Ecological SF

I've been re-reading Frank Herbert's Dune after seeing the stunning new film version by Denis Villeneuve, and I noticed something which I found hilarious, in my usual contrarian way.

Consider the two factions struggling for control of the desert planet Arrakis:

On one side you have the villainous Harkonnens, fortified in the spaceport city of Arrakeen, only venturing out of their bubble to gather spice in the desert — but the dreaded sandworms mean no permanent presence is possible. Their spice harvesters are flown out, operate for a few hours until the worms approach, then are lifted off back to base. Aside from a few raids on the nomadic Fremen, the Harkonnens stay put in Arrakeen and rely on supplies imported from off-world.

On the other side you have the noble Fremen, who live in the rocky desert regions, cultivating plants which can survive the climate, hunting native and imported animals, and obsessively stockpiling water with the goal of someday transforming Arrakis into a world where humans can live without protective suits, with rain and rivers and lakes.

Who are the more environmentally responsible?

At first it seems obvious. The Harkonnens are on Arrakis only to extract resources. They have lots of big noisy machines and go around being greedy and oppressing people. They make no effort to understand the planet, they just want spice. In contrast, the Fremen say noble desert-warrior stuff and are often accompanied by wooden-flute music or female vocalists singing in an unrecognizable language. Sure signs of environmental consciousness, right?

Except . . . 

The Harkonnens "live lightly" on Arrakis. They oppress every human in reach, but humans are alien to the planet. They extract spice, but it's a renewable resource created by the sandworms. The Harkonnen "footprint" is confined to one city and its environs.

The Fremen, meanwhile, are planning to terraform half the planet into a more Earthlike environment — which is explicitly stated to be deadly to native Arrakis life. They have adapted to live on Arrakis, but they plan to adapt Arrakis even more. How many species — how many thousands of species — will go extinct when half of Arrakis is covered by an alien ecosystem?

This points up an interesting historical shift in how we view the natural world. Frank Herbert was born in 1920, and grew up during the Great Depression, when giant public-works programs aimed at turning deserts into pasture or cropland. Until the 1960s or so, preserving the natural environment was specifically about preserving it for use by humans. And it is this paradigm which the Fremen embody. Arrakis is their home, and they want to make it more fertile and pleasant.

But beginning around the time Herbert's novel Dune became a best seller (and in no small part because of Dune), a new strain of environmental thought began to appear. The goal was no longer preserving the natural world for human use but preserving it for its own sake. The most extreme version is the "Voluntary Human Extinction" movement, which literally seeks to remove humans from the world altogether. 

In the space exploration realm, this idea sometimes crops up in opposition to human colonization of other worlds. I find this very hard to understand. Protecting the Amazon rainforest or the Pacific coral reefs is obviously a good thing, but what good is achieved by making sure lifeless, radiation-blasted rock remains lifeless forever?

But, amusingly the Harkonnens's colonial, resource-extractive presence on Arrakis is more in tune with this viewpoint than the efforts of the Fremen are.

All of which goes to show that if your ideology is indistinguishable from that of the bad guys, maybe you need to think about it a bit more.