There's Something Missing on our Spaceships

This weekend, I went to friend’s Star Wars birthday party. As a kid, he had seen the first Star Wars movie at the age of ten, and was hooked right away. He decided then and there that he wanted to be in the movie industry when he grew up, and now he does payroll for feature films. To celebrate his birthday, we watched the first Luke Skywalker film again, which now seems incredibly cheesy, with bad acting, bad directing, and terrible writing. But despite all of that, it is still magical, especially with its vision of a world filled with strange aliens.

But as I watched, I noticed that on board the spaceships, there was something missing. As I came to think about all the other space movies I have ever seen, I realized this missing element applied to just about every one. Space ships always have lots of technology, various types of engines, weapons and living quarters. But there’s one thing that is missing which says a lot about who we are as a civilization, and the trouble we’re in now.

To appreciate what’s missing on spaceships, it helps to see the world through the eyes of our ancestors. A few years ago, I went to an art gallery exhibition of early Renaissance paintings from Florence. For the most part, it was religious art, featuring crucifixion scenes, but they weren’t what caught my eye. Instead, it was a document written in the 14^th century that had been placed on the wall. It was gorgeous. In the center, there was hand-written text ( the printing press had not been invented yet), but all around the borders there were intricately drawn vines and birds. Each page had these lovely embellishments. But the document had nothing to do with nature. It was actually a legal document, something about commercial law. In other words, it was totally boring and utilitarian, like a computer manual now, yet it was covered in drawings of nature. Why?

This sort of natural adornment was not restricted to legal documents. It shows up in all sorts of manuscripts, most famously in religious texts like prayer books and bibles. Virtually every page has some kind of imagery from nature, usually forests, vines, birds or animals. The strange thing is that most of the time, the stories being told in the text have nothing to do with nature. These nature drawings are ornamental. They show that at this time in history, the people who made these books could not imagine the human world without the natural world. It was simply part of their world view and consciousness. Humans existed in nature, even when discussing laws that only affected humans. The implication was that humans could not be extracted from nature, we are a package deal.

Now, spin forward to the era of spaceship movies. Human beings hurtle through space in ships that look like all sorts of Earth-based models, from cities to hotels, battleships to submarines. They are populated by humans and their alien friends, all of which are intelligent. But in the vast majority of films, there are no other life forms from Earth on board. No plants, no animals, no fish, no meadows or forests. Not even a houseplant here and there. Nada.

You may wonder, well so what, why would they want any plants or animals on board? Simple: because in real life, we need them. Scientists have discovered that patients who have been ill recover faster in hospital rooms which have a window looking out onto green trees and plants. In fact, even a painting of nature helps more than a blank wall. This is one of the reasons why real offices have plants in the corners. People like to have nature nearby, even inside, because at a subconscious level it makes us feel more at home, more at peace. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has named this feeling “biophilia”  , and he believes it is innate in all of us.

It may seem strange to argue that we love nature in an era where corporations and governments are burning down rainforests and turning up the global thermostat. Collectively we don’t seem to express much biophilia, but at the individual level, it is a different story. Rich people provide a particularly striking example. Studies of wealthy neighbourhoods have found that they usually include more trees and plants than where poorer people live .  Gated communities have trees, ghettoes don’t.  Rich people are also the folks who own expensive country homes, and penthouse apartments with views of the nearest park, like the wealthy denizens on Park Avenue in Manhattan. Although at work, CEOs may be wrecking the environment, when they come home, they drive through tree-lined streets, and spend the weekend at expensive cottages.  Given a choice, we want nature with us. It is part of our nature.

Why aren't there plants on the Enterprise?

When we imagine going out to space, that love of nature goes out the airlock. If the Enterprise really was like a city in space, it would have dogs in the hallways, perhaps the small ones like condo owners walk to the park. Why doesn’t Uhura have a houseplant strapped to her work station? Why can’t there be a real meadow or forest inside the ship, instead of a holodeck? If spaceships were like real human environments, there would be plants and animals.

One might assume that the reason is ultimately technological, not psychological: plants and animals would take up too much space or be a drag on scarce resources. But in fact, the opposite is true. When NASA imagines taking human to Mars, plants will be on board to provide food, and to clean the air and water. The weight of bringing all the food and oxygen for the long trip is simply too great, so a sustainable organic system is actually more practical. Future real spaceships would include plants simply because this type of life support system works better than current artificial models for long-haul trips.

Granted, movie spaceships have never claimed to be very accurate scientifically, but instead tend to draw their inspiration from past types of ships like submarines and air craft carriers. But here, again, reality includes nature. World War Two submarines were home to small dogs whom the crew kept as mascots, and were valued for their calming effect. Sea dogs were a regular part of the crew of sailing ships, and during the  World Wars, mascots of all kinds of species could be found among sailors, pilots and soldiers.  If our spaceships really were inspired by actual ships, then nature would be on board, too.

So what’s going on with these barren movie spaceships? Why is it that despite our persistent desire to bring nature with us, there are no pets or plants on board most of these spacecraft? I think the key is that the movies are a form of collective dream, which frequently portrays our deepest desires and wishes, long before we consciously recognize them. In the 20^th century, the movies depicted spaceships where human society was depicted as living in a vacuum, completely divorced from nature. This was not a nightmare, but a dream, the next stage in our evolution.

This disturbing dream was on screen long before the environmental crisis hit, further proof that art can be a powerful guide to the human psyche. Now that the world is getting warmer, and thousands of species are going extinct due to habitat loss, it is slowly becoming clear that we cannot afford to imagine ourselves as separate from nature. Our love of nature needs reinforcement, on the streets and on screen. As individuals we are drawn to nature, but increasingly, only on our own terms. Shrinking dogs to fit into our increasingly cramped world is not the answer. Our ancestors knew that humans were embedded in nature, there was no way to separate us. We need to regain that consciousness, and it may require artists dreaming of it in new ways before it ever becomes policy. This is not a problem that will be fixed if houseplants are added to the next Star Trek movie, but it wouldn’t hurt. More important is to realize how strange our world has become – that, surely, is something worth making movies about.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto. www.milton2.tv.

He also runs a website devoted to nature, www.torontonature.com.