> Or a naturalist tale of trying to turn the desert green?
That's an interesting premise, and a nice third way between the obvious and tired approaches of Imperialist Exploiter 2000 and Mujahideen Simulator.
That's an interesting premise, and a nice third way between the obvious and tired approaches of Imperialist Exploiter 2000 and Mujahideen Simulator.
What about a naturalist tale of keeping the desert as it is, and resisting the urge to destroy it for the supposed benefit of the humans? I recently read Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey (highly recommended), and I'm reminded of the start of the ninth chapter:
"This would be good country," a tourist says to me, "if only you had some water."
He's from Cleveland, Ohio.
"If we had water here," I reply, "this country wound not be what it is. It would be like Ohio, wet and humid and hydrological, all covered with cabbage farms and golf courses. Instead of this lovely barren desert we would have only another blooming garden state, like New Jersey. You see what I mean?"
"If you had more water more people could live here."
"Yes sir. And where then would people go when they wanted to see something besides people?"
"I see what you mean. Still, I wouldn't want to live here. So dry and desolate. Nice for pictures but my God I'm glad I don't have to live here."
"I'm glad too, sir. We're in perfect agreement. You wouldn't want to live here, I wouldn't want to live in Cleveland. We're both satisfied with the arrangement as it is. Why change it?"
"Agreed."
We shake hands and the tourist from Ohio goes away pleased, as I am pleased, each of us thinking he has taught the other something new.
Like all life, we modify our environment in accord with our needs, and by itself there's no more harm in that than when beavers or wasps or crows or spiders or any other animals do it. The problem isn't that we're so good at improving our environment for ourselves, but that we suck so bad at avoiding damage to the ecologies we so modify. We can improve upon the latter without forswearing the former, which is good, because we might as well try to forswear breathing.
As far as your second point, that it is possible to improve our environment in ways that are reasonably ecologically-friendly, I generally agree. What constitutes environmental improvement vs damage will vary considerably from person to person however, and some things we may collectively view as improvements are much easier to implement than to reverse, so in fragile ecosystems (e.g. much of the desert in southwest US) we should think very carefully about whether our improvements are really a good idea.
Full disclosure: Haven't read all the books, nor am I looking to after reading a bunch during the pandemic.
And indeed, we learn that Herbert's inspiration for Dune was encroaching desertification in Oregon (largely caused by humans) and the geoengineering efforts to create a green belt to stem the tide.
I guess a general point that may be worth making is that it's often useful to think in terms of protecting fragile ecosystems, be they desert or the victim of desertification.
This is a huge plot point of a bunch of the later dune books. Based on the comments here, almost no one has actually read them.
Anyway, my point was more about ecological conservation in general, and not much about Dune in particular.
Well, in the Dune source material it was terraformed into desert from a green planet. So, you know, returning it to green is perfectly fine.