9 - Foul Contagion Spread: Ecology and Environmentalism

Summary

Science fiction often depicts the interaction between the environment and its inhabitants. There are correlations between individuals, their physical setting and the surrounding flora and fauna; an ecosystem of greater or lesser consistency is depicted. The environment itself may become a character in the narrative, especially as an antagonist to the hero, an often unstoppable and sometimes invisible set of forces. The continued rise of consumerism and the post-industrialised West in the 1970s, as represented in an increasingly global and globalised media, put a growing strain on raw materials, fuel and labour. Earth was imagined as a single unit, for example as the Spaceship Earth of a speech by Adlai Stevenson in 1965, in Kenneth E. Boulding's ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’ (1966), which contrasted open and closed systems, and in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968). Harry Harrison adopted the phrase to refer to the moral he perceived behind Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973), a loose adaptation of his Make Room! Make Room! (SF Impulse August–October 1966; 1966): it ‘shows what the world will be like if we continue in our insane manner to pollute and overpopulate Spaceship Earth’ (1984: 146), an idea he had already advanced in his short story ‘Commando Raid’ (1970): ‘The richest countries better help the poorest ones, because it's all the same spaceship’ (1977: 122). Barry Commoner argued that there was only one ecosystem, and that everything came from somewhere and went somewhere, with resources likely to be turned from useful to useless. Natural systems kept resources generally renewable.