Fixing the Sky (6 page)

Catlin draws two lessons from this story. First, “when the Mandans undertake to make it rain, they never fail to succeed, for their ceremonies never stop until rain begins to fall” (1:157). Second, the Mandan rainmaker, once successful, never tries it again. His medicine is undoubted. During future droughts, he defers to younger braves seeking to prove themselves. Unlike Western, technological rainmaking, in Mandan culture the rain chooses the rainmaker.

In his imaginative book
Ishmael
(1992), Daniel Quinn draws a basic distinction between two major streams in human culture: the Takers (the heirs of the agricultural revolution) and the Leavers (or traditional societies). As he tells it, ten thousand years ago, the Takers exempted themselves from the evolutionary process. They saw the world as having been made for them and belonging to them, so they sought to manipulate and control it. Since then, they have systematically expanded their own food resources and their population at the expense of other species. Their quest for control seemingly knows no bounds. It extends from the control of pests, both micro- and macroscopic (from bacteria to browsing deer), to the attempted control of the sky. Guided by the tacit but ubiquitous voice of Mother Culture, the assumed nurturer of Taker human societies and lifestyles, they have come to see themselves as special and superior beings who possess the knowledge of good and evil. This allows them to decide, in god-like fashion, who shall live and who shall die. The world for them is a human life-support system, a machine designed to produce and sustain human life. When the elements or other species defy him, man declares war on nature and sees it as his destiny to conquer and rule it with
complete
control:

Technology seems to provide the leverage to make all this possible, but, according to Quinn, Taker culture is fatally flawed in that it lacks historical perspective and the wisdom of how to live. The Takers, who act as though the world belongs to them, are the enemy of the world and are on an evolutionarily recent, unsustainable, and potentially world-shattering detour.

The older cultures, the Leavers, far from being savage, primitive, or degenerative, constitute the main stream of human evolution and trace their roots back at least 3 million years. They respect the right to life and food of all other creatures and live as members, not rulers, of the community of all life. They live close to nature in relative abundance, free from worry, in the hands of the gods, enhancing biological and cultural diversity and ecological sustainability. The Leavers, who act as though they belong to the world, allow the creatures around them a chance to fulfill their potential. In this sense, they share an evolutionary destiny.

Quinn's basic quest is to reform Taker culture by making people aware of what has been lost. He argues that people need something positive to work for, rather than something negative to work against. They need an inspiring vision more than a vision of doom, more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty:

This is the voice of Ishmael, an articulate, Bible-reading, telepathic gorilla whom Quinn uses as a transcendent messenger to humanity. Ishmael's students, in effect
each reader of the book, must have “an earnest desire to save the world,” must “apply in person,” and must be willing to enact a life-affirming story that puts them in accord with the world. Ishmael reminds us that stopping pollution or cutting down on carbon emissions is not in itself an inspiring goal, but thinking of ourselves and the world in a new way is. By seeking to have a minimal impact on the planet, environmentalists align themselves with the values of Leaver culture. The climate engineers, however, in the name of stopping climate change, are the consummate Takers.

Ultimate control of the weather and climate embodies both our wildest fantasies and our greatest fears. Fantasy often informs reality (and vice versa). NASA managers know this well, as do Trekkies. The best science fiction authors typically build from the current state of a field to construct futuristic scenarios that reveal and explore the human condition. Scientists as well often venture into flights of fancy. Although not widely documented, the fantasy–reality axis is a prominent aspect of the history of the geosciences. The chief distinction is that the fiction writers provide a moral core and compass.

An occasional whimsical story of rainmaking in the nineteenth century has given way to such a flood of science fiction that accounts of weather and climate control alone could fill a volume. The plot of the science fiction film
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
(1961) revolves around a heroic and unilateral engineering response to a global environmental emergency. When a swarm of meteors pierces the Van Allen radiation belt and sets it on fire, the Earth is threatened by imminent “global warming” and possible mass extinctions. With the Arctic ice cap disintegrating and Africa on fire, with world temperatures rising quickly and the end of civilization nigh, the commander of a new state-of-the-art atomic submarine (with Cadillac tail fins) proposes to extinguish the fires by launching a nuclear missile into space to cut off the burning radiation belt from the Earth. When United Nations scientists reject the plan as too risky, the commander takes unilateral action against the will of what he deems to be overcautious government representatives and elected officials. Thwarting various attempts to stop him, by saboteurs, a giant octopus, and a religious fanatic who believes it is God's will that the world end, the submarine commander fires the missile and saves the world, proving that he was right all along. The television series also featured many episodes with geophysical threats and geoengineering responses.

Other thrillers and spoofs of thrillers in recent eras had plot lines involving weather or climate control. In
Our Man Flint
(1965), super-duper secret agent Derek Flint foils an evil cabal of utopian mad scientists who are planning to take over the world through weather control. At the end of the movie
The Andromeda Strain
(1971), cloud seeding over the Pacific Ocean results in the alien “strain” being washed into the salt water, presumably killing it.
The Nitrogen Fix
(1980), by Hal Clement, depicts catastrophic global chemical and environmental changes in the not-too-distant future triggered by both extractive industry and misguided genetic engineering aimed at increasing the number and quality of nitrogen compounds. The resulting chemical reactions deplete the Earth's atmosphere of oxygen, deposit toxic and explosive compounds on the surface, and acidify the oceans. Anaerobic bacteria are the only life-forms that flourish, while humans survive only with breathing apparatus and, since most metals corrode in this harsh environment, develop a material culture based on ceramic technology. Jack Williamson's
Terraforming Earth
(2001) is based on the premise that after a devastating asteroid impact, beneficent robots will tend the human remnant, slowly terraform the Earth, and eventually reintroduce colonies of cloned humans on the planet, while Kim Stanley Robinson looks to the utopian project of terraforming the planet Mars in the not-too-distant future in his trilogy
Red Mars
(1993),
Green Mars
(1994), and
Blue Mars
(1996). In
The Case for Mars
(1996), Robert Zubrin argues that terraforming Mars for human habitation would be a relatively simple and straightforward process. Not to overlook the comedic genre, in the
Red Green Show
episode “Rain Man” (season 15, episode 297), title character Red Green sets up a homemade cloud-seeding cannon at Possum Lodge to shoot chemicals into the clouds and alleviate a drought—with hilarious unintended consequences.

In what follows, rather than overwhelming the reader with the seemingly endless themes of modern or postmodern, post-1960s science fiction, I have chosen to present some older literature that most people have not read or probably have not read recently. This literature, which is dated in many ways, yet quite relevant and enjoyable in others, strikes many of the thematic and moral chords that echo through past, recent, and current concerns about weather and climate control. I am not claiming—indeed, I think it is insupportable to claim—that science fantasy eventually finds its way into science fact. Instead, generations of readers, long before the atomic age or the space age, discovered in science fiction a more subtle kind of wish fulfillment that sets the tone but not the parameters for what might be expected in the future. The main theme here is control, but the literary genres are varied. Although some of it is tragic, much is what we might call “hard path” science fiction (with apologies to
Amory Lovins), involving massive and heroic efforts to terraform a planet or geoengineer its basic physical or biophysical systems. Such literature usually emphasizes words such as “mastery” or “domination.” That is, it plays out the Baconian program involving fantasies of control. The comedic genre is well represented too, with stories that are both silly and funny. The overall effect is that no single style dominates imaginative work on weather and climate control, and some, akin to Woody Allen's movie
Melinda and Melinda
(2004), explicitly combine both tragedy and comedy.

Jules Verne, the renowned French author of “scientific fiction,” wrote a notable book in 1865,
De la terre à la lune
, known in English after 1873 as
From the Earth to the Moon
. In the story, when the members of the elite Baltimore Gun Club, bemoaning the end of the Civil War, find themselves lacking any urgent assignments, their president, Impey Barbicane, proposes that they build a cannon large enough to launch a projectile to the Moon. But when Barbicane's adversary places a huge wager that the project will fail and a daring volunteer elevates the mission to a “manned” flight, one man's dream turns into an international space race.

In a sequel,
Sans Dessus Dessous
, published in 1889 and appearing simultaneously in English as
The Purchase of the North Pole
, Verne revisits the possibilities of big guns, but this time with a distinct skepticism for the wonders of technology. For 2 cents an acre, a group of American investors acquires rights to the vast, incredibly lucrative but seemingly inaccessible coal and mineral deposits under the North Pole. To mine the region, they propose to melt the polar ice. Initially, the project captures the public imagination, as the backers promise that their scheme will improve the climate everywhere. They find it relatively easy to convince the public of the idea that the tilt of the Earth's axis should be eliminated (shades of John Milton). This would remove the contrasts between summer and winter, reduce the extreme stresses of heat and cold, improve health, calm the power of storms, and make the Earth a terrestrial heaven, where every day is mild and springlike. But public opinion shifts when it is revealed that the investors—members of the Baltimore Gun Club, the very same group who shot the projectile to the Moon—intend to shoot the Earth off its axis by building and firing the world's largest cannon. Initial public enthusiasm gives way to fears that if these retired Civil War artillerymen (modern-day Titans) have their way and build a kind of Archimedean lever, the tidal waves generated by the explo-sion
will kill millions of people. In secrecy and haste, the protagonists proceed with their plan, building the huge cannon in the side of Mount Kilimanjaro (figure 1.3). The scheme fails only when an error in calculation renders the massive shot ineffective. Verne concludes, “The world's inhabitants could thus sleep in peace. To modify the conditions of the Earth's movement is beyond the power of man.”
⁷
Or is it? Perhaps he spoke too soon.

1.3
The Purchase of the North Pole
: (
left
) building the cannon at Mount Kilimanjaro; (
center
) inside the cannon; (
right
) Fire! (ILLUSTRATION BY GEORGE ROUX, IN
THE ILLUSTRATED JULES VERNE
)