2023-11-23 23:46:04
Ecofiction is not a new genre – Dune, by Frank Herbert, was published in 1965 – but it is now experiencing renewed interest. Faced with the crises we are going through, his poetic and literary freedom allows us to think differently about ecological challenges. By imagining other worlds, other ecosystems and other relationships with our environment, ecofictions, and more broadly science fiction, allow us to take a step aside: they produce a beneficial spatial and temporal decentration. Because if we continue with the current extractivist and consumerist model, the “desirable” future touted by its supporters will only concern a tiny part of humanity, namely those who will have the means to protect themselves from the damage produced on the environment by this unbridled productivity.
In Dune, this awareness is well summed up by one of the characters, the planetologist Pardot Kynes, commissioned by the Padishah Emperor to draw up a complete portrait of Arrakis. “What someone who doesn’t know anything about ecology doesn’t understand is that it’s a system,” Kynes says. “A system that maintains a certain stability and can be broken by a single mistake. […] And someone who ignores ecology may not intervene until it is too late. This is why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.” This masterful demonstration is still relevant today, sixty years after its publication… For a long time, humanity did not understand its impact on the environment. Today, the facts are there, but will we be able to draw the consequences in time?
One of the most harmful clichés in science fiction is the possibility of a planet B, and the imaginary space conquest that accompanies it: the Earth becomes unlivable – too much pollution, bloodless biodiversity, a devastating climate , a sick humanity – rather than sparing it or repairing it, let’s leave it! However, most often, cinema and SF literature give a fairly clear answer on the subject, presenting this escape as a dead end. Thus, Elysium, the film by Neill Blomkamp (2013), shows a high-tech artificial world created for the benefit of a chosen few, continuing to exploit an extraordinarily degraded Earth, and with it the billions of inhabitants who survive there so much. although bad – but rather bad.
It is the interest of SF, and in particular of ecofictions, to ask directly, unvarnished, the angry questions. Intrinsically political, its role is major today. Because there is an urgent need to reinvest the imaginations of the future, to rebuild the future, and not leave it in the hands of techno prophets who design it according to their sole profit.
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