, 2012. ---. “The Capitalocene.” Public Seminar (15 Oc- Bernardo, Susan M., ed. Environments in Science Fic- tober 2015): http://www.publicseminar. tion: Essays on Alternative Spaces. Critical Explo- org/2015/10/the-capitalocene/. rations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, 44. Jeffer- Yanarella, Ernest J. The Cross, the Plow, and the Sky- son, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014. line: Contemporary Science Fiction and the Ecolog- Buell, Frederick. From Apocalypse to Way of Life: En- ical Imagination. Parkland: Brown Walter, 2001. vironmental Crisis in the American Century. New York: Routledge, 2003. While a full list of SF and short stories deal- Buell, Lawrence. “Toxic Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (Spring 1998): 639-665. too overwhelmingly numerous to name here, I Canavan, Gerry and Kim Stanley Robinson, eds. Green woulding with suggest the subject the list of generated “ecology” byis ofEric course Otto inmuch his Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Middletown: “Environmentalism 101” piece as a very good start- Wesleyan University Press, 2014. ing point, as well as entries like ECOCATASTROPHE, Canavan, Gerry. “‘If the Engine Ever Stops, We’d All ECOLOGY, and NATURE in Brian Stableford’s Science Die’: Snowpiercer and Necrofuturism.” Paradoxa Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia (Rout- 26: “SF Now.” Vashon Island, WA: Paradoxa, 2014. ledge, 2006) and the list of works “Of Further Inter- Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four est” I complied as an appendix to Green Planets. Of Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197- the novels that have appeared since that publication, 222. I would especially recommend: Garrad, Greg. Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2004. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam (2013); Haraway, Donna. “Reprise: Science Fiction, Fictions Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015); of Science, and Primatology,” in Primate Visions. Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest (2015); New York: Routledge, 1989. Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Our- Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: selves (2013); The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014); York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014); MacDonald, Graeme. “Improbability Drives: The En- James Patterson’s Zoo (2012); ergy of Sf.” Paradoxa 26: “SF Now.” Vashon Island, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012), Shaman WA: Paradoxa, 2014. (2013), and Aurora (2015); Murphy, Patrick D. Ecocritical Explorations in Liter- Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (2015); ary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus (2015); and Fields. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009. Andy Weir’s The Martian (2011) ---. “Environmentalism,” in The Routledge Compan- ion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M. as being of particular interest. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, 373-381. New York: Routledge, 2009. Otto, Eric. Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. Stableford, Brian. “Science Fiction and Ecology,” in A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed, 127-141. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Vint, Sherryl. Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Liverpool: Liverpool Uni- versity Press, 2010. 24 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 25