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At night where I grew up, the skies are a deep, clear dark. The industrial lights to the north are a faint, glowing smudge over the horizon but here, back laid in night-damp grass, the star-flecked black sprawls out above you. Gardens are humbly complicated little places. This one is bordered on one side with ivy-wrapped trees, their branches interlaced with telephone wires. A greengage tree is gradually growing into life, dogtooth-marked but bearing fruit. The bushes at the top have grown around the oil tanker, swallowing it whole in a mesh of thin branches. Swallows roost in the roof and bats will circle and loop around the garden in a summer dusk. At night, the air is still, ruffling occasionally with owl or pheasant - a fragmentary, lived soundtrack to the constellated dark above you.
Since the rush of the space age, this night sky has become increasingly permeable. A fascination with what other worlds would be and whether we could live within them now runs through our cultural imagination. Mars is waved in front of us as a possible future home, we are looking to mine asteroids, we search, always, for goldilocks-zone planets like our own. This desire to get off-world, to colonise beyond our little rock, seems increasingly linked to the status of our own world and our treatment of it. As we pollute and de-stabilise the only habitable place we know, the imagination goes out to seek refuge in others, to imagine fresh starts and clean breaks. This is the core narrative drive behind Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). The environment has turned against them; they are unable to farm, to grow plants and crops, and they have to leave. For all its lovingly rendered black holes and planet-wide waves, it is their inability to, and their need to, nurture a garden that drives the film.
Nolan’s film is coated in environmental anxiety - the possible lack of a future, the coming possible lack of a home – and of course is not the first science fiction to carry this ecological trauma with it. Silent Running (1972) is very clearly the product of the growing environmental movement of the seventies. It is almost cloyingly hippy at times, with a soundtrack of folk songs and costume design that sometimes leaves him looking like a kind of New Age Jesus.
In the film, earth has become one sterile desert of corporate blandness. The plant-life that remains is now being preserved in a series of domes attached to ships that drift around the solar system. Each dome is its own form of environment, from thick coniferous trees to the hot-wet tropics, and are being maintained ready to re-foliate the earth. An early shot pans out from the greenery to show the glass and metal dome that holds out the darkness that surrounds it, organic life framed against sterile void. They seem so fragile, these forest-bubbles, islands of vivid green drifting frictionless away from a desert planet out towards nothing, relic artefacts of our mismanagement and our apathy.
Aniara, a Swedish sci-fi from 2018, takes this idea of relic nature one step further. Here, the organic only manages to live on as AI-resuscitated memories, trauma-washed remnants of a ruined planet. The film takes place on a transport vessel, designed to look like a contemporary cruise ship, that is transporting people to Mars from a now uninhabitable Earth. A series of clips at the start show extreme weather events, anchoring their flight in our current environmental destruction. There is flooding, tornadoes, wildfires. A lot of the passengers are burns victims, the camera lingering on their scars. These people are traumatised, all of them.
The ship’s answer to this trauma is Mima – an AI-machine that transports you back into a calm, natural scene selected from your memories. The room this eco-therapy takes place in is all neutral colours and soft lines. Mima fills the ceiling, a constantly fluxing pool of CGI, psychedelic colour on this sterile, corporate ship. When you go under, the clean lines of the room are left behind for leaf-under-foot woodland walks, lake swims - for momentary reversals to a living, organic world. Now-impossible berries are picked and tasted in soft focus. Dragonflies land on waterlogged grass. The natural becomes a pure, blissful release; a desperate hiding place from the stark barrenness of space and from the knowledge that these worlds are gone.
This ability of the natural to provide comfort and calm is increasingly well researched and experiments are ongoing to see how it can be used to help maintain psychological well-being and group cohesion over long-distance space travel. Even when we manage to travel to other planets, we will still feel a psychological yearning for green, organic life; still unable to wean ourselves off our relationship to Earth’s biosphere. Ad Astra, James Gray’s beautiful 2019 film, is a work of huge scale, both personal and societal, that follows Brad Pitt’s character Roy McBride across a near-future, commercialised solar system and contains some glimpses of how interplanetary travel may look. McBride flies into space on a Virgin Atlantic shuttle, complete with complimentary hot towels. There are moon-bandits, space-bound animal testing ships. It is a depiction of an increasingly corporate solar system, where capital has become interplanetary. Mars in this film is a realistically desolate place, filmed in a haze of dull orange-red. It has one island of natural colour on it in the form of a nature-immersion room – neutral floors with screens wrapped around the walls showing moving images of flower fields and crashing water. Similar to the trauma response in Aniara, here, these nature-images are a sensory lifeline in this planet-wide desert, a functional aesthetic space designed to give some psychological relief to the service people stationed at the base. They show that you are never really able to leave earth, always needing to mimic it, to cling onto your roots.
These images of nature are almost luminous in the films, near-succulent scenes of water, woodland and wildlife contrasted against the sterility of space. But, of course, they are just screens, just ecologically-haunted records of distance and loss. You cannot feel the water or breathe in a lung of air. You cannot step outside these structures and walk barefoot on the thin Martian ‘soil’.
Back laid in the garden’s night-damp grass, looking up into that deep, clear dark, sandwiched between root networks and sprawling space I am between the organic and the void. It is a contrast of tangled growth and clean, stark sterility. This is the overriding message of all of the films - we have no other worlds, this is all we have. All that these people are left with are these ghost images that haunt them from Earth. Think about what images of all the wildlife we currently have will look like in a hundred years if we do not change our current course. Think of the pain of watching an Attenborough documentary in two hundred years. “Being distracted and self-absorbed, as is our nature, we have not yet fully understood what we are doing. But future generations, with endless time to reflect, will understand it all in painful detail. As awareness grows, so will their sense of loss. There will be thousands of ivory-billed woodpeckers to think about in the centuries and millennia to come.”
Info
If the space nature stuff is interesting it’s well worth learning about how we actually have grown some plants up on the ISS (and even eaten a space salad) on the NASA website. Also on the space garden thing - Claire Denis’ film High Life is very good and was going to be quite a big part of writing on this but ended up making everything a bit messy. It’s got Robert Pattinson, some really cool visuals and a ‘fuck-box’.
Also, on the plants, climate breakdown and psychological well-being side of things, this Atlantic piece that came out last week or so is very good and brings the topic a bit closer to home.
Finally, publication day is getting switched to Thursdays to save my weekends.