Herbert attributes the initial inspiration for the Dune trilogy to an uncompleted magazine article, “They Stopped the Moving Sands”, which focused on the US Department of Agriculture’s project involving the use of poverty grass to bind sand dunes in Florence, Oregon.81 Martyn Fogg writes in his preface to Terraforming that the Nebraska Sand Hills, having undergone a similar treatment, provides a ‘marvelous metaphor [...] for terraformers’, and he speculates: ‘[w]hat if we could engineer the sand seas of Mars’?82 These connections between geoengineering and terraforming, between transformations of Earth and other planets, are typical of the ecological concerns of this type of narrative. Herbert goes on to write ‘I could begin to see the shape of a global problem, no part of it separated from any other’ and that ‘[a] new field of study rises out of this like a spirit rising from a witch’s cauldron: the psychology of planetary societies’.83 As one of the most influential examples of ecological sf, its treatment of nature, science and society have fed into sf discourse and wider society, helping to shape sf’s ecological vision.
Dune begins with the ducal family Atreides, who take possession of the Arrakeen feudal house, the political centre of the planet Arrakis and its spice mining operations. It articulates a politico-economic struggle over control of the planet, fought between the interplanetary Empire and the indigenous Fremen (led by Paul Atreides). Throughout the Dune trilogy the spreading growth of plant life on the desert planet stands as an emblem for Fremen dreams of freedom, abundance and vitality. As Arrakeen’s influence grows after becoming the centre of the Empire at the end of Dune, this dream is threatened by the destruction of an older form of spiritual cohesion and reciprocity with the planet, itself emblematised by the threatened disappearance of the deep desert, the sandworms and the superlatively valued spice. As Dune concludes, Paul imposes his vision of a future Arrakis onto the Emperor he has overthrown:
81
Frank Herbert, ‘They Stopped the Moving Sands’, in The Road to Dune (New York: Tor, 2005), pp. 203-210.
82
Martyn J. Fogg, Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments (Warrendale: SAE International, 1995),
p. xii. 83
Frank Herbert, ‘Dune Genesis’, in Dune: The Official Website (2007) <http://www.frankherbert.org/news/genesis.html> [accessed 27 Feb 2012].
‘The Fremen have the word of Muad’Dib,’ Paul said. ‘There will be flowing water here open to the sky and green oases rich with good things. But we have the spice to think of, too. Thus, there will always be desert on Arrakis ... and fierce winds, and trials to toughen a man’.84
This image encapsulates the contrast between the wilderness of the present Arrakis and the promise of a pastoral synthesis between civilisation and nature. Paul’s oath is a political act that focuses the inhabitants’ efforts toward the shaping of a new future for Arrakis. The wilderness is valued not just as an economic asset but for its role in developing individuals that can be used as tools to enforce Paul’s sovereignty. Those who survive on Arrakis do so because of their rigid discipline,
subordination to the welfare of the group and their individual strength of character, traits aligned with a heroic militarism imagined as an exclusively masculine domain. James Oberg cites Dune as
exemplary of the examination of the role of people in terraforming,85 while the theme of individuals and groups who are used as tools is explored in many other terraforming narratives, including Pamela Sargent’s Venus of Dreams (1986).86
This instrumental view of communities extends toward the planet and its importance as the sole source of spice in the interplanetary Empire. Liet Kynes is the Imperial Planetologist, a position that, under Harkonnen rule, amounted to the use of the ‘native labour pool’ to enact the terragouging of Arrakis.87 Liet recalls his father Pardot describing this political arrangement in economic and hierarchical terms:
‘Arrakis is a one-crop planet,’ his father said. ‘One crop. It supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semi-human mass of semi-slaves exists on the leavings. It’s the masses and the leavings that occupy our attention. These are far more valuable than has ever been suspected’.88
Pardot’s scheme for terraforming Arrakis seeks to tie the Fremen’s emancipation to a long term project of world construction that builds multiple levels of physical (the terraformation of the planet) and cultural adaptation (the development of a culture that can support this terraformation) into a single transformative network. Like the physical processes that have shaped the planet, Pardot states that
84
Dune, p. 462. 85
James Edward Oberg, New Earths: Transforming Other Planets for Humanity (Harrisburg, Pa: Stackpole
Books, 1981), p. 120. 86
Pamela Sargent, Venus of Dreams (London: Bantam, 1989).
87
Dune, p. 26.
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‘[o]ur timetable will achieve the stature of a natural phenomenon […] A planet’s life is a vast, tightly interwoven fabric’. The new community that Pardot seeks to develop is subordinated to the directive of the messianic hero Paul and, in the third novel Children of Dune, to his grandson Leto II. This is accompanied by a shift in the timescale envisioned for terraforming and emancipation, which falls from geological to generational spans. Anticipating the acceleration that Paul’s escape into the deep desert in Dune promises for the ecopolitical project, Pardot warns Liet that ‘[n]o more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero’.89 This, as Herbert remarks in “Dune Genesis”, is the originary concept for the trilogy: ‘the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us’.90 The Fremen “masses” are subordinated to the agenda of an individual aristocrat. The terraforming project, originally conceived of as a slow growth of a culture in co-adaptation with its environment, is hijacked for the purposes of individual revenge and power. This theme of heroic individualism can be traced back to “Born of the Sun” (1934)91 and, as Susan Stratton points out, is one of the enduring sf tropes that pose problems for ecocriticism.92
Ecology is central to the terraforming motif in Dune and provides a conceptual bridge
between concern for the natural world and an examination of the groups who inhabit the planet. Plans for terraforming Arrakis are overseen by Kynes, whose father Pardot, as Arrakis’ planetologist before him, supplied the ecological vision for the long term terraforming of the planet. Liet continues to hallucinate his father’s early teaching on ecological principles when abandoned by the Harkonnens in the deep desert: ‘[w]e are generalists […] You can’t draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science’. The title “planetologist” signals a shift away from the
specificities of local ecosystems to a focus on the global, including its human inhabitants. Pardot first identified the potential for ecological management offered by the nomadic Fremen, noting that ‘[t]o the working planetologist, his most important tool is human beings, […]. You must cultivate ecological literacy among the people. That’s why I’ve created this entirely new form of ecological notation’. The importance placed on ecological literacy or awareness in the context of the directed 89Dune , p. 263. 90 ‘Dune Genesis’. 91
Jack Williamson, ‘Born of the Sun’, in Astounding Stories, 12.1 (1934), 10-38. 92
Susan Stratton, ‘The Messiah and the Greens: The Shape of Environmental Action in Dune and Pacific Edge’, Extrapolation, 42.4 (2001), 303-316.
global modification of a planet links human emancipatory projects to that of an ecological awareness. This vision of an endeavour that includes both natural and cultural worlds, and the possible
transformations that can be affected by a global community, is expanded when Liet recalls his father’s visionary ambition: ‘[w]e must do a thing on Arrakis never before attempted for an entire planet, […] We must use man as a constructive ecological force – inserting adapted terraform life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place – to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape’.93 This passage links a nomadic, globalised movement over the land to a conscious, directed
transformation of social and cultural practices. Pardot’s call for a new landscape shifts between natural and cultural referents and leaves the realisation of this new landscape ambiguous, demonstrating how such global transformations are dependent on the interrelation of nature and culture.
This focus on planetary ecology strongly anticipates Lovelock’s interest in Gaia as a metaphor for considering Earth as a planetary system. When reflecting on how the sandworms’ evolution and life cycle impact upon the planet, Pardot notes that ‘the near-ideal nitrogen-oxygen-CO2 balance [is] being maintained here in the absence of large areas of plant cover’ and claims that ‘[t]he Arrakeen environment built itself into the evolutionary pattern of native life forms’, both of which echo elements of Gaian processes and effects. It also places humankind in relation to a global environment in which nature is managed for instrumental ends. For Pardot, the Fremen embody ‘an ecological and geological force of almost unlimited potential’; like the native life and their
homeostatic regulation of the environment, the Fremen are vital tools for the transformation of the planetary ecology toward a new set of regulatory parameters. Liet, who constantly thinks of the Fremen using the possessive pronoun ‘my’, Pardot, who cares nothing for the individual Fremen over the group and who is content to ‘[l]et them think anything they wish as long as they believe in us’, and Jessica, who speculates that the Fremen ‘could be wielded like a sword to win back Paul’s place for him’, all view the native community in instrumental terms. This social engineering is given the status of an ecological principle: ‘[m]ovement across the landscape is a necessity for animal life,’ Pardot explains. ‘Nomad peoples follow the same necessity. Lines of movement adjust to physical needs for
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water, food, minerals. We must control this movement now, align it for our purposes’.94 The
migratory lifestyle that informs the Fremen’s culture is, in ecological terms, a flow of energy that can be harnessed to direct intervention with the environment.
This migratory lifestyle is at odds with Kynes’ realisation regarding terraforming and its relationship to civilisation: ‘[a] thought spread across his mind – clear, distinct: The real warmth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization-agriculture’.
Agriculture is linked to terraforming and necessitates the development of a rooted culture. Opposing this vision of an agricultural landscape is that of the migratory sandworms who, like the Fremen, embody a vast force aligned with movement: Pardot explains that ‘[i]t was lines of movement that gave us the first clue to the relationship between worms and spice’. Two cultural forms of habitation emblematised by agriculture and the sandworms are thus opposed, and a synthesis between them explored. These cultural systems are themselves metaphorical ecologies: when Paul is adopted into a Fremen tribe he realises that he ‘was surrounded by a way of life that could only be understood by postulating an ecology of ideas and values’.95 Ecology offers a framework with which to consider both the physical and cultural parameters of a planet and its inhabitants.
Arrakis’ global environment, the chronotope of the barren desert wilderness, offers
advantages for ecopolitical reflection and the growth of an eco-cosmopolitanism that continues to be explored in other works of terraforming. Arrakis’ harsh environment fosters a heightened awareness of the impact of the environment on the body and, at a larger scale, of the constraints to the
development of indigenous communities and civilisations. The scarcity of resources on these planets bring the economic basis of humankind’s relationship to the environment into focus:
‘The historical system of mutual pillage and extortion stops here on Arrakis,’ his father said. ‘You cannot go on for ever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after. The physical qualities of a planet are written into its economic and political record. We have the record in front of us and our course is obvious’.96
The wasteland chronotope is ideally suited to highlighting the implications of an economic system that operates by exploiting others for access to an ever dwindling supply of resources. A sense of time 94Dune , pp. 261, 467, 263, 304, 261. 95 Dune, pp. 259, 261, 329-330. 96Dune , p. 262.
geared toward responsibility to future generations is joined to this socio-political outlook, itself a new awareness that can be considered a form of eco-cosmopolitanism that struggles with the repercussions of the human impact on the landscape and the changes to the way in which the landscape signifies for the Fremen. Arrakis’ environment does not determine as much as it provides the initial foundations for the economic and political systems that Paul establishes on Arrakis. The character of this ecocological vision is undermined by the dominance of the main heroic narrative and its strong instrumental approach to nature, but it does remain a critical undercurrent in the sequence.