Waterless World – The Policital Ecology of Frank Herbert's Dune

The political ecology of water shapes environments and human responses. Water also plays a prominent role in Science Fiction, either by its abundance or its absence. Floods destroy cultures and necessitate them to adapt, such as in Stephen Baxter’s “Flood” or Kim Stanley Robinson’s “New York 2140”. The absence of water is a powerful backdrop for how people survive in a harsh environment in Frank Herbert’s “Dune” novels. Patterns of power are contoured by water not only today, but also in futures and worlds far away. Originally published in TOPOS 111/2020.

Water is life, but too much or not enough of it poses risks to the way humans inhabit their environment. Unsurprisingly, the myth of the deluge has inspired imagination since the dawn of time. Its prophets and heroes – Noah, Utnapishtim, Deucalion – are testament to the power these myths still hold. In modern times, Science Fiction offers pathways to exploring worlds submerged by apocalyptic floods or buried beneath ice. They propose powerful scenarios for stories in which the catastrophic abundance or dearth of water determines how humans interact with their surroundings. They echo real life challenges of sea level rise or increasingly frequent and intense flood or drought. Cultures complicit in such environmental changes are required to develop adequate responses, and the realms of Science Fiction can depict them in poignant ways.

Dune – desert planet – Arrakis

What if a planet possesses hardly any water at all, and how would this contour its political ecology? In the epic Dune series of novels created by Frank Herbert, the planet Arrakis – enshrouded entirely by arid, desert landscapes – is in the center of action that spans an entire galaxy. Considered a backwater planet in cultural terms, it is of paramount importance from the vantage point of galactic policy. Arrakis, or Dune, is the only known planet to harbor the most important substance of the universe: the spice melange. This exceedingly rare commodity can prolong life, trigger physical mutation, and heighten mental awareness beyond mortal ken. Spice is literally what drives the Dune cosmos and its political structure. Frank Herbert weaves a truly cosmic tapestry in illustrating the multi-planet cultural and economic context of his galaxy-spanning saga, with plenty of attention to the details. Initially published as a serial story in the SF magazine Analog, Dune was rejected by publishers before winning awards and conquering hearts and minds of readers and becoming one of the best selling SF novels of all time(s). Various film versions succeeded in failure or failed to succeed. Currently, the newest iteration by stylist supreme Denis Villeneuve can be viewed on the big screen. Despite or because of the films, one reason for Dune’s popularity is how convincingly Herbert orchestrates the story within its political and ecological framework. Tens of thousands of years in the future, faster-than-light travel has long since been established. There are feudal Great Houses that battle each other according to centuries-old codes of honor. There is the Emperor, himself member of a Great House that occupies the imperial throne. And all of them are ensnared in a deadly struggle for power. Their strife structurally reflects their access to resources – more or less openly – and aims towards a central one: the spice melange. Which points directly into Dune’s ecological heart. The catch is: where there is spice, there is no water. Arrakis is a desert precisely because of the spice. The spice melange so important to galactic politics can only be found on Arrakis. To the Great Houses who occupy the planet, the absence of water makes ruling it arduous, more a form of punishment than a matter of distinction, and mining the spice is an extremely dangerous task. It is a byproduct of the fauna indigenous to the desert planet – the sandworms of Arrakis, the colossal Shai-Hulud. They seemingly “protect” the spice, attacking those who seek it.

Not only are the Great Houses unaware of the interdependencies between water, spice and sandworms. They are also blind to the indigenous culture – neither are they interested in it, nor do they value it. The giant sandworms are worshipped by the “Fremen”, humans who migrated to Arrakis thousands of years earlier. Despised by imperial culture proper as boorish denizens of the sands, the Fremen have adapted to the desert by conserving water to the extreme. They wear stillsuits – sophisticated water reclamation systems that catch every last drop of water produced by human bodies through a system of pumps and filters driven by a heat exchange system and stored within catch pockets. Fremen inhale the dry desert air through a mouth filter and exhale into a nose tube to capture the last remaining iota of moisture. And they have begun to do so on a planet-wide scale. While water is rare on the surface, the Fremen collect it in vast amounts in their underground fortresses. Water is more valuable to them than spice – not only because it is so scarce, but because they have an ulterior purpose for it.

As a culture defined by deprivation, and despite their close to perfect adaptation to the near absence of water, they want to transform their desert world into a garden. They descended from enslaved people who were purposely exiled to Arrakis and its deadly environment. They eventually gained the knowledge required to effectively collect water in quantities needed to radically transform Arrakis. This desire for transformation can also be read as a trope to achieve control over their destiny. But by desiring to overcome the deadly struggle with the harsh environment, the Fremen are catapulted towards a different kind of struggle. They are caught in the galaxy-wide feudal conflict for the power to control the spice extraction. The heir to one of the Great Houses, Paul Atreides, promises to help the Fremen terraform Arrakis. In return they assist him in overthrowing the Emperor, and the key to doing so is stopping the flow of the spice. The Fremen are confronted with a dilemma: once they exchange environmental dependency on the desert for the political control over the spice, they can terraform their world into a garden they no longer need to adapt to. It is sadly ironic that the Fremen rebellion led by Paul Atreides leads to the demise of the Fremen way of life, as they overcome the exploitation of Arrakis by losing their rich culture of adaptation to their waterless homeworld. The Fremen replace an existing form of deprivation with a new one, they exchange water scarcity for a loss of cultural identity. Yet, the Fremen, themselves transformed by the lack of surface water into a tough, tribal society that obsesses over turning the desert into a garden, are described by Herbert this way because it serves his story. Dune is not a document of an actual culture, while readings of Dune reveal obvious references to bedouin culture, reminiscent of tales told by Lawrence of Arabia and others. Dune is “only” a story, albeit one that refracts the structure of reality in ways that are insightful.

Lessons from Dune

The scarcity of water as essence of life clearly poses risks to human survival. The dream to transform a desert into a green and blue paradise is an old one. Yet, transformation occurs within a broader political context of control over the environment and the exploitation of natural resources. The resultant contextual change potentially comes at a high price, and the underlying risks include loss of culture, identity, and adaptive skills to deal with water scarcity. At the same time, local ways of adaptation are possibly hidden to outsiders, while these skills offer sustainable pathways to living within a harsh environment. Yet the underlying dilemma is related to a perceptive mismatch within ascribing value: if you have sufficient water, you lose sight of how it is like to have none. If the desire to control and transform the environment is at the core of this dilemma, perhaps we need to give up this desire. In this regard it appears surprisingly prudent to question the logic of transformation. This shouldn't mean to give preference to scarcity or keep people in states of deprivation, but to value adaptive skills that may soon be required when water becomes scarce elsewhere. In this regard, it is telling that the Fremen form an alliance precisely with the heir to a Great House that aims to better understand the political ecology of Dune.

Contact the author at: mark.kammerbauer@nexialist.com