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August 22, 2006
The move progresses; New photos on Flickr
C and I arrive in Alexandria on or around September 9, so keep an eye out for us. Tomorrow we leave for Minnesota and wedding bells. Part of my duties there will be take pictures on the Minolta X-700 I inherited from Dad. As preparation, I have started to take some interest in photography. Check it out over on our Flickr account. More later.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Book Review: Dune’s vision of ecological futility
Dune’s fortieth anniversary was last year. For anyone who’s read it, the resonant central image of the series is the desert of Arrakis—planetwide and populated only by the Fremen, a ferocious tribe that survives by clinging to every drop of water, and by shai-hulud, the great sandworm. The story’s full of political intrigue and an astonishing cast of characters, cultures, and histories rivaled only by The Lord of the Rings. But Dune is also an environmental exploration, and that’s what I want to talk about.
By the way, this posting is full of spoilers, so stop now if you don’t want to see discussion of some major plot points in Dune. It also only covers the first three books of the Dune Chronicles. Frank Herbert wrote three more after this, and his son co-wrote three more after Herbert’s death.
Dune (1965), Dune Messiah (1969), and Children of Dune (1976), by Frank Herbert.
While Tolkien resisted critics’ attempts to find political lessons in Lord of the Rings,1 Frank Herbert hoped that Dune would help develop some planetary consciousness in a public that was (and is) unfamiliar with the idea that human agency has global effects. Actually, in the universe of Dune, the Atreides’ manipulation of Arrakis’s ecosystem affects the whole planet and politically realigns an entire galaxy.
A major plot point in Dune, and here I’m speaking of the first book particularly, was the revelation that the Fremen had a secret 500-year plan to shift Arrakis’s desert ecosystem into something a lot more hospitable to humans, with surface water, green plants, and the like.2 In Dune Messiah, Paul Atriedes’ ascension to the Imperial throne made it possible to vastly accelerate that plan. And in Children of Dune, Leto II, Paul’s heir, came to realize that the unintended consequences of this terraforming would be the extinction of the sandworms and exhaustion of the galaxy’s only source of the vitally-important drug melange (which the sandworms produce).
It’s impossible to read Dune without being impressed that billions of fates turn on the ecological management of Arrakis. But Dune is not Silent Spring (published three years before). There’s no discussion in Dune of non-intentional effects on the planet, through pollution, construction, overharvesting of melange, etc. Herbert’s ideology is that of the steward, not the conservationist. In fact, at the end of Children of Dune, Leto II decided that to save human lives (long-term), it was necessary to radically accelerate the conversion of Arrakis’s environment, driving the sandworm straight into extinction and giving himself a political stranglehold on the only Imperial stockpiles of melange.3
For Frank Herbert, planetary ecology was something to understand, but it was also something to husband, use and, if necessary, destroy. This kind of stewardship ethic is popular in political discourse today, where it is both attractive and extraordinarily dangerous. Pretty much every character in Dune makes management decisions based on a desire to properly steward Arrakis’s primary natural resource, melange, but all except for Leto II make catastrophically wrong choices leading only to violence and destruction. In particular, Alia (sister of Paul and regent during Leto II’s infancy) attempted to irrigate Arrakis, not appreciating the threat to melange production. This ultimately led to political destabilization and contributed to her fall. Alia and others failed because they either couldn’t see or wouldn’t confront the Big Picture—the full environmental and political consequences—implicated in natural resource stewardship. Only Leto could see the Big Picture and properly husband Arrakis’s ecology. But Leto had superhuman prescient powers.
This is the source of Dune’s overall skepticism. The only person who could effectively husband Arrakis’s resources without destroying himself or, worse, the human race, was basically a superhero. Everyone else—even those with the very best intentions—failed.
The real world doesn’t have a kwisatz haderach—a superbeing like Leto II. Thus, Dune can be read as a polemic against interference with planetary systems. In the absence of complete understanding, unintended consequences are rife.
The characters most idolized in Dune are the Fremen, who typify human honor and dignity throughout the series. Fremen accepted the brutal realities of Arrakis and comported their lifestyle to the planet rather than vice versa. As Arrakis transformed, so did the Fremen, becoming soft, avaricious and cowardly. When we transform our environment, what is left of us?
1 Tolkien’s foreword to Lord of the Rings famously denied that LOTR was allegory for World War II or the beginning of the atomic era.
2 This plan was actually developed by an off-world “planetologist” who came to live on Arrakis and became a Fremen himself. I mention this because “planetologist” is a great word and deserves revival.
3 It’s a brutal political calculus; this is the kind of thing Herbert is famous for and to understand it, you’ll have to read the book.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack