Green Planets
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Hardin defines carrying capacity as a measure of the maximum exploitation an environment will permit, without diminution, into the indefinite future. In terms of nature’s revenues, Hardin states: “The carrying capacity is the level of exploitation that will yield the maximum return, in the long run.”13 In terms of population pressure, carrying capacity defines the maximum number of a species that an environment can support indefinitely without reducing its ability to support the same number in the future. The problem of a limited ecological carrying capacity, on Earth as in any other contained environment, came along with the question of how to dispense with the increasing “surplus” of human beings and entire human populations.14
The spaceship Beagle literally embodies this problem. To Hardin the Beagle serves neither as a device to explore new worlds and encounter alien life forms nor as part of a powerful fleet in interstellar war or as an exit technology to transport earthly nature to outer space and terraform new planets. Rather, the intergenerational spaceship serves as a metaphor and a model of human life in a finite environment.15 Hardin’s narrative resonates with recurring references to the ship in contemporary environmental discourse. Ehrlich repeatedly spoke of the “good ship Earth” on the verge of sinking.16 The United Nations conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 fashioned the One Boat concept, the thought that all of humanity shared a common fate within absolute limits.17 From the voyages of discovery to the Space Age, the ship had been a reservoir of collective memory and imagination in Western culture. The ship harbored the congregation or family of mankind and was a figure of hope, shelter, and survival.
In the following sections I will explore three aspects of the Beagle’s voyage that were central to Hardin’s new ethics for the survival of the human race: first, the conservation and replication of earthly achievements and failures, presenting the Beagle as ark and archive; second, the circulation and allocation of limited resources and living space, featuring the Beagle as a spaceship or technologically sustained metabolism; and third, the demands of its carrying capacity on the eligibility of its passengers for a place aboard, turning the Beagle into a lifeboat. I will close with Hardin’s “lifeboat ethics,” a selective ethics, which imagines a shipwreck situation to determine who should survive the global ecological crisis. Taking a strictly scientific approach to lifeboat capacity, Hardin saw traditional ethical considerations unhinged by necessity. His ethics for survival is thus perhaps the most striking work of science fiction produced in the 1970s.
CONSERVATION AND REPLICATION: THE BEAGLE AS ARK AND ARCHIVE
Reflecting his analytical plot, each of the three parts of Hardin’s book opens with a report from the Beagle’s journey. The reports describe practical features of life aboard: embarkation and first problems of environmental effluence; reproductive responsibility and regulatory mechanisms installed; and soaring overpopulation and ensuing drastic measures. The first part also explains the Beagle’s mission, begun in Hardin’s own lifetime. “When people realized that Earth would be destroyed someday, they decided that they had to do something about it. Obviously the thing to do was to make a big spaceship, fill it with people, and blast it off towards other stars to look for a planet to settle on.”18 The U.S. government sent out the Beagle on a journey of 480 years to Alpha Centauri (the name of Beagle as homage to the change of humankind’s place in the world brought about by Charles Darwin, and to the Americans’ love of dogs). The ship measures three kilometers in diameter and harbors one thousand people; it is equipped with artificial gravity and with a plastic sky, nice family apartments, and TV. Apart from the lack of automobiles, the Beagle is “just like home.”19
The mission also experiments with the Marxist critique that capitalism requires (wasteful) expansion to sustain itself. The spaceship is designed as a test case for a steady-state society. Nevertheless it soon turns out that the mission itself is an emission: the selected emissaries are on their way to emitting the American way of life to the entire universe. Start-up businesses cause the first environmental problems on board when they begin swiftly depleting resources and polluting public goods like air and water. On a micro-scale, the predicament of supporting free enterprise and private profit on the one hand and acknowledging public demands on the other unfolds at an extremely accelerated pace. Within the perfect enclosure of the spaceship, the American spirit of industrialization and the capitalist economy and consumer cycle literally run up against the wall.
The Beagle is an archive that goes beyond the miniature worlds that authors like Jules Verne have furnished in such works as 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870), in which the submarine Nautilus keeps a library of twelve thousand volumes, a collection of art and music, and a museum at the traveler’s disposal. While Verne’s nineteenth-century vessels were encyclopedic collections of humankind’s knowledge and technology, the Beagle not only contains but replicates humankind’s evolutionary successes and failures on a small scale. The Beagle represents the primal archive, the inventory of the life on Earth: the ark. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has analyzed the ark as the perfect example of the “ontology of enclosed space.”20 Ark, from the Latin arca, means case or compartment. According to Sloterdijk, the ark denotes an artificial interior space, a “swimming endosphere” that provides the only possible environment for its inhabitants.21 In Hardin’s account the spaceship makes a finite insular habitat; material, informational, or energetic exchanges with its environment are not possible. The Beagle is a closed system.
As the ship represents Earth, Earth itself turns into a ship, an exceptional site where life is at stake.22 Hardin reminds his readers of the revolutionary change in perception brought about with the first pictures of Earth from space: “We must feel in our bones the inescapable truth that we live on a spaceship.”23 Hardin quotes Adlai E. Stevenson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who in 1965 took up this image in his appeal to the international community. Stevenson referred to Earth as “a little spaceship” on which humankind traveled together as passengers, “dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil.”24 In 1966, the English economist and political scientist Barbara Ward in her book Spaceship Earth pointed to the “remarkable combination of security and vulnerability” that humanity in the Cold War era found itself in.25 The spaceship became an allegory for the need of a new balance of power between the continents, of wealth between North and South, and of understanding and tolerance in a world of economic interdependence and potential nuclear destruction.
CIRCULATION AND ALLOCATION: THE BEAGLE AS SPACESHIP
Spaceship Earth also reconciled seemingly opposing ideals of sufficiency and efficiency in environmentalist thought. In a programmatic lecture, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” given in 1966, the American economist Kenneth E. Boulding chose the spaceship as a metaphor to promote the “closed earth of the future,” suggesting to foreclose the wasteful “cowboy economy” of the past for a frugal “spaceman economy.”26 The spaceship was his model of a self-contained cyclical economical and ecological system capable of continuous material reproduction. The American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) used the spaceship as a metaphor of an intricate cybernetic machine to be expertly run by science and technology. Fuller summoned the engineering elite to take control of an earthly environment in bad repair.27 He propagated the optimistic view that ecologically smart design and resource-efficient technologies would take the modern ideals into the future.28
Hardin endorsed Boulding’s model of spaceman sufficiency but did not concern himself with the technological details of life support. Instead he pointed to an aspect that neither Boulding nor Fuller had addressed: “The real problem of a spaceship is its people.”29 Next to the question of government, the long-term changes brought about by generational succession had to be handled. In part two of his book we learn that the creators of the Beagle came up with the solution of eternal life for a tiny part of the population. The spacesh
ip society is divided into “civilized man” (a category excluding women) and “procreative man” (this one including women). This arrangement allows Hardin to experiment with what he deems most valuable in human populations: culture or the development of ideas on the one hand, and evolution through natural selection on the other.
The “Argotes” form an all-male insular community of twelve who secretly monitor the common “Quotions.” The Argotes are the custodians of the past; they were selected for their qualities of the mind, to act as trustees of civilization. To maintain the stability of intelligence and ideas, the Argotes do not reproduce biologically, and they are conveniently free of emotions and desire. The Argotes reproduce culturally by going through a cycle of perpetual youth to oppose the aging of the mind, “like pushing RESET on a computer.”30 The Quotions were selected for their fine biological qualities and then left to the basic processes of aging and mortality, sexual selection, reproduction, and mutation. They are subjected to chaotic nature, which develops human DNA but also threatens long-evolved cultural ideas and values from each generation to the next. The Beagle’s plan is to wait and see whether the Argotes or the Quotions will eventually prove more suited to colonizing a new planet.
Through decades and centuries the Argotes have been watching the Quotions divide and multiply and suffer all the major societal conflicts, which, as the records show, people on Earth also fought through. Repeatedly, the liberal ideals of freedom and competition clash with the sustainability ideal of freedom and responsibility. From these conflicts Hardin construes his major argument. After Darwin, he claims, a society can trust neither the individual conscience nor the appeal to individual responsibility. In a community favoring freedom and responsibility in using common resources, there will always be one who just favors freedom and takes more than his share. In a commons, or a “system of voluntary restraint,” gains will be privatized while losses are socialized. Solidarity and altruism have no place in his philosophy, which excludes collective or socialist forms of joint property and joint property management: “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”31
For this point Hardin exploits his legendary Science article of 1968, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in which he attacked the allegedly prevailing practice that common earthly resources like forests, air, and oceans could freely be used and overused.32 The scarcity and contamination of any commonly owned and used natural resource, so his argument goes, will inevitably increase, since it will eventually be exploited within a limited world. Hardin bases his justification on the biological principle of natural selection as he understood it: man is an “egoistic animal,” and as “the descendant of an unbroken line of ancestors who survived because they were sufficiently egoistic,” man will naturally attempt to secure and maximize his own advantage.33 Ultimately the conscientious people will go extinct in favor of the ruthless and egoistic. According to Hardin the system of the commons can only work in a limitless world or in a world in which the carrying capacity has not yet been reached. “But it cannot work in a world that is reaching its limits, in which the decisions being made overstress the carrying capacity of the environment—in a word, in the world of a spaceship.”34
To Hardin the Hobbesian nature of man must also preclude common access to procreation. Like many of his colleagues, Hardin built his assumptions on the Malthusian principle that humans will naturally breed and populations will increase geometrically or exponentially, while resource supply will grow arithmetically or in linear fashion only.35 Natural selection, so thought Hardin, will favor Homo progenitivus (“reproductive man”) at the expense of Homo contracipiens (“contracepting man”).36 When defining Spaceship Earth, Barbara Ward had warned that in “such a close community, there must be rules for survival.”37 Hardin claimed that a spaceship’s mission was to reconcile freedom with coercion. He postulated “the necessity of coercion for all—mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon,”38 a freedom collectively delimited and controlled through law.
ELIGIBILITY AND SELECTION: THE BEAGLE AS LIFEBOAT
Dystopic visions of a population-resource-environment predicament are explored in other works of SF around 1970. Frequently the city takes the place of the spaceship to signify the closed world. Sufficiency and efficiency aspects of closure feature both in artificially balanced societies and in conditions of “overpopulation.” The movie Logan’s Run (1976) presents a world in perfect ecological equilibrium. Three hundred years into the future, “the survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution live in a domed city, sealed away from the forgotten world outside. Here, in an ecologically balanced world, mankind lives only for pleasure, freed by the servo-mechanisms which provide everything.” To maintain the equilibrium a mastermind computer executes an efficient scheme of population control. While the citizens believe in their chance of “renewal” at the age of thirty through competing in the spectacle of “Carrousel,” the central feedback system behind the scenes keeps the total number of human lives stable according to a strict “one for one” rule: “One is terminated, one is born. Simple, logical, perfect. You have a better system?”39
Soylent Green (1973), a movie set in the year 2022, explores an alternative but no less “sustainable” path. New York City is thickly polluted; its population is forty million. Congestion, poverty, hunger, and corruption dominate the city. A merciless police force keeps the masses in control, clearing human surplus away with huge power shovels and garbage trucks. Governmental euthanasia facilities are running day and night. Director Richard Fleischer explores the excesses of a world applying Boulding’s spaceship solution of the closed circulatory system to human mass. The single company that controls food production and distribution, the Soylent Corporation, devises a most efficient scheme in which dead bodies are recycled to organic material and reintegrated into the food chain.40
“There is a sense in which all these movies are in complicity with the abhorrent.”41 Susan Sontag’s view from 1965 on disaster fiction also applies to the fiction of population disaster of the 1970s. But clearly the different works of fiction also presented different perceptions of what the disaster of overpopulation consists of, what it entails, and for whom. Undoubtedly, many works of SF, by exploring a variety of disastrous conditions and effects, have approached the “population problem” in a more thorough and differentiated way than many population scientists have.
Let us return then to the Beagle, which meanwhile also witnesses a gigantic population increase. In part three of Hardin’s book the spaceship has traveled far beyond Alpha Centauri, as it turned out that the planet was “no good.”42 As hundreds of years stretched into thousands, the spaceship’s population increased to twelve million people (naturally, all Quotions; there are still only twelve Argotes). The chapter with the evocative title “Freedom’s Harvest” explains that several hundred years earlier, a massive conflict on matters of reproduction was decided in favor of the individual and inseparable right and freedom to reproduce. The pro-creation faction prevailed over the “Trustful Fellowship for Zero Population Growth” that believed in family planning and demanded to “Stop at Two.” Predictably this group was heavily attacked for its insinuated ideas of policing and genocide.43
The Argotes rationalize this development by applying simple calculus on the grounds that “every reproductively isolated group potentially multiplies in exponential fashion.”44 Hardin draws on the Darwinian principle of differential reproduction to describe how one part of the spaceship’s population ruthlessly outbred the other. As the right to breed selected for fertility, overcrowding selected for the tolerance of crowding—to the effect that literally no space on board is left for movement and action. The identical calculus had been applied to Earth in the twentieth century. Repeating the title phrase from authors Edward A. Ross (1927) and Karl Sax (1955), Hardin argues that, taking the 1970 rate of population growth of 2 percent, there would be “standing room only” on all the land areas, with a population of 8.27 x 1014, within six hundred years.45 Converting
the entire mass of Earth to human flesh would result in 1.33 x 1023 people, achieved in only 1,557 years. Hardin acknowledges that these thought experiments of converting masses might seem ridiculous: “The real point of the mathematical exercise (so often missed) is to compel choice.”46
On the Beagle the Argotes choose to reduce the population drastically. In godlike fashion they force the Quotions to pick one out of three biblical scourges: famine, war, or pestilence. The Quotions opt for the disease, and the Beagle is once again sparsely populated. Hardin admits that sweeping death might lend itself as a solution to earthly problems in the form of an unintended consequence, but not as a political deliberation. To compel choice, politics needs to generate a “fundamental extension in morality.” Hardin contests Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” symbolizing the belief in the self-regulating capabilities of a market, state, or population, and in rational individual decisions for the greater good. To “close the commons” in breeding, Hardin claims, the society will have to abandon the “present policy of laissez-faire in reproduction.”47 Among other “corrective feedbacks” he suggests abandoning the welfare state, which promotes “overbreeding,” and abolishing the 1967 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which instituted the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. Hardin essentially repeats a view he expressed in 1970: that of parenthood being not a right but a privilege to be granted to responsible parents only.48
Clearly, Ehrlich’s Good Ship Earth was not an inclusive vehicle that emphasized commonality. Arks may seem egalitarian, but they are not free from power relations, and they do not strive for completeness. Even the biblical ark sorted its species into separate classes of purity, ruling out the unclean.49 Sloterdijk has pointed to the selectivity that characterizes all ark narratives. In all stories of the ark, he reminds us, the choice of the few is declared a holy necessity, and salvation is found only by those who have acquired one of the few boarding passes to the exclusive vehicle.50 Arks are discriminatory technologies; they combine the imperative of resource sufficiency with selective strategies and efficient rules of allocating resources to their occupants. In their most exclusive form arks become lifeboats.