Once my eyes get to a focus point, because right now I’m groggy, unfocused, and uncaffeinated, I’ll try to make this into a coherent post. Right at the moment, I’m sitting here thinking about terraforming, how most old SciFi that postulates it gets it wrong, how our own planet has been altered in unexpected ways, and invasive species.
It started yesterday with the Bermuda grass and nutsedge. As I’ve been working on my gardens, I’ve become more aware of the weeds in my area. Normally with weeds I’m a very live-and-let live gardener. Dandelion is not a weed, it’s a choice green that we eat routinely. The nutsedge, on the other hand… I have it coming up through a one-foot-deep raised bed my son put in for me. It’s kind of impressive. I was given a lead on a chemical control, which isn’t my first choice, but pulling it by hand just makes more of it grow. Thinking about this made me think about the mammalogy lecture in the Naturalist class, where the professor giving it talked about the Aoudad and how it had been introduced to Texas, where it’s made itself so much at home it’s pushed the native Bighorns out of their range entirely in places. Which was not uncommon, he told us, there are a large number of introduced exotic animals here in Texas, brought for sport or collections that have escaped and made themselves at home.
None of that is a surprise, really. I’ve been familiar with the concept and reality of invasives for decades. Many people aren’t, though. I’ve surprised people several times when I mentioned that the honeybee is very much not native to North America. Yes, it’s settled in well and most people have no idea it wasn’t always here. Horses, the same. Burros, to return to that same lecture on mammals in Texas, are so well adapted they have become a noxious pest, and they were originally brought in as pack animals.
We shape the world around us, advertently and inadvertently. We also, being human, attempt to control it. Some of the old science fantasies about terraforming fall into these dreams of creating a perfect world. There is no such thing – nor, really, can we control the movement of the natural world around us. It simply means we must adapt to it, learn all we can, and then use that learning to optimize what we do with it. There’s a strong element of self-loathing in the eco-conscious SF of a certain era. Authors who fell into the pit of Malthusian despair, and imagined worlds where all humans had ceased to be – or at least, only the right kind of humans were allowed. An odious concept that is possibly worse than their suggested alternative of death of our species, because it attempts to hide mass slaughter in the fine words of utopian pipe dreams.
The problem is, those SF worlds are terrariums. Artificial ecosystems carefully crafted, and although there are terrariums that have existed in balance carefully capped for decades, those are the exceptions, not the rule. Unless everything going into the terrarium is sterilized – and by definition it cannot be, as living things must enter it – we do not have full control over the fungal spores, bacteria, insect eggs, and many other things going into that little glass bottle. Change is inevitable, and while frightening, and sometimes frustrating as I kneel pulling handfuls of weeds to allow my new plants to get a fighting chance, it’s also part of the universal laws of thermodynamics. All falls towards entropy.
Which is not to say I embrace nihilism. Quite the opposite. I think that there needs to be more sense of wonder, more education, more embracing the imperfections of humanity, and it’s boundless potential. We created problems, sure. Will you go back and tell those early settlers and explorers not to bring their pack burros? Why would you handicap them and possibly condemn them to miserable existences and then death? Instead, let’s look forward into a future where we come up with ways to explore beyond this planet, and do our best not to repeat that mistake. If it was a mistake. Ok, the nutsedge was likely an accident, tiny tubers bundle up in animal feed, then grasping for life when it was spread out on the new world’s ground to give those burros something to munch on. What can we do differently? What can we do now, where we are, that doesn’t involve elimination or even degradation of the human race? We are the ultimate survivors on this planet. We alone can battle uphill against the entropic chaos.
Mad Genius Club 
43 responses to “Terrarium Worlds”
And how long does it take for a failed terrarium world to find a new balance?
My experience with failed terrariums tells me it would be a long time. They stink, and nothing grows any longer – the nutrients are depleted.
:takes notes for her ‘huh this world was terraformed not long enough ago’ idea:
A world, at least, will have more of a chance than a sealed terrarium. It might die back to the microbial life, but that can keep going for a long time. Besides, single-celled life has options like chemotrophy, where they can get their nourishment from the molecules around them.
It’s already the fungi’s world — we just live in it.
So true.
Humans have not introduced all new life to an area. I’m reminded of when my grandfather told me that when he was a boy, there were no armadillos in our part of Texas. That was on the Texas/Mexico border near Del Rio. He said the armadillos moved in from the south. I’m shocked when I count back to how many years ago that he was a boy – about 120 years ago. Now, armadillos are often consider icons for Texas.
Armadillos, and Mesquite, which is slowly expanding it’s range northward.
Mesquite had help, in the form of cattle and burn suppression. It turns out, a cow pat is the absolute perfect starting place for mesquite seeds. They’ve been lightly scarified in the guts, and are now well away from the parent plant, in a deposit of fertilizer. (A fun read is *The Magnificent Mesquite*, although most ranchers I know use terms besides “magnificent.”)
I thought it was cockroaches and salt cedar that would inherit the earth? 😉
Salt cedar being a prime example of “we brought it in for a good cause and … it got away.” It spreads like kudzu, forms stands too thick for any deer or animals to use, and sucks up water faster than a runner in the Death Valley Marathon. It has become a “planta non grata” in much of the American West, and people pay lots of money to get rid of it. Back in Asia, it has native predators that keep it in check. Not so much here. If you are going to terraform, you need to consider “what keeps this plant/animal/fungus/whatever in check here? Environment? Insect? Other plants? What if we remove that limiting factor?”
And there are numerous examples of ‘oops, that got away from us, let’s bring in it’s predator, oops, that got away from us…’ which make it even more complicated!
In Freefall, there’s a vet who works with parasites — introducing them in the terraforming because of co-evolution and not wanting to risk what leaving them out would do.
I thought cockroaches and rats will inherit the earth.
Humans outcompete those, even, given sufficient control.
Good terriers are key… 🙂
When you consider that the common earthworm is a wildly successful foreign import to America… The stuff that hitchhikes in by accident in water or soil is dramatic.
At least horses started in North America, though they didn’t last there. They had to go around the world (from the northeastern Eurasian steppe) to end up back where they started.
Remember, the widely separated Polynesian islands are pretty much all part of a single ecosystem through the dramatic colonization of happenstance plants & critters. Some arguably made it across the Pacific to South America.
Pleistocene rewilding advocates think it’s just great, bringing in feral equines to replace those driven to extinction. . . .
Do NOT get me started on “recreate the Pleistocene.” Just don’t.
Wait, that’s seriously a thing people are trying to do?
Well, I certainly HOPE so. The thought of a dozen sabretooths loose in Congress warms the cockles of my black heart…..
And I, at least, feel sorry for all of those relics still producing giant seeds for consumption by vanished megafauna. Bring back the giant sloth and the mammoth — make the avocado and the Osage orange happy.
At least, to argue for.
*SIGH* Yes. It started—sort of—with two professors from Rutgers, and then the idea got grabbed by Ted Turner and some others who had less science. The gist of the idea is that if we introduce lions, leopards, modern African elephants, African camels, some antelope and gazelles, along with bison and wolves, we can “make up for” the megafauna extinction during the Pleistocene. Of course, this requires either persuading or buying out land owners to give their property to … someone.
Now, the fact that the area where the activists want to start has far less water than it did back then, has a very different climate than it did back then (drier summers, colder winters, steppe instead of savanna plant life), and would require a lot of human manipulation to keep running was … immaterial to the starry-eyed activists. The ranchers who realized that they can make money AND improve land health by running bison on the land and providing bison meat and fiber to different groups are a lot more realistic. [leaps off soapbox, races for water bowl]
I don’t know.
I sort of like the idea of a bunch of sabretooths munching on a bunch of people who believed “sabretooths wouldn’t attack/eat humans”. 😈
I believe some theorize that the megafauna would change the climate back.
Well, IIRC, Texas has already made a good start, with more privately owned lions in TX than there are wild lions 🙂
Whada ya know? It turns out that Homo sapiens europeans aren’t the only colonizers out there!
I suspect that what we’re going to have to do, if we ever try to Terraform, is make sure that the system is robust. Because there will be bacteria and spores and insect eggs, that’s inevitable. And even the entire cast of Cats cannot keep a ship completely free of rodents. And, no matter how strictly you enforce a “no pets” policy, and no matter how many times you lecture people on the reason for it, at some point some idiot is going to succeed in sneaking in some of those pseudosquirrels from Altar IV that “are just so adorable, what harm could it do?”
But, if we’ve done our job reasonably well, I think things should be okay. Invasive species aren’t a good thing, but in general, they haven’t reduced the area they’ve invaded to a barren wasteland either. I suspect we can create a livable world, as long as we accept that the end result will not be the world we intended.
That’s just it. We have to accept changes and adjust what we expect. Even now, with the whole ‘native plants’ movement, I look at it and think ‘how do we set a standard of what’s native?’ Just how far back are we going to roll the expectations and how on earth do we expect to freeze an entire ecosystem in time?
how on earth do we expect to freeze an entire ecosystem in time?
Just remove Humans and then any change is natural. [Very Big Sarcastic Grin]
Oh, concerning human attempts to “save endangered species”, I remember reading about the concern about “endangered predators” hunting “endangered prey animals”. 😆
Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World by Emma Marris is a little eco-freaky but hits on many of the issues. also gives a good view of the radical fringe if you’re interested.
Those questions aren’t meant to have answers; they’re meant to tell you “stop whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it WRONG!”
Check out Ascension Island. When humans found it, it had ferns.
They introduced stuff. While they endangered several of its fern species, it is a very complicated ecosystem.
The San Diego area is infested with brown snails some…entrepreneur brought from France planning to make a fortune selling escargot in the U.S. Went broke, dumped the snails and now they’re everywhere.
Rats are not native to the Western Hemisphere, nor are mice native to Australia. Rabbits and cane toads were deliberately introduced into Australia as ‘natural’ solutions to certain perceived problems, and have now become much bigger problems than the ones they were supposed to solve.
One of the reasons ‘super-advanced civilizations in the distant past’ make no sense. Invasive species didn’t spread around the world until Europeans started sailing across oceans.
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At my house, the ‘things that go bump in the night’ are cats.
The Earthcent series features one race of aliens that specializes in terraforming planets. Mostly accomplished by handwavium, but there are touches of reality here and there, in that it usually takes hundreds of years to accomplish the task. One entry in the series involves humans on Earth tracking down cases of rainforest disappearing (as in being removed, not dying out), and a decrease in the population of native animals on Earth. Eventually they figure out that everything went to colonize a planet later known as Earth Two.
Terraforming could go wrong is so many ways, but how many stories are there about sabotaging somebody’s terraforming efforts?
Part of the Back-Story of Sterling Lanier’s “Menace Under Marswood” (not available in e-format) was that the terraforming of Mars was sabotaged by the Chinese.
Apparently they were “left out” of the planned terraforming and settlement of Mars so they arranged for nasty bio-packages to be sent to Mars.
In the novel, people can live on Mars but plenty of areas on Mars are full of nasty Terran lifeforms that the official terraforming plans didn’t include.
WRT your nutsedge. Are the tubers edible?
If not, you may be able to use Dear Son’s bindweed eradication system.
Top each and every nutsedge plant (or bindweed vine) with a tin can. Let the plant grow, starving itself in the process, inside the dark can. Re-can as needed. We’ve killed a lot of bindweed this way but it takes several seasons. It certainly works better than trying to hand-weed!
I spend a *lot* of time thinking about terraforming Mars because that’s where my series is set.
Start by seeding the planet with genetically altered molds, lichens, algae, and fungi. Wait a few million years for them to generate an atmosphere and organic material. Assuming you’ve figured out how to keep the solar wind from stripping off the atmosphere, you’re ready to begin with grasses.
One of the most remarkable things (that is so often ignored) to come out of Biosphere 2 was that it didn’t fail at all.
It proved how hard it is to make a viable world and even harder, to keep it going. It was a terrarium magnified to be big enough for a crew of humans who brought all their problems with them. Add in all the other, unsuspected issues that reared up and caused more problems.
Terraforming is really, really hard!
Kudzu.
Napalm.
Douglas Tallamy, an entomology professor at the University of Delaware, wrote Bringing Nature Home. I highly recommend it to any would-be terraformers or gardeners. It not only provided me a theory of terraforming for the alien invasion plans in my Martha’s Sons series, but also added me to the home defense team in terms of what I should be doing in my own garden.
Tallamy makes the point that insects, including caterpillars and butterflies, are specialists, thus agreeing with Robert Heinlein who made the same point, so that makes him credible right there. Ninety percent of insects, including caterpillars and butterflies are super picky eaters. They eat only one or two plants. Plants produce toxins so they mostly don’t get eaten, but there are insects that have carved out their own ecological niche by being the one guy who can eat that plant. They just don’t eat others.
With all the alien ornamental plants we put in our gardens, not to mention invasive aliens bequeathed to us by bird droppings, we deprive insects of food. This in turn deprives birds of the insects they eat, squirrels of nuts, etc, breaking links in the food chain right and left.
For any wannabe terraformers, Tallamy’s observations suggest that we can’t just dump a bunch of plants–some from Brazil, others from Asia, a couple from Ohio–on alien planets. There’s a whole interconnected jigsaw puzzle to export if we want the new system to hold together, sustain itself, and thrive. I foresee Terraformers, Inc. doing a survey of an alien rock world, seeding it with oxygen-producing cyanobacteria, waiting an eon, and then deciding which Earth ecosystem it’s going to install at what latitudes. Terraformers would, perhaps, install a specific Mid-Atlantic (North America, Eastern Seaboard) Suite. Or something from the American Southwest for Tatooine.
Personally, I plant food (which is hard because I have so much shade, so herbs it is), and only natives now. I pull invasives, and only disturb benign non-natives when they have something I want for a new native I want to get going. Am I going to get rid of my glorious Gruss an Aachen rose that smells so wonderful? No, no I am not. But, yeah, the porcelain berry, Japanese honeysuckle seedlings, oriental bittersweet, Italian arum, English ivy, yellow iris, and all the other invasives are making their way to the landfill.
Instead, I nurture pokeweed, snakeroot, evening primrose, sweetroot, three-seeded mercury, clearweed, and eastern enchanters nightshade, all of which have been volunteering since I changed tactics. I’ve been affirmatively planting bee balm, wild bergamot, and other things that I hope to encourage. If only the deer would stop eating them.
I’ll second “Bringing Nature Home”.
It is possible to remake your yard but it takes time and effort. I turned a 1/4 acre of hard clay into a mini-wildlife refuge but it’s taken me 20 years and this is when I could easily add — over the years — a ton of someone else’s fertility.
If you see those big brown Kraft bags of leaves along the side of the road? Stop and get them! At least in Pennsylvania, no one, including the state trooper driving by, will stop you.
Of course, until we get out there, we won’t know what sort of planets we’ll be dealing with and whether they are livable with just a few domesticated plants and animals added, or whether we’ll be dealing with dead rocks.
And which will be easiest. What about all the foreign pseudo-pollen? What if we’re horribly allergic to it?