I hate re-blogging BoingBoing, but this item really got my attention. In case you haven’t read the Red, Green, Blue Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, it is a great allegory about the various strategies a society can make to create a sustainable planet. It is the best ecological sci-fi series next to Dune that you will read. Consequently, I think the following article has a great idea, which is to reframe our world, as Bucky Fuller once did, as “spaceship earth.”
WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future: Colonizing Planet Earth:
We should have been colonizing Earth as though it were a planet with no ecosystem resources to exploit.
Look at the difference between what we do when we settle a new area on Earth, compared to what we’d do on a planet like Mars. On Earth we’d take advantage of the free air and water, ready-made soils provided by local fauna, pollination provided by the local bees, all to minimize the costs of building and maintaining our colonies. This process is documented expertly by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel; he points out that the conquest of the Americas was really the invasion of one ecosystem by another, rather than a simple matter of moving human populations. North America is the greatest success story of European expansionism because its ecology was most similar to that of Europe, more than for any political or social factors.On Mars most of those services are unavailable. Mars is the most attractive local planet precisely because it does have some services, most notably a 24 (and-a-half) hour day, potentially fertile soil, and ready water from underground sources. Still, that’s not much compared with even the Gobi desert. Our assumption on landing there has to be that the 24-hour day is about the only service we’re going to get. Everything else–from air to agricultural production–has to be provided by us.
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