Earth: The Final Frontier?

Space exploration is back in fashion. We can see that from the considerable live media coverage given over to NASA’s Perseverance Rover landing on Mars in February of this year. We see it too in a corresponding story in the Times Higher Education about the rapid expansion of university degree programmes into studying space (May 13, 2021). And, as I write, the University of Surrey is advertising for a new director for its Space Centre, a role designed to lead the field in areas such as space robotics and traffic control, space debris and cyber security.

Judging by the Times Higher report universities have fallen behind the curve on this one. They are now endeavouring to catch up in the light of flourishing private space initiatives (Elon Musk’s Space X, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin) and equally ambitious government programmes, such as the UAE Space Agency’s recent quest to recruit ten ‘Arab space pioneers’. Traditional programmes (such as they were) in space engineering are rapidly being augmented by new courses in space entrepreneurship, policy, management, and law. These signify the extent to which space exploration is now intertwined with the structures (extractive, economic, political) that govern life on earth.

My first reaction on reading this article was ‘how cool – maybe I could set up the UK’s first Space Humanities programme’! In fact, one already exists at the International Space University in France.¹ And there is already ecocritical work about space. Green Letters readers may well be familiar with Chris Pak’s book Terraforming (2016) and there have, likewise, been proposals for applying an ecocritical approach to space exploration and colonisation. Alessandra Calanchi, Almo Farina and Roberto Barbanti have drawn on postcolonial theory to point out how an extension of the human domain into space will inevitably pose new ecological, ethical and cultural questions. They argue, for example, that ‘we must be respectful of Mars territories as well as of those we will continue to inhabit on Earth’ (2017, 67). Perhaps, without the time dilation between the urgency of launching new courses – that address the moment and rapidly respond to emerging social priorities – and university Quality processes, a Space Humanities course could happen. Yet even thinking about this momentarily my ecocritical alarm bells began to ring .

Space travel is clearly an inspiring subject. The UAE scheme attracted 37,000 applicants. Already, 21 million people have viewed NASA’s video of the Perseverance landing on YouTube. But consider the priorities that drive space exploration. These are primarily economic: the extraction of mineral and gas resources; the development of hinterlands to grow surplus crops through technologies of artificial photosynthesis; human settlement (perhaps to alleviate population and resource pressures on Earth); and tourism. What do these resemble? colonialism; globalisation; imperialism. In Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015), Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney, is presumed dead and left behind on Mars by his fellow astronauts. Regaining consciousness, he survives by planting a supply of potatoes. When he restores communication with earth, Watney receives a congratulatory email from the University of Chicago informing him that ‘once you grow crops somewhere you have officially colonised it’. The tropes of the science fiction blockbuster prefacing the NASA video are, likewise, little different from the British Empire Adventure Stories volume which as recently as 2008 anthologised Kipling, Rider Haggard and G.A. Henty’s ‘Stirring Tales of Heroism from the Age of Empire’ (Kipling et al., 2008). For Mars and the Moon read the exploitation and theft of resources (from Caribbean slave plantations to Nigerian oil); the imposition of non-native crops; western-style building development.

There are further reasons to be sceptical about space exploration. The sheer recklessness (however advanced the technology) of adventuring into unknown, incompletely mapped territories is one. An even more compelling reservation is evidence that the public, in nations with space programmes, are distinctly lukewarm about its benefits. In a 2019 C-Span/Ipsos poll only 31% of Americans answered ‘yes’ when asked if, ‘given the opportunity’, they would travel into space. In a 2009 survey of EU citizens only 26% (across all nations) believed that the EU should ‘definitely’ increase its space activities. Such ambivalence is underscored by the messages coming from popular media. The storyline of Disney/Pixar’s Wall-e(2008), in which the eponymous rubbish-collecting robot is left behind on a decimated earth, moves towards its resolution when wall-e discovers the single shoot of a pea plant concealed in an old tin. Wall-e somehow manages to transport the plant onto one of the airborne space colonies where what’s left of the human population (all of whom appear now to be infantilised and obese) live. Needing to research what this peculiar object is, the ship’s captain (McCrea) retrieves a visual recording of an earlier human history of trees, plants, and farms and subsequently (in the denouement of the film) flies his entire posthuman colony back down to Earth. This echoes a common trope in Japanese TV anime where exiled humans living in space colonies, or on other planets, are frequently seen looking wistfully back at images of our planet. They draw an affective force from NASA’s famous photographs of Earth, probably the most iconic images of the last 50 years.

While, as Greg Garrard has pointed out, the ‘history of the Earth image’ is that it does not have a ‘single meaning’ (2012, 182), it could be – and surely is, in certain eyes – a paean to human technological prowess as epitomised by space travel. In that context Calanchi, Farina and Barbanti’s analogy between space exploration and colonialism offers another timely reminder: that we have caused quite enough damage in aggressively ‘exploring’ earth to ever justify exporting the same mindset into space. And there is another, equally significant conclusion we can draw from over 60 years of space exploration – that its most significant cultural influence, encapsulated by those images of earth in popular media, has been to underline the importance of ‘home’, of Planet Earth. Consider why people support space exploration. In the EU, the public’s main reason is that it enables the development of new technologies that can be put to use terrestrially. Similarly, asked to rank a parallel list of objectives for space travel, the top priority chosen by the American public was monitoring the earth’s climate. Missions to Mars and the Moon, even the search for natural resources and other liveable planets, polled lowest of all. The message is clear: the public support space exploration only so far as it can help protect and improve life back on Earth. The need to come down to Earth, our one and only home, is a thread that runs through this latest issue of Green Letters.

On a certain reading, the opening article – Joanna Wilson-Scott’s ‘Accommodating the Anthropocene: The Home as a Site of Ecological Significance in Climate Fiction’ – turns the ecocriticism of space travel on its head. For the question posed is, in effect, that if the earth itself has been remade, re-formed, in our own image how do we accommodate ourselves to it? Wilson-Scott accordingly (re)focuses our attention on ‘home’, understood with its full, domestic implications. In a sharp appraisal of the Anthropocene, Heather Anne Swanson (2017) describes its ‘banality’ and argues that we have failed to notice the onset of the Anthropocene because (certainly in the global North) the agents of ecological impact are the very housing developments, workplaces, transport links, food and consumer goods that constitute everyday life. While homes may be ‘elephants of stuff’ (says Wilson-Scott) this article takes a different perspective to Swanson’s by examining fictional depictions of homes lost as a result of climate change and the psychological trauma such loss engenders. In these banal domestic environments, Wilson-Scott argues, epochal changes occurring on an otherwise unimaginable scale become perceptible precisely because of their impact on our most intimate, personal spaces. This spotlights our precariousness while challenging our apathy and denial.

Katherine Huber’s essay on Belfast, as depicted in Ciaran Carson’s poetry, focuses on home in an overlapping sense. The speaker in Carson’s poem ‘Brick’ remembers both the home of their childhood, a ‘new semi-detached house in Andersonstown’, and the ‘half an acre of not-yet-built-on land’ that lay behind it. On this waste ground, childhood friends engage in feats of ‘miniature engineering’ – constructing dams, harbours, run-offs and overspills. These reproduced in microcosm the ceaseless cycle of building, flattening and rebuilding that typified Belfast. Carson’s poem grounds the riparian environment in intersecting geological, material, linguistic and political histories, a mesh impossible to escape from even when trying to imagine the future. This is the contradiction captured in Huber’s title: between the ‘Eden of the future’ and a ‘banished past’. Carson himself recalls a lost attempt to create a canal in Belfast. Its imposition (Huber argues) of a ‘static’ trope of gardens and streams only served to conceal the inequitable social histories and ecological damage that underlay industrial Belfast. It is a story familiar from many places. In Salford, for example, a similarly river-based environment has been repeatedly torn down and rebuilt in successive phases of history: Victorian industrialism; the 1970s modernism of motorways and supermarkets; Peel Media’s development of MediaCityUK in the 2000s. In these examples, material environments (terrestrial, maybe even extra-terrestrial?) are perpetually scarred by a political economics from which they can never escape. Huber does nevertheless retain the belief that human temporality remains entwined in, and ultimately answerable to, deep time and a nonhuman material agency.

The two essays that follow turn to animals to consider ways of repairing our relationship to the earth. Maggie Roe and Antony Lyons’ essay likewise attends to riparian environments in examining how human-nonhuman entanglement is refracted through place. Through an inspiring example of participative art and public outreach, they report on a creative engagement with two endangered species – the European eel and the black-legged kittiwake. They consider both the hidden violence of human–nonhuman relationships and the grounds on which we might find interspecies empathy. Roe and Lyons set up market-stalls in two English cities – Bristol and Newcastle – that have had historical connections to the two species. They sold merchandise (tea-towels and t-shirts) on which stories about the eel and the kittiwake were printed. This incongruity between environmental messaging and a commercial transaction provoked reactions from passing members of the public, which included rousing personal memories such as those of a woman who spoke about her French grandmother going to the Marseilles fish market to buy eels. The ensuing interchange of puzzlement, conversation, and reflection functions, they argue, to generate an ‘emotional sense’ of the complexity of our relationship with other animals as well as of the importance of place in framing that relationship. Rather like Wilson-Scott’s conception of home, Roe and Lyons suggest that such reflection might be a first step towards corrective action in place of the anxiety and paralysis that frequently haunts our relations with other species.

The extent to which an attachment to place can focus on a more robust relationship with other animals is, too, the subject of Paola Loreto’s essay. This examines the nineteenth-century regionalist writer Sarah Orne Jewett’s story ‘A White Heron’ and considers a fundamental tension in ecocriticism: the question of whether human language can ever really represent the nonhuman. In a sophisticated engagement with nuances in both literary representation and posthuman philosophy, Loreto suggests that Jewett’s ‘self-aware and ethical’ use of anthropomorphism leads to a radical take on the animal question not dissimilar to Cary Wolfe’s notion of the ‘infrahuman’ – in which we conceive of other species not as an ‘other’, or as our equivalent, but as a part of who we are. Loreto suggests that one way in which Jewett performs this difficult manoeuvre is by entering the ‘soundscapes’ of other animals. She draws here on R Murray Schafer’s suggestion that we should augment the term ‘landmark’ with a concept of ‘soundmark’ – which signifies a ‘community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by the people in that community’. The closeness to the heron which the story’s central character, Sylvia, achieves results from sharing its sound-space (including the silence) and works to form ‘an ontology of the gradual difference among beings that allows the surfacing of their commonality’. Critically, though, this is forged in a process by which the previous city dwelling Sylvia moves to New England. If we can achieve a better relationship with other animals through shared space perhaps, correspondingly, a closeness to other animals might be one way of forging a better place on earth.

Our two closing essays bring us to the question of how the damage we have done to the earth might be put into perspective via space. Doris Lessing is a largely unnoticed figure in ecocriticism and Mona Almaeen’s essay, which looks at the 1971 novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell, is a rare and welcome exception. Lessing’s protagonist, Charles Watkins, is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. Hospitalised after a trauma, Watkins enters a mystical world in which he is absorbed by a ‘crystal’ and transported into space. While in space, Watkins attends a conference of ‘concerned planets’ where delegates reflect upon the perilous state of Planet Earth and the impact this might have on Mars and Venus. Lessing once described her work as ‘Inner-space fiction, for there is never anywhere to go but in’. What results from Watkins’ ‘highly purified state of consciousness’, however, is a distinct eco-spirituality. Lessing (Almaeen points out) drew from the Sufi concepts of fana and baqa (death and rebirth) to find ways to articulate and address ecological crises on Earth. In striking contrast to the urge to populate and colonise other planets, thinking about our own potential annihilation, while seeing ourselves in cosmological terms, spurs us to reflect on the ecological peril we have brought upon ourselves. Instead, we might reach towards re-birth, something which comes from seeing ourselves as part of a ‘collective, cosmological oneness’. Given that this relationship between the material present and deep time and universal space appears to elude the poet or narrator of Belfast Confetti, perhaps it really does require the speculative leaps of science fiction to realise such ambitious but necessary conjunctures.

Bridget Sutherland’s closing essay returns us to animals, on this occasion mythological animals as crafted by the sculptor Anish Kapoor. The essay pivots on a philosophical juxtaposition Kapoor makes between Plato looking out from the cave to see the light of ‘civilisation’ and a countervailing tendency, represented by Dante and Freud, of staring back in order to see what lies in the darkness. Sutherland quotes Akira Mizuta Lippit’s description of modernism as the period in which the animal disappeared from the human world and, consequently, posits Kapoor’s work as ‘a vehicle for reflecting on the psychic structures that are encrypting animals and compensating for this traumatic loss’. Specifically, his dramatic blood red sculptures (three of which are reproduced in this article) confront the rupture of our psychological positioning of the animal as Other while (in repeated references to blood, dismemberment, and flaying) critiquing the violence humans have done to other species, and that industrial agriculture continues to do. Like Roe and Lyons, Sutherland argues that by examining one type of darkness (the relationship with other animals that haunts human culture) we might come to see ourselves in a new light.

And what might we see? In the poem ‘Sonnet’ (about NASA’s Voyager 1 mission) Alice Oswald describes a different form of staring into darkness. Launched in 1977 – and, to this day, still journeying through space – Oswald speculates that Voyager 1’s journey might turn out to be pretty futile; the craft could just ‘go on and on falling up steep flights of blackness with increasing swiftness’. Yet the poem also underlines the transition encapsulated in Sutherland’s title – from ‘cave to cosmos’ – and in Almaeen’s reading of Briefing for a Descent into Hell: that if there is any value in travelling into what Oswald calls dark ‘homeless space’ it will be to shine new light onto earth. Greg Autry, recently appointed to run Arizona State University’s degrees in space policy and management, is quoted in the Times Higher as saying that though prospective students are excited by the prospect of travel into space they nevertheless ‘also see space as unifying, as a place to find solutions to our problems that we can’t find on Earth’. Space travel, and the technologies that enable it, perhaps do bring practical benefits but, as Autry implies, these are principally benefits on Earth not to service a new life elsewhere. In The Martian Watney’s skilfully cultivated potato crop is wiped out instantly when a sudden loss of pressure in the space capsule exposes the crop to Mars’ minus 80°F temperatures. It is at this point that Watney knows he must come back down to Earth and that his perceived colonisation of Mars was only ever a mirage. The OED defines terraforming as transforming a planet or environment ‘into something resembling the earth, esp. as regards suitability for human life’. Yet a century and a half since Darwin (and others) discredited the idea of an Earth made according to God’s (intentional) design we humans are even less capable of moulding planets, not least our own, into a preferred human shape.

In Londoners (a book of interviews describing London and its inhabitants’ relationship to it) Craig Taylor reproduces an interview with Peter Rees a planning officer for the City of London. Rees declares that ‘London does work’, but

in a way none of us understand. It’s so complex, so multilayered, so interrelated with places around the world and activities within itself. You have to look at how you can manage London, not plan it. How you can treat it, if you like, as an exercise in gardening, look at which plants are thriving and which aren’t. Weed out new plants and try new species, encourage those that are doing well. Sometimes try to corral them so they don’t do a Japanese knotweed and take over the whole garden. But at the same time recognize the local climate and ecology and work with it rather than against it. (2012, 147–8)

‘People are earthy’, Rees concludes (2012, 148). But as we can see throughout this issue of Green Letters, this riparian slipperiness, this evasion of human control, is incarnate to our entangled relationships with other species, landscapes, and place. It bedevils our attempts to plan cities – like London or Belfast – or even to maintain a domestic space. At the end of The Martian a chastened Watney – greying and bespectacled – discovers a green shoot emerging from the gravel path of NASA’s training centre. He greets it like an old, cherished friend before going inside to give a lecture where Damon’s character tells the trainees ‘space does not cooperate’ but ‘if you solve enough problems you get to come home’. Even on Earth, terraforming is ongoing. Forget exploring new or even ‘final frontiers’ – we have enough on our hands already.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See https://ssp19.isunet.edu/academics/departments/349-space-humanities-hum-2