Cultural Geography

In combination these connections are now

beginning to change the biosphere as a whole.

Humanity has become a major geomorphic and

climate changing force in the planetary eco-

system (McNeill, 2000). We are literally remak-

ing some important planetary systems, a process

that alarms many people who look to the future

of humanity and our habitat.

TERRAFORMING

Scenarios for the future are stock in trade for the

science fiction genre, one which is all too easily

dismissed with some disparaging comments

about either the patent absurdities of ‘Star Trek’

and the cult of trekkies, or the transparency of its

allusions to Cold War geopolitics and political

stereotypes. The Star Wars movie series’

marriage of American revolutionary warfare

themes to imperial Rome also captures the

geopolitical themes in a pale imitation of Isaac

Asimov’s (1951) much earlier musings on

themes of imperialism, technological innovation

and cultural change. The theme of the single

completely urbanized planet remains a fantasy of

science fiction, the latest rendition, in the

‘Phantom Menace’ episode of the Star Wars

series, being the planet ‘Coruscant’, easily read

as an update of Fritz Lang’s 1920s movie images

of the ‘Metropolis’, as well as another reference

to Roman themes. But to lightly dismiss science

fiction is to ignore an important cultural genre

that is worthy of careful scrutiny by the geo-

graphy discipline.

More important, it is to ignore some of the

most imaginative attempts to think through the

likely outcomes of current political and technical

difficulties. Of importance to the argument here

is the rise in concern with ecological themes and

in particular the questions of ‘terraforming’ or

literally planetary engineering necessary to make

other celestial bodies inhabitable by humans.

Discussed in great detail in Kim Stanley

Robinson’s (1993; 1994; 1996) Marstrilogy, a

fictionalization of ‘Mars Project’ plans for the

future (Zubrin, 1996), the impact of space explo-

ration on ecological thinking is unavoidable. It is

worth remembering that James Lovelock’s

(1979) innovative formulation of the Gaia

hypothesis was initially spurred by the crucial

question posed by NASA about how to decide

whether there was life on other planets, and Mars

in particular. Arthur C. Clarke first posited the

use of geosynchronous communication satellites

long before he collaborated with Stanley

Kubrick on 2001 (Clarke, 1968). Carl Sagan’s

popularizations of planetary exploration were not

unconnected with either his subsequent work on

nuclear winter or his science fiction novels

(Turco et al., 1983).

Science fiction novels are frequently driven by

some variation of post-apocalyptic struggles or

by attempts to deal with the consequences of the

twentieth century. Many deal imaginatively with

the politics of space travel in the context of strug-

gles on earth over resources and the politics of a

polluted and unjustly divided planet (Barnes,

1994). Some explicitly deal with questions of

environmental change and speculative discus-

sions that pick up on some of the themes in the

contemporary scholarly literature on environ-

mental security (Suliman, 1999). They do so in

ways that offer both a window into the contem-

porary angst about the future and also ways of

conceptualizing matters that challenge conven-

tional academic analyses. Some of them expli-

citly deal with the remaking of suburban

landscapes using green technologies and the

possibilities of the internet (Clee, 1998).

The best thinking about these themes manages

to avoid the twin concerns that worry David

Harvey (2000): the utopias of the spatial fix, the

environmental engineering that assumes utopia is

a geographical arrangement; and the utopias of

social process, which ignore the practical

geographical realities of lived experience. While

the temptations of a technical fix are always

present in the genre, the questions that they often

explore are the questions of subjectivities and the

possibilities inherent in technological arrange-

ments that fundamentally alter the assumptions

about the relationships between humans and

ecosystems. This science fiction offers a poten-

tially useful pedagogic tool for cultural geogra-

phers as well as a useful foil for critical reflection

on the cultural assumptions about nature that

modern geography has taken for granted for so

long. If the current biophysical changes at the

planetary scale are to be dealt with seriously,

assumptions about consequenceless consumption

will need to be fundamentally challenged.

Science fiction offers ways of reflecting on such

possibilities precisely because it so effectively

facilitates a critique of the ontological categories

of modern culture and in the process raises

questions of how to rethink environmental

geopolitics.

ECOPOLITICS

There are some grounds for optimism about

the potential for new thinking as ecological

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