Eco Culture by Robert Bell Robert Ficociello

Author:Robert Bell,Robert Ficociello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Part II

REMEDIATION

Chapter 7

“The Missing Element is the Human Element”

Ontological Difference and the World-Ecological Crisis of the Capitalocene

Kirk Boyle

The over 1,600 pages of Kim Stanley Robinson’s award-winning Mars Trilogy (1993–1996), the epic tale of the colonization and terraforming of the red planet by that peculiar hominid from Earth that calls itself Homo sapiens, begins with a description of Mars:

Mars was empty before we came. That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no witnesses—except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever known…. And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place.1

I was reminded of Robinson’s work when reading McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Wark devotes an entire chapter to the trilogy, “Kim Stanley Robinson: The Necessity of Creation,” to decode what the science fictional terraforming of Mars might tell us about the possibilities of living in a new geological age ushered in by the activities of a singular species of great ape. As Wark somewhat offhandedly remarks, “Perhaps Earth is now a Mars, estranged from its own ecology.”2

I find this line of thought—Earth as not-Earth (at least as humans have known it for millennia)—compelling, and I share Wark’s interest in the importance of theorizing utopia in a time of global environmental crisis caused by artificially created climate change. By setting the Mars Trilogy in the near future and in a nearby locale (at least with respect to outer space), Robinson invites his readers to entertain the utopian possibilities of the Anthropocene. I am drawn to Robinson’s science fiction, however, for his representation of that which precedes what his former professor Fredric Jameson refers to as “the desire called utopia.”3 In the opening section of the trilogy quoted from above, Robinson establishes the qualitative difference between a planet comprised of “mineral unconscious” and beings conscious of the existence of planets, let alone able to journey to them. What is known in philosophical circles as ontological difference arises when phenomenological beings transform a “blind power” into a “place.” It is no accident that this brief section—like several others in the trilogy which appear in italics; come from an unidentified narrator; and function as prefaces, interludes, or epilogues—carries the mythopoeic tone and metanarrative weight of a universal history imparted by one generation to the next. To become a place, a blind power requires a story, and the very existence of narrative betrays the presence of beings that are by their very essence—because they have to tell a story about where they live in order to live there—estranged from their home planet, whether they be occupiers of Mars or inhabitants of Earth. Science fiction narratives about the presence of humans on other planets reveal that we have always already been an alien species.

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