Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  Hartwell’s reference to agribusiness is quite appropriate since, at one level, the novel is a powerful critique of techno-scientific methods for accelerating and amplifying natural processes of cultivation. This mechanized agriculture amounts to the systematic “rape of a planet” that has far-reaching consequences.45 A hybrid crop designed in alien labs, the trees are brilliantly efficient machines of growth, but their burgeoning comes at the expense of the overall ecology. Since they don’t shed their leaves, no compost accumulates, so the topsoil rapidly withers to dust. Their greedy consumption of carbon dioxide is quickly cooling the planet, making the winters brutally severe. And their monopolization of resources has systematically killed off higher species: the “balance of nature had been so thoroughly upset that even animals one would not think threatened had joined the ever-mounting ranks of the extinct.”46 An offhand allusion indicates the novel’s critical perspective: as winter recedes and no birds emerge to herald the new season, the narrator grimly comments, “it was a silent spring”47—thus referencing Rachel Carson’s classic 1962 critique of the deadly effects of agribusiness methods on the environment.48 Unfortunately, human beings don’t have the luxury of being absentee landlords of the planet, as Disch’s aliens are, and so must directly suffer the long-term consequences of this ecological tinkering.

  Disch’s title, The Genocides, thus refers on one level to humanity’s imminent self-extinction through ecological mismanagement, a snuffing out the narrator comments on at the end with Wellsian detachment:

  Nature is prodigal. Of a hundred seedlings only one or two would survive; of a hundred species, only one or two.

  Not, however, man.49

  On another level, the novel allegorizes the biotic invasion of the New World, which resulted in the wholesale destruction of native cultures and ways of life. Like the Europeans in America, the aliens reconfigure the existing ecosystem to satisfy their own needs, at first ignoring the original inhabitants and then, when their methods of cultivation come into competition, brutally eliminating them. Yet, as in the histories of ecological imperialism described above, the most effective genocidal technique by far is the environmental transformation wrought by the invaders, which literally makes indigenous modes of agriculture impossible. As William Cronon points out, “European perceptions of what constituted a proper use of the environment … reinforced what became a European ideology of conquest”: whereas Amerindians generally favored mobile settlements and subsistence agriculture supplemented by hunting, the colonists preferred fixed habitats, organized animal husbandry, and surplus crop production for purposes of trade.50 The latter system required widespread deforestation, which killed off deer populations on which the natives were dependent, and the cultivation of large tracts of land, now conceived as permanent property rather than an open bounty. Disch’s novel shows the consequences of such an arrangement from the Amerindian perspective, as the humans are confronted by literally alien biota maintained by superior technology and policed by ruthless violence.

  Disch’s jaundiced view of European supremacy in the New World is underlined by the most viciously satirical scene in the book, a Thanksgiving Day celebration. Following the incineration of their cattle by the alien machines, the community has lost its main source of protein. To promote harmony among a population grown restive and contentious, the governing patriarch decides to proceed with the occasion, serving up sausages prepared from the bodies of a group of urban marauders the community has recently slain. “Necessity might have been some justification. There was ample precedent (the Donner party, the wreck of the Medusa).” But the patriarch’s goal in enforcing this communal cannibalism is more sinister and jingoistic: to unite the group in a “complex bond,” a “sacrament” that transmutes the squalid act into patriotic solidarity. And so the others sit there, chewing desultorily, bickering with one another, and growing drunk on liquor fermented from the sap of the alien trees. As their resident scientist drily comments, “Survival is a matter of ecology…. Ecology is the way the different plants and animals live together. That is to say—who eats whom.”51 This pathetic remnant of European colonization, enjoying a hallowed holiday feast that sentimentally commemorates its triumph, is reduced to feeding on their erstwhile countrymen in order to survive. Reinforcing this sarcastic portrait of collapsed American hegemony, Disch dates the aliens’ extermination order 4 July 1979, with the projected completion of the project 2 February 1980—Groundhog Day, now the harbinger of an eternal winter for the human race.52 Watching Duluth go up in flames kindled by the alien drones, one of the characters waves and snickers, “goodbye, Western Civilization.”53

  While ecological extrapolation was not new to SF in 1965—indeed, Frank Herbert’s Dune, serialized in Analog magazine during 1963–64, probably did more than any other single book to bring ecological awareness into the center of the genre—Disch’s The Genocides gave the topic a sharp polemical edge through its arraignment of traditional SF’s complaisant scientism. Techno-scientific development, in the novel, is not a cure-all for the problems posed, but is itself the problem: the faceless alien technocrats, armed with a battery of sophisticated machines, show a casual contempt not only for natural balance but for human life itself. The besieged community Disch portrays has as much chance against this monolithic apparatus as Third World farmers have against Western agribusiness enterprises; their small-scale agrarian revolt, pitched against the environmental monopoly of the trees, fails as miserably as, say, the Guatemalan revolution against the United Fruit Company in the 1950s. Disch’s novel points the way toward more politicized engagements with ecological issues in SF, such as John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Sheep Look Up (1972); as Michael Stern observes of the latter novel, “the relation of the US to the rest of the earth’s societies … takes the form of a total but undeclared ecological war”54—an invasion less of Western biota than of industrial pollution, resource extraction, and neocolonial “development” projects. During the early 1970s, the genre witnessed not only a handful of theme anthologies devoted to these issues—including, alongside Disch’s Ruins of Earth, Rob Sauer’s Voyages: Scenarios for a Ship Called Earth (1971) and Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd’s Saving Worlds (1973)—but even fanzines with an environmentalist agenda, such as Susan Glicksohn’s short-lived Aspidistra. In the balance of this essay, though, I will focus on a second major New Wave text that specifically treats ecological imperialism in the terms outlined above: Ursula K. Le Guin’s short novel The Word for World Is Forest (1972).55

  In many ways, Le Guin’s novel reads like an inversion of The Genocides: rather than the victims of biotic invasion, Earth people are the invaders, and rather than seeding a host of trees, they lay waste to a vast forest on the planet Athshe. Le Guin quite calculatedly draws parallels between the exploration of space and the history of Western colonialism: despite the existence of “Ecological Protocols” governing interaction with alien biospheres, largely designed to keep other worlds from being reduced to the “desert of cement” bereft of animal life that the Earth itself has become,56 the colonists on Athshe behave exactly like classic imperialists, renaming the planet “New Tahiti,” conscripting its humanoid population into forced labor camps, and systematically extracting its riches, especially lumber. The tale’s main villain, Captain Davidson, captures the mind-set perfectly: contemptuous of the natives as lazy “creechies” yet lusting after their women; eager to command the landscape as proof of his manhood and cultural superiority, seeing in the endless vistas of trees only a “meaningless” expanse of wasted resources, rather than the richly meaningful cultural world it is for the native inhabitants. He has nothing but scorn for the “bleeding-heart” attitudes of the expedition’s token ecologist and anthropologist, viewing the situation in basically military terms: “You’ve got to play on the winning side or else you lose. And it’s Man that wins, every time. The old Conquistador.”57 Whereas in Disch the motives of the alien invaders remain obscure, Le Guin provides, in Davi
dson, a scathing portrait of overweening racist machismo as the root impulse supporting projects of imperial domination. While the effect is perhaps to overly psychologize the colonial relationship, de-emphasizing crucial political-economic imperatives, her treatment does infuse a strong ecofeminist consciousness into the traditional invasion scenario.58

  Still, the tale did have an essentially political origin; Le Guin has indicated that the military-ecological rape of Vietnam by U.S. forces is what impelled her writing: “It was becoming clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and the murder of noncombatants in the name of ‘peace’ was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP, and the murder of the creatures of the Earth in the name of ‘man.’”59 Thus, we see Davidson and his renegade band decimating creechie villages in classic counterinsurgency fashion, “dropping firejelly cans and watch[ing] them run around and burn,”60 while the Athsheans adopt guerrilla tactics as the only effective resistance. These blatant historical connections have led to complaints by some critics that the story is overly tendentious and moralizing,61 yet as Ian Watson points out, the plot is broadly allegorical and can symbolize any number of instances of ecological imperialism, including “the genocide of the Guyaki Indians of Paraguay, or the genocide and deforestation along the Trans-Amazon Highway in Brazil, or even the general destruction of rain-forest habitats from Indonesia to Costa Rica.”62 William Cronon has shown how deforestation was a major factor in the reconfiguration of New World biota by European colonists: an ecological habitat to which the natives had adapted themselves was systematically culled to serve a new “mosaic” of settlement; and, like Captain Davidson and his comrades, the “colonists themselves understood what they were doing wholly in positive terms, not as ‘deforestation,’ but as ‘the progress of cultivation’”63—even though the effects were often pernicious, ranging from topsoil erosion, to increased flooding, to the spread of marshes with their attendant diseases. The callous quality of the transformations wrought by the colonists, their lack of concern for enduring consequences, in both the historical record and in Le Guin’s story, suggest the heedless alien genocide depicted with such casual savagery in Disch’s novel.

  A key difference between Le Guin’s work and Disch’s, however, is that, by the early 1970s, a quite developed discourse regarding the effects of ecological devastation, and a growingly militant environmentalist movement, had risen up to assert the “rights” of nature and native peoples over against the needs of Western neocolonialism. Generally guided by an ethic of “responsibility” and governed by a concern for long-term “sustainability,” this movement was propelled by a conviction that the ongoing exploitation of nature augured nothing short of a catastrophe for the planet—“ecocide,” according to the title of a 1971 collection of essays.64 The Club of Rome’s best-selling study The Limits to Growth, published in the same year as Le Guin’s novel, argued that current levels of resource depletion were likely to lead to major socioeconomic crises in the relatively near future.65 The Word for World Is Forest reflects these anxieties in its depiction of a home planet literally bereft of foliage, dependent on alien jungles to satisfy its appetite for “clean sawn planks, more prized on Earth than gold.”66

  In terms of the ethics of interaction with other species, positions ranged from John Passmore’s view, in Man’s Responsibility for Nature (1974), that human life is the basic standard of value in terms of which all potential violence against animals or plants must be gauged, to more radical arguments for the recognition and inclusion of nonhuman beings, such as Peter Singer’s brief for Animal Liberation (1975).67 An interesting text with relevance to Le Guin’s story is legal scholar Christopher Stone’s 1971 essay “Should Trees Have Standing?” Written as an intervention in a lawsuit pitting the Sierra Club against the Disney Corporation’s efforts to build a resort in California’s Sierra Nevada range, Stone’s essay was groundbreaking in its attempt to define legal “‘injury’ not merely in human terms but with regard to nature…. Stone argued in all seriousness that trout and herons and cottonwood trees should be thought of as the injured parties in a water-pollution case,” and not simply the people who might be deprived of clean water or the opportunity to enjoy a pristine landscape.68 The impulse to protect trees in particular, not merely from their human uses but intrinsically, for themselves, formed a significant impulse of the environmental movement, as the deployment of the term “green” as a political rallying cry suggests.69 On the one hand, this impulse may merely express a sentimental romanticization of nature, one that has too readily led to the disparagement of environmentalists as “tree huggers” (an identification facilitated, for example, by the dedication to an anthology commemorating the first Earth Day celebration: “to the tree from which this book is made”70); on the other hand, if pursued with intellectual rigor, such an attitude could lead to a conceptualization of “nature” not as an anthropocentric tool or an essentialist “other,” but as a socially constructed reality with important dimensions of agency and autonomy.71

  Le Guin’s abiding humanism, however, makes it difficult for her to articulate an ethic of rights that does not inhere ultimately in human subjects. While the novel fudges the issue by essentially identifying the Athsheans with their habitat—like the forest, they are peaceful, close-knit, and actually green—the effect is to naturalize their culture and to see the violence committed against them as an environmental desecration. The forest is their world, as the title indicates, and alterations to it are alterations to them; by the end, they have, like the trees, learned violence and been scarred by the knowledge. They have been “changed, radically, from the root” by “an infection, a foreign plague.”72 The model of moral relation Le Guin finally defends is not surprising, given the central bond in her celebrated novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969): a friendship, despite differences, between sentient humanoids. The novel’s anthropologist-hero, Lyubov, is everything Captain Davidson is not: empathetic toward the Athsheans and comfortable in the enveloping forest, fondly protective of their mutual innocence and dignity.73 Not only does this depiction bear a lingering noble-savage Romanticism,74 but it leaves open the question of whether the denuding and strip-mining of an uninhabited planet would be ethically acceptable. If the forest were not someone’s indigenous world, would it then be ripe for the picking? Can ecological imperialism only be committed against human subjects or their fictional surrogates?

  Le Guin’s attitude toward techno-science and its role in colonial conquest is also more ambivalent than in previous New Wave eco-catastrophes. Unlike Disch’s The Genocides, in which advanced science is exclusively an agency of domination—and unlike ecocritics such as Lynn White, whose influential 1967 essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” indicts Europe’s “superior technology” that permitted its “small, mutually hostile nations [to] spill out over all the rest of the world, conquering, looting, and colonizing”75—Le Guin draws a distinction (a quite reasonable one, in my view) between military-industrial technologies designed for violent purposes, whether warfare or resource extraction, and communication technologies that allow for the exchange of ideas and information. In the novel, the arrival on the planet of an ansible—an interstellar radio that permits instantaneous messaging, despite the decades-long time lag of space travel—is the mechanism that alerts the new League of Worlds to the violation of Ecological Protocols and leads to the termination of the colonial administration and the eventual economic quarantining of the planet. Similarly, in the present day, communications media such as the Internet have facilitated the worldwide dissemination of data about serious ecological problems, such as global warming,76 and computer simulation software has been used to model ecosystem interactions, such as (to cite a relevant example) the growth and decline of forest areas.77 Le Guin, to her credit, resists the assumption, common to some New Wave texts, that Western techno-science itself has been irreparably contaminated by it
s conscription for technocratic-imperialist ends.

  In his environmental history of the twentieth century, J. R. McNeill summarizes recent biotic invasions and concludes with a prognostication: “In the twenty-first century, the pace of invasions is not likely to slacken, and new genetically engineered organisms may also occasionally achieve ecological release and fashion dramas of their own.”78 If they do, one can be certain that SF writers will be there to chronicle the results, and to craft powerful moral allegories out of them. While they will doubtless draw upon the compelling example of major New Wave precursors, it is likely that their treatments of the topic will cleave closer to Le Guin’s ethical-political ambivalence than to Disch’s neo-Wellsian despair.

  Notes

  1. Peter Fitting, “Estranged Invaders: The War of the Worlds,” in Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 127–45 (127).

  2. Ibid., 130–31.

  3. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, in Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells (New York: Dover, n.d.), 307–453 (311).