In population biology a refugium, or simply fuge, is a protective place for a relict population that has become threatened in its native habitat. Paradoxically, refugiums often make things worse for individuals and populations remaining in nature.
The vast royal greenhouses at Laeken, near Brussels, are such a refugium. Built as a pirate showcase for the extraordinary biodiversity of the Congo rainforest that Leopold II had so brutally colonised, they now preserve these fast-disappearing species. Yet the paradox: the 800,000 litres of fuel oil burnt each year to keep these plants alive help drive the climate change that is destroying what natural populations remain.
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| Illustration: Simon Bosch |
The paradox? Given the number of evangelical Christians in Sydney leadership – and that a 2011 survey that found "six of ten evangelical leaders believe in the rapture – a few would actually believe this arrogant nonsense. That way - naturally counting themselves amongst the liftees - it's suddenly easy to treat climate change as no big thing.
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| Alison Whyte in Sydney Theatre Company's The Testament of Mary. |
Melissa and Mary. These innocuous-sounding names could be the most significant you'll hear this century. Melissa, properly written MELiSSA (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative) cropped up in a Sydney Festival art event by extraordinary scent artist Cat Jones. MELiSSA is the European Space Agency's bare-minimum ecosystem for indefinite human existence in deep space.
Mary is, well Mary, Mother of, as voiced by Colm Toibin's Testament of Mary, currently at Sydney Theatre. Toibin's Mary is overwhelmingly a mother: harrowed, heartbroken, doubtful of her son's divinity, insisting he just got in with the wrong crowd.
At first, MELiSSA and Mary seem to occupy opposite extremes of the existential spectrum – abstract, hyper-sterile reductionism versus stoic, earthy humanism. Each represents a future, a power relationship with nature: which (assuming we still have a choice) will we choose?
But perhaps, under the surface, Mary and MELiSSA are singing the same anthropocentric tune.
To be honest, the words European Space Agency seem almost a contradiction in terms, so far does old textured Europe (and especially Barcelona, where MELiSSA is based) seem from the abstract nothingness of space. But MELiSSA takes abstract nothingness totally on board – which is why it's terrifying.
The yearning for space is deep, but still morally ambiguous. There's the brave and noble urge to explore, self against Big Universe, chasing the final frontier. And there's the less noble – more brutal and territorial – urge to colonise.
The colonial drive has always been dodgy – both because it generally involves stealing other peoples' lands and lives, and because it offers the illusion of something for nothing: free resources, costless plunder and, as UTS social scientist Dr Jeremy Walker notes, escape from the moral and environmental responsibilities of home.
Walker has studied MELiSSA, parsing the eco-political ramifications of "guiltless abundance". MELiSSA, he writes (with colleague Celine Granjou), "emboldens the utopian anticipation of a synthetic biosphere within which the privileged may continue to elude the earthly consequences of their history".
MELiSSA is more exploratory than colonial, aiming to garner the fewest, smallest, most transportable species necessary to sustain human life with no input except sunlight.
But anyone who saw Matt Damon in The Martian knows that, ship or planet, it's the same deal. You're in space, you need water, oxygen, food. How do you make it? How do you treat waste?
The inverse relationship between respiration and photosynthesis is clearly key. That each process absorbs the other's waste and excretes the other's raw material seems one of evolution's little gifts to space travel. Certainly, it lets MELiSSA whittle the "necessary" species to a few photosynthetic bacteria and algae, 30 or 40 needed food crops and the billion-odd microbes that, extracted from the human gut, compost the waste back into nutrients. As Walker notes, MELiSSA demands "a claustrophobic proximity between the crew and its wastes".
Forget Noah. This is an ark sans trees, elephants, gibbons and grasshoppers. Multicells unnecessary. If Earth dies (we decide), they die with it – while in cold loveless space, humans live on in their hyper-sterile pharma-factory, feeding forever on hydroponic, shit-fed veges without gravity, mystery or chance
For me, it has strictly limited appeal. If Trump presses the button, I'll probably head for the epicentre and be done with it.
But MELiSSA's founding premises also need scrutiny. One is that storming off to new planets is legitimate as a response to having wrecked this one. The other is that "necessary" species are definable in strictly anthropocentric terms.
Enter Mary. Although Toibin's Mary grudgingly acknowledges one or two of her son's miracles, she denies the immaculate conception ("I was there") and insists the resurrection story is a dream repeated in error. She herself worships Artemis, goddess of animals and the hunt.
Many see this as the play's strength. Tracing our planetary exploitation to our shift, way back, from embedded pantheism to transcendent monotheism, they regard Mary's stoic humanity as one for the planet.
I'm less sure. Transcendence is not arrogance. It doesn't mean remaking yourself as some space-based jet-propelled sky god. What you're meant to transcend is not Earth, but ego. Exploitation should become impossible.
Neither space nor rapture will save us; not heaven, not Mars, not the Starship Enterprise. The gods, one or many, have no interest in slithering us from our deeds. Earth is our refugium. Fade to black.
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