Terraforming and Earth Day
The politics of European terraforming
In the global north, Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 demonstrating support for "environmental protection." It was first celebrated in 1970 and today encompasses 1 billion people in over 193 countries. But to get to the necessity and celebration of this day and the superficial celebrations of corporate greenwashing, we have come a long way in separation and dismemberment. In the following paragraphs, we open some narrow trapdoors on the weave of modern Western beliefs about the Earth and the concept of Terraforming.
Before moving on, I recall the Gaia hypothesis, formulated by chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, and still contested today. Lovelock took the name Gaia, the primordial goddess who personifies the Earth in Greek mythology, to name this theory, which proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic environment to form a complex, synergistic, and co-regulatory system that helps maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. This means that biodiversity, which refers to all living things, including plants, bacteria, animals, and humans - the approximately 8.7 million species of plants and animals - actively contribute to keeping the planet habitable in a complex system of chemical and symbiotic exchanges, between rocks, animals and plants, and water.
Out of curiosity, Gaia was one of the primordial elemental deities in the Greek pantheon, born at the dawn of time, the great mother of all creation. Some modern sources, such as Mellaart, Gimbutas, and Walker, claim that Gaia as Mother Earth is a later form of a pre-Indo-European Great Mother, venerated in Neolithic times. On the other hand, as Stephan Harding points out, although all the other planets in our vast cosmic ecology have names of Greco-Roman gods, there is still much coyness in the scientific community about assuming a name for our planet (as it cannot be considered alive). Of course, one can (and should) ask why they are just names from one of the European mythical traditions?
Getting into what brings us here, I recall that in late March 2023, Maristela Barenco1 shared in her brilliant lecture "Decolonizing consciousness," at the 1st Eco-Mythology Conference the thought of the Brazilian philosopher Ana Godoy. Maristela, quoting Godoy, says: "to begin the journey, it is not enough to leave the continent. It is necessary to lose it as a reference." Barenco goes on and refers to how the continent has been imposed on the world via countless processes of colonization and how if we do not lose the continent as a reference, we do not question the vision of the capture and domestication of the Other. She also refers to how the universalizing gaze of the seafarer would always make the departure land the same that it arrived at - of how the process was replicated by leaving continents and founding other continents, on islands, archipelagos, or whatever, as long as nothing changes.
This dogmatic look that ignores the complexity and otherness of the other has a number of consequences for the way we are world. Through her subjectivity, Maristela Barenco, touches deeply on the politics of European terraforming.
I now add Amitav Gosh, who in his book "The Nutmeg's Curse," reminds us that terraforming is an English neologism, which joins "earth" with "formation" in the sense of "making" or "shaping," something like "shaping earth." In contemporary English, the word is almost always used in relation to multimillionaires and other planets, men who intend to terraform Mars, unilaterally creating conditions for life, again ignoring the complex system of chemical and symbiotic exchanges in which life sustains life itself, as postulated by Lovelock and Margulis (and most indigenous cosmologies). However, there is no reason why the concept of "terraforming" should not be applied to planet Earth. Gosh, claims that the idea of terraforming long predates the neologism, giving the example of H.G. Wells' novel, War of the Worlds, where aliens attack Earth intending to adapt the planet for their own use. This novel was inspired by one of the best known colonial "wars of extermination" - the conflict that eliminated the indigenous people of Tasmania after the colonization of the island by the British. Wells reversed the perspective in his novel: advanced alien races, intended to do to the inhabitants of planet Earth what the colonizing peoples did to countless others - exterminate them, seize their lands, and adapt them for their own use.
Gosh moves forward by interweaving the concept of terraforming with invasion, control, and domestication in the replication of "new-europes," in a narrative that draws on the rhetoric and imagery of empire, envisioning territory as a "frontier" to be "conquered" and "colonized." The scale and speed of the environmental transformations of colonizations radically changed more than a quarter of the earth's surface in a few hundred years.
The author reflects on how terraforming processes were applied intensively "in the sense that large tracts of land were redesigned to resemble European models, to suit European ways of life."
This inevitably entailed the weakening and elimination of the ways of life of the original inhabitants, as well as the extermination of the varied niches and biomes of unique ecosystems, which were radically domesticated and normalized according to European logic. Where there was bison, now there is grass.
We now connect Godoy's concept of continent, cited by Barenco, with Gosh's perspective of Terraformation. Recalling Maristela Barenco's comment on Ana Godoy's quote about how the continent has been imposed on the world via countless processes of colonization, we now add Gosh's perspective, which states the terraforming project is fundamentally conflictual, a mode of war. Gosh states, "Terraforming required a different kind of warfare, in which environmental interventions and non-human entities played a central role."
The author also quotes Girolamo Benzoni, an Italian whose History of the New World was published in 1565, on how the indigenous peoples viewed the newly arrived Europeans: "They say we came to this land to destroy the world. They say ... that we devour everything, we consume the earth, we redirect the rivers, we are never quiet, we never rest, but always run here and there, in search of gold and silver, we are never satisfied, and then we play with it, make war, kill each other, steal, swear, never tell the truth, and deprive them of their means of subsistence." From this quote, we can understand how ignorant and arrogant the conquerors were in the face of Gaia's processes, as a symbiotically living earth, in their violent replication of new-europes at the environmental level, altering and tragically simplifying the newly conquered complex ecological systems.
The terraforming wars are biopolitical conflicts in which entire populations, were subjected to forms of violence that included enormous biological and ecological disruptions. As Maristela Barenco states: over the universalizing gaze of the navigator that would always make the Earth from which one departs the same as the one one one arrives - we now realize that this is not "only" a philosophical metaphor or a form of perception, but reports devastating biocidal actions with very real and current consequences.
We return then to the planet, perhaps Gaia, or perhaps with so many other names, that we now know to be chemically and symbiotically alive, in its valuable contextual diversity, in each niche, biome, and concrete ecosystem. We return to the need to celebrate Earth Day, for the omnicidal history that brings us here, but with awareness of the deep perversity of the colonial practice of terraforming.
What Earth do we want to celebrate?
REFERENCES:
https://www.earthday.org/
https://www.theoi.com/Protogenos/Gaia.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia
Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. John Murray Press. Kindle edition.
https://serpentedalua.com/produto/1o-encontro-de-eco-mitologia/
Maristela Barenco Corrêa de Mello - Graduated in psychology and theology, with a doctorate in environmental sciences. Worked 20 years with human rights in Brazil. Post-doctorate (2019-2020) on issues of the performance society and the importance of a politics of 'self-care', devising, from there, the Mil-em-Rama Podcast. She studies interdisciplinary issues, with a focus on subjectivity and decolonizing academic logics and writing. She is a university professor (UFF), and columnist for the magazine Vento e Água. Instagram: @mil_em_rama