Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  It is only in postmodernity, Delany goes on to say, that new ideological forms are generated at the interstices of the first four. The first of these is the Junk City—the dysfunctional New Jerusalem in slow-motion breakdown, where the glittering spires haven’t been cleaned in quite a while, where the gas stations have all run out of gas, and where nothing works quite the way it did when it was new. The positive side of Junk City is an ecstatic vision of improvisational recombinative urban chaos, “the Lo Teks living in the geodesic superstructure above Nighttown in Gibson’s ‘Johnny Mnemonic,’” to borrow Delany’s example, or perhaps something like a fix-it shop in the ruins of today’s Detroit. The other hybrid position is the ruined countryside, toxified by runoff from the cities and factories, which we need not even to turn to SF to imagine; we sadly have enough of these places in the real world as it is. And the flip side of the ruined countryside, its positive charge, is the unexpectedly sublime vision of decadent beauty that Delany calls the Culture of the Afternoon—the way a sunset, shining splendidly through the smog, glistens off the antifreeze.4

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  Among other things, the shift from the modern to the postmodern as articulated by Delany registers a loss of political-historical agency in favor of a sense of doomed inevitability. The science fictional “Fable for Tomorrow” that opens Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), we might note, tells of an Arcadia “in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings” that is corrupted and destroyed by the introduction of chemical poisons that slowly kill all life in the area. But “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves”—and thus we, reading Silent Spring before the final disaster, might yet choose to do otherwise.5 Similarly, in the nuclear apocalypses that dominated the Cold War imagination of the future, agency is retained always in the spirit of an urgent but still-timely warning; living in the present, rather than the scorched and radioactive future, we can choose not to build the last bomb, and choose not to push the button that will launch it. The haunting UNLESS that punctuates the end of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (1971) captures well the sense of hope that is retained even in the most dire jeremiads, which presume that politics and indeed revolution are still possible, that we might still collectively choose to leave the world better than we found it.

  For Fredric Jameson, it is also this loss of faith in the possibilities of political and social transformation—the evacuation of futurity that Francis Fukuyama famously called “the end of history”6—that marks the shift from modernity to postmodernity. The incapacity for the imagination of alternatives to global capitalism has been frequently encapsulated by Jameson’s well-known, oft-misquoted observation from The Seeds of Time that “it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.”7 Back when we were modern, we believed real change was possible; now that we are postmodern, we are certain it is not.

  Shifts in the dominant vision of ecological apocalypse between the modern and postmodern periods reflect this paradigm shift in our relationship to futurity. The superweapons of early twentieth-century SF—and their terrible actualization in the nuclear bomb—threatened to unpredictably explode at any moment in the future, destroying all we have, and transforming the planet into a radioactive cinder. Thus the urgent need in the present, expressed in so much leftist SF of the period, to oppose more bombs, more wars. But, as Green Planets contributor Timothy Morton has noted, the temporality of climate change, the characteristic planetary apocalypse of our postmodern moment, is rather different: “Global warming is like a very slow nuclear explosion that nobody even notices is happening.…That’s the horrifying thing about it: it’s like my childhood nightmares came true, even before I was born.”8 In the unhappy geological epoch of the Anthropocene—the name scientists have proposed for the moment human activities begin to be recognizable in the geological record, the moment visiting aliens or the future’s Cockroach sapiens will be able to see scrawled in their studies of ice cores and tree rings that humanity wuz here9—the climate has always already been changed. The current, massive disruptions in global climate, that is to say, have been caused by the cumulative carbon release of generations of people who were long dead before the problem was even identified, as well as by ongoing release from the immense networks of energy, production, and distribution that were built and developed in the open landscape of free and unrestricted carbon release—networks on which contemporary civilization now undeniably depends, but which nobody yet has any idea how to replicate in the absence of carbon-burning fossil fuels. As Benjamin Kunkel has wittily noted: “The nightmare, in good nightmare fashion, has something absurd and nearly inescapable about it: either we will begin running out of oil, or we won’t.”10 That is: either we have Peak Oil, and the entire world suffers a tumultuous, uncontrolled transition to post-cheap-oil economics, or else there is still plenty of oil left for us to permanently destroy the global climate through continued excess carbon emissions.

  Despite the urgency of these increasingly undeniable ecological constraints placed upon human activity, however, late capitalism remains a mode of production that insists (culturally) and depends (structurally) on limitless expansion and permanent growth without end: into the former colonial periphery, into the peasant countryside, through oil derricks into the deepest crevices of the earth, and, then, in futurological imaginings, to orbital space stations, lunar cities, Martian settlements, asteroid belt mining colonies, sleeper ships to Alpha Centauri, and on and on. It is a process of growth whose end we can simply not conceive. “The Earth got used up,” begins the intro to several episodes of Joss Whedon’s western-in-space Firefly (2002), “so we moved out and terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths.”11 It sounds so easy! But from a scientific standpoint the other planets in the solar system are simply too inhospitable, and the distances between solar systems far too great, for the fantasy of unlimited expansion to ever actually be achievable.

  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 Theory12) 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, re
serves 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 Robots15) 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 mus
t 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