Green Planets (21 page)

As the ship represents Earth, Earth itself turns into a ship, an exceptional site where life is at stake.
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Hardin reminds his readers of the revolutionary change in perception brought about with the first pictures of Earth from space: “We must feel in our bones the inescapable truth that we live on a spaceship.”
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Hardin quotes Adlai E. Stevenson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who in 1965 took up this image in his appeal to the international community. Stevenson referred to Earth as “a little spaceship” on which humankind traveled together as passengers, “dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil.”
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In 1966, the English economist and political scientist Barbara Ward in her book
Spaceship Earth
pointed to the “remarkable combination of security and vulnerability” that humanity in the Cold War era found itself in.
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The spaceship became an allegory for the need of a new balance of power between the continents, of wealth between North and South, and of understanding and tolerance in a world of economic interdependence and potential nuclear destruction.

CIRCULATION AND ALLOCATION: THE
BEAGLE
AS SPACESHIP

Spaceship Earth also reconciled seemingly opposing ideals of sufficiency and efficiency in environmentalist thought. In a programmatic lecture, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” given in 1966, the American economist Kenneth E. Boulding chose the spaceship as a metaphor to promote the “closed earth of the future,” suggesting to foreclose the wasteful “cowboy economy” of the past for a frugal “spaceman economy.”
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The spaceship was his model of a self-contained cyclical economical and ecological system capable of continuous material reproduction. The American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller in his
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
(1969) used the spaceship as a metaphor of an intricate cybernetic machine to be expertly run by science and technology. Fuller summoned the engineering elite to take control of an earthly environment in bad repair.
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He propagated the optimistic view that ecologically smart design and resource-efficient technologies would take the modern ideals into the future.
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Hardin endorsed Boulding's model of spaceman sufficiency but did not concern himself with the technological details of life support. Instead he pointed to an aspect that neither Boulding nor Fuller had addressed: “The real problem of a spaceship is its people.”
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Next to the question of government, the long-term changes brought about by generational succession had to be handled. In
part two
of his book we learn that the creators of the
Beagle
came up with the solution of eternal life for a tiny part of the population. The spaceship society is divided into “civilized man” (a category excluding women) and “procreative man” (this one including women). This arrangement allows Hardin to experiment with what he deems most valuable in human populations: culture or the development of ideas on the one hand, and evolution through natural selection on the other.

The “Argotes” form an all-male insular community of twelve who secretly monitor the common “Quotions.” The Argotes are the custodians of the past; they were selected for their qualities of the mind, to act as trustees of civilization. To maintain the stability of intelligence and ideas, the Argotes do not reproduce biologically, and they are conveniently free of emotions and desire. The Argotes reproduce culturally by going through a cycle of perpetual youth to oppose the aging of the mind, “like pushing RESET on a computer.”
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The Quotions were selected for their fine biological qualities and then left to the
basic processes of aging and mortality, sexual selection, reproduction, and mutation. They are subjected to chaotic nature, which develops human
DNA
but also threatens long-evolved cultural ideas and values from each generation to the next. The
Beagle
's plan is to wait and see whether the Argotes or the Quotions will eventually prove more suited to colonizing a new planet.

Through decades and centuries the Argotes have been watching the Quotions divide and multiply and suffer all the major societal conflicts, which, as the records show, people on Earth also fought through. Repeatedly, the liberal ideals of freedom and competition clash with the sustainability ideal of freedom and responsibility. From these conflicts Hardin construes his major argument. After Darwin, he claims, a society can trust neither the individual conscience nor the appeal to individual responsibility. In a community favoring freedom and responsibility in using common resources, there will always be one who just favors freedom and takes more than his share. In a commons, or a “system of voluntary restraint,” gains will be privatized while losses are socialized. Solidarity and altruism have no place in his philosophy, which excludes collective or socialist forms of joint property and joint property management: “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
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For this point Hardin exploits his legendary
Science
article of 1968, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in which he attacked the allegedly prevailing practice that common earthly resources like forests, air, and oceans could freely be used and overused.
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The scarcity and contamination of any commonly owned and used natural resource, so his argument goes, will inevitably increase, since it will eventually be exploited within a limited world. Hardin bases his justification on the biological principle of natural selection as he understood it: man is an “egoistic animal,” and as “the descendant of an unbroken line of ancestors who survived because they were sufficiently egoistic,” man will naturally attempt to secure and maximize his own advantage.
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Ultimately the conscientious people will go extinct in favor of the ruthless and egoistic. According to Hardin the system of the commons can only work in a limitless world or in a world in which the carrying capacity has not yet been reached. “But it cannot work in a world that is reaching its limits, in which the decisions being made overstress the carrying capacity of the environment—in a word, in the world of a spaceship.”
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To Hardin the Hobbesian nature of man must also preclude common access to procreation. Like many of his colleagues, Hardin built his assumptions on the Malthusian principle that humans will naturally breed and populations will increase geometrically or exponentially, while resource supply will grow arithmetically or in linear fashion only.
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Natural selection, so thought Hardin,
will favor
Homo progenitivus
(“reproductive man”) at the expense of
Homo contracipiens
(“contracepting man”).
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When defining Spaceship Earth, Barbara Ward had warned that in “such a close community, there must be rules for survival.”
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Hardin claimed that a spaceship's mission was to reconcile freedom with coercion. He postulated “the necessity of coercion for all—
mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon
,”
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a freedom collectively delimited and controlled through law.

ELIGIBILITY AND SELECTION: THE
BEAGLE
AS LIFEBOAT

Dystopic visions of a population-resource-environment predicament are explored in other works of
SF
around 1970. Frequently the city takes the place of the spaceship to signify the closed world. Sufficiency and efficiency aspects of closure feature both in artificially balanced societies and in conditions of “overpopulation.” The movie
Logan's Run
(1976) presents a world in perfect ecological equilibrium. Three hundred years into the future, “the survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution live in a domed city, sealed away from the forgotten world outside. Here, in an ecologically balanced world, mankind lives only for pleasure, freed by the servo-mechanisms which provide everything.” To maintain the equilibrium a mastermind computer executes an efficient scheme of population control. While the citizens believe in their chance of “renewal” at the age of thirty through competing in the spectacle of “Carrousel,” the central feedback system behind the scenes keeps the total number of human lives stable according to a strict “one for one” rule: “One is terminated, one is born. Simple, logical, perfect. You have a better system?”
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Soylent Green
(1973), a movie set in the year 2022, explores an alternative but no less “sustainable” path. New York City is thickly polluted; its population is forty million. Congestion, poverty, hunger, and corruption dominate the city. A merciless police force keeps the masses in control, clearing human surplus away with huge power shovels and garbage trucks. Governmental euthanasia facilities are running day and night. Director Richard Fleischer explores the excesses of a world applying Boulding's spaceship solution of the closed circulatory system to human mass. The single company that controls food production and distribution, the Soylent Corporation, devises a most efficient scheme in which dead bodies are recycled to organic material and reintegrated into the food chain.
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“There is a sense in which all these movies are in complicity with the abhorrent.”
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Susan Sontag's view from 1965 on disaster fiction also applies to the fiction of population disaster of the 1970s. But clearly the different works of fiction also presented different perceptions of what the disaster of overpopulation
consists of, what it entails, and for whom. Undoubtedly, many works of
SF
, by exploring a variety of disastrous conditions and effects, have approached the “population problem” in a more thorough and differentiated way than many population scientists have.

Let us return then to the
Beagle
, which meanwhile also witnesses a gigantic population increase. In
part three
of Hardin's book the spaceship has traveled far beyond Alpha Centauri, as it turned out that the planet was “no good.”
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As hundreds of years stretched into thousands, the spaceship's population increased to twelve million people (naturally, all Quotions; there are still only twelve Argotes). The chapter with the evocative title “Freedom's Harvest” explains that several hundred years earlier, a massive conflict on matters of reproduction was decided in favor of the individual and inseparable right and freedom to reproduce. The pro-creation faction prevailed over the “Trustful Fellowship for Zero Population Growth” that believed in family planning and demanded to “Stop at Two.” Predictably this group was heavily attacked for its insinuated ideas of policing and genocide.
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The Argotes rationalize this development by applying simple calculus on the grounds that “every reproductively isolated group potentially multiplies in exponential fashion.”
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Hardin draws on the Darwinian principle of differential reproduction to describe how one part of the spaceship's population ruthlessly outbred the other. As the right to breed selected for fertility, overcrowding selected for the tolerance of crowding—to the effect that literally no space on board is left for movement and action. The identical calculus had been applied to Earth in the twentieth century. Repeating the title phrase from authors Edward A. Ross (1927) and Karl Sax (1955), Hardin argues that, taking the 1970 rate of population growth of 2 percent, there would be “standing room only” on all the land areas, with a population of 8.27 x 1014, within six hundred years.
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Converting the entire mass of Earth to human flesh would result in 1.33 x 1023 people, achieved in only 1,557 years. Hardin acknowledges that these thought experiments of converting masses might seem ridiculous: “The real point of the mathematical exercise (so often missed) is to compel choice.”
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On the
Beagle
the Argotes choose to reduce the population drastically. In godlike fashion they force the Quotions to pick one out of three biblical scourges: famine, war, or pestilence. The Quotions opt for the disease, and the
Beagle
is once again sparsely populated. Hardin admits that sweeping death might lend itself as a solution to earthly problems in the form of an unintended consequence, but not as a political deliberation. To compel choice, politics needs to
generate a “fundamental extension in morality.” Hardin contests Adam Smith's “invisible hand” symbolizing the belief in the self-regulating capabilities of a market, state, or population, and in rational individual decisions for the greater good. To “close the commons” in breeding, Hardin claims, the society will have to abandon the “present policy of
laissez-faire
in reproduction.”
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Among other “corrective feedbacks” he suggests abandoning the welfare state, which promotes “overbreeding,” and abolishing the 1967 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which instituted the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. Hardin essentially repeats a view he expressed in 1970: that of parenthood being not a right but a privilege to be granted to responsible parents only.
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Clearly, Ehrlich's Good Ship Earth was not an inclusive vehicle that emphasized commonality. Arks may seem egalitarian, but they are not free from power relations, and they do not strive for completeness. Even the biblical ark sorted its species into separate classes of purity, ruling out the unclean.
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Sloterdijk has pointed to the selectivity that characterizes all ark narratives. In all stories of the ark, he reminds us, the choice of the few is declared a holy necessity, and salvation is found only by those who have acquired one of the few boarding passes to the exclusive vehicle.
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Arks are discriminatory technologies; they combine the imperative of resource sufficiency with selective strategies and efficient rules of allocating resources to their occupants. In their most exclusive form arks become lifeboats.