Terraforming

Thea Møller Jensen

Related terms: borders, earthbounds, Gaia, geostories, maps, metamorphosis, point of life, response-ability, science art worldings, science fiction, worldings

Bruno Latour opens a key article by posing the question “[h]ow are we supposed to react?” – in response to the accumulating news of climate-induced catastrophes – events that can no longer be kept at a distance from our human bodies (Latour 2014, 2). He argues that the Earth has “taken back all the characteristics of a full-fledged actor,” and that humans, as Earthbounds, are obliged to navigate in a dynamic and responsive world, sharing agency with more-than-human matter (Latour 2014; 2, 5). Drawing on James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s conceptualization of the Earth system as Gaia (Lovelock and Margulis 1974), Latour calls for new ways of telling stories about the Earth – what he terms geostories – across both scientific and artistic disciplines: “The prefix ”geo” in geostory does not stand for the return to nature, but for the return of object and subject back to the ground – the ‘metamorphic zone’ – they had both believed it possible to escape: one by deanimation, the other by overanimation” (Latour 2014, 16). These new stories, emerging from a metamorphic and dynamic ground, offer new ways of understanding landscapes and terrain – not as entities solely under human control, but as environments formed by multiple agents.

The concept ‘terraforming’ was coined by the American science fiction writer Jack Williamson in the 1940s to describe the process of adapting the climate of other planets to human living conditions, making them so-called ‘Earth-like’ (Williamson 1951; 2001). The neologism is a combination of the Latin word terra, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘land,’ and forming, the action of creating or molding (Pak 2016, 1). Frequently present in science fiction stories set in the future, ‘terraforming’ describes either human attempts to colonize other planets and make them livable for humans, or alien lifeforms adjusting Earth's atmosphere to their needs, using geoengineering technologies. As in Latour’s concept of ‘geostories,’ ‘terraforming’ is not only tied to terrestrial processes and alterations, but also encompasses changes in the hydrosphere and atmosphere. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen further argues in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015) that it helps to understand the dynamics of terrestrial materials by acknowledging their enmeshment with other elements and planetary cycles: “Stone is everywhere entangled with the aqueous: volcanic fields scraped by errant glaciers, marshes where lava penetrated an ice shield to form pseudocraters, turbid rivers of melt that plunge into the earth, rock and water in constant terraforming partnership” (Cohen 2015, 256).

Science fiction stories centered around terraforming processes are often explorations of complex worldmaking – sometimes in collaboration with the planetary environment, and at other times in opposition. In recent cultural-historical readings, ‘terraforming’ has been used to describe historical alterations of landscapes, particularly those linked to colonial practices, the establishment of mines and extraction of raw materials, and the cartographic mapping of territories (Usher 2019; Ghosh 2021). Within these narratives, terraforming is framed as an act of warfare that was not fought out with guns and weapons but by biological and ecological disruptions (Ghosh 2021, 55). These activities were primarily prompted by human agents, directed by certain ideas and ideologies of how to order or comprehend the Earth as dead, inert material that exists to serve and benefit humans solely (Yusoff 2018; Merchant 1989).

In Staying with the Trouble (2016), Donna Haraway proposes a reframing of ‘terraforming,’ suggesting that the concept does not merely indicate negative changes but further refers to “multispecies worldings,” which evoke mutual response-ability to create a more livable world for all earthbounds (Haraway 2016, 10–11). Understood through this prism, the actions of terraforming are not carried out in ‘empty’ areas or terrain prompted by humans but are always performed in relation to more-than-human agencies. Thus, ‘terraforming’ could also be understood as a perpetual practice of becoming-with, in which different imagery of possible worlds and landscapes are negotiated and shaped. For Haraway, terraforming is an act of SF, a concept which in Haraway’s thinking has a multitude of meanings, including science fiction, science fact, and speculative fabulation (Haraway 2016, 2). According to her, SF is a method of tracing material actions and telling stories that emerge from unexpected and surprising entanglements – between kin, across disciplines, and through varying timescales (Haraway 2016, 7). 

Terra Forma

In the recent book Terra Forma (2022), written by the historian of science Frédérique Aït-Touati in collaboration with the two architects Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Grégoire, the authors propose a new cartographic practice that shifts the perspective from a God's eye view to an inverted and situated point of life (Aït-Touati et al. 2022, 55). In this shift of positioning, Earth no longer appears as an empty and inert space seen from above. Instead, the situated point of life offers a new way of orientation in cartography – one that, similarly to Haraway’s SF, follows the traces of terraforming activities, highlighting the constantly becoming of local landscapes (Aït-Touati et al. 2022, 22). The authors write:

The point of life terraforms the globe's localities, but it doesn't do so alone. It is surrounded by other points of life. We can interpret the Gaia hypothesis in this way: it doesn't mean that the Earth is a living thing, but that the Earth's ecosystem is inextricably interwoven with living things; that there is no physical milieu, because a living thing's milieu is other living things and is the product of their metabolic activity in the past and present.

The point of life acknowledges landscapes as polyphonic space-times in which humans and more-than-humans take part in a continuous metamorphosis that sets the Earth in motion. The authors present different approaches to mapping the materiality and movement of landscapes, challenging the notion of definitive and static borders: “Within a single landscape, living territories overlap, and any movement involves crossing thresholds, so that living things constantly evolve along, within, and across borders” (Aït-Touati et al. 2022, 103). Borders are living milieus – zones of exchange that often overlap and seep into one another. However, when drawn on a map from a distant God’s eye view, they appear as arbitrary and fictitious frameworks (ibid.). In contrast, mapping from a bodily and situated point of life allows us to recognize space and borders as “distortions of the transformation-as-creation of the planet by life” (Aït-Touati et al. 2022, 103–4). Inspired by the maritime medieval map – the portolan chart – it is the route and movement, affected by local conditions and climate, that informs the map rather than fixed coordinates and arbitrary lines (Aït-Touati et al. 2022, 80). Without a terrestrial, static anchor, this map allows a mesh of situated landscapes to overlap and present itself as a living matrix, akin to Latour’s metamorphic zone. Thinking with the ocean – and in line with the field of Blue Humanities – offers valuable tools for understanding the fluid and dynamic nature of borders central to this practice (Steinberg and Peters 2015; Starkey 2020).

One way the authors illustrate this shift in perspective and the mapping of material traces is through a circular “Soil Map,” which guides us to rethink the planet as a closed system (Aït-Touati et al. 2022, 48–49). In the map, the globe is turned inside out like a glove, so the atmosphere, which we are used to perceiving as stretching out into infinity, is now at the center, enclosed by different strata of soil, rock, and other terrestrial materials. This exercise visualizes how our actions and interactions with other materials will always affect the whole system and ultimately ourselves through rebound effects. Even though this mapping has its point of duration in locally situated points of life, the authors argue that these cannot be isolated from the effects they have within the global and enclosed system (Aït-Touati et al. 2022, 62). Some of these material cycles are induced by humans, but some are also caused by natural processes or responses. Thus, like Haraway, the authors of Terra Forma see both human and more-than-human agencies as part of the same ‘theater’ (theatrum mundi), animating space and choreographing landscapes and terrains together. Maps become stages and exist in the plural as living maps – “always under construction, always moving” (Aït-Touati et al. 2022, 18–19).

Science Art Worldings

This exploration or mapping of terraforming activities is thus not an exercise in discovering something new, but rather an attempt to explore well-known territories differently by shifting orientation towards the different co-creators of these (Aït-Touati et al. 2022, 21). Returning to the genre of Sci-Fi – or Haraway’s SF practice – this exercise contains an important mixture of situated knowledge of the material surroundings and a creative imagination of possible worlds, which Haraway calls science art worldings (Haraway 2016, 71). The sci-fi writer and essayist Ursula K. Le Guin describes such a practice in her essay “World-Making”:

[…] what artists do is make a particularly skillful selection of fragments of cosmos, unusually useful and entertaining bits chosen and arranged to give an illusion of coherence and duration amidst the uncontrollable streaming of events. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. […] Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity. And yet all it is is an explorer’s sketch-map. A chart of shorelines on a foggy coast.

 This tracing of a possible world, which Le Guin, like the authors of Terra Forma, compares to the explorer’s sketch-map, is a dynamic worlding that may present itself as a definite cosmos but is rather a dynamic theater – an assemblage of multiple points of life. Within the arts, ‘terraforming’ guides us to recognize landscapes not as passive backgrounds, but as dynamic co-creators of meaning and form – inviting the spectator to bodily situated experiences.

An art form that particularly emphasizes science art worldings and their entanglement of local materiality and speculative imagery is garden design. In 16th-century Europe, the garden was understood as a microcosm, resembling a range of different natural processes taking place in both local and distant landscapes, and thus always had an embedded speculative quality. Here, the boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ were blurred, which in turn attuned visitors’ sensibilities and curiosities to more-than-human processes. The literary scholar Michel Jeanneret examines how the work of artists and thinkers from this period is characterized by a transformist sensibility – allowing the mutation and flexibility of natural forces (natura naturans) to affect aesthetic as well as scientific ideas and forms (Jeanneret 2001, 3; 215). This intermingling of science and art was especially evident in these gardens:

Presented as a world in miniature, they [16th-century gardens] concentrate within an enclosed space the quintessence of the universe and show nature reduced to its foundations. […] A garden does not have to represent change because, by its very nature, it changes according to the time of day, the season, and weather. […] it is the ultimate expression, in both its themes and its metamorphic nature, of the principle of the mobile work of art (Jeanneret 2001, 127).

In the 16^th century, the garden was also a testing site for engineering technologies mimicking their use in ‘natural’ landscapes and environments. One such example is the Grotto Grande, an artificial grotto designed by Bernardo Buontalenti between 1582 and 1593 for the Boboli Garden at Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Buontalenti, who worked in diverse fields such as hydraulic engineering, stage and theater design, and architecture, used his knowledge of water mechanics to create a wet environment where the constant infusion of water through fountains and secret water plays animated the rooms and engaged the spectator to make them feel submerged in water. Notably, the design features stalactites or rustic stones, called spugna, which are found and harvested from aquatic caves near the coast and were, at that time, perceived as growing due to the forces of water. These raw stones establish a link to the local areas near Florence and refer to the actions of extraction while simultaneously emphasizing their vital qualities as co-creators of the collected aesthetic expression. Furthermore, this material is used as the basis for some of the figures that seem to erupt from the interior grotto walls. It has been argued that the muddy or stone-like appearance of these figures resembles the material remains of the recurring flooding caused by the Arno River in the city of Florence (Kelley 2016, 742). This scene of deluge, presented in the grotto, could thus be interpreted as a staging of local trauma and the experience of the brutal and uncontrollable forces of nature – perhaps as an attempt to comprehend them, or as a way of mourning the loss they inflicted. Furthermore, it also evoked a possible future scenario, drawing on the biblical myth of the great deluge that cleanses the world of all evil and brings it back to its original matter – an ambivalent imagery that resonated strongly during this period (Jeanneret 2001, 82). While Buontalenti constructed Grotto Grande, he worked simultaneously on mechanics that could prevent these floods from the Arno River by redirecting the water elsewhere. Thus, the grotto becomes a space for reflection and embodied studies of terraforming activities carried out by both human and more-than-human agents alike, within and outside of the garden.

Science art worldings, such as Grotto Grande, map terraforming activities and highlight the liveliness of landscapes affected by multiple points of life. As Le Guin emphasizes, the microcosm presented in these worldings is dynamic, and their demarcations are only temporary. As Latour suggests, it gives form to agents we are not trained to perceive as animate by showcasing their actions (Latour 2014, 11–12). By enfolding humans with more-than-human agencies, they carry the potential to cultivate robust response-ability for our living landscapes and imagine more sustainable ways of terraforming living landscapes in the future. As Haraway argues, geoengineering technologies should be part of how we shape future landscapes (Haraway 2016, 3). Perhaps science art worldings such as Grotto Grande can teach us how the entanglement of technology, humans, and more-than-human matter might terraform livable milieus through more speculative practices.

References

Aït-Touati, Frédérique, Arènes Alexandra, Grégoire Axelle, Latour Bruno, and DeMarco Amanda. 2022. Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps. Cambridge, MA; The MIT Press.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 2015. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2021. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press.

Jeanneret, Michel. 2001. Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from Da Vinci to Montaigne. Translated by Nidra Poller. Parallax. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kelley, Shannon. 2016. “Arno River Floods and the Cinquecento Grotto at the Boboli Garden.” Renaissance Studies 30 (5): 729–51.

Latour, Bruno. 2014. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45 (1): 1–18.

Le Guin, Ursula. K. 1997. “1981 World-Making.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 51–53. New York: Grove/Atlantic.

Lovelock, James E., and Lynn Margulis. 1974. “Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis.” Tellus A: Dynamic Meteorology and Oceanography 26 (1–2).

Merchant, Carolyn. 1989. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row.

Pak, Chris. 2016. “Introduction: Terraforming: Engineering Imaginary Environments.” In Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction, 1-17. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Starkey, Lindsay. 2020. Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond: Redefining the Universe through Natural Philosophy, Religious Reformations, and Sea Voyaging. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Steinberg, Philip, and Kimberley Peters. 2015. “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33 (2): 247–64.

Williamson, Jack. 1951. Seetee Ship. New York: Gnome Press.

Williamson, Jack. 2001. Terraforming Earth. New York: Tor.

Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.Forerunners: Ideas First from the University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.