Nations States 2 of 4 - The Sanctuary
Ecology is kind of a Big Deal. Well, it is now, anyway. For most of history, it really wasn't, and for reasons that should be pretty obvious: when you're starving to death, you don't tend to worry about the lives of anything else, as was typically the case during our semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer origins. Then, when we made the jump over to agrarian lifestyles, as Sir John Keegan noted in several of his works on the history of war (and incidentally also of humans - odd how the two tend to be interconnected), the fear over shortages, over the intense precariousness of our situation, coupled with the desensitization to violence against animals that raising them rather than hunting them engendered (since, after all, you live in close daily contact with a creature that you eventually intend to kill - I think you can draw your own conclusions about the mindset of most people in such circumstances...but only most, not all), just made us even more ruthless.
My first exposure to just how alien the people of only a fairly short time ago - a mere two centuries plus - came when my family decided to read through the book The Swiss Family Robinson. Of course we'd all seen the Disney version and enjoyed it - I still love a good number of those old films based on 19th-century literature, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which ranks as one of my all-time favorites - so we naively thought that we'd love the book-of-inspiration just as much.
What a shock we had!
As it turns out, the Swiss Family Robinson in the book were quite content to slaughter their way through the local wildlife, willy-nilly, pell-mell. They didn't even care much when their animals ended up being killed and eaten by various animals, only missed getting as much use out of them as they'd intended. The original Doctor Dolittle books, starting from the one published in 1920, were similarly shocking, full of racism and ideas that repulsed me on first reading. Jules Verne regularly talks about how a particular area could be exploited according to the philosophical and ecological standards of ethics at his time, such as in An Antarctic Mystery, which is to say brutally and completely, with the complete annihilation of any creature, plant or animal, that wasn't useful so as to replace it with useful things instead being standard operating procedure.
Our growth and understanding of ecology has been a long and hard trail. The concept of animals even having rights, rather than being regarded as a subset of property, is still one that is exceedingly hard to change in international legal systems. I can understand this, since after all, meat comes from animals, and it's rather hard to kill and slaughter something that has rights. Some of those issues are brought up in The Witcher series of books, as well as David Brin's Uplift series (linked at the start), as well as the likely consequences; arguably, the whole Witcher series of books could be said to trace the process of extinction over the course of the story, both of animals and also of nonhuman people.
To put that into additional context, incidentally, I eat meat, but then, I've also looked animals in the eyes and taken part in their killing, felt the sorrow of their death, the regret of my action. It's a messy, smelly, gooey business that physically taxes the body to its limits at times, besides the emotional trauma involved. After a hard day working a slaughter yard, which I did several times as part of getting my Animal Science degree, I would end up spattered in blood and mud and muck. When I pray to thank God for my daily food, I know where it came from, know that all food comes from life, life to sustain my life. I believe firmly that if someone can't face the reality of where their food comes from, or if their conscience is too pricked by that reality when they do know, then they shouldn't eat that food, whatever it might be.
Now! That all said, here's the Sanctuary, the second of the four City States found in my book trailer, as drawn by Pierre "Astanael" Joubert. The whole point of the Sanctuary is a place of safety so as to prepare Earth's animal life to be restored. Except the aliens involved didn't stop at just bringing back the animals in the recent past.
You know what, here's what the book has to say about it, from the words of the Man himself, all from Chapter 3 (that's the big infodump chapter). First, here's his take on what we did to our little blue world:
The carnage of the End left our poor little planet covered in vast swaths of wasteland, or wasted land, places where nothing natural could live, not even microscopic organisms. There were bio-engineered plagues and irradiated landscapes and storms that ranged from flaying sand or ice, to smothering dust or acid snow, to literal fire and brimstone.
That's not even including his take on the monsters - that's in last week's blog posting.
But here's what happened next:
Back in those days, maybe ten, twenty, thirty Earth years ago, my contact in the Pan-Galactic Republic was this guy named Scintillant Camor. Mister Camor is probably the nicest, sweetest, gentlest guy you’ll ever meet anywhere, and you’d never know that he’s actually one of the really important people in the PGR’s government, a Chief Minister and Master. The Master of the Ministry of Life, actually. He’s this wizard with genetic engineering, and, oh. Oh, the things he’s done. With the help of Republic technicians and at the request of what was left of the Empire’s leadership, Scintillant Camor went to work enacting the miracle of Ezekiel’s Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones.
He brought them back.
He brought them all back.
River dolphins. Bats in colonies, in droves, in scads, thick enough to blot out the skies if they ever left their Links and took wing. Cheetahs. Rhinos. Dodos and passenger pigeons and penguins and birds, birds, birds beyond counting, beyond imagination. Whales, all of them. Seals and sea lions and things from the ocean I’d only read about in Lovecraftian fiction. Polar bears. Dinosaurs by the boatload: take that, Noah! Megafauna that were around eons before the quaternary extinction event. Dwarf mammoths!
...okay, sorry: reading that again actually makes me tear up a little. Surprisingly, I'm not exaggerating for effect: I had to pause a bit to wipe my eyes clear. Sometimes that happens when I'm writing, when I'm putting down something I think is really important.
Whether it's important to anyone else...well...you know. And I'm sure that you do: we have all, after all, gone through our griefs, however great, however small.
Some of my past readers have complained about Franklin's 50/500 Rule. It's the idea that there have to be at least 50 members of a community to be short-term viable, 500 to be long-term viable. This often comes up as a complaint about creationism in Genesis, such as how the "sons of God married the daughters of men," which most Christians seem to interpret as being proof of fallen angels (called the Nephilim or Watchers), but which I personally think is just a mixing of communities, those started by Adam and later run by Seth, and the ones run by Cain and his descendants, and that there were a whole lot more people involved than are mentioned in that very abbreviated account. Which makes sense: it was written for a specific purpose, just like every history, and so it left out some parts and included others in order to drive home its intended points more completely.
Yet here in the Sanctuary some of my readers have pointed out that I have a problem like that found in the film Rio, namely that there's just not enough members of each species. Some others haven't pointed out a variety of other problems, such as that we don't have sufficient genetic information about many species, often just fossilized bones, if that, and you can't even get dead cells out of a fossil.
So, like in Rio 2, where they answer the question of population density, here I answer explicitly what I don't in the book: I've always had the answer, knew about the problem (as the Freefall comic link should indicate - I love that comic, by the way, for a whole lot of reasons), but didn't want to spend too much time explaining it when I'd already used up so much on worldbuilding as it was - and there was so much more in the book before I cut it to trim the length!
For me, it starts with the idea of the Theory of General Relativity, which states, summed up, that everything is made out of light. Then cross-reference that idea with panspermia theory, which is that all life originates from some cosmic starting point (again, summing up - it's a lot more complicated than that, and a major plot point in lots of books; the most recent I read was Dennis E. Taylor's We Are Bob series, which I quite enjoyed). Every creature evolves out of the same soup of material available on its homeworld, draws from the same collective resources. So for a genius like Scintillant Camor, who invented the process (along with a staff of thousands, but for some reason we only ever put the names of the people in charge on important discoveries), reviewing likely biospheres for the creature to be restored, a shape-template, and a few other details of appearance, diet, atmosphere, and so forth, the entire creature and its ideal environment could be replicated within the controlled floating forcefield bubbles of the Sanctuary.
Having actual genetic samples, or better yet, living members of a species would just make the template model to create more all the better.
Mostly, the Sanctuary isn't there to allow repopulation of species. The Man, in fact, isn't really there to be a caretaker, though that's a secondary job. He's actually there to help the animals resurrected by this process regain their lost creature-culture. Surprisingly enough, creatures with just about any degree of higher brain function do have cultures, though they're not generally as complex as those of sapient beings ("people," in other words). The Sanctuary is a testing zone, a place to try out what it's like to live, a process heavily assisted by having most of the creatures there living in the highly realistic virtual reality of the Pan-Galactic Republic's Link system. The Man is mostly there to make sure nothing goes wrong, to provide emergency medical assistance at need, and to tweak the programs running appropriately. All of this, of course, with the intention of eventually releasing these starting "seed" creatures back into an appropriate environment. Which might or might not actually be on Earth.
Seriously: Earth has gone through some really weird changes over its lifespan! Changing the environment presently on the planet simply wouldn't allow many of those creatures to survive, even if there wasn't a brutal Wasted Land out there. But there are loads of other places in the world, lifeless rock balls that are ideal for adjustment into whatever sort of environment might suit the creatures in question best.
Why? Because life is the most precious and desperately rare commodity in the universe.
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