A Wild World

July 6th 2008 at 4:05 pm

This is the first installment in a series of blog posts about my current science fiction series.  The first book, THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA, is now available in paperback.  The sequel, READING THE WIND, will be out on July 22^nd.  Each post in the series explores one way the books address a problem we are also affected buy, or probably will be in the future.  I hope you enjoy this one:  A Wild World.

We were born wild.  Our environment helped to shape us.  And now, in large part, we are shaping it.  Much of the world is now cultivated land.  Some is literally cultivated:  farms and fields.  Some is protected and preserved:  refuges and national parks.  Very little of our land simply “is.”  It was big news a few months ago that a civilization without much outside contact was sighted in the Amazon jungle.

There is a blue heron rookery in Kenmore, just north of us.  It is completely fenced in, apparently the only way to keep the bird’s nests safe, even though they are clustered high and huge in three tall trees. Last fall, I participated in the bizarre exercise of weeding a local park.  Yes, it makes sense to remove invasive plants so native plants can thrive.  Yes, in fact, we have to do it, or lose the park trees to English Ivy.   But really, think about it.  We have progressed to the point that we have to weed our wild places.

I live in a city.   I’m pretty sure all of the land is owned by homeowners, business, or the government.  It all needs some level or another of human attention to thrive.  Yes, if we all died off, nature would find a way to prevail, but that’s not my point here.  We’ve taken on the job of caring for the almost all of the garden.

In THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA, and even more so in READING THE WIND, two human cultures clash.  One lives on a wild world, and refuses to change itself.  It doesn’t attempt to control much of the world, either.  In fact, for the original settlers, it is a struggle even to survive.  They are beset by chaos and wildness which they have little control over.  Trip vine and thorn; paw and jaw and sharp claw. 

And then, a competing claim is made by the altered, people happy to change themselves, and intent on changing the world of Fremont.  These same people come from Silver’s Home, where all things are controlled and designed.  Where humans and data interact almost seamlessly and kitchen gardens can have different ecosystems than the back yard down to humidity and temperature. 

We are somewhere on the pendulum between these two societies.  I believe we have changed Earth so it is more like Silver’s Home than like Fremont.  We have intervened so much, we will have to continue to intervene to manage the climate and the flora and the fauna and to keep Earth someplace we can call home.  What do you think?

Please feel free to comment, and also to leave your ideas for future blog post topics.

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