Green Planets (3 page)

Moreover, putting aside the sheer impossibility of this persistent trope of capitalist ideology—the basic mathematical impossibility of economic growth that
literally
never ends—we should find that narratives of space colonization dialectically reinscribe the very horizon of material deprivation and ultimate limit that they are meant to relieve. “Escape” from Earth actually only constrains
you all the tighter, in miniature Earths smaller and more fragile than even the one you left. In his essay “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” discussed in Sabine Höhler's chapter of
Green Planets
, Kenneth E. Boulding (the cofounder of the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory
¹²
) notes this reality as he characterizes the “critical moment” of the mid-twentieth century as a transition from a “cowboy economy” to a “spaceman economy”:

For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the “cowboy economy,” the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the “spaceman” economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy.
¹³

The echo of Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 “frontier thesis” is unmistakable; a once-open, once-free horizon of expansive possibility, which previously drove American history, has now slammed forever shut.

In the cowboy economy, consumption is an unalloyed good; if there are infinite reserves of everything (or abundant resources so inexhaustible as to be effectively infinite), the health of an economy is logically predicated on the expansion of consumption. But on a spaceship economy, governed by scarcity, reserves must always be tightly controlled, requiring a reevaluation of the basic principles of economics:

By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized. The essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of the human bodies and minds included in the system. In the spaceman economy, what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less production and consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who
have been obsessed with tile income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts.
¹⁴

This central insight—an ecological one—makes visible certain contradictions that were programmatically obscured by the “space empire” fictions so popular in the Golden Age of
SF
. In stark contrast to the untold riches and total freedom they are imagined to provide, distant space colonies—whether on inhospitable moons or orbiting far-flung planets—are in fact necessarily markers of deep, abiding, and permanent scarcity, requiring, for any hope of survival, careful planning and rigorous management, without any waste of resources. From an earthbound perspective, the colonization of space appears wildly expansive, a “New Frontier” that opens up the entire universe to human experience and exploitation—but from a perspective inside one of these spaceships or colonies, life is a state of fragile and even hellish enclosure, at constant risk of either deadly shortages or deadly exposure to the void outside.

Asimov, of all
SF
writers, confronts this paradox in a late work,
Robots and Empire
(1985), which sees one of its robot heroes (operating under the self-generated “Zeroth” Law of Robots
¹⁵
) deliberately and permanently poison Earth's crust with radioactive contaminants in order to force humans off their otherwise paradisal home world. Earth is already perfect for us, the robot R. Giskard reasons—too perfect. The only way to get human beings off the planet and out into the universe (where, scattered across hundreds of worlds, the species will finally be safe from any local planetary disaster) is to destroy Earth altogether: “The removal of Earth as a large crowded world would remove a mystique I have already felt to be dangerous and would help the Settlers. They will streak outward into the Galaxy at a pace that will double and redouble and—without Earth to look back to always, without Earth to set up as a God of the past—they will establish a Galactic Empire. It was necessary for us to make that possible.”
¹⁶
Taken in the context of the rest of Asimov's immense shared universe, the intended conclusion for the reader is that this robot indeed made the correct decision to poison the planet and kill all nonhuman life on Earth.
¹⁷

The use of interstellar travel and space colonization as a metaphor for understanding and reimagining questions of material/ecological limit is well-trod ground in
SF
, in works ranging from Brian Aldiss's
Non-Stop
(
Starship
in the United States) (1951) to Robert Heinlein's
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
(1961)—which popularized the ecologically sound proverb “There ain't no such thing as a free lunch”—to my coeditor Kim Stanley Robinson's own unapologetically
utopian
Mars
trilogy (1990s). It is even, in somewhat sublimated form, the kernel structuring Stephen King's recent horror blockbuster,
Under the Dome
(2009), in which an impenetrable barrier suddenly isolates Chester's Mill, Maine, from the rest of the outside world, leading to immediate resource scarcity, social breakdown, and violent chaos. As King told
popeaters.com
:

From the very beginning, I saw it as a chance to write about the serious ecological problems that we face in the world today. The fact is we all live under the dome. We have this little blue world that we've all seen from outer space, and it appears like that's about all there is. It's a natural allegorical situation, without whamming the reader over the head with it.…But I love the idea about isolating these people, addressing the questions that we face. We're a blue planet in a corner of the galaxy, and for all the satellites and probes and Hubble pictures, we haven't seen evidence of anyone else. There's nothing like ours. We have to conclude we're on our own, and we have to deal with it. We're under the dome. All of us.
¹⁸

As King suggests, and as Ursula Heise has described in more detail, in the 1960s and 1970s these questions of limit crystallize around a particular series of science fictional visual images that, while familiar and perhaps unremarkable today, were revelatory and even shattering in their moment: Soviet and especially NASA images of Earth as viewed from space, chief among them the “Earthrise” photograph obtained by the
Apollo 8
crew in 1968 and the “Blue Marble” photograph taken by the
Apollo 17
crew in 1972. (To Heise's list we might add the “Pale Blue Dot” photograph taken by
Voyager 1
in 1990, in which a six-billion-kilometer-distant Earth is but a single pixel, barely visible against a field of total darkness.) The wide circulation of these “blue planet” images, Heise writes, represents Earth as an immanent and immediately graspable totality, in which all differences between race, class, gender, nation, ideology, and ecosystem have been completely smoothed away: “Set against a black background like a precious jewel in a case of velvet, the planet here appears as a single entity, united, limited, and delicately beautiful.”
¹⁹

But the utopian possibilities encoded in this reading of the photo—
we are all one species on this pale blue dot
, we are all in this together—can just as quickly give way to the brutally apocalyptic. This is, after all, Al Gore's anxious use of the “Pale Blue Dot” photo in his climate change documentary
An Inconvenient Truth
(2006): “You see that pale, blue dot? That's us. Everything that has ever happened in all of human history has happened on that pixel. All the triumphs
and all the tragedies, all the wars, all the famines, all the major advances.…It's our only home. And that is what is at stake: our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization.”
²⁰
In this reading “Spaceship Earth” quickly becomes not our paradise, but our prison—we are all of us trapped here, waiting to be killed either by cosmic accident or our own folly. Indeed, I would suggest that post-1970s recognition of this unhappy ultimate limitation on the future growth of wealth may do much to explain the cultural importance of cyberpunk in the 1980s and 1990s and speculation about a technological “Singularity” in the 2000s, as both at their core offer an alternative scheme for getting outside scarcity and precariousness—simply leave the material world altogether, by entering the computer. In virtual space, with no resource consumption or excess pollution to worry about, we can all be as rich as we want for as long as we want (or so the fantasy goes).

The more we learn, the smaller Earth seems—much too small, far too delicate, to encompass all our lavish dreams of inexhaustible, techno-futuristic wealth. And yet, forty years since a human being last set foot on the moon, we are increasingly just as certain that there is nowhere else for us to go. Thus ecological discourse, both in and outside
SF
, both during and after the 1970s, becomes characterized by a claustrophobic sense of impending ecological limit, the creeping terror that technological modernity, and its consumer lifestyle, may in fact have no future at all. Chad Harbach in
n + 1
captures well the material origins of this sense of dread:

America and the fossil-fuel economy grew up together; our triumphant history is the triumphant history of these fuels. We entrusted to them (slowly at first, and with increasing enthusiasm) the work of growing our food, moving our bodies, and building our homes, tools, and furniture—they freed us for thought and entertainment, and created our ideas of freedom. These ideas of freedom, in turn, have created our existential framework, within which one fear dwarfs all others: the fear of economic slowdown (less growth), backed by deeper fears of stagnation (no growth) and, unthinkably, contraction (anti-growth). America does have a deeply ingrained, morally coercive politics based in a fear that must never be realized, and this is it. To fail to grow—to fail to grow ever faster—has become synonymous with utter collapse, both of our economy and our ideals.
²¹

In a recent essay in
Harper's
, Wendell Berry makes much the same point, describing U.S. energy policy as a “Faustian economics” predicated on a “fantasy
of limitlessness” that, when put under threat, produces claustrophobia and dread.
²²
Dipesh Chakrabarty, drawing from Timothy Mitchell, has in turn suggested that we might extend this analysis even further, across the whole of post-Enlightenment liberal democracy: “The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.”
²³
In this sense limit and apocalypse can be thought, in the ideology of American-style capitalism at least, to be nearly synonymous—indeed, the end of the liberal subject as such.

Few cultural documents depict this moment of anxious confrontation with limit more vividly than the opening sequence of the overpopulation disaster film
Soylent Green
(1973), which depicts a miniature history of America. We begin with a quiet classical piano score over a sepia-tinted montage depicting nineteenth-century settlement of the American West, in which the wide-open natural spaces of the frontier seem to dwarf their human inhabitants. But soon something begins to change. Suddenly there are too many people in the frame, then far too many people; cars and then airplanes begin to appear; cities grow huge. New instruments enter the musical track: trumpets, trombones, saxophones; the cacophony begins to speed. Now humans are dwarfed not by nature but by the ceaseless replication of their own consumer goods—replicating the logic of the assembly line, the screen becomes filled with countless identical cars. We see jammed highways, overflowing landfills, smog-emitting power plants, flashes of war, riots, pollution, and graves. The sequence goes on and on, using vertical pans to give the sense of terrible accumulation, of a pile climbing higher and higher and higher. Finally, we reach the end—the music slows back to its original piano score, combined with an out-of-harmony synthesizer, over a few sepia-tinted images of that same natural world in ruin, now filled with trash. The end of the sequence locates this site of ruin in the future; New York, 2022, population forty million. But of course these nightmarish images are all photographs from the present: the disaster has already happened, it's already too late.
²⁴

Thus we frequently find, in the Junk Cities and Cultures of the Afternoon that characterize the most contemporary sense of our collective ecological future, a sense that there is nothing left to do but somehow accommodate ourselves as best we can to ongoing and effectively permanent catastrophe. In
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
(1984), a widely loved ecological anime from Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, the eras of both green forests and global capitalism are in the distant past, lost in the mists of thousands of years. The legacy of our time—the legacy of a final war called the Seven Days of Fire—is a snarl of toxic jungles and mutant insects, in the gaps of which scattered human beings still
struggle to survive. Paolo Bacigalupi's stories of the future (discussed by Eric C. Otto in his chapter in this volume) frequently see their quasi-human and nonhuman protagonists exploring polluted, toxic landscapes in search of new types of beauty (if any are possible) in a world where unchecked capitalism has completely destroyed nature. And in John Brunner's utterly apocalyptic
The Sheep Look Up
(1972)—the best of 1970s ecological
SF
, if only because it so unflinchingly shows us the worst—even this consolation is denied us as a parade of manmade environmental horrors poisons every aspect of our lives, where Things Go Wrong, and Wronger, and Wronger Still, but nothing ever changes.