In the episode, Spock first suggests that the creature may be the last of its kind when he and the captain encounter a maze of tunnels that couldn’t have been made by an average animal:
Kirk: Then we’re dealing with more than one creature, despite your tricorder readings, or we have a creature with an extremely long life span.
Spock: Or it is the last of a race of creatures which made these tunnels. If so, if it is the only survivor of a dead race, to kill it would be a crime against science.
Kirk: Mister Spock, our mission is to protect this colony, to get the pergium moving again. This is not a zoological expedition. Maintain a constant reading on the creature. If we have to, we’ll use our phasers to cut our own tunnels. We’ll try to surround it. I’m sorry, Mister Spock, but I’m afraid the creature must die.
Spock: I see no alternative myself, Captain. It merely seems a pity.
Spock’s sentiment is not a moral or ethical argument against extinction, but rather a scientific one. Spock believes the creature would be useful as an object of study because it is the first silicon-based life-form the Federation has ever encountered. This anthropocentric take on extinction reflects both Spock’s scientific orientation and the common 1960s environmentalist approach of focusing on the human benefit of killing animals.
Although Kirk insists that the creature must be killed regardless of being the last of its kind, when he comes face-to-face with it, he changes his mind. Because the creature does not immediately attack him, Kirk decides to forgo his plan and to try to figure out what is motivating the creature. Spock proposes to do a Vulcan mind meld with the alien life-form. During the joining, he cries out in the Horta’s voice, “Murder. Of thousands. Devils! Eternity ends. The chamber of the ages. The altar of tomorrow. Murderers. Stop them! Kill! Strike back! Monsters! . . . It is the end of life. Eternity stops. Go out into the tunnel. To the chamber of the ages. Cry for the children” (TOS, “The Devil in the Dark”).
Through the mind meld Spock learns that the silicon nodules that the miners have been destroying are Horta eggs. The miners are in fact the devils in the dark, not the Horta. As Spock later explains to the miners, “There have been many generations of Horta on this planet. Every fifty thousand years, the entire race dies, all but one, like this one, but the eggs live. She cares for them, protects them. And when they hatch, she is the mother to them, thousands of them. This creature here is the mother of her race” (TOS, “The Devil in the Dark”).
The Horta’s actions are then justified, because “she fought back in the only way she knew how, as any mother would fight when her children are in danger,” as Kirk explains it (TOS, “The Devil in the Dark”). According to William Shatner, this twist of turning the Horta from a killer to a sympathetic creature made the episode “intelligent and highly compelling.”13
Yet the resolution of the Horta’s potential extinction does not come from Kirk’s moral argument alone—the miners could still have decided that it was preferable for the Horta species to die out in order to protect their mining interests. But Kirk offers up a solution that benefits the miners:
Gentlemen, the Horta moves through rock the way we move through air, and it leaves tunnels. The greatest natural miners in the universe. It seems to me we could make an agreement, reach a modus vivendi. They tunnel. You collect and process, and your process operation would be a thousand times more profitable. (TOS, “The Devil in the Dark”)
Kirk’s suggestion is right on target—the head of the mining operation reports at the end of the episode that the Horta children are tunneling out enormous quantities of minerals, and both sides are content. In this episode, the endangered species was transformed from a threat to a benefit, and thus it was saved from certain doom.
The conflict between conservation and development was a central concern of the twentieth century. The environmentalist movement of the 1960s was a response to the human degradation of nature, but it could not ignore human needs. Unlike in “The Man Trap” when the last individual of a species is killed, the Horta survives because a balance is struck between what is good for nature and what is good for humans.
What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us
“The Devil in the Dark” revealed that what we don’t know can hurt us. The miners did not understand that the silicon nodules were the Horta eggs; by destroying them, they incurred the wrath of the Horta mother and nearly missed out on harnessing the power of thousands of little miners working on their behalf. Creatures and humans could have a symbiotic relationship. This would become the major theme of the fourth motion picture in the Star Trek series, The Voyage Home.
In The Voyage Home, Earth is under siege from an alien probe, and after some quick analysis, Spock deciphers the probe’s signal as the song of a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). Unfortunately, humpback whales were hunted to extinction in the twenty-first century, so the crew of the Enterprise has to make a trip back in time to find a whale and return it to the twenty-third century.
The environmentalist theme of The Voyage Home was no accident. Leonard Nimoy, who directed the film, was reading the Pulitzer Prize–winning book Biophilia by the ecologist Edward O. Wilson at the time that script ideas for the movie were being developed. In Biophilia, Wilson argued that humans have “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.”14 Wilson believed that humans want to be around nature because they are intimately linked with nature; in fact, all species are linked together in webs that could crumble if even one species is removed. According to Nimoy, this idea caught his attention:
In his work, Wilson talks about the vast numbers of species becoming extinct, and predicted that by the 1990s, Earth would lose as many as 10,000 species per year. That’s one species per hour! Most disturbingly, many of these lost species would never have been catalogued; we would never have the chance to know what they were or what function they performed in the cycle of nature. They would simply vanish without leaving behind a record of their existence. The grim future painted by Biophilia haunted my thoughts.15
The notion that species can be extirpated without us ever knowing their role or purpose was key for Nimoy. In a conversation Nimoy had with a friend about Biophilia and endangered species, the humpback whale came up as an example. Because scientists are unsure about the function of whale song, Nimoy decided on a plotline for the movie that focused on how what we don’t know—the function of the whale song—can hurt us, because we’ve caused the whales’ extinction and now we’re in danger.16
The choice of the whale as the species under threat was fitting for a movie filmed and released in 1986, because of the history of the antiwhaling movement. The International Whaling Commission (IWC), a voluntary international organization founded in 1946 to review and revise whaling standards worldwide, had instituted a ban on all commercial hunting of humpback whales and blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) in 1966.17 The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an international agreement that took effect in 1975 to limit international trade in wild plants and animals, listed several species of whale, including humpback, blue, and grey whales, as endangered species.18 Two vocal environmentalist protest organizations specifically targeted what they considered illegal whaling activities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Greenpeace launched its antiwhaling campaign in 1975, which included harassing whaling ships at sea, especially in Icelandic waters, and the militant organization Sea Shepherd began targeting whaling ships in 1978, including ramming ships at sea and sinking ships in port.19 Antiwhaling sentiment was growing fierce by 1980.
Very few governments objected to protecting large whales, but the IWC entered a sea of controversy in 1982 when it moved to extend the protection. That year, backed by numerous nonwhaling country members, the IWC implemented a moratorium on all commercial whaling worldwide, regardless of the species, scheduled to begin in late 1985. Several countries active in whaling of smaller whale types, including Japan, Norway, and Iceland, vo
ted against the measure and continued hunting whales.
The action of The Voyage Home occurs within this context. When the Enterprise crew (who are manning a Klingon Bird-of-Prey) travels back in time to 1985 to search for a humpback whale, they stumble upon the Cetacean Institute in San Francisco. On a guided tour of the facility, Dr. Gillian Taylor introduces Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock to the plight of whales in the twentieth century:
Since the dawn of time, men have harvested whales for a variety of purposes, most of which can be achieved synthetically at this point. One hundred years ago, using hand-thrown harpoons, man did plenty of damage, but that is nothing compared to what he has achieved in this century. This is mankind’s legacy, whales hunted to the brink of extinction. Virtually gone is the blue whale, the largest creature ever to inhabit the Earth. Despite all attempts at banning whaling, there are still countries and pirates currently engaged in the slaughter of these inoffensive creatures. Where the humpback whale once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, today there are less than ten thousand specimens alive and those that are taken are no longer fully grown. In addition, many of the females are killed, while still bearing unborn calves. (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
During her talk, graphic video footage of a whale hunt and bloody slaughter is shown to the guests. Dr. Taylor’s monologue reflects clearly the antiwhaling sentiment and the controversies over the continuation of whaling practices as of 1985.
When the ship is ready to take on its oceanic passengers, Dr. Taylor discovers that the institute’s humpback whales, George and Gracie, have been released into the Pacific. The crew hurries to track the whales and discovers a whaling ship is nearby. As our heroes speed toward the whales, the whaling ship is closing in. The whalers “are largely bearded; they are Northern Europeans, maybe Swedes, Icelanders or Russians, all famous as Humpback hunters.”20 The whalers get ready for the kill; they load their harpoon, and when the whales breech, they fire it. Sulu manages to fly the Bird-of-Prey in between the harpoon and the whale, forcing the harpoon to fall harmlessly into the water. The whole sequence mimics a common antiwhaling practice used by Greenpeace of moving people in Zodiac inflatable boats between a whaling ship and its prey.21
The Voyage Home reflects several 1980s ideas about extinction. The twenty-third-century interlopers in the twentieth century know that humpback whales will be hunted to extinction, and this will have a price. Kirk poignantly comments near the end of the movie when gazing at George and Gracie on board the ship: “It’s ironic. When man was killing these creatures, he was destroying his own future.” The line picks up on Biophilia’s emphasis on a web of life facing the challenges of globally rising extinction rates. It also taps into contemporary antiwhaling fervor and the concerns about the future of whales. Many have called Star Trek IV one of the greatest environmental movies of all time.
Intervening to Right Past Wrongs
In the 1990s Star Trek reached out to a new generation with an all-new cast, and they embraced new ideas about extinction and the human role in preventing it. Older environmentalist concepts of preventing animal extinction for the benefit of humans gave way to the notions of preventing extinction for the sake of the animals themselves. Humans were called upon to intervene and to right past wrongs.
The Next Generation episode “New Ground,” which aired in 1992, included a subplot about extinct and soon-to-be extinct animals. As part of a school outing, a group of students visiting the Biolab onboard the Enterprise-D are told about a mission to relocate the endangered Corvan gilvo. The teacher is talking about the white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum), which became extinct in the twenty-second century, when the show’s viewers join the class:
As the value of their horns increased, the number of white rhinos in the wild kept falling, until they finally became extinct about two centuries ago. Now, I’d like to show you a pair of animals we’re trying to save from extinction. Would you follow me? They’re from Corvan Two, where their homes in the rainforests are being threatened by industrial pollutants. They’re called Corvan gilvos. They’re a little shy. The eating habits of gilvos are very similar to those of Earth’s draco lizards, which died out over three hundred years ago. There are only fourteen gilvos left on Corvan Two. We’re transplanting these two to the protected planet Brentalia, where they should thrive (TNG, “New Ground”).
In this monologue, the teacher cites two examples of extinct species: the white rhino, from overhunting, and the draco lizard, from the loss of its rain forest habitat. Neither of these animals was extinct in 1992, but both were under mounting pressure of extinction by humans. The white rhino has been on the CITES Appendix I list, which bans all commercial trade in the animal or products made from the animal, since 1977.22 According to the World Conservation Union (IUCN), an estimated 17,480 white rhinos remained in the wild as of 2008. Poaching in order to acquire the rhino’s horn, which is used in Chinese medicine and as ornate Middle Eastern decoration, is the main threat to the species.23 Draco lizards are a family of lizards with membranes that allow them to glide among the treetops; they are known as flying dragons. They live in rain forests in southeastern Asia, and although the IUCN does not consider them threatened, their habitat loss may be considerable.24 It was not a big stretch to think that these types of animals might become extinct by the twenty-second century.
In “New Ground,” there are only fourteen of the fictional gilvos left, so the Enterprise is transporting a pair of them to a planet with “protected” status, presumably like a national park where industrial development is limited or banned. This kind of movement of threatened or endangered species was a growing practice in the late 1980s and 1990s. Concerns about local extinctions of animals in areas where they previously lived prompted scientists in the 1970s and 1980s to start reintroducing animals from stock that still existed elsewhere. High-profile reintroductions of some attractive and compelling species, including the Arabian oryx in Oman, golden lion tamarinds in Brazil, and peregrine falcons in North America, served as conservation media events, showcasing the handling, transport, and release of the animals to better the environment.25 In addition to putting species back into areas where they had been extirpated, some animals were relocated to new areas in order to conserve them.
The growing practice of introducing and reintroducing animals prompted some concerns in the scientific community. In 1987, the IUCN issued a position statement to set the standards for the movement of species because “translocations [the practice of relocating species] are powerful tools for the management of the natural and man made environment which, properly used, can bring great benefits to natural biological systems and to man but like other powerful tools they have the potential to cause enormous damage if misused.”26 The IUCN also created a Re-introduction Specialist Group in 1988 to draft the guidelines for wildlife reintroduction projects and to disseminate information to scientists around the world about reintroduction experiences.27 These guidelines permit the introduction of species from one location to another for conservation “only as a last resort when no opportunities for re-introduction into the original site or range exist.”28 The gilvos of Corvan would qualify for such drastic measures since their numbers had dwindled and their habitat had become uninhabitable.
The episode portrays the mission to conserve the gilvo as a serious responsibility. When fire threatens to consume the Biolab housing the creatures, Worf’s son, Alexander, who has been injured, pleads with Riker to save them. The potential consequence of losing a whole species weighs heavily on the boy. Just in the nick of time, Riker carries the gilvos to safety while Worf saves Alexander. Humans must intervene to save endangered species; letting them die is unthinkable.
Not all extinction is serious, however. Saving a species from extinction found a lighter treatment in the Deep Space Nine episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” in 1996. In this episode, which includes time travel to the twenty-third century and a meeting between the Deep Space Nine and Star Trek crews, we learn about
the plight of the tribbles. In the original series episode “The Trouble with Tribbles,” the tribbles on Space Station K7 showed their affection by purring for all humanoids, except Klingons, at whom they hissed. The Klingons returned the sentiment. Some years later, the crew of the Enterprise found that Cyrano Jones, a two-bit trader, has sold some tribbles on a Klingon planet, which prompted the Klingons to genetically engineer a tribble predator called a glommer (TOS: Animated Series, “More Tribbles, More Troubles”). In the “Trials and Tribble-ations” episode, we find out that in the late twenty-third century, Klingons hunted down the tribbles and even destroyed their home world in order to eradicate the species. Upon hearing about the intentional slaughter, one of the Deep Space Nine crew, Odo, remarks, “Another glorious chapter in Klingon history. Tell me, do they still sing songs of the Great Tribble Hunt?” (DS9, “Trials and Tribble-ations”) Although the Klingons had worked diligently to rid the universe of the tribble, the time-traveling Deep Space Nine crew ends up bringing back a tribble to the twenty-fourth century, thus unintentionally reintroducing it. In this series of episodes spanning across multiple Star Trek shows, tribbles are seen as an ecological menace, but their reintroduction is depicted in a lighthearted, comical fashion.
The Enterprise’s Evolving Environmental Mission
Star Trek and History Page 28