Why the word "ecopoesis"?
Apr. 5th, 2003 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI've used the word "ecopoesis" in my 2400AD write-ups--here in connection to Mars, for instance--in place of terraforming. Why?
Tripartite Alliance Earth is an alternate history. It figures that it would develop different words.
Ecopoesis is a word that has a literary pedigree of sorts. A brief literature search reveals that ecopoesis is used Mark Rudolph's poem "Ecopoesis", for instance, while Jonathan Bate's book The Song of the Earth uses ecopoesis as a term to describe an ecologically-inspired form of literary criticism. (Kathy Bates' review of his book describes him as the leading writer in his particular field.)
Ecopoesis is a word that sounds nice falling off the tongue--e-ko-po-ee-sis. Terraforming, though, is a bit of a "hard" word, inelegant.
Most importantly, ecopoesis describes a minimum state. One cached site at Google defines ecopoesis as:
As Christopher McKay observed in a June 1992 interview with Omni Magazine, however, moving beyond this stage might not be possible or desirable if possible:
A world might well not be able to sustain a completely Earth-like environment: it might orbit too far or too close from its sun/suns, it might not be massive enough to hold onto its volatiles, and so on. Making Mars (say) a tropical jungle might not even be possible; even if it was, it wouldn't be sustainable without some energy source (massive mirror arrays?) to increase insolation, and without continuous shipments of volatiles (water, air) to the planet to replace the volatiles that heated to escape velocity. And what happens when civilization fails?
So, why not just content oneself (if one is technologically capable of the feat, of course) with establishing a living world? Ecopoesis, not necessarily terraforming.
Tripartite Alliance Earth is an alternate history. It figures that it would develop different words.
Ecopoesis is a word that has a literary pedigree of sorts. A brief literature search reveals that ecopoesis is used Mark Rudolph's poem "Ecopoesis", for instance, while Jonathan Bate's book The Song of the Earth uses ecopoesis as a term to describe an ecologically-inspired form of literary criticism. (Kathy Bates' review of his book describes him as the leading writer in his particular field.)
Ecopoesis is a word that sounds nice falling off the tongue--e-ko-po-ee-sis. Terraforming, though, is a bit of a "hard" word, inelegant.
Most importantly, ecopoesis describes a minimum state. One cached site at Google defines ecopoesis as:
the process of the formation of a new ecology where one did not previously exist. From there on, the details are not agreed on. Martyn Fogg, a terraforming expert, believes that the new ecology should be one that is anaerobic - that is, it does not involve oxygen being present in the atmosphere. In an anaerobic environment, only organisms that can survive with oxygen will be present - microbes such as yeast are included in this category.
Others believe that this new ecology that is introduced can be of any type, anaerobic or not, but it does not have to resemble Earth. Many people think that terraforming any planet, for example, Mars, would result in an Earth-like ecology - this is not entirely correct. While we might choose to terraform a planet and give it an Earth-like ecology, we might also decide to keep the temperate fairly low, at an average of 0ºC so that many of the large land masses can be preserved. Or we might increase the temperature to an average of 25ºC for humid, jungle-like conditions.
If we use Fogg's definition of ecopoesis where an anaeorbic biosphere is introduced, we can see that it is merely one stage in the much longer process of terraformation.
As Christopher McKay observed in a June 1992 interview with Omni Magazine, however, moving beyond this stage might not be possible or desirable if possible:
A terraformed Mars is a habitable state for plants and anaerobic microorganisms. Its atmosphere is composed of almost pure Co2 with the small amounts of nitrogen and oxygen required for plant metabolism. It's just like the primordial Mars: It's got liquid water; it's warm and green. Once created, its atmosphere is stable, and we shut down the CFC factories. With the pressure cranked up to 300 millibars, humans can walk around with oxygen bottles and masks. Is Mars then terraformed? That implies something like Earth. Well, for 80 percent of our planet's history, it had a thick C02 atmosphere and humans would have suffocated in it. So Mars would be like Earth was. That's a natural state for Mars.
There's a chasm between a world for microbes and one for people. To make Mars habitable for humans, we'd need to cover the planet with green plants--self-replicating machines--to change C02 into oxygen. It would take 100,000 years to get enough oxygen for humans to breathe. But diluting the C02 so much would make the planet very cold again, because oxygen and nitrogen don't have the greenhouse effect. On Earth, "warm and breathable" go together because we're closer to the sun. But Mars may not be able to handle oxygen. We'd have to turn the CFC factories back on and keep patching up the atmosphere. That's inelegant.
Maybe we should only take the first step and make a garden of Mars. To me the first goal in terraforming a planet is altering it to improve the chances for indigenous life to flourish. Imagine that under the surface is a geothermal source keeping a little pot of water warm with pressure from the overlying material keeping it contained. If life is frozen in the permafrost or eking out an existence in some warm subterrain, we have an obligation to help this organism to pop out of its hidden environment, like lichen coming out to live on the surface of a rock. This would be far more interesting than putting Earth life on Mars. Instead of a clone, we'd have a separate biology of separate origin. To study it would be mind-boggling.
A world might well not be able to sustain a completely Earth-like environment: it might orbit too far or too close from its sun/suns, it might not be massive enough to hold onto its volatiles, and so on. Making Mars (say) a tropical jungle might not even be possible; even if it was, it wouldn't be sustainable without some energy source (massive mirror arrays?) to increase insolation, and without continuous shipments of volatiles (water, air) to the planet to replace the volatiles that heated to escape velocity. And what happens when civilization fails?
So, why not just content oneself (if one is technologically capable of the feat, of course) with establishing a living world? Ecopoesis, not necessarily terraforming.
