5
“The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People”
Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction
SABINE HÖHLER
My fellow citizens: It is with a heavy heart that I bring you the findings of the council. After deliberating in continuous sessions for the last four months in unceasing efforts to find a solution to the devastating problem of overpopulation threatening to destroy what remains of our planet, the World Federation Council has considered and rejected all halfway measures advanced by the various regional scientific congresses. We have also rejected proposals for selective euthanasia and mass sterilization. Knowing the sacrifices that our decision will entail, the World Council has nevertheless reached a unanimous decision. I quote: “Because it has been agreed by the nations of the world that the earth can no longer sustain a continuously increasing population, as of today, the first of January, we join with all other nations of the world in the following edict: childbearing is herewith forbidden.” To bear a child shall be the greatest of crime, punishable by death. Women now pregnant will report to local hospitals for registration. I earnestly request your cooperation in this effort to ensure the last hope for survival of the human race.
ZPG: Zero Population Growth
ZPG, released in 1971, deals with the rigid measures for population control that a densely populated Earth might require in the future. In the effort to ensure the survival of the human race the World Council rules that having children will be strictly illegal for the coming thirty years. Set in a thickly polluted American metropolis, the movie tells the story of the young white couple Russ and Carol, who, upset with having to make do with a surrogate robot baby, secretly give birth to a child, whom they hide carefully from friends and neighbors. However, the young family is discovered by a neighboring couple, itself with a strong desire for a child. A fight about proprietary rights results in blackmail and betrayal, and finally in the disclosure of the child to the authorities. The family is arrested, their elimination imminent.1
Around 1970, scenarios of population growth and restrictions on reproduction were explored not only in works of fiction. “ZPG—Zero Population Growth” was also the name of a US activist group founded in 1968 to raise public awareness of the “population problem.” The group sought to confront the white American middle class with its lifestyle of using up far more than its global share of natural resources and adding more than its share to environmental pollution. ZPG meant to secure a birth rate of 2.2 to achieve a desired replacement rate of 1:1 and to thereby realize the dream of a numerically stable population—zero population growth. The initial mission was to encourage citizens to reduce family size: “Stop at Two,” “Stop Heir Pollution,” and “Control Your Local Stork” were some of ZPG’s slogans advertised on bumper stickers, flyers, and posters, in public service announcements, magazines, and organized protest marches. ZPG also founded its own “Population Education Department” that produced classroom texts, and a video titled World Population that was used as an educational tool in public exhibitions, museums, and zoos. The organization did not confine its actions to showing movies and handing out condoms. It also urged changes in population policy and abortion legislation, and it opened vasectomy clinics.2
Among ZPG’s founding members was the biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose popular book The Population Bomb (1968) briefly boosted group membership to more than thirty thousand in its first year.3 Drawing on his studies of animal populations, Ehrlich warned about the impending destructive “explosion” of the human world populace. He became one of the founders of population ecology, which emerged from population biology by extending the realm of the natural sciences to the study of human societies in relation to their environments.4 As the historian Matthew Connelly aptly put it, “Political problems were assumed to be biological in origin, potentially affecting the whole species.”5
The “natural laws” of population growth leveled individual and social differences. People were aggregated into comparable numerical entities to make them “accountable”: commensurable for the sake of statistics and responsible for their reproductive behavior. The ecological and governmental calculus of allocating contested earthly living space along the lines and divides of biological, ecological, and economical eligibility of human beings and populations warrant more research, to which I have contributed elsewhere.6 This chapter, however, attends to the thin line between science fact and science fiction in population ecologists’ accounts.
THE SCIENCE AND THE FICTION OF POPULATION GROWTH
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the perceived “population problem” was neither about science nor about fiction only. Both ecological science and ecological fiction invented truisms about too many people sharing too little space and about how overpopulation would soon destroy what remained of planet Earth. “Ecocide” through unprecedented population increase, environmental degradation, and resource exploitation became the subject of numerous popular works of science. Ecologists employed alarming images of exponential growth of industrial pollution, the resource consumption of the rising world economy, or of sheer human numbers within the recently discovered limits of Earth as a “small planet.”7
To understand the popularity of population ecology around 1970, its science fictional elements need to be taken seriously.8 Population ecologists shared with science fiction writers similar sweeping concerns, like the “survival of the human race,” and similar narrative strategies, like shifting present observations to other times and spaces. As Connelly observes, the actors “seeking support for campaigns to control world population continually pointed to the future because they could not actually prove that it had caused any particular crisis or emergency” in the present time.9
Moreover, population ecologists were poignantly prophetic about the future of all of humanity on the global scale. They corroborated their planetary predictions with scientific references to Malthusian and Darwinian evolutionary theories of natural selection and differential reproduction. Numerical approaches to social and political problems were supplemented by forthright deliberations on technical fixes. Suggestions of selective euthanasia and mass sterilization were not limited to works of SF but were also openly discussed in ecological publications. And finally, population ecologists proved to be genuine science fiction writers when toying with new forms of supranational governments and “new ways in which the world might be divided and united”10 to allocate planetary living space and resources. How many people could the world support, who should live, who should decide, and how—these were the questions population ecologists concerned themselves with.11
I will focus on the work of Garrett Hardin (1925–2003), an American biologist and professor of human ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hardin was a prolific and provocative writer. His philosophy of reproductive restraints was highly contested during his lifetime and remained so after his death. Most notorious perhaps are his writings on the access to common resources and on reproductive responsibility, summarized in his 1972 book Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle.12 This book provides a case of ecological SF through its blending of analytic approach with fictional narrative. Drawing on the traditions of science fiction literature and film, Hardin asks his readers to suspend their disbelief in a near apocalyptic future. He sets his story on a spaceship, providing a perfect stage to a fast-motion recapture of humankind’s history and impending doom as the population exceeds the “carrying capacity” of its finite environment.
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 spaceship 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.
LIFEBOAT ETHICS
The so-called population problem was never simply about “too many,” to quote a 1969 book by the Swedish food scientist Georg Borgstrom.51 It was not primarily the absolute number of the world’s population, reaching three billion by the 1960s, that alarmed his contemporaries. Rather, population ecologists pointed to the disastrous effects of some parts of world population outbreeding others. Respectively, Hardin’s aim was not to realize the maximum population that the nineteenth-century British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham might have had in mind when formulating his goal of “the greatest good for the greatest number.”52 Hardin aimed to achieve the optimum population, proportionately and responsibly composed and numerically safely below Earth’s carrying capacity.
Hardin formulated his “Lifeboat Ethics” in the mid 1970s.53 He abandoned the idea of Spaceship Earth, criticizing that it presupposed a powerful captain on its bridge to take a decision. Viewing Earth as a lifeboat prescribed rules of selection independent from Darwin’s biology and from the (possibly fatal) choices of a steering elite. Survival on a lifeboat depended solely on its carrying capacity: the number of occupants in relation to the amount of provisions, their economic allocation, and the disposal of deadweight. The lifeboat enforced new criteria of eligibility: its physics determined its ethics.54 Hardin himself took on a godlike authority when framing the basic law of the lifeboat in the Old Testament formula Thou shalt not: “Thou shalt not exceed the carrying capacity” became his quasi-biblical commandment of ecological correctness.55
On the ethical basis of Earth presenting a lifeboat Hardin made his “Case against Helping the Poor.” He argued against the “fundamental error of the ethics of sharing” in international aid programs and urged wealthy nations to close their doors to acts of charity like immigration and food aid to the poor. The population of poor countries, his argument went, would simply “convert extra food into extra babies.”56 The optimum world population, able to survive on the planetary lifeboat, would have to be reached via a Darwinian process of selection that reflected a nation’s “fitness.” Fitness he defines according to orthodox liberal logic of achieved economic prosperity, and so determines that top nations or groups should be rewarded while communities not able to cleverly economize be punished. Hardin’s disposition of human lives entirely ignores the historical roots of disparities of wealth through colonial exploitation and postcolonial power relations. Socially and historically developed problems he describes as biological in origin and individual in character. All the while, the good cause he claims to support deflects from the genocidal logics that inform his judgment.
EXIT STRATEGY
The concluding chapter of Hardin’s book follows the Argotes preparing their return to Earth. The Beagle’s nuclear energy pack has been used up. Besides, after five thousand years of the ship’s journeying through space, three young women have discovered the entrance into the Argotes’ hiding place. Following the Eve principle of spoiling any sophisticated mission, the intruders have turned what began as a rational endeavor into a luxury cruise. The women introduced sex and brought genetic variety to the Argotes, meanwhile great-grandmothering a new population of Argotes. The price of sex has been mortality. Fourteen people are left in the secret hub of the ship, and essentially nothing distinguishes them from the Quotions outside.
The shuttle to Earth can carry twenty people. The Argotes discuss the question of who may go, displaying the ultimate lifeboat predicament. Should they draw lots? Should they give up their place voluntarily to one of the Quotions? In the end, the fourteen Argotes enter the shuttle, leaving six seats empty—for the safety factor—and leaving behind the millions of Quotions blissfully ignorant of their fate of certain death. This passage clearly exhibits the deeper meaning and consequence of Hardin’s ethics for survival. Lifeboat ethics is not about an absolute morality that binds every human being in the same way at all times and all places. Lifeboat ethics calls for a situational morality. The truly knowledgeable and responsible will not take in more people than their lifeboat’s carrying capacity allows for.
At least one question remains unanswered: Where will the lifeboat go? After the Beagle’s voyage of thousands of years, the state of planet Earth is utterly unknown. The last message arrived twenty years after the Beagle left; it is very probable that the Earth fell victim to nuclear destruction. Can this be a return home? Hardin leaves this part of the story untold—perhaps to him this is where true science fiction begins. As a population ecologist he takes no interest in visions of terraforming new planets and reinventing paradise. Hardin is engaged solely with numerical aggregates of living beings and with the distribution of countable resources and measurable living space. Noticeably, with his focus so narrow, there are things that escape him, first of all the insight that his science has been fiction all along.
Hardin misses out on the reflection that the science of ecology has been constructing the closed worlds it describes. The movie ZPG: Zero Population Growth I began this text with explores how an escape from philosophies of sufficiency and efficiency in the spaceship, the ark, and the lifeboat might be performed. By way of the junk-littered canals beneath the city, the couple Russ and Carol with their newborn can flee the state authorities in a tiny rubber dinghy. This lifeboat is not designed as an economic container but as a makeshift rescue vehicle. It takes the family to an abandoned beach, a former radioactive zone where they set out to make a new start. The wasteland serves as a metaphor of what may lie beyond the realm of rigid population control: an open wilderness, deserted and anything but pure, but also unrestrained and free to inhabit in new ways. This is not a return. The story presents the ship as an exit strategy to claim an environment that is not within but outside the confines of ecology.
Notes
1. ZPG: Zero Population Growth, dir. Michael Campus (2008; Los Angeles: Paramount, 1971), DVD. The epigraph for this chapter quotes from the opening sequence.
2. The Population Connection, “30 Years of ZPG,” [ZPG] Reporter, December 1998, 12–19, http://www.populationconnection.org/site/DocServer/1219thirtyyears.pdf?docID=261.
3. Ibid. According to the article about the history of the organization between 1968 and 1998, “the years between 1969 and 1972 saw the membership of ZPG briefly blossom to more than 35,000 members” (13).
4. See Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968; New York: Ballantine, 1969).
5. Matthew Connelly, “To Inherit the Earth: Imagining World Population, from the Yellow Peril to the Population Bomb,” Journal of Global History 1, no. 3 (2006): 300. For more-encompassing treatment, see Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). On population models and laws see Sharon E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology (1985; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
6. Sabine Höhler, “The Law of Growth: How Ecology Accounted for World Population in the 20th Century,” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 14 (2007): 45–64.
7. Next to Ehrlich’s Population Bomb the best known are perhaps Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (1948; Boston: Little, Brown, 1950); Fairfield Osborn, The Limits of the Earth (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953); Fairfield Osborn, Our Crowded Planet: Essays on the Pressures of Population (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962); Karl Sax, Standing Room Only: The World’s Exploding Population (1955; Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), Standing Room Only: The Challenge of Overpopulation); Georg Borgstrom, Too Many: A Study of Earth’s Biological Limitations (New York: Macmillan, 1969); Michael Hamilton, ed., This Little Planet (New York: Scribner, 1970). The 1972 study The Limits to Growth developed future scenarios termed the “behavior modes of the population-capital system.” Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972), 91–92.
8. Science fiction is too broad a genre to be defined uniformly or conclusively. See Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1987; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), chap. 1, “The Limits of the Genre,” 17–63.
9. Connelly, “To Inherit the Earth,” 314.
10. Ibid., 301.
11. J. H. Fremlin, “How Many People Can the World Support?” New Scientist 415 (1964): 285–87.
12. Garrett Hardin, Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle (New York: Viking Press, 1972).
13. Ibid., 114.
14. Ehrlich repeatedly speaks of “human surplus”: see Population Bomb, 167. See also Sabine Höhler, “‘Carrying Capacity’—the Moral Economy of the ‘Coming Spaceship Earth,’” Atenea: A Bilingual Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 26, no. 1 (2006): 59–74.
15. A number of twentieth-century science fiction writers have set their stories on “interstellar arks,” self-contained generation spaceships on their way to distant worlds, to explore how societies evolve in closed environments, from Robert A. Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky (1941) to Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop/Starship (1958), to more recent works like Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day (1997).
16. “It is obvious that we cannot exist unaffected by the fate of our fellows on the other end of the good ship Earth. If their end of the ship sinks, we shall at the very least have to put up with the spectacle of their drowning and listen to their screams.” Ehrlich, Population Bomb, 132.
17. Rafael M. Salas, International Population Assistance: The First Decade; A Look at the Concepts and Politics Which Have Guided the UNFPA in Its First Ten Years (New York: Pergamon Press, 1979), 125.
18. Hardin, Exploring New Ethics for Survival, 92.
19. Ibid., 12.
20. Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998–2004), vol. 2, Globen (Makrosphärologie) (1999), chap. 3: “Archen, Stadtmauern, Weltgrenzen, Immunsysteme. Zur Ontologie des ummauerten Raumes,” 251–64. Translations are mine.
21. Ibid., 252.
22. “The earth is a spaceship.” Hardin, Exploring New Ethics for Survival, 16.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 17.
25. Barbara Ward, Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 15. On the figure of Spaceship Earth in environmental discourse see Sabine Höhler, “‘Spaceship Earth’: Envisioning Human Habitats in the Environmental Age,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 42 (2008): 65–85; Sabine Höhler, “The Environment as a Life Support System: The Case of Biosphere 2,” History and Technology 26, no. 1 (2010): 39–58.
26. Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” in Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, Essays from the Sixth RFF Forum on Environmental Quality held in Washington, D.C., March 8 and 9, 1966, ed. Henry Jarrett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 9. Hardin recommends Boulding’s vision; Hardin, Exploring New Ethics for Survival, 242.
27. Richard Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1971; originally published by Southern Illinois University Press, 1969). See also Peder Anker, “Buckminster Fuller as Captain of Spaceship Earth,” Minerva 45, no. 4 (2007): 417–34.
28. These views were two early versions of the programmatic term “sustainable development” emerging in the late 1980s. World Commission on Environment and Development (Chairman Gro Harlem Brundtland), Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
29. Hardin, Exploring New Ethics for Survival, 92.
30. Ibid., 96.
31. Ibid., 118.
32. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–48.
33. Hardin, Exploring New Ethics for Survival, 102.
34. Ibid., 118.
35. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London, 1798). On mid-twentieth-century Neo-Malthusianism see Björn-Ola Linnér, The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-war Population-Resource Crises (Leverburgh, Isle of Harris, UK: White Horse Press, 2003); Paul Neurath, From Malthus to the Club of Rome and Back: Problems of Limits to Growth, Population Control, and Migrations (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).
36. Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” 1246.
37. Ward, Spaceship Earth, vii.
38. Hardin, Exploring New Ethics for Survival, 130. Emphasis in original.
39. Logan’s Run, dir. Michael Anderson (2007; New York: Warner Bros. / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976), DVD. I quote from the written prologue introducing the film and from one of its opening dialogues. The movie is based on the novel Logan’s Run written by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (New York: Dial Press, 1967).
40. Soylent Green, dir. Richard Fleischer, Warner Bros. / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973). The screenplay is based on a novel by Harry Harrison titled Make Room! Make Room! (with an introduction by Paul R. Ehrlich) (1966; New York: Berkley, 1973).
41. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” [1965], in The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Gregg Rickman (New York: Limelight Editions, 2004), 113.
42. Hardin, Exploring New Ethics for Survival, 163.
43. Ibid., 157–59.
44. Ibid., 159.
45. Ibid., 172. Edward A. Ross, Standing Room Only? (New York: Century, 1927); Sax, Standing Room Only (1955). See also Höhler, “Law of Growth.”
46. Hardin, Exploring New Ethics for Survival, 174.
47. Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” 1248, 1244.
48. Garrett Hardin, “Editorial: Parenthood: Right or Privilege?” Science 169 (1970): 427.
49. In a short story titled “The Stowaway,” Julian Barnes has aptly summarized the themes of authority, order, and classification associated with the Ark (Old Testament, Genesis 1: 6–9). Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989; New York: Vintage, 1990), chap. 1: “The Stowaway,” 1–30. An anonymous woodworm reports, “I was never chosen. In fact, like several other species, I was specifically not chosen.”
50. Sloterdijk, 260–61.
51. Borgstrom, Too Many (1969). See also Höhler, “Law of Growth.”
52. Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” 1244.
53. Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today 8, no. 4 (1974): 38–43, 123–26. On Hardin’s problematic premises see Petter Næss, “Live and Let Die: The Tragedy of Hardin’s Social Darwinism,” Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 6, no. 1 (2004): 19–34.
54. Garrett Hardin, “Ethical Implications of Carrying Capacity,” in Managing the Commons, ed. Hardin (San Francisco: Freeman, 1977), 112–25.
55. Garrett Hardin, “Carrying Capacity as an Ethical Concept,” in Lifeboat Ethics: The Moral Dilemmas of World Hunger, ed. George R. Lucas Jr. et al. (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 134.
56. Garrett Hardin, “Living on a Lifeboat,” BioScience 24, no. 10 (1974): 564.