EL EJÉRCITO DE LA REPÚBLICA EN EL PAÍS VASCO

The interwar period hosted a debate between two strands of ecologism. The first is a monism that can be traced back to Ernst Haeckel and his student Hans Dreisch, the latter of whom popularised

ecological vitalism in Germany and in a series of lectures in Scottish and English universities till 1913. The other strand derives from energy economics, itself based on recognition of the finiteness of Earth’s resources and on notions of entropy, ideas that were often taken to imply a mechanistic view of nature. Bramwell argues that Wells and Stapledon drew from the energy economics prevalent

11

Christopher P. McKay, ‘2. Does Mars Have Rights? An Approach to the Environmental Ethics of Planetary Engineering’, in Moral Expertise: Studies in Practical and Professional Ethics, ed. by Don MacNiven (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 184-197 (p. 188).

12

Keekok Lee, ‘Awe and Humility: Intrinsic Value in Nature. Beyond an Earthbound Environmental Ethics’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 36 (1994), 89-101 (pp. 90, 89, 91, 91, 92).

during the interwar period and cites Wells as an example of the scientific utopians who preferred strategies of global planning conducted by a scientific elite.13 Wells was a member of the Fabian society, an organisation that shared with the Monist league (which inspired Haeckel’s ecological vitalism) Wells’ trust in the utopianism of a cadre of scientists who would bypass the contemporary political process. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (1933) is a future history that recounts an episode of “geogonic planning” during the world state’s technocratic management of Earth.14 This example of terraforming is a form of geoengineering embarked on after a long period of war and global political unification leads toward a scientific utopia. Wells sent a copy of this text to his correspondent and admirer Olaf Stapledon,15 whose Last and First Men (published in 1930 and thus predating Wells’ own work) and Star Maker (1937)16 utilise narrative features of the future history within a cosmic context as part of their design as “essays in myth creation”.17 Stapledon incorporated into Last and First Men elements of J.B.S. Haldane’s scientific paper “The Last Judgement” (1927),18 which proposes the possibility of terraforming Venus, combining it with J.W. Dunne’s speculations on alternative temporalities and prescient dreaming in An Experiment With Time (1927).19 Unlike Wells’ reliance on energy economics, Stapledon’s texts are indebted to vitalist philosophies that emphasised notions of a life-force underpinning conceptions of nature.

The Shape of Things to Come features episodes of geoengineering representing the culmination of civilisation’s effort to address a deep-rooted anxiety toward nature. This anxiety underlies a complex of environmental relations and effects that appear in earlier phases of

civilisation’s development, such as the colonial appropriation of resources, international war and the dramatic reduction of species diversity and their environments. At a late stage of the world state’s growth, Earth is described in a way that justifies the physical mastery of the planet and confirms the

13

Bramwell, pp. 54, 65. 14

H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (London: Corgi, 1967), hereafter referred to as Shape. 15

Olaf Stapledon, Letter to Wells dated 24.4.36 in The Olaf Stapledon Collection, Liverpool, Sydney Jones Library Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool, OS/H4/3/5.

16

Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (London: Penguin, 1966) and Star Maker (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), hereafter referred to as Last and Star respectively.

17

Brian Stableford explains that these essays in myth creation ‘construct imaginary worlds to embody

metaphysical theses’ (Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950 (London: Fourth Estate, 1985), p. 138).

18

J.B.S. Haldane, ‘The Last Judgement’, in Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), pp. 287-312.

19

socio-political system supporting the state: ‘[f]rom the air on a map it was manifest that the world was still ‘governed’. The road system was like a net cast over a dangerous beast’. The endeavour to govern nature by metaphorically ensnaring it with a planetary road system is symptomatic of humanity’s fundamental dependence on a hostile environment. An example of such dependence appears in the chapter “1933: Progress Comes to a Halt”, where the narrator highlights a representative instance of ‘a terrific defeat for [a town near Cardiff] in the war upon Nature’.20 This event, in which a local mine explodes and kills three hundred people, stands as a microcosm for humanity’s dependence on and subjugation to natural forces. The text’s fictionalisation of the difficulty of recovering economic and social wellbeing in the wake of the Great War of 1914-1918 enlarges the scope of humanity’s vulnerability to nature when the civilisation that is built upon it collapses. These local and

international events exemplify civilisation’s physical fragility. The threat symbolised by the emblem of Earth as a dangerous beast signifies an uneven human relationship to nature. As a consequence of humanity’s “war against nature”, civilisation’s changing technological abilities allow them to mitigate this dependence on and vulnerability to their environment.

The emblem of the ensnaring road system is a landscape that symbolises progress. The world state’s political unification and technological proficiency is seen as the solution to humanity’s difficult adaptation to nature. Roads overcome spatial constraints and consequently unify disparate nations by facilitating travel and communication over long distances. In contrast to the Modern World State’s saner technological utopia the narrator identifies the underlying reason for the old socio-political order’s failure to overcome both nature and civilisation’s fragility as a disparity between two forces:

The great processes of mechanical invention, which have been described in our general account of the release of experimental science from deductive intellectualism, were increasing the power and range of every operating material force quite irrespective of its fitness or unfitness for the new occasions of mankind.21

The argument here is that growing technological power unaccompanied by a corresponding increase in the intellect necessary to manage the repercussions of that power lead civilisation to war and socio- political collapse. During the ascendancy of the Modern World State the dialectic between humanity

20

Shape, pp. 442, 132. 21_Shape

and their environment becomes subject to civilisation’s increasing influence, which allows humanity to overcome the failures of the old socio-political order. The application of technologies capable of altering the planet’s environments offer opportunities for directed human evolution; the narrator speculates that ‘an increase in desirable habitats may bring with it an increase in the variety of desirable human types’. The dialectic underlying civilisation turns on evolution, which governs the relationship between the human and the non-human and which is in turn connected to ideas of progress, ‘the essential and permanent conflict in life between the past and the future, between the accomplished past and the forward effort’.22 The developing world state embodies this conflict as it attempts to redress the imbalances between technological capability and its fit use wrought by the excesses of the old order.

The Transport Control fails to effectively maintain global unity, eventually ceding to an enlightened scientific community capable of better managing Earth’s resources. This saner, more reflective humanity is able to resolve many environmental and geopolitical problems. Recapitulating economist Henry George’s metaphor of the Earth as a well-provisioned ship sailing through space (itself anticipating the image of Spaceship Earth), which appeared in his 1879 Progress and Poverty,23 the narrator explains that this new government establishes a way of living that shows how ‘[t]his planet, which seemed so stern a mother to mankind, [was] discovered to be inexhaustible in its bounty. And the greatest discovery man has made has been the discovery of himself’. This vision of nature remains instrumental, as it is considered both a resource and an object for autological

speculation, which reflects concern onto the study of the human self. The socio-political sphere is mapped against nature through its structuring as a metaphorical “ecology”.24 As humanity is better able to manipulate the planet

[h]istory becomes a record of increasingly vast engineering undertakings and

cultivations, of the pursuit of minerals and of the first deep borings into the planet. New mechanisms appeared, multiplied, and were swept away by better mechanisms. The face of the Earth changed.25

22_Shape

, p. 455, 54. 23

Henry George, Progress and Poverty (New York: Doubleday, 1912)

<http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/George/grgPP.html> [accessed 26 April 2011], para IV.II.21. 24

Shape, pp. 487, 290 25_Shape

Despite these changes and the early exploration and mapping of ‘the last terra incognitae’, Earth for the Second Council was ‘a world of promise still to be fulfilled’. An early anticipation of

geoengineering appears in a brief chapter titled “Geogonic Planning”, in which the ‘[m]odification of the planet-levels operating in conjunction with the restoration of forests now in progress’ is

considered. Here, the world state’s plans for planetary engineering remain a dream of ‘moulding a fire-sprouting, quivering planet closer to the expanding needs of man’.26 Geogonic planning

represents a stage in the development of civilisation in which “deductive intellectualism” directs the use of technology, thus allowing humanity to alter nature to provide ideal foundations for a scientific utopia whose expansion is charged with colonial ideology. In either case the form of progress that is advanced here, evident from the landscaping analysed by the narrator, is a response to the

asymmetrical relationship between humanity and non-human nature that disrespects nature’s autonomy. Nature in this context is Earthbound and non-human. Human relationships to nature tend to be instrumental, with nature functioning as a resource and background to civilisation. Human dependence on this beastlike non-human nature exacerbates the dangers that nature poses to

civilisation, imagined as a sharply demarcated entity. This understanding of nature attempts in part to account for the failure of “The Age of Frustration” to realise its project of progress.

The Shape of Things to Come was adapted into the well-received film Things to Come in 1936, which popularised the broad themes of Wells’ future history. It portrayed the decline of civilisation after war and the struggle from “barbaric” nation states toward a scientific world civilisation riddled by widespread disaffection with the dominant ideology of progress. This film staged a debate over the worth of science for society and retains a sense of asymmetry between humankind and nature. The rise of the scientific age is preceded by a period of rebuilding described as ‘an active and aggressive peace’ in which all the Earth’s resources are tapped to ‘put the world in order’. Theotocopulos, the leader of a rebellion against continuing progress in the year 2036, concedes that this age of ‘machines and marvels’ had conquered nature and built ‘a great white world’ of artificially lighted underground cities, thus replacing nature’s threatening otherness with a construct rigidly controlled by technology. The conflict in this future age centres on a rebellion against progress

26_Shape

that is expressed as a desire for the destruction of a “space gun”, the world civilisation’s first attempt at interplanetary travel and a symbol of continuing scientific progress. Theotocopulos’ arguments centre precisely on the Promethean fear that cosmological nature engenders: anticipating further journeys into space that the success of the space gun would portend, Theotocopulos foretells in a public speech that ‘the time will come when you and your turn will be forced to take their chance upon strange planets, on dreary, abominable places beyond the stars’.27 This ideological opposition revolves around the idea of the colonisation and shaping of other worlds in the future, a possibility that is ultimately endorsed by the film’s climax. Contesting notions of progress with ideas of freedom, rest and safety, Theotocopulos argues that the effects of the sacrifice of human lives to technological and scientific progress will eventually expand to alter the face of the whole world once again, thus forcing the majority who are content with the current state of affairs to adapt to new conditions. These primarily social concerns are symbolically invested in a confrontation with untamed nature. The conquerors of the old world order, who directed their mastery toward other societies, is replaced by a government that attempts to dominate first local, then increasing scales of nature, before this tendency culminates in an expansion outward toward space. Oswald Cabal, the grandson of the legendary John Cabal who inaugurated the scientific age, argues that any life worth living must continue to advance, and that this advance can only be achieved by facing death, the symbol of which is space. It is only through striving for continual expansion outward toward the stars that living can be made worthwhile.

Lee’s Asymmetry Thesis claims that while humans are dependent on nature, nature is not similarly dependent on humanity: ‘[n]ature’s own existence and functioning integrity is independent of human existence’. The Autonomy Thesis builds on this by stating that ‘the Earth and its extremely complex biosphere are fully autonomous’. Lee uses the example of human extinction to point out that nature would continue to operate in the absence of humanity. She defines autonomy here as nature’s ‘ability to exist, to function integratively and well without any reference to, assistance from or reliance on humans’.28 These works recognise the Asymmetry Thesis by demonstrating humanity’s dependence on Earth while representing Earth’s existence as independent of humanity, although it

27

Things to Come, dir. by William Cameron Menzies (London Films, 1936). 28

does illustrate nature’s physical fragility through its devastation by war and humanity’s adaptation of its surface. It also shows a disrespect of the Autonomy Thesis and nature’s otherness in that

Earthbound nature is only valuable instrumentally: as a condition for ensuring human comfort and as a space in which humanity can, narcissistically, reflect on their own mind. While this reflection is not in itself problematic, these works take the extra step of disregarding the way in which these human landscapes do not completely account for nature as an autonomous non-human other, thus

contributing to an attitude that leads to its domination. The emblem of Earth as an imprisoned beast and the theme of civilisation’s war against nature are reactions against this asymmetry and responses that curtail nature’s autonomy. Hailwood suggests that nature’s otherness can be usefully predicated on the Autonomy and No-Teleology Theses (the latter discussed below), but that the additional Asymmetry Thesis could lead to a Promethean fear that would justify the domination of nature in order to counter its threatening aspect.29 This dynamic is amply demonstrated by the notion of progress and its entailments depicted in The Shape of Things to Come and its cinematic counterpart.

2.1.3 Nature’s Otherness and Terraforming in Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star