Green Planets (7 page)

In addition to the animal metaphors that demean human beings through comparison with lower creatures while simultaneously challenging the categories of high and low, the experience of invasion and subjugation by another species leads the narrator to develop a new perspective on nature. The newly subjugated position of human beings causes the narrator to identify with other animals, to empathize with the creatures over whom human beings had previously asserted unreflecting dominance. Watching the progress of the “mechanical colossi of the Martian tripods,” the narrator begins to imaginatively enter into the mental and emotional perspective of other species, “to ask myself” as he puts it, “for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.”
⁸
Emerging later from hiding to find the town of Sheen in ruins around him and already overgrown with Martian vegetation, the narrator experiences “an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes that we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy natives digging the foundations of a house.”
⁹
The narrator extends his sense of fellow feeling even to animals commonly viewed as vermin, reflecting, “I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place—a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed…. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity—pity for those witless souls that suffer our domination.”
¹⁰
The War of the Worlds
is thus underpinned by an idealization of sympathy.

The War of the Worlds
expresses a distinctly fin de siècle, evolution-induced anxiety about the future of human dominance, the power of technology, and the long-term survival of the species and the planet. However, its evolutionary pessimism is tempered by the emergence of a new experience of empathy across species boundaries. In
The War of the Worlds
, humans experience what it is to be treated as pests to be exterminated or livestock to be exploited, and while this experience results in a sense of diminishment or dethronement, it also leads to a compensatory empathy for and identification with the animal.

EARLY ECOLOGY AND HUMAN AGENCY

In the quarter century between the publication of
The War of the Worlds
and
Men Like Gods
, a number of new trends in biological research emerged. These included the early stages of the development of genetics, arising from the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work on inherited characteristics, and a new focus on animal behavior, which gained institutional recognition as the science of ethology. Of particular relevance to Wells's shifting attitudes toward nature and science was the emergence of ecology in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century. One of the most significant figures in the transmission of ecological ideas and the establishment of ecology as an institutionalized discipline in Britain was the botanist A. G. Tansley. Tansley was the driving force behind the formation in 1904 of the Central Committee for the Survey of British Vegetation, which conducted the first ecological survey of the British Isles; he was the first president of the British Ecological Society, founded in 1913, and in the same year he helped to establish the
Journal of Ecology
, which he also edited for many years. Tansley's views of biology, the ways in which it should be studied and the ends to which it should be applied, are thus clearly relevant to an understanding of early ecology in Britain.

Tansley's views are perhaps best expressed in the article “The Reconstruction of Elementary Botanical Teaching,” published in the
New Phytologist
in December 1917. This article expressed the grievances and aspirations of the rising generation of botanists. There were five signatories to this article, but perhaps because Tansley was the founder and editor of the
New Phytologist
, the article was widely viewed as Tansley's brainchild, so much so that it became known informally as the “Tansley Manifesto.” Recent scholarship by historians of science A. D. Boney and Peder Anker on the controversy surrounding the manifesto demonstrates convincingly that Tansley was not alone in holding the views
expressed in the article, but the name stuck nonetheless.
¹¹
In this article, Tansley and his associates argued that the study and teaching of botany was too narrowly focused on morphological work and excluded important emerging areas of study. They declared that “botany in this country is still largely dominated by the morphological tradition, founded on the attempt to trace the phylogenetic relationships of plants, which began as the result of the general acceptance of the doctrine of descent…. Plant physiology is relegated in most cases to a subordinate place…. The newer studies of ecology and of genetics play a very small part in the curriculum. The result is that the student's introduction to the study of plant life is unbalanced and has a definite morphological bias.”
¹²
This morphological bias troubled Tansley and his colleagues not simply because it resulted in a general lack of breadth in biological teaching and research but also and more particularly because morphological work that focused on tracing phylogenetic relationships was to a great extent an academic study with very few practical applications. While commending British morphologists for having “worthily upheld the loftiest traditions of pure science,” Tansley and his colleagues contended that excessive focus on the “tracing out of an obscure phylogeny … is sterile and leads to little but further refinements of itself … because it has no outlets on practical life.”
¹³
Tansley and his associates wished to focus instead on the solution of practical problems and on “the part which plants play or can be made to play in the economy of the world.”
¹⁴
Ecology struck early twentieth-century botanists as an ideal example of a scientific discipline with close connections to practical life. Speaking of ecology, Tansley and his colleagues state that “here we have the scientific bases of agriculture, of forestry, of the economic utilization of waste lands, of the use of plants in coast protection, of every industry in which man grows plants, or employs plants which grow spontaneously, for specific purposes, for his own use or for the use of his animals.”
¹⁵
The emphasis on the value of the new discipline of ecology to humanity's use and management of natural resources is unmistakable.

The emphasis on the practical usefulness of ecological work to human life continued to dominate the rhetoric of ecology throughout the interwar period. Julian Huxley summarized the outlook of the time in his introduction to Charles Elton's
Animal Ecology
(1927) with his assertion that ecology was “destined to a great future” because it offered a means of assuming “control of wild life in the interest of man's food supply and prosperity” and would ultimately make it possible for man to “assert his predominance” over “his cold-blooded rivals, the plant pest and, most of all, the insect.”
¹⁶
Elton himself, speaking in a series
of radio broadcasts on ecology in the early 1930s, declared that “scientists are engaged on this absorbing adventure of finding out how these [natural] systems work—both for the interest of the search and in order to obtain the best deal that is possible for humanity.”
¹⁷

In justifying their call for greater attention to practical science, Tansley and his colleagues argued that “science—especially experimental science—increases our power of doing things.”
¹⁸
Practical and applied sciences such as ecology and genetics—as these disciplines are represented in the Tansley Manifesto—are thus valuable because they increase human agency. Applied sciences such as these are promoted as a solution to the late-Victorian sense of the powerlessness of human beings in the face of natural forces that is so effectively communicated in
The War of the Worlds
.

Having briefly summarized the perspective and preoccupations of early twentieth-century ecologists, I turn now to Wells's 1923 novel
Men Like Gods
to trace the ways in which both the rise of ecology and early twentieth-century biologists' preoccupation with practical, applied work that would increase the human power of “doing things” are reflected in Wells's work of modern utopian
SF
.

MEN LIKE GODS

In
Men Like Gods
, the novel's central character, Mr. Barnstaple, finds himself transported, along with a motley collection of 1920s Londoners, to a planet where “life has evidently evolved under almost exactly parallel conditions to those of our own evolution” but which is judged to be several thousand years ahead of Earth in its development.
¹⁹
In this Utopian world of the future, Barnstaple and his fellow travelers encounter a human society, far superior to their own in scientific knowledge, that has applied its understanding and skills to the task of assuming control over natural systems and regulating nature for human benefit.

The Utopians recount that one of the first initiatives set in motion following the creation of a Utopian world-state was the implementation of

the long-cherished ideal of a systematic extermination of tiresome and mischievous species. A careful inquiry was made into the harmfulness and the possibility of eliminating the house-fly, for example, wasps and hornets, various species of mice and rats, rabbits, stinging nettles. Ten thousand species, from disease-germ to rhinoceros and hyena, were put upon their trial. Every species
was given an advocate. Of each it was asked: What good is it? What harm does it do? How can it be extirpated? What else may go if it goes? Is it worth while wiping it out of existence? Or can it be mitigated and retained?
²⁰

This trial scenario, in which human beings assume the authority to pass the “verdict” of “death final and complete” upon other species, suggests that a species' right to exist is determined primarily if not solely by its usefulness and appeal to human beings in their capacity as the planet's dominant species.
²¹

As a result of this inquisition, “there had been a great cleansing of the world from noxious insects, from weeds and vermin and hostile beasts.”
²²
Some large predators such as the wolf and hyena had been systematically hunted out of existence, while others such as the leopard and the bear had been “combed and cleaned, [and] reduced to a milk dietary” or “converted to vegetarianism.”
²³
Rats, mice, and “the untidier sorts of small bird” had been eliminated.
²⁴
An extended campaign against various species of insects had led to an “enormous deliberate reduction of insect life in Utopia,” and all native disease germs had likewise been eradicated.
²⁵
Troublesome or useless plants had been either disposed of or refashioned through breeding and hybridization into plants of practical or aesthetic value to human beings.

Reflecting the growing understanding of the importance and complexity of ecological relationships at the time of the novel's composition, Wells has the Utopian Urthred declare that “the question of what else would go if a certain species went was one of the most subtle that Utopia had to face.”
²⁶
However, this awareness of ecological relationships does not deter the Utopians in their systematic engineering of extinctions; rather, it is seen as providing the knowledge necessary to
successfully carry out
the desired exterminations. Thus, the Utopians note that the aforementioned “enormous deliberate reduction of insect life in Utopia … had seriously affected every sort of creature that was directly or indirectly dependent upon insect life”; insectivorous birds such as swallows and flycatchers, for example, “had become extremely rare,” but this concomitant loss is viewed as acceptable collateral damage by the Utopians.
²⁷

Wells employs Barnstaple, a simultaneously idealistic and discouraged writer for a liberal London newspaper, as his authorial stand-in within the novel and as his principal respondent to the attitudes and undertakings of the Utopians. From the first, Barnstaple shows himself to be receptive to the extreme environmental management practiced by the Utopians. As a self-professed “expert and observant mower of lawns,” he shows himself to be supportive of artificially
cultivated and maintained environments.
²⁸
He rhapsodizes about “the beauty of a world subdued” and approvingly describes the “whole land” of Utopia as being “like a garden, with every natural tendency to beauty seized upon and developed and every innate ugliness corrected and overcome.”
²⁹

In commending the Utopians' active pursuit of a program of mass extinction, their achievement of “a world where ill-bred weeds … had ceased to thrust and fight amidst the flowers and where leopards void of feline malice looked out with friendly eyes upon the passer-by,” Barnstaple suggests Wells's tacit endorsement of an exterminatory and controlling approach to nature.
³⁰
Barnstaple reflects: “How peaceful was the Utopian air in comparison with the tormented atmosphere of Earth. Here there was no yelping and howling of tired or irritated dogs, no braying, bellowing, squealing and distressful outcries of uneasy beasts, … the tiresome and ugly noises of many an unpleasant creature were heard no more…. The air which had once been a mud of felted noises was now—a purified silence.”
³¹
The contrast between Wells's approving description of the peaceful silence resulting from engineered extinctions and Rachel Carson's warning vision of a silent spring four decades later illustrates a crucial difference in perspective between early twentieth-century ecology and ecology as it came to be conceived in the latter half of the twentieth century.
³²