💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › shaun-huston-murray-bookchin-on-mars.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:01:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Murray Bookchin on Mars!
Author: Shaun Huston
Language: en
Topics: Bookchin, space, science fiction
Source: Huston, Shaun. “Murray Bookchin on Mars! The Production of Nature in the Mars Trilogy.” Burling, William J., ed. Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. 231–41.
Notes: Provided by the Institute for Social Ecology

Shaun Huston

Murray Bookchin on Mars!

While science fiction most often conjures up images of technology and

the so-called ‘hard sciences’, writers in the genre also address human

social relations. One of the exemplars of this tradition is Kim Stanley

Robinson. In his award-winning Mars trilogy, Red,Green and Blue Mars,

Robinson uses the idea of transforming Mars into a habitable planet to

explore the ethics and limits of the human ability to (re)produce

nature. Philosophically and theoretically, Robinson’s writing has

particular relevance to the work of social ecologist Murray Bookchin.[1]

The Mars trilogy provides a fruitful exploration of what Bookchin refers

to as third or free nature, a synthesis of first (bio-physical) nature

and second (human social) nature wherein humans ‘co-operate’ with first

nature and directly participate in the evolution of life.

This chapter is divided into two main sections. The first sketches out

Bookchin’s ‘dialectical naturalism’ and considers a particular critique

of the idea of third nature. The second section introduces Robinson’s

Mars trilogy and interprets those works as an exploration of free

nature.

Bookchin’s Philosophy of Nature

Intellectually, Bookchin falls in the Western tradition of dialectical

thought represented by Aristotle, Hegel, Marx and the Frankfurt School.

Bookchin’s relationship with Marx is largely oppositional; he rejects

the centrality of class struggle, focusing on a more general struggle

with hierarchy/domination (for example, 1971 and 1989;Purchase 1994:

57–70). At the same time, Bookchin clearly draws insights from Marx’s

analysis of capitalism (Kovel 1998:37–48). His early work on cities, The

Limits of the City, directly builds on Marx’s observations regarding

uneven development between city and country (1974: vi-xi, 4, 101).

Similarly, Bookchin draws on Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of

instrumental reason in developing his own critique of domination, both

human on human and human on nature, but criticizes their work for

reducing nature to a passive, crude object transcended by the human

species (1982: 270–80). Bookchin develops his notion of ‘eduction’, or

reasoning that draws out the developmental potential of things in

nature, and nature itself, from Aristotle and Hegel, though he argues

that their dialectics require a sense of natural evolution to be truly

ecological, that is, a sense of nature as a ‘flowing continuum’ rather

than a static ladder of Being’ (1995: 124, also 119–33; Purchase 1994:

68–70). Perhaps the critical distinction between Bookchin and his

influences, especially Marx and the Frankfurt School, is that Bookchin

reasons that the domination of nature by the human species was preceded

by, and emerged from, the domination of human by human (hierarchy),

rather than in the reverse (Merchant 1994: 8–9; Bookchin 1990: 154)

Politically, Bookchin’s closest predecessor, both historically and

substantively, is the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin contributes

several historical and theoretical themes to Bookchin’s work, notably

the rooting of cooperation (mutual aid) and ethics in nature, historical

connections between cities and human freedom and the image of a free

world made from regional confederations of cities and towns (which, in

turn, are organized as grassroots confederations) (Macauley 1998;

Purchase 1994: 57–70; also Bookchin 1990: 154 and 1992b: 152–3). It is

out of this synthesis of an ‘ecologized’ dialectical tradition and

anarchist communism that Bookchin develops his philosophy of nature.

As noted in the introduction, Bookchin conceives of nature as developing

through three forms. Initially, there is first or bio-physical nature.

In this form, nature strives for self-awareness, providing the basis for

the emergence of the human species. With the human species comes second

or social nature. In second nature, the development of life, as

represented by the human species, and the interaction between life and

its environments become self-conscious and self-directed, rather than

instinctive and guided primarily by deep evolutionary memory. However,

because human and non-human nature do not actually break from one

another, but remain intertwined, it is necessary to bring social nature

into conscious synthesis with first nature. Bookchin refers to this

synthesis as third or ‘free’ nature. Here, human-defined second nature

is integrated with first nature so that the human species actively

participates in the differentiation and evolution of life.

Third nature is ‘free nature —that is, an ethical humanly scaled

community that establishes a creative interaction with its natural

environment’ (Bookchin 1992b: xvii, italics in original). This

integration of first and second nature heals the (illusory) split

between ‘the social’ and ‘the natural’ that occurs in the elaboration of

second nature. According to Bookchin:

Both are in a very real sense natural, and their naturalness finds its

evolutionary realization in those remarkable primates we call human

beings who, consciously responding to a sense of obligation to the

ecological integrity of the planet, bring their rational, communicative,

richly social, imaginative, and aesthetic capacities to the service of

the nonhuman world as well as the human. (1992b: xvii—xviii, italics in

original)

Thus, in reaching third nature, humans realize their potential as

‘nature rendered self-conscious’ (Bookchin 1982: 315—16). In second

nature, humans emerge as a species able to think and act in and for

itself. This achievement lays the ground for the human species to think

and act in and for the world, or nature, at large (see 1982, 1986, 1992b

and 1995).

Bookchin’s account of third nature is heavily weighted towards

describing human social relations and structures. His description of how

first and second nature can, and will, be integrated is much less

developed. This leaves his work open to the criticism that third nature

is, at best, recklessly vague, and, at worst, plays to human hubris

regarding non-human nature. Eckersley (1992: 137) argues that

‘Bookchin’s vision of stewardship does not qualify how and to what

extent our responsibility is to be discharged’. She proceeds to provide

a list of potentially disastrous human interventions into the evolution

of life (wholesale introductions of new species, the ‘greening’ of

deserts, etc.), not to mention the cumulative history of past and

present human interventions. Furthermore, while acknowledging that

Bookchin’s social ecology advances beyond a simple anthropocentrism, one

that justifies the use of non-human nature for strictly human ends, she

questions the extent to which Bookchin’s world-view remains focused on

humanity to the potential detriment of other species. She asks whether

‘we now know enough about these processes [of natural evolution] to

foster and accelerate them’ (Eckersley 1992: 142, italics in original).

In other words, there seem to be grave risks in moving humans to

actively, and as a matter of course, intervene in the evolution of

non-human nature, especially with the intent of promoting certain

characteristics.

It can be argued, as Bookchin has (1992a), that critics such as

Eckersley are uncritical sceptics and unimaginative about the

reconciliation of first and second nature and the transcendence of

inherited histories. Nonetheless, Bookchin’s discussions of third nature

tend to be either highly abstract, advocating the use of ‘eductive’

reasoning to understand first nature (1995), or superficial and

technical (see 1971, 1980 and 1982). Significantly, the technical

innovations that Bookchin writes about, renewable energy technologies

and bioregional urban design and architecture for example, do not

directly address what human participation in the evolution of nature

might be like. Such innovations may adapt second nature to first, but,

if anything, they are tools for minimizing, rather than heightening, the

impact of human development on non-human nature. If Eckersley is too

chained to the past or the world as it is, Bookchin appears too

confident in his own sense of the process of nature (see also Kovel

1998). At the very least, the questions raised by Eckersley suggest a

need for a more satisfactory accounting of how third nature is to emerge

and what it would mean for humans to overcome their one-sided

relationship with first nature.

There is also the issue of the relative specificity with which Bookchin

addresses the two dimensions of third nature. While Bookchin’s

consideration of first nature in third nature tends to take the form of

general principles with a smattering of specifics, his account of second

nature and its revolutionary transformation is rife with detail (see

1980, 1990 and 1992b; Biehl 1998). Furthermore, in the 1990s, Bookchin

turned much of his attention to beating back perceived misanthropic

tendencies in the ecology movement, that is, tendencies which blame

humans per se for ecological and environmental degradation, rather than

social structures (see, for example, 1994). Bookchin’s extensive effort

to articulate the specific conditions for human freedom, while leaving

the actual integration of first and second nature to the unfolding of

‘the Dialectic’, underscores the criticism that third nature is a hazy,

if noble, idea fraught with potential difficulties if not disasters.

It is in addressing the criticism that his work fails to sufficiently

elaborate on the content of third nature that Kim Stanley Robinson’s

Mars trilogy offers the greatest insight for Bookchin’s social ecology.

Robinson and Bookchin

Operating in the realm of social theory and philosophy, it is difficult

for Bookchin to get around the largely negative history of human

intervention into bio-physical nature and its environments, especially,

though not exclusively, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

Noting a lack of imagination in getting past that history on the part of

critics such as Eckersley is not sufficient. By working in fiction,

Robinson is able to take the question of third nature into new contexts

for examination. Through the literal removal of humans from the bonds of

the Earth, he presents the human species with a new beginning in its

relationship with first nature.

In Mars, Robinson presents an environment that appears to require

outside intervention for life to evolve (or, perhaps, to re-evolve).

Mars possesses key elements necessary for life as humans know it, an

atmosphere, albeit a thin one, and water, though locked up in ice and

permafrost, but there are no signs of actual life or evolution. This

puts a new perspective on possible human participation in the production

of nature. The biological aspect of bio-physical first nature requires

action out of second nature to exist, while second nature is extremely

limited without completing first nature. Not surprisingly, in the

trilogy, the issue of whether to use human technology and knowledge to

release Mars’s latent capacity for life, ‘terraforming’, quickly gives

way to the question of how to transform the planet. The question thus

becomes: will humans terraform Mars in order to reproduce an environment

convenient to human activity, or will they choose to terraform in a

manner that co-operates with the Martian environment and gives rise to a

unique order of life? In more Bookchinist terms, will humans annex Mars

to second nature, or will the species foster a third nature that

transcends the legacy of human social nature on Earth?

The idea that moving humanity to another planet would be an opportunity

to develop new social and physical environments is one that Robinson

explicitly introduces in Red Mars through the character of Arkady

Bogdanov, a space navigator and one of the First Hundred colonists.

We have come to Mars for good. We are going to make not only our homes

and our food, but also our water and the very air we breathe — all on a

planet that has none of these things... This is an extraordinary

ability, think of it! And yet some of us here can accept transforming

the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing

to change ourselves or the way we live... And so I say that among the

many things we transform on Mars, ourselves and our social reality

should be among them. (Robinson 1993: 89)

This statement captures the full sense of third nature: the freeing of

humanity from a narrow second nature that fosters domination in both

human and non-human nature, and a shift to a (more) fully self-conscious

relationship to our own nature, the nature of others and the physical

environments that tie all forms of nature together.

Through two devices, a longevity treatment and the benefits of living in

a lower gravity environment, Robinson tracks the progress of the human

project on Mars (and back on Earth) through a group of characters that

live through large sections of the trilogy’s 200-year-plus timespan. Two

of the trilogy’s central characters are physicist Saxifrage Russell

(Sax) and geologist Ann Clayborne. The development of these two

characters, more than others, captures the transition of Terran-Martian

culture from a replicant of Earthly second nature to a unique third

nature.

In Red Mars, both Sax and Ann are, in different ways, alienated from the

Martian environment. Sax’s alienation is more straightforward than

Ann’s. Sax is the archetypal master planner: an ivory tower scientist

and technocrat. To Sax, Mars could be any place. What matters is that

humanity, with its technology, its knowledge and the superiority of

sentience and self-consciousness, has arrived. In one of the early

exchanges about the human role on Mars, still on the transport from

Earth, two proclamations sum up Sax’s early relationship with the

planet: ‘We’ll change it just by landing’ and ‘It’s dead’ (Robinson

1993: 40). Once humans arrive on Mars, the process of change will be

underway, it will be irreversible and it will be for the better. Sax

elaborates on these sentiments in a debate with Ann.

Without the human presence it [Mars] is just a random collection of

atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the

universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning... Not

the basalt and the oxides... If there are lakes, or forests, or

glaciers, how does that diminish Mars’s beauty? I don’t think it does. I

think it only enhances it. It adds life, the most beautiful system of

all ... W e can transform Mars and build it like you would build a

cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. (Robinson

1993: 177–8)

While Sax’s sentiments are suggestive of third nature, the image of a

cathedral or monument implies human control over the production of

nature. For Sax, Mars in itself is irrelevant. What matters is the human

ability to turn Mars into a habitable place.

In contrast with Sax, Ann is deeply attached to Mars, or, at least, to

what it represents: billions of years of geologic history (apparently)

uninterrupted by the chaos and disturbances of life. This attachment

puts her in conflict. She wants to see Mars up close. She wants to touch

and study it, but to do all that she must alter what makes Mars special

to her. On a larger scale, the forces that make it possible for her to

be on Mars will not allow the planet to remain as it was found. She lets

these contradictions out in a conversation regarding how much time to

spend on the surface in the face of radiation allowed in by the planet’s

thin atmosphere. Ann exclaims:

I look at this land and, and I love it. I want to be out on it

travelling over it always, to study it, to live on it and learn it. But

when I do that I change it —I destroy what it is, what I love in it...

I’d rather die. Let the planet be, leave it wilderness and let radiation

do what it will. (Robinson 1993: 157, italics in original)

For Ann, there is an essential Mars to which humans, herself included,

are anathema. To ease this contradiction, she seeks ways to minimize the

human impact on Mars even as she realizes that the planet will never be

the same now that humans have arrived, no matter how circumscribed their

presence.

The early life of the First Hundred is observed by people back on Earth:

a live-action soap opera and political thriller. Sax and Ann come to

represent different sides of the terraforming debate, with the physicist

representing a majority faction on both Mars and Earth that believes in

terraforming Mars ‘by all means possible, as fast as they could’, and

the geologist standing in for a smaller but committed ‘hands-off

attitude’ (Robinson 1993: 169). In the face of overwhelming odds, Ann

commits herself to slowing terraforming down, making the case that

humans need to study and understand Mars before changing it.

Ann loses this argument and the human population on Mars grows. Many of

the new arrivals possess distinct cultural and political identities and

have different goals in mind for Mars: cultural autonomy for individual

groups versus universal standards of rights and responsibilities, close

ties to Earth versus Martian independence. In the end, the United

Nations and corporate authorities that funded the Martian expedition

assert their authority over the planet. Many of the First Hundred,

identified with movements in favour of an independent Mars, are forced

underground, including Sax and Ann. This change in circumstance sets the

stage for Green Mars.

In Green Mars, Ann heads into the Martian outback. It is revealed to her

that she has, reluctantly and, it seems, unknowingly, become a focal

point and hero to a faction on Mars called the ‘Reds’, essentially a

Martian Earth First! who practise ecotage against terraforming. Coyote,

an unofficial member of the First Hundred who stowed away on the

original transport, persuades her to meet with the Reds. Initially, Ann

is sceptical about the efficacy of ecotage and is reluctant to involve

herself in a political movement removed from scientific debate. Her

turning point comes during a trek to the Red base of operations.

Witnessing multiple signs of life and environmental transformation, she

decides that she should meet with the Reds and arrives a hero. Ann’s

turn to the Reds is significant because it is a self-admission that her

objections to terraforming are not grounded solely in science — too much

has already changed for her arguments for further study of the native

landscape to hold. Joining the Reds is an emotional and political

decision.

A bunch of radicals. Not really her type, Ann thought, feeling a

residual sensation that her objection to terraforming was a rational

scientific thing. Or at least a defensible ethical or aesthetic

position. But then the anger burned through her again in a flash... Who

was she to judge the ethics of the Reds? At least they expressed their

anger, they had lashed out. (Robinson 1995: 129–30)

After witnessing the land ‘melting’ away from the unlocked water, she

decides to lash out as well. At this moment, Ann does not perceive

humans to be capable of transcending second nature, and, as a result,

rejects the idea of a third nature on Mars.

Contributing to Ann’s decision to join the Reds is her scepticism about

human nature. She expresses the conviction that humans on Mars, whether

they were born there or not, are ‘human and human we remain’. A

significant number of humans on Mars take as an article of faith that as

humans terraform Mars, Mars ‘areoforms’ human nature. Areoforming is

defined as a certain sense or spirit of place and life that is uniquely

Martian. To Ann, the terraforming efforts in themselves, and the

sameness of the colonists’ tent cities, imply that areoforming is a

bankrupt idea, one that serves to mask the destructive selfishness of

human activity on Mars (see 1995: 365–6). This rejection of even the

idea behind areoforming represents a rejection of third nature. For Ann,

humans should withdraw from Mars as much as possible without leaving

entirely. That is the only way to insulate the planet from a selfish and

grasping human social nature.

Where Sax is concerned, Green Mars is a significant time of transition.

Not satisfied with hiding out, he acquires a new identity and a new

face. Fundamentally a generalist, he transforms himself into a biologist

and goes to work for a Biotech company designing plants for Mars’s

emerging environments. Whereas, before, Sax was the master planner,

working with macro-level design and analysis of terraforming, in his new

identity, Stephen Lindholm, he is involved in the ground-level work of

terraforming. His observations as a field-worker have a profound affect

on his awareness of the Martian influence on human endeavours to change

the planet and on the ability of life to develop in unintended or

unexpected ways.

In a key passage, Sax takes off on his own to explore a proto-alpine

meadow. Dotted with trees and grass, he observes that the trees, mainly

white spruce and lodgepole pine, are gnarled and stunted, and this is

despite extensive engineering for growth, hardiness and adaptation to

Martian soil composition. Taking delight in these trees and the few

insects that had been released, he wishes for ‘Some moles and voles, and

marmots and minxes and foxes’ (Robinson 1995: ISO). His reasons are

practical: many animals provide useful services to plant life and vice

versa, but he also begins to realize that not everyone is engaged in the

terraforming for the same reasons. He is especially disturbed by an

arrangement of solar mirrors and lenses being used to heat the surface

and increase the melt of ice and permafrost. This action not only

destabilizes the surface, but increases the amount of CO₂ in the

atmosphere, intensifying and speeding up the warming of the planet, but

making it uninhabitable for animal life. ‘As if warming the planet was

the only goal! But warming was not the goal. Animals on the surface was

the goal’ (Robinson 1995: ISO). His commitment to life, articulated in

Red Mars, sharpens here. It is not only human life, but life in general

that matters to Sax. However, many of the more drastic, and apparently

ascendant, terraforming plans are centred on a heavy industrial model

that would heat the surface and thicken the atmosphere as fast as

possible. This would make the planet eminently exploitable, unveiling

mineral ores and enabling activities on the surface otherwise inhibited

by cold, but it would not support the introduction of life in general,

most likely only technologically or genetically enhanced humans.

This distinction in terraforming goals illustrates the practical and

ethical differences between remaining in second nature and transitioning

to third nature. In the former, human knowledge and technology are

employed to bend the Martian environment to serve human needs. In the

latter, those same capabilities are employed for the benefit of other

species and, at some level, preserving the integrity of the Martian

landscape.

These differences also come into relief at an annual conference on

terraforming. The push to heat and thaw the surface in all haste

disturbs Sax. He begins to doubt even his own initial plans for making a

fast jump to a human habitable surface. The extent to which terraforming

now seemed to be driven by developing an environment exclusively

convenient to human purposes and tastes, and by the pursuit of profit,

shakes Sax’s faith in the political disinterest of science. He becomes

even more aware of the drastic changes to the Martian landscape

resulting from the terraforming. Significantly, he thinks:

All of this was as Ann had predicted to him, long ago. No doubt she was

noting reports of all these changes with disgust, she and all the rest

of the Reds. For them every collapse was a sign that things were going

wrong rather than right. In the past, Sax would have shrugged them off;

mass wasting exposed frozen soil to the sun, warming it and revealing

potential nitrate sources and the like. Now he was not so sure ... The

collapse of landforms were considered no more than an opportunity, not

only for terraforming which seemed to be considered the exclusive

business of the transnats, but for mining. (Robinson 1995: 217–18)

Sax comes to believe that the terraforming effort has become something

other than a noble attempt to bring life to Mars, but a means for

turning the planet into a raw materials colony for Earth.

Eventually, Sax’s identity is uncovered by the Earth-based authorities

on Mars. He is tortured and brain-damaged. After he is rescued by the

underground, his mind and body are reconstructed, albeit not perfectly.

He decides to take down one part of the solar mirror-lens arrangement to

slow down the heating of the surface. His success leads to another

exchange with Ann, a person that he has come to think about a lot. Until

the end, this exchange is much like the others between the two of them.

Sax defends the terraforming in principle. He reasserts a plan for a

‘human-viable surface to a certain elevation’ and a slower approach to

transforming the surface and the atmosphere. Ann is curious about his

decision to knock out the one portion of the heating device, but is

still bitter about the terraforming and Sax’s commitment. But this time

Sax ends with this admission: ‘I was wrong... We should have waited. A

few decades of study of the primal state. It would have told us how to

proceed. I didn’t think things would change so fast.’ Ann, non-plussed,

simply responds: ‘But now it’s too late’ (Robinson 1995: 415). This

exchange, Ann in bitter alienation from Sax and what she believes he

represents, and Sax expressing remorse and a desire to reach out to and

understand Ann, sets the scene for Blue Mars. Ann continues to be

uncomfortable with the idea of integrating the human species with the

Martian environment, while Sax has undergone a significant

transformation in consciousness, ethical awareness and judgement. No

longer overwhelmingly enamoured of human capabilities, and freed from

the belief that human second nature can freely bend other forms of

nature to its will, Sax has moved to an understanding of the ethical and

practical limits to human interventions into the production of nature.

Most significantly, he has come to appreciate the value and role of the

native Martian landscape in guiding the evolution of life on the planet.

Mars itself undergoes yet another revolution in Green Mars, only this

time Mars breaks free from Earth. In Blue Mars, the independence

movement must now address issues of Martian governance and what sort of

relationship to establish with Earth. Both of these decisions shape the

context for addressing Sax’s and, especially, Ann’s personal

transformations and their respective relationships with the planet that

has become their home. Indeed, in Blue Mars, Sax and Ann emerge as the

trilogy’s principal characters. Sax’s focus in Blue Mars is on deepening

his understanding of Ann’s connection to Red Mars and finding an entry

to persuade her that life on Mars is not a blight, but a beautiful and

right thing.

It is clear in Blue Mars that Martian independence from Earth plays an

important role in bringing Ann to an accommodation with the human

presence on, and even transformation of, Mars. Most sections of the

trilogy are introduced by the thoughts and descriptions of an unnamed

observer. Blue Mars begins with one of these passages. The observer is

describing a scene where Ann Clayborne is smiling, addressing a group of

Reds. The heart of her message is recorded by the observer:

We came from Earth to Mars, and in that passage there was a certain

purification. Things were easier to see, there was a freedom of action

that we had not had before. A chance to express the best part of

ourselves. So we acted. We are making a better way to live. (Robinson

1997: 2, italics in original)

While still not persuaded that the terraforming is anything but a

small-minded endeavour, it is significant that Ann would be talking not

about restricting human action on Mars, but about the possibilities of

making a better human life on the planet. The break with Earth distances

Mars from what are, in Ann’s estimation, the most selfish and grasping

aspects of second nature.

There are several places in Blue Mars where Ann engages in close

observation of human life on Mars. While these observations are not

wholly positive, her curiosity about how humans are living on the planet

is a crack in her shield against the idea of truly inhabiting, as

opposed to simply studying, this new place. She finds herself concluding

at one point ‘People’s faces, staring in concert; this ran the world’

(Robinson 1997: 16). This thought indicates a recognition that humans

have added value to Mars rather than simply taking value from it.

There is one particularly important moment in the book where Ann starts

to make a turn away from her alienated relationship with humanity on

Mars and the Martian environment. This moment is a conversation with

Michel Duval, another of the First Hundred, who, at Sax’s urging, has

engaged her in conversation about possible suicidal tendencies. Perhaps

because he has more distance from Ann, or perhaps because of his

psychological training, Michel is able to talk to Ann in ways that Sax

is not.

[Michel:] There is so much of Red Mars that remains. You should go out

and look! Go out and empty your mind and just see what is out there. Go

out at low altitude and walk free in the air, a simple dust mask only.

It would be good for you, good at the physiological level. Also it would

be reaping a benefit of the terraforming. To experience the freedom it

gives us —that we can walk on its surface naked and survive. It’s

amazing! It makes us part of an ecology. It deserves to be rethought,

this process. You should go out to consider it, to study the process of

areoformation.

[Ann:] That’s just a word. We took this planet and plowed it under. It’s

melting under our feet.

[Michel:] Melting in native water. Not imported from Saturn or the like,

it’s been therefrom the beginning...

(Robinson 1997: 252, italics in the original)

Ann resists Michel’s arguments but this exchange does send her out on a

trip around the planet, both in and out of human company. It is also

evident that Michel has raised difficult questions about terraforming.

The discussion about water is important because it questions Ann’s

assumptions about what is and what is not ‘natural’. Her trip prompts

further reflection on these lines.

The backdrop to Ann’s rapprochement with Sax and with humanity on Mars

is the changed political situation on Mars. Early in Blue Mars, a new,

independent Martian government is established. This government exhibits

many Bookchinist characteristics, including a confederal structure,

common ownership of land, and a system of human and environmental ethics

that is reflected in various institutions and limitations on strictly

private enterprise (Robinson 1997: 153— 8). This new government taps

into Ann’s hopes about building a better life, a better form of humanity

on Mars.

The trilogy winds down with Sax devising a memory treatment to address

one of the symptoms of the extreme old age made possible by the

longevity treatments and Martian gravity. Many of the remaining First

Hundred begin to die off, suffering a ‘quick decline’, with memory loss

being one of the harbingers. Sax gathers together those who are left at

their original settlement to undergo the treatment. Ann uses this as an

opportunity to focus on Mars as it was before the terraforming, and

emerges fully transformed from the experience. She and Sax sail on one

of the inland seas, taking in the emerging Mars, one made blue as well

as green and red by an earlier deal between them that resulted in Sax

removing the final part of the solar heating arrangement.

As the final chapter begins, the reader is introduced to ‘A ne\ Ann. A

fully Martian Ann at last’ (Robinson 1997: 754). In a public way, this

transformation is represented by Ann speaking in favor of allowing legal

Terran immigration to Mars in order to avert a war that would destroy

the still-developing, life-sustaining Mars. More privately, the closing

paragraphs bring both Ann and, symbolically, humanity into a state of

free nature with Mars.

Ann, Sax and a host of family and friends make a home out of the

original settlement. On the beach, after bringing ice cream back for

everyone and experiencing a brief, terrifying moment where she thinks

she is experiencing quick decline, Ann is confronted by a child looking

at the water, sky and passing pelicans. ‘Innit pretty? Innit pretty?

Innit pretty?’ Eventually Ann answers ‘Yes’, but her reflection

continues internally.

Oh yes, very pretty! She admitted it and was allowed to live. Beat on,

heart. And why not admit it. Nowhere on this world were people killing

each other, nowhere were they desperate for shelter or food, nowhere

were they scared for their kids. There was that to be said. The sand

squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains

of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of

colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fragments of the

Hellas impact itself. (Robinson 1997: 761)

Mars is forever changed, but the Mars they inherited is still there,

beneath her feet, mixed with what humans have, if not fully created,

then set in motion. In the end, for both Sax and Ann, the desire to

inhabit this particular place leads them to overcome their original

states of alienation.

Conclusion

By making Sax in particular struggle with the threat of Mars being

terraformed into a tropical mining colony for Earth, Robinson does

address the problematic history of human intervention into the

production of (first) nature. Unlike Earth, Mars does not bear the full

weight of this history. Mars represents the possibility of a different

direction, one that is not marked by an attempt to subsume the rest of

nature into the human fold. Sax and Ann, in their own ways, give up the

idea that humans can dominate nature. Sax abandons the notion that

humans can fully master the evolution of life or transformation of an

environment, while Ann comes to accept that human intervention does not

necessarily extinguish nature. By tracing the transformation of Sax and

Ann, and speculating on the process of terraforming, the Mars trilogy

opens a window on third nature, one that makes it possible to perceive

the possibilities of a truly integrated relationship between human and

non-human nature. Robinson creates a human culture where the central

questions are: what does it mean to live in a place, and how can the

human species use its abilities to enhance the life of that place? That

these questions are difficult to answer is not in itself significant.

What matters is that the questions are asked and the answers are

meaningful and consequential. The struggle toward this type of

social-cultural context is what Robinson elaborates in Red, Green and

Blue Mars. It is also the struggle, and fundamental basis, for third

nature.

Acknowledgements

This chapter was prepared and edited with constant help and

encouragement from Anne-Marie Deitering. Additional thanks to Rob

Kitchin and James Kneale for their efforts in putting the anthology

together and helping me clarify the chapter.

[1] The connection between Robinson and Bookchin is more than

incidental. The Mars trilogy is peppered with explicit references to

Bookchin’s work. Pacific Edge (1990), one of the Three Californias

books, is a slice-of-life story about a Bookchinesque municipality.

Robinson’s first post-Mars-trilogy book, Antarctica (1999), tackles

social ecology themes such as what it means to inhabit a place,

distinctions between radical, reformist and (arguably) misanthropic

ecology, and the promises of collective self-management.