Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  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.

  The logical endpoint of such narratives generates a final position of the imagination located beyond even Delany’s proposed Junk Cities and Cultures of the Afternoon: the Quiet Earth, a planet that is devoid of human life entirely. The negative charge of the Quiet Earth is the elegiac fantasy of an entirely dead planet—a murdered planet—in which the human species has left behind nothing but ruin before finally killing even itself. Margaret Atwood evokes this vision of a Quiet Earth in a short flash fiction (written for the Guardian during the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit) called “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet,” which finds a human race whose apex of development was the twentieth-century creations of deserts and death. (In the face of this final extinction even her apocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake, written six years earlier, seems somehow upbeat.) In a spirit of mourning and loss, the speaker of the piece addresses him- or herself to the unknown aliens who have come, millennia hence, to bear witness to our vanishing: “You who have come here from some distant world, to this dry lakeshore and this cairn, and to this cylinder of brass, in which on the last day of all our recorded days I place our final words: Pray for us, who once, too, thought we could fly.”25

  Atwood’s blighted vision of a ruined world recalls—and transforms—Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem “Ozymandias” as an anticipatory memory of Earth’s barren future. In the desert of a “distant land” stands the toppled monument to the arrogant king of a lost civilization that believed both he and it to be immortal. But only the head and legs remain; all else has turned to dust. “Lone and level sands” stretch “round the decay of that colossal wreck”; the thriving cities and once-verdant landscapes of Ozymandias’s empire have been utterly erased by a totalizing desertification that, in the present moment, inevitably suggests the bleak endpoint of global climate change. Look upon our works, ye Mighty, and despair. Nothing beside remains.26 “When we contemplate ruins,” Christopher Woodward writes, “we contemplate our own future”;27 the apocalypse is thereby transformed into a memory, an event that is yet to come but which has also somehow, paradoxically, already happened.

  The positive side of the Quiet Earth retains at least some small sense of hope, though for other life forms, not for us. As Imre Szeman and Brent Bellamy show in their Green Planets chapter on recent depictions of nonhuman Earths in such productions as Life after People (2008) and The World Without Us (2007), such texts frequently suggest that the elimination of human beings can itself be thought of as a kind of misanthropic ecotopia; without us, at least, the dogs and the trees and the birds and the bees can go on living. In the Kenyan short SF film Pumzi (2010), directed by Wanuri Kahiu, the allegorical stakes are these explicitly; after a devastating series of water wars and droughts, the human race has been driven underground, clinging to every drop of water that can be wrung from sweaty T-shirts or recovered from the condensation on bathroom mirrors. The world outside the bunker is totally dead. But our scientist hero, Asha (meaning “hope” in Sanskrit, “life” in Swahili), discovers a plant seed that she believes can still germinate; stealing into the forbidden world outside, Asha sacrifices first her meager water ration and ultimately her own life to nourish the world’s last, and first, tree. A shift to the sublime, God’s-eye perspective of time-lapse photography shows the slow return of life to the desert after years, decades, centuries—Asha’s corpse nourishing its roots. If it’s us or them, the film suggests, perhaps we should choose them.28

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  But perhaps we can pull ourselves back from this brink. “We have to accept,” Slavoj Žižek has recently written, “that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny—and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act that will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.”29 The bizarre time-travel logic of this notion suggests the visions of ecological apocalypse might have some radical political potential after all. If capitalism has always been, in K. William Kapp’s memorable formulation, “an economy of unpaid costs,”30 then the growing recognition that the bill is coming due can represent a kind of nascent revolutionary consciousness. Looking through the lens of the apocalypse—skipping ahead, that is, to the end of the story—we can see capitalism more clearly, without the distortions of ideology, complacency, and reaction that ordinarily cloud our view. And then we might, even now, act. As Octavia E. Butler once wrote of her novel of neoliberal deprivation and devastating ecological collapse, Parable of the Sower (1993), “Sometime ago I read some place that Robert A. Heinlein had these three categories of science-fiction stories: The what-if category; the if-only category; and the if-this-goes-on category. And I liked the idea. So this is definitely an if-this-goes-on story. And if it’s true, if it’s anywhere near true, we’re all in trouble.”31 Perhaps the true fantasy of apocalypse then is not so much that we will be destroyed but that something might intervene in time to force us to change—apocalypse in its original, biblical sense, from the Greek ἀποκάλυψις, connoting not a final end but an unveiling: revelation. The fantasy of apocalypse is here unveiled as itself a mode of critique, a crying out for change.

  At the core of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)—whatever else we might have to say about the film’s lavish visual spectacle and its troubling politics of race, gender, disability, and indigeneity—is the fantasy that a typical American might somehow be transformed: put into another body, located in another social-historical context, capable of living a different sort of life. The desire for this transformation is so strong that it leads even the film’s domestic audiences to root against what is essentially the U.S. military as it invades the planet Pandora looking to seize control of its valuable resources for the benefit of a desperate, dying Earth—with our hero leading the resistance and successfully forcing the imperialists off the planet. And his reward for all this in the end is to be permanently transferred into the body of the big-O Other—to, in essence, not have to be an eco-imperialist any longer.32 Little wonder, perhaps, that despite the anxiety over the film’s clear evocation of Orientalist and white-savior fantasies like Pocahontas and Dances with Wolves that has dominated its reception in the Western academy, Avatar has frequently been embraced by indigenous activists in the Global South, who see in it a science fictional reflection of their own struggles.

  A similar miracle takes place at the end of little-seen box-office flop Daybreakers (also from 2009), which makes literal the metaphor famously employed by Karl Marx: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”33 Ten years after a viral outbreak that has turned the national elite into vamp
ires, in Daybreakers’ 2019 there are no longer enough humans left to feed America’s insatiable desire for blood. Vampires who go without blood for too long are transformed into monstrous “subsiders” that attack anything that moves; as the film opens, the subsider epidemic is just reaching the suburbs. Coffee shops advertise that they “still sell 20% blood,” while “blood riots” rock the Third World. All efforts at an energy substitute are stalled. America has reached Peak Blood.

  The solution here is again personal transformation: it turns out that through controlled exposure to the sun, vampires can be cured. But the “cured” vampires cannot be revampirized; in fact their blood itself now contains the cure, turning any vampire who drinks from them into a cured human as well. What is being imagined is a kind of viral enlightenment operating through an epidemiological social network—friend to friend, relative to relative, coworker to coworker—that has the power to slowly transform a society of vampire-consumers back into human beings once again.34

  The active fantasy in both these narratives, and in dozens of others across the field of ecological SF, is salvific: that the nightmare of exploitation, and our own complicity in these practices, might somehow be stopped, despite our inability to change. As Kierkegaard put it, in an epigram sometimes invoked by Darko Suvin: “We literally do not want to be what we are.”35 (Since U.S. consumerism is so often framed as an addiction, the ecological state of grace imagined by these films may well be thought of as something like AA’s “Higher Power.”) The task before us then would seem to be to transform that dream wish into waking act, to find ways to nourish and sustain the drive to change even in a world of ordinary, nonmiraculous causation, transforming Reagan and Thatcher’s slogan that “there is no alternative to capitalism” to Suvin and Jameson’s that “there is no alternative—to utopia.”36 “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” Jameson writes:

  We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.

  But I think it would be better to characterize all this in terms of History, a History that we cannot imagine except as ending, and whose future seems to be nothing but a monotonous repetition of what is already here. The problem is then how to locate radical difference; how to jumpstart the sense of history so that it begins again to transmit feeble signals of time, of otherness, of change, of Utopia. The problem to be solved is that of breaking out of the windless present of the postmodern back into real historical time, and a history made by human beings.37

  How then to imagine a history in which modernity’s ongoing destruction of nature does not itself carry the weight of an immutable law of nature? Where might we even begin?

  One interesting, if complicated, attempt to do depict an alternative mode of history comes somewhat unexpectedly during the credit sequence of a recent children’s film, Disney’s WALL-E. Here we see precisely the difficulty of imagining an equitable and sustainable future history made by human beings—what my coeditor, borrowing from Australian agriculturists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, has elsewhere called a “permaculture”38—in the intriguing credit montage that follows the film’s abrupt happy ending. As in Atwood’s “Time Capsule,” the logic of interstellar expansion and space empire has been reversed: here, the janitorial robot WALL-E has brought the morbidly obese Americans of the future back to the Earth they once ruined, and robot and human together begin the process of rehabilitating the global ecology the humans completely destroyed. The extremely earnest Peter Gabriel song playing over the sequence, “Down to Earth,” points our attention to this reversal of the usual direction of progress: “Did you feel you were tricked / By the future you picked?” Instead of a future “high in the sky” where “all those rules don’t apply,” the lyrics offer us snow, rivers, birds, trees, and “land that will be looked after.”

  Recalling the looping cyclical repetitions of history of Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this attempt to imagine and represent a non-apocalyptic, non-disastrous future is not (and perhaps cannot be) depicted narratively. Instead, it is represented through a montage showing some aspect of the new historical situation through some artistic medium of the past—the sort of artistic media Pixar might consider its own computer-generated practice to have superseded, from cave paintings to Monet’s watercolors—blessedly cutting off with the landscape art of Vincent van Gogh in, one supposes, an attempt to avoid having to unhappily endure all the many disasters of the twentieth century a second time. (Precisely this fantasy is, after all, at the core of the recent steampunk movement in SF, which similarly offers us the thrills of advanced technology without the constraints, limits, and existential horrors that historically came alongside it.)

  The paradox inherent in WALL-E’s visualization of ecotopia is clear: it sidesteps the question of how the generally hopeless ecological situation the film depicts (a hyperbolic, super-exaggerated version of the very quagmire we find ourselves in) could ever actually get any better, finding recourse instead in a nostalgia that imagines this better future as a replication of the very path that led us into the disaster in the first place. But at the same time the bizarre cognitive estrangement of the montage—the historical juxtapositions, the anachronistic presence of robots at every stage, the culmination of history in a new permaculture that is shown to take its roots from van Gogh’s famous workboot—prevents this from being the merely nostalgic or bad utopian fantasy of a “return to nature” that it might initially appear to be. In foregrounding the impossibility of imagining historical difference, while insisting at the same time on the vital necessity of doing so, WALL-E pushes us unexpectedly in the direction of utopia, forcing us to think about what the radical singularity of that historical break might entail. It deploys the meager imaginative tools we have at hand to refashion the fixed reality of Joyce’s “nightmare of history”39 as it actually happened into the fresh possibility of a new history, still open and unfixed, and somehow done right this time. History, for a few scant minutes at least, becomes unmoored; things, after all, might yet be otherwise.40

  The utopian potentiality implied—and, often, made possible—by apocalyptic critique is the necessary critical move to rescue us from a diagnosis of the world situation that would otherwise appear utterly hopeless. In his contribution to Mark Bould and China Miéville’s Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, the collection that inspired this volume, Carl Freedman identifies as a central disjuncture in Marxist thought the distinction between deflationary and inflationary modes of critique. But, as Freedman shows, deflation and inflation necessarily function as a dialectic. The cold calculus of deflation—“the attempt to destroy all illusions necessary or useful to the preservation of class society in general and of capitalism in particular”—is predicated on the baseline moral recognition that the injustice, deprivation, and suffering that is being described ought not exist; and the soaring utopian heights of inflation can only surpass mere wishful thinking when they arise out of a historical-scientific understanding of capitalist reality as it now exists.41 Ecocritique, like the cognitive estrangements of SF, and like the leftist project as a whole, necessarily operates along this same dialectic of deflation and inflation. And, like these other modes, ecocritique requires both deflation and inflation to stay vital. This is why the impulse toward the miserable, deflationary naming of all the various ongoing ecological catastrophes is always matched (if only in negative) by an inflationary, futurological impulse toward the better world that might yet be. Here utopia and apocalypse unexpectedly collapse into one another—they are each disguised versions of a single imaginative leap into futurity.

  The essays in Green Planets are predicated on the proposition that two hundred years of SF can help us collectively “think” this leap into futurity in the context of the epochal mass-extinction event called the Anthropocene (which the literary theorists more simply call “modernity”). SF is our culture’s vast, shared, polyvo
cal archive of the possible; from techno-utopias to apocalypses to ecotopian fortunate falls, it is the transmedia genre of SF that has first attempted to articulate the sorts of systemic global changes that are imminent, or already happening, and begins to imagine what our transformed planet might eventually be like for those who will come to live on it. Especially taken in the context of escalating ecological catastrophe, in which each new season seems to bring with it some new and heretofore-unseen spectacular disaster, my coeditor’s well-known declaration that in the contemporary moment “the world has become a science fiction novel” has never seemed more true or more frightening.42 Indeed, such a notion suggests both politics and “realism” are now always “inside” science fiction, insofar as the world, as we experience its vertiginous technological and ecological flux, now more closely resembles SF than it does any historical realism. In this sense perhaps even ecological critique as such can productively be thought of as a kind of science fiction, as it uses the same tools of cognition and extrapolation to project the conditions of a possible future—whether good or bad, ecotopian or apocalyptic—in hopes of transforming politics in the present.