In the passage below of my eco-fiction dystopian novel A Diary in the Age of Water, the year is 2065 and the diarist Lynna (a limnologist at the University of Toronto) reflects on the steeply growing infertility in humans and our tenuous future. Lynna draws on the factual study published close to fifty years earlier (in 2017) by Hagai Levine and others at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who found that sperm counts among western men had reduced close to 60% in four decades:
Back in ’49, Daniel and I had several discussions about the environmental triggers and epigenetic mechanisms of infertility in humans. Daniel went on about how it was all about the men. While women showed signs of increased infertility, men’s rate of infertility was more than double that of the women, he said. Taking an inappropriately gleeful tone, Daniel cited the classic 2017 paper by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the one that started it all. Their findings were startling: men’s sperm count in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand had diminished by sixty percent in forty years, between 1973 and 2011. The scientists predicted that by 2060, virtually all men in these parts of the world would have little to no reproductive capacity.
It’s 2065 and they’re right. Only it’s worse. Before the twenties, only the developed countries seemed to be affected, but then sperm counts started to plummet in South American countries, like Argentina and Brazil, where GMO, pesticides, and solvent manufacturing were exploding.
You get out what you put into the ground. India and Asia—where endocrine-disruptive chemicals are finding their way into the water—are reporting very low sperm counts in their men as well as higher incidents of intersex humans.
You get out what you put into the water. We are over two thirds water, after all. I find it a little ironic that we’ve inadvertently produced a non-discriminatory way to control the problem of humanity’s overpopulation. Infertility. And that infertility results from defiling the environment we live in.
But now climate change is shouldering its way in. Climate change is shutting us down.
Is this the first sign of our impending extinction?
–excerpt from “A Diary in the Age of Water”
That environmental perturbations impact our ability to reproduce has been proven. In their 2017 article, Levine et al. write that:
“Sperm count and other semen parameters have been plausibly associated with multiple environmental influences, including endocrine disrupting chemicals (Bloom et al., 2015; Gore et al., 2015), pesticides (Chiu et al., 2016), heat (Zhang et al., 2015) and lifestyle factors, including diet (Afeiche et al., 2013; Jensen et al., 2013), stress (Gollenberg et al., 2010; Nordkap et al., 2016), smoking (Sharma et al., 2016) and BMI (Sermondade et al., 2013; Eisenberg et al., 2014a). Therefore, sperm count may sensitively reflect the impacts of the modern environment on male health throughout the life course (Nordkap et al., 2012).”
This rain falling on an Ontario marsh most certainly contains forever chemicals (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Thanks to chemical companies such as DuPont and others, forever chemicalsare currently in rain water globally, and in many places in unhealthy concentrations. These endocrine-disrupting and cancer-causing chemicals often end up in drinking water and include PCBs, phthalates, PFAS, BPAs (used in pesticides, children’s products, industrial solvents and lubricants, food storage, electronics, personal care products and cookware).
Heavy rain in Mississauga, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
Illustration depicting ‘Rocket Summer’ (image from The Black Cat Moan)
They came because they were afraid or unafraid, happy or unhappy. There was a reason for each man. They were coming to find something or get something, or to dig up something or bury something. They were coming with small dreams or big dreams or none at all
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
When I was but a sprite, and before I became an avid reader of books (I preferred comic books), I read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. It changed me, what I thought of books and what I felt about the power of stories. It made me cry. And perhaps that was when I decided to become a writer. I wanted to move people as Bradbury had moved me.
The 1970 Bantam book jacket aptly describes The Martian Chronicles as, “a poetic fantasy about the colonization of Mars. The story of familiar people and familiar passions set against incredible beauties of a new world…A skillful blending of fancy and satire, terror and tenderness, wonder and contempt.”
Rockets land on Mars overlooking Bradbury Lane (illustration from Sutori)
The Martian Chronicles isn’t really about Mars. True to Bradbury’s master metaphoric storytelling, The Martian Chronicles is about humanity. Who we are, what we are and what we may become. What we inadvertently do—to others, and finally to ourselves—and how the irony of chance can change everything. Despite the knowledge of no detectable amounts of oxygen, Bradbury gave Mars a breathable atmosphere: “Mars is a mirror, not a crystal,” he said, using the planet for social commentary rather than to predict the future.
From “Rocket Summer” to “The Million-Year Picnic,” Ray Bradbury’s stories of the colonization of Mars form an eerie tapestry of past and future. Written in the 1940s, the chronicles long with the nostalgia of shady porches with pitchers of lemonade, ponderously ticking grandfather clocks, and comfortable sofas. Expedition after expedition leave Earth to investigate and colonize Mars. Though the Martians guard their mysteries well, they succumb to the diseases that come with the rocketeers and grow extinct—not unlike the quiet disappearance of the golden toad, the Pinta giant tortoise, or the Bramble Cay melomys. Humans, with ideas often no more lofty than starting a tourist hot-dog stand, bear no regret for the native alien culture they exploit and eventually displace.
It is a common theme of human colonialism and expansionism, armed with the entitlement of privilege. Mars is India to the imperialistic British Empire. It is Rwanda or Zaire to the colonial empire of the cruel jingoistic King Leopold II of Belgium. Mars is Europe to Nazi Germany’s sonderweg. We need look no further than our own Canadian soil for a reflection of this slow violence of disrespect and apathy by our settler ancestors on the indigenous peoples of Canada.
Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves… Each wave different, and each wave stronger.
The Martian Chronicles
Tyler Miller of The Black Cat Moan makes excellent commentary in their 2016 article entitled “How Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Martian Chronicles’ changed Science Fiction (and Literature).”The article begins with a quote from Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges (in the introduction to the Spanish-language translation of The Martian Chronicles: “What has this man from Illinois done, I ask myself when closing the pages of this book, that episodes from the conquest of another planet fill me with horror and loneliness?”
Remember, this was the 1950s … halfway through a century dominated by scientific discovery, and expansion. The 1950s saw developments in technology, such as nuclear energy and space exploration. On the heels of the end of World War II, the 1950s was ignited by public imagination on conquering space, creating technological futures and robotics. The 1950s was considered by some as the real golden age for science fiction, still a kind of backwater genre read mostly by boys and young men, that told glimmering tales of adventure, exploration, and militarism, of promising technologies, and often-androcratic societies who used them in the distant future to conquer other worlds full of strange and disposable alien beings in the name of democracy and capitalism. (In some ways, this is still very much the same.Though, it is thankfully changing…)
(Bantam 1951 1st edition cover)
Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction. And the fact that some of that science fiction was not of the highest quality is irrelevant. Ten year‐olds do not read the scientific literature.
Carl Sagan, 1978
First edition book covers of Martian Chronicles (Doubleday, 1950); I, Robot (Grayson & Grayson, 1952); Childhood’s End (Ballantine Books, 1953); and Starship Troopers (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959)
Large idea-driven SF works that typified this time period included Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and his Foundation series.
It was at this time that Ray Bradbury published The Martian Chronicles. Though filled with the requisite rocket ships, gleaming Martian cities, ray guns, and interplanetary conquest, from the very start—as Borges noted—The Martian Chronicles departed radically from its SF counterparts of the time.
(Illustration on album cover of “Rocket Summer”, music by Chris Byman)
Instead of starting with inspiring technology or a stunning action sequence, or a challenging idea or discovery, Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles opens with a domestic scene.
One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on the slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.
And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer’s ancient green lawns.
Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open air, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.
Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.
The rocket lay on the launching field, lowing out pink clouds of fire and oven heat. The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for brief moment upon the land…
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, Rocket Summer
Bradbury’s focus was on the domestic. Housewives fighting off the ice and snow of Ohio. A Martian woman “cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind.”
They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of the empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs. K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnet dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard…you could see Mr. K in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle…
This morning Mrs. K stood between the pillars, listening to the desert sands heat, melt into yellow wax, and seemingly run on the horizon.
Something was going to happen.
She waited.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, Ylla
Bradbury’s gift to literature—and to his SF genre—was his use of metaphor. Unlike the science fiction of his colleagues, Bradbury’s stories are a lens to study the past and the present. According to Miller, “The Earthmen’s exploration and desolation of Mars allowed Bradbury to look not forward but backward at exploration and desolation on Earth, namely the European arrival in the New World. Just as Europeans landed in North and Central America wholly unprepared for what they found there, Bradbury’s Earthmen are unprepared time and again for the wonder and the horror of Mars. And just as European diseases decimated native people in the Americas, it is chicken-pox which wipes out the Martians.”
The back cover of the 2012 mass market paperback Simon & Schuster Reprint edition of The Martian Chronicles reads:
Bradbury’s Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor—of crystal pillars and fossil seas—where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn—first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars … and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.
“Ask me then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I’ll say yes. They’re all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we’ll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we’ll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we’ll give to the canals and the mountains and the cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.”
“We won’t ruin Mars,” said the captain. “It’s too big and too good.”
“You think not? We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.”
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, And the Moon be Still as Bright
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a profound and tender analysis of the quiet power humanity can wield unawares and how we define and treat ‘the other.’ It is a tragic tale that reflects only too well current world events where the best intended interventions can go awry. From the meddling friend who gossips to “help” another (only to make things worse) to the righteous “edifications” of a religious group imposing its “order” on the “chaos” of a “savage” peoples … to the inadvertent tragedy of simply and ignorantly being in the wrong place at the wrong time (e.g., the introduction of weeds, disease, etc. by colonizing “aliens” to the detriment of the native population; e.g., smallpox, AIDs, etc.). Bradbury is my favourite author for this reason (yes, and because he makes me cry…)
Mars terrain (photo by NASA)
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
My son Kevin and his partner Lin cycled 260 km over two days for Tour de Cure BC this August. Starting in Cloverdale and finishing in Hope, they helped raise over seven million dollars for cancer research and equipment.
Kevin’s pledge follows below:
Following Kevin’s Day One 160 km cycle on Garmin…
Saturday was their first day of the Tour de Cure. Kevin sent me a link to follow his ride in real time on Garmin. It was so cool to watch him move along the various roads to the finish line! On the first day, he and Lin (Team Blue Fish Speed) went a hundred and sixty km (hundred miles) at an average of 20-22 kph for over 7 hours from Cloverdale to Chilliwack!
Day Two 100 km route from Chilliwack to Hope finish line
They camped in Chilliwack overnight and started the following morning at 7:30, travelling 100 km toward the finish line in Hope. Good friend Anne and I drove to Hope to greet them at the finish line. It was so exciting and I confess I was very emotional. I was so proud of them both!
Crowd cheers Blue Fish Speed on as they approach the finish line on Walker Street, Hope (photo by Anne Voute)
Blue Fish Speed crosses the finish line in Hope, BC (photo by Anne Voute)
Proud mother gathers in her two amazing riders for cancer (photo by Anne Voute)
… and tighter still! (photo by Anne Voute)
After lots of hugging, we had some burgers for lunch then a beer at the beer garden and visited in Memorial Park (by the finish line). I noticed their mud-covered faces and jerseys, particularly Lin’s—and how very clean Kevin looked—and it was explained to me that cyclists, when riding together, take turns leading and drafting each other (riding directly behind) to get a break while the leader breaks the wind and sets the pace; hmmm… what was Kevin doing? Ensuring that his jersey stayed clean, that’s what!
Kevin and Lindsay at the finish line in Hope, BC (photo by Anne Voute)
Kevin and Lin got a ride back with their bikes and Anne and I made our way back to Ladner, where Anne lives and I was visiting from Ontario. We celebrated with an ice cream cone!
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
My eco-fiction book A Diary in the Age of Water was recently cited along with Paolo Bacigalupi’s book The Water Knife, in an article on conflict risk in international transboundary water bodies.
The citation was made in Ken Conca’s article (Chapter 1: “Climate change, adaptation, and the risk of conflict in international river basins: Beyond the conventional wisdom”) of the 2024 Routledge book “New Perspectives on Transboundary Water Governance:Interdisciplinary Approaches and Global Case Studies” (edited by Luis Paulo Batista da Silva, Wagner Costa Ribeiro, and Isabela Battistello Espíndola).
Conca begins his chapter with a statistic—an estimated 310 rivers in the world cross national borders, form borders, or both—and goes on to discuss the risk of conflict that naturally arises in such situations. Conca traces a rich history of disputes, with one of the oldest occurring between Lagash and Umma (present-day southern Iraq) in 2500 BCE. Conca explores the early warning indicators explored by the World Resources Institute that imply “a future in which our bordered politics, combined with hydrologic interdependencies, could yield a combustible mix of tension and grievances” and adds that several rivers flagged in the WRI study lie in regions of crhonic tension and political instability. He then includes a 2013 quote by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:
“Our experiences tell us that environmental stress, due to lack of water, may lead to conflict, and would be greater in poor nations … population growth will make the problem worse. So will climate change. As the global economy grows, so will its thirst. Many more conflicts lie just over the horizon.” Ban also stated that climate change promised “an unholy brew that can create dangerous security vacuums” in which “mega-crises may well become the new normal.”
Conca makes his point by quoting the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies: “the real wild card for political and social unrest in the Middle East over the next 20 years is not war, terrorism, or revolution—it is water.”
Conca makes the connection with narratives of fiction:
“This framing of scarcity-induced conflict risk has even crept into the world of fiction. Paulo Bacigalupi’s dystopian novel The Water Knife (2016) portrays a parched southwestern United States of the near future. He foresees American states militarizing both their water relations (with corporate militias destroying infrastructure meant to divert water) and their borders (with the water-rich states seeking to keep thirsty migrant out, and the water poor states seeking to keep them in). Nina Munteanu’s A Diary in the Age of Water (2020) envisions Canada as a wholly-owned colony of the United States (itself owned by China). She describes a world in which Niagara Falls has been turned off and pet ownership is outlawed as an unacceptable water burden.”
Conca unpacks various misconceptions on sources of conflict and conflict resolution to do with transboundary water bodies. The chapter is very enlightening, as is the entire book!
The 2024 Routledge book “New Perspectives on Transboundary Water Governance:Interdisciplinary Approaches and Global Case Studies” (edited by Luis Paulo Batista da Silva, Wagner Costa Ribeiro, and Isabela Battistello Espíndola) is described by the publisher below:
This book presents a novel examination of transboundary water governance, drawing on global case studies and applying new theoretical approaches.
Excessive consumption and degradation of natural resources can either heighten the risks of conflicts or encourage cooperation within and among countries, and this is particularly pertinent to the governance of water. This book fills a lacuna by providing an interdisciplinary examination of transboundary water governance, presenting a range of novel and emerging theoretical approaches. Acknowledging that issues vary across different regions, the book provides a global view from South and Central America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, with the case studies offering civil society and public managers concrete situations that indicate difficulties and successes in water sharing between bordering countries. The volume highlights the links between natural resources, political geography, international politics, and development, with chapters delving into the role of paradiplomacy, the challenges of climate change adaptation, and the interconnections between aquifers and international development. With rising demand for water in the face of climate change, this book aims to stimulate further theoretical, conceptual, and methodological debate in the field of transboundary water governance to ensure peaceful and fair access to shared water resources.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of water resource governance from a wide variety of disciplines, including geography, international relations, global development, and law. It will also be of interest to professionals and policymakers working on natural resource governance and international cooperation.
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
Water Is… sits on the shelf at Banyen Books (photo by Nina Munteanu)
My books “Water Is… The Meaning of Water” and “A Diary in the Age of Water” are selling at Banyen Books in Kitsilano, Vancouver. While “A Diary in the Age of Water” is on Banyen’s virtual shelf for order, “Water Is…” sits on a shelf in the Water: Life-force & Resource / Ecology section.
“Water Is…” sits on the ‘water as life-force & resource’ shelf at Banyen Books, Vancouver (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Banyen Books is located in Kitsilano on the south side of W 4th Avenue on the corner of Dunbar under a grove of healthy oak trees. Across the store is Aphrodite’s Organic Pies, itself a destination for awesome pies. Banyen Books is a beautiful store. It is spacious and surrounded with the warmth of wood and plants. Its wonderful atmosphere invites you to browse the shelves and sit on the comfortable chairs to read. Banyen Books has become a destination for me whenever I’m in Vancouver.
Banyen Books on the corner of W 4th and Dunbar, Vancouver, BC (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Since opening in 1970 Banyen Books has become Canada’s most comprehensive metaphysical bookstore, offering a broad spectrum of resources from humanity’s spiritual, healing, and earth wisdom traditions. Here is how they put it:
Banyen is an oasis, a crossroads, a meeting place… for East and West, the “old ways” and current discoveries and syntheses. Our beat is the “Perennial Philosophy” as well as our evolving learning edges and best practices in a wide variety of fields, from acupuncture to Zen, from childbirth and business to the Hermetic Mysteries, from the compost pile to the celestial spheres. We’re “in the philosophy business,” on “a street in the philosophy district” (as an old cartoon wagged). We welcome and celebrate the love of wisdom, be it in art, science, lifecraft, healing, visioning, religion, psychology, eco-design, gardening… Our service is to offer life-giving nourishment for the body (resilient, vital), the mind (trained, open), and the soul (resonant, connected, in-formed). Think of us as your open source bookstore for the “University of Life”.
Whenever I’m in Vancouver to visit family and friends, I make at least one stop at Banyen Books and often come out with an armful of books. On my most recent stop, I purchased a book on plant intelligence and several beautiful journals (I use a journal for each book project I work on).
My latest purchase at Banyen Books (photo by Nina Munteanu)
19th Avenue in Vancouver, BC (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
“Oh, Brave New World that has such people in it!”—Minerva in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and John the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Canadian science fiction thriller Orphan Black, written by Graeme Manson and directed by John Fawcett stars the extraordinary multi-talented Tatiana Maslany in multiple roles of herself. If you haven’t yet watched the series (five seasons worth), you must on this point alone: to enjoy Maslany’s superb performance as seven clones, all different, yet all the same.
The various clone identities of Tatiana Maslany: Sarah, Alison, Cosima, Rachel, and Helena
Shot in and around Toronto, Ontario, the series focuses on Sarah Manning, a fringe-dweller with questionable friends, who assumes the identity of her clone, cop Elizabeth (Beth) Childs, after witnessing her suicide and stealing her stuff. In Season 1 alone, seven clones are revealed. Those still alive include suburban housewife Alison Hendrix, university evolutionary biologist Cosima Niehaus, corporate mogul Rachel Duncan, and crazed sociopath Helena.
Toronto is filmed brilliantly in a vague every-city pastiche that combines the look of London’s eastside, NYC and northern Europe all in one. Like its characters, the show is both sparsely existentialist and baroque funk. Besides Sarah’s own diverse clones there is foster brother Felix and his various friends or cronies who add significant colour to this film-noir set. Unsavory antagonists not only add intrigue but provide significant texture from sophisticated and subtle to the banal and truly terrifying. And like biology itself—perhaps the true main character here—all the characters are shape-shifters; looking for balance in a shifting world where “normal” keeps chasing itself.
Sarah at train station where she will encounter her first clone
“While other stories, including Jurassic Park and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, could certainly be categorized as biopunk science fiction, very few television shows and movies today delve into the idea of biology,” says Isabella Kapur in her 2013 article “Clones are People Too: The Science and Science Fiction of BBC America’s Orphan Black.” There was, of course, the 2005 film The Island and the 2004-2008 Canadian TV series Regenesis. And, since then, there have been some excellent films and TV series that have delved imaginatively into the wonders and terrors of genetic engineering, human cloning, and synthetic biology, including the German 2020-21 series Biohackers, 2022 film Vesper, and 2023 film The Creator. But Orphan Black was certainly one of the first to explore this topic with such unflinching depth.
Orphan Black is a slick, sophisticated and edgy exploration of human evolution that raises issues about the moral and ethical implications of bio-engineering and genetic tampering—specifically human cloning (currently against the law), personal identity, and intellectual property. Manson and Fawcett enlist symbols and clever metaphor to enrich the story with layers of depth—no item is free of meaning: from the seemingly innocuous naming of a transit station (Huxley Station) in the show’s premiere, or Delphine’s passing reference to “a brave new world” to a terse discussion between a religious extremist and a restaurant proprietor over the merits of factory-farmed eggs: “They’re not normal,” the extremist complains. “They’ve been interfered with.” There is nothing normal about Orphan Black.
Clone identities: Alison, Helena, Sarah, Beth, Cosima, and Katia
Episode titles in Season One quoted parts of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary text On The Origin of Species. Titles like “Natural Selection” (series premiere) and “Parts Developed in an Unusual Manner” elucidate concepts of evolution and survival of the fittest. Season 2 adopts the works of Sir Francis Bacon, reflecting the ethical and moral implications of scientific pursuit in a world of contrasting philosophies and values. “The frequently antagonistic relationship between ‘sound reason’ and ‘true religion’ and the attempt to reconcile the two,” says SlantMagazine, “emerges here as the structuring principle of Orphan Black‘s sophomore season—exemplified by the decision to title each episode after the writings of Sir Francis Bacon, whose body of work at once advocated empiricism and abhorred atheism.”
The Season 2 Premiere title, “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed” excerpts Bacon’s “Plan Of The Work” published in 1620:
“Next, with regard to the mass and composition of it: I mean it to be a history not only of nature free and at large (when she is left to her own course and does her work her own way)—such as that of the heavenly bodies, meteors, earth and sea, minerals, plants, animals—but much more of nature under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded…seeing that the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.”
Sir Francis Bacon
Tatiana Maslany (center) plays several different clones on the BBC America series Orphan Black.
Mingling Its Own Nature With It…
Human cloning made a media comeback when three different research groups created embryonic stem cells out of embryos cloned from adult cells. Scientists insisted that the cloned embryos are meant for research and therapeutic purposes—not to create human clones (shades of The Island?). John Farrell of Forbes Magazine wrote, “The breakthrough also means that it is now just a matter of time before reproductive cloning is achieved. Probably within the next decade.”
Issues, brought on by GMO foods and medical genetic research, have propelled a major debate in gene patenting. The United States Supreme Court ruled against patenting sequences of the human genome in Association for Molecular Pathology Et Al. vs. Myriad Genetics, Inc., Et Al., reports Isabella Kapur in her 2013 article. “Myriad Genetics had patented two genes they had isolated that were identified as genes involved in increased ovarian and breast cancer risks,” said Kapur. “Companies, like Myriad, that spend money to identify nucleotide sequences want to be able to patent those discoveries. However, the patenting allows for monopolies on illness treatments and allows companies to have exclusive access to portions of human DNA. In 2013 companies like Myriad Genetics were not allowed to legally copyright portions of DNA they isolated in the human genome, but they were, according to the Supreme Court, allowed to patent synthetically created sequences of complementary DNA.” This is still the case, as far as I know.
In Orphan Black, The Dyad Institute, a biotech corporation with arcane connections to invisible powers and eugenics, patented the clones as theirs to do with as they please—which might be anything. The ownership of the clones’ genomes by The Dyad Institute would be lawful if all the clones’ DNA was entirely synthetically made. The company would also have exclusive rights to study the clones’ genome, effectively placing the clone Cosima under copyright infringement if she decided to study and apply her research (on herself) outside of the Dyad Institute. If the clones were synthetic, like the DNA created by scientist Dr. Craig Venter, then the Dyad Institute would be in a unique situation with regards to ethics and newly emerging considerations of human rights yet to be determined. For instance, how much of the clones really belong to the company that made them? What even constitutes a person?
Felix encounters several biohackers at a Neolution getogether
Intrigue unfolds as Sarah and Felix discover that her clones are being systematically killed and/or getting sick. The series unravels a frightening panoply of stakeholders in this biological transhumanist game, spanning from the ultra-sophisticated to the deranged fanatic. Among the frightening stakeholders are the Proletheans, a religious extremist group who seek to systematically eliminate clones as “abominations” against the natural order of things. Pastor Henrick, a Waco-style cult “prophet” who quotes Einstein, conducts Mengele-style “breeding” experiments to recast humanity in his version of “perfection.”
Neolutionist Dr. Aldous Leekie talks with Cosima about human self-directed evolution
Sarah and Felix trace the origin of her clones to The Dyad Institute. One of the institute’s scientists, Aldous Leekie, heads Neolution, a transhumanist movement whose notion of “self-directed evolution” to recast humanity in the image of “perfection” evokes social Darwinism and the Übermensch. It brings to mind the early American eugenics programs that inspired the fascist sonderweg and Hitler’s aggressive application of eugenics in the Holocaust.
Nazi poster promoting eugenics and sterilization
The terrible question remains: why were the clones made? Who exactly is the Dyad Institute and who is behind them? In the Season Two episode Variable and Full of Perturbation, we discover that not only are the clones female prototypes (of what?) but that they were purposefully created to be sterile. Frightening motivations reveal themselves over the remaining seasons as we discover just how far some are willing to go to achieve their goals of a ‘perfect society.’
Conditions of Existence…
Where do we draw the line in our tightrope walk across the sea of chaos to find the Holy Grail? When does a Transhumanist’s individual expression of “transcendence” become a movement toward the Singularity? When does a singular powerful thought encompass an entire society?
The political ambitions that wish to use science to “enhance” humanity, based on someone’s idea of “perfect” carry great social implications. Enter the pseudoscience of eugenics and scientific racism, concepts as old as Plato that have haunted humanity since the biblical portrayal of Adam and Eve. Simply put, eugenics is the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of “racial improvement’ and “planned breeding” which gained popularity during the early 20th century; the practice of eugenics is based on the notion that not only physical traits but mental and behavioral attributes—like mental capacity, musical ability, insanity, sexual licentiousness and criminality—are inheritable and therefore can be directed through breeding, sterilization and now through genetic manipulation.
“Perhaps more than any other science, biology has consistently been employed as an accomplice to moral claims because it has tremendous social utility in translating scientific findings into political imperatives,” says Cosima Herter, science consultant for Orphan Black. “Historian of science, Garland Allen, argued that the “decline in economic and social conditions” gives strong indications ‘of our potential to find eugenical arguments […] attractive once again,’ albeit ‘clothed in the updated language of molecular genetics.’ The social importance of genetics lies not only in how genetic research has contributed towards advances in biology (and undoubtedly it does in many, many beneficial ways – medicine not the least among them), but because we have yet to counter ‘simplistic claims of a genetic basis for our social behavior’ with modern facts. Our understanding of genetics has changed, but many of our social aspirations for its uses have not. Deeply embedded in the public consciousness is the hope that social problems can be solved with ‘scientific panaceas’.”
Herter goes on to say that, “We may indeed have a richer understanding of the science of heredity and genetic mechanisms, but public attitudes as to their social relevance have changed very little in the last 100 years. And we might be well advised to remember that science can as easily act as an ally to existing institutions and justify pernicious prejudices – racism, sexism, homophobia, and class disparity to name but a few – as it can produce wondrous, beautiful, and beneficial fruits in the service of a better world where these prejudices could be overcome. Many of us still hold on to ambitions that we can build ‘perfect’ people and genetically engineer ‘perfect’ societies, yet do so without much pause as to how we measure what ‘perfect’ is, and what horrendous and inhuman costs this aspiration towards perfection might incur. Many traits we value, and are wont to consider ‘perfect,’ are historically plastic. And ‘genes are not rigid pieces of information’ that necessarily lead to a particular behavioral trait. If our definitions of many behavioral traits we study today are known to be highly subjective, then our attempts at studying the genetics behind them is likely to remain on precariously shifting grounds.”
Cosima attends presentation by Neolutionist Aldous Leekie
Eugenics: Designing A Perfect Society from a Perfect Human…
Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World describes a society based on eugenic principles. It is a stratified genetic caste society where the lower orders are deliberately stunted both mentally and physically. The destiny of its five main strata is determined from an early age. The strata consist of Alphas, destined for leadership positions; Betas, who hold less exalted but still intellectually demanding jobs; Gammas and Deltas, who occupy roles needing some intelligence; and finally Epsilons, happy morons capable of only the most menial and unskilled tasks.
“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”
Aldous Huxley in a speech at the University of California
“Perhaps more than any other science, biology has consistently been employed as an accomplice to moral claims because it has tremendous social utility in translating scientific findings into political imperatives,” says Cosima Herter, science consultant for Orphan Black. “Deeply embedded in the public consciousness is the hope that social problems can be solved with ‘scientific panaceas’,” Herter adds. “…Science can as easily act as an ally to existing institutions and justify pernicious prejudices – racism, sexism, homophobia, and class disparity to name a few – as it can produce wondrous, beautiful, and beneficial fruits in the service of a better world.”
Helena on the chase
Transhumanism: Nature Under Constraint and Vexed…
In 1923 British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane predicted great benefits to humanity from applications of advanced sciences to human biology. He also suggested and that every such advance would be considered blasphemy or perversion, “indecent and unnatural”.
In 1929, Cambridge crystallographer J.D. Bernal, speculated on radical changes to human bodies and intelligence through bionic implants and cognitive enhancement. Two years before that, Fritz Lang’s expressionist SF film Metropolis introduced the first robot depicted in cinema: the Maschinenmensch, the machine-human.
Biologist Julian Huxley, brother of the writer Aldous, first used the word Transhumanism in a 1957 article, where he presented the concept of the technological singularity, or the ultra-rapid advent of superhuman intelligence. Julian Huxley defined Transhumanism as “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” As an aside, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published in 1932.
The founders of Transhumanism were educated wealthy individuals of mostly British and European descent. They were an elite ruling class, who considered themselves the forward-thinking intelligentsia. Transhumanism is an intellectual and cultural movement that promotes eugenic principles through science & technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. Transhumanists seek to expand technological opportunities for people to live longer and healthier lives and enhance their intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities through the use of synthetic biology: genetic, cybernetic and nanotechnologies. From the transhuman perspective, “in time the line between machines and living beings will blur and eventually vanish, making us part of a bionic ecology.”
While early Transhumanists advocated the elitest pseudoscience of Eugenics or “racial hygiene”, many of today’s Transhumanists argue that market dynamics and individual choice will drive twenty-first century eugenics. However, this argument contradicts the movement’s own dialectic: that of achieving the Singularity. The Transhuman quest for the Singularity of the Übermensch consists of the ability to upload the minds of all individuals to a Hive Mind, a symbiotic collective consciousness, in which all peoples can link to an artificial “brain” or global hard drive, to achieve super-intelligence. The Mind Upload Research Group (MURG) is currently researching this possibility.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines and co-founder of the Singularity University, predicts that humans will be uploading their minds to computers by 2045 and that bodies will be replaced by machines—essentially achieving “immortality”—before the end of the century. “We’re going to become increasingly non-biological to the point where the non-biological part dominates and the biological part is not important any more,” says Kurzweil. “In fact the non-biological part – the machine part – will be so powerful it can completely model and understand the biological part. So even if that biological part went away it wouldn’t make any difference.”
Author Paul Joseph Watson reminds us that—even if desirable—such a utopia would not be available to everyone; rather, it would remain the domain of a wealthy aristocracy, creating yet another class system. Kurzweil seems to agree: “Humans who resist the pressure to alter their bodies by becoming part-cyborg or are unable to afford such procedures will be ostracized from society. “Humans who do not utilize such implants are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those who do.”
In Kurzweil’s brave new world of “biological and non-biological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light,” will such an elite see the mass of humanity as worthless parasites and either prevent them from reproducing via mass sterilization programs or simply slaughter them outright?
What is perfect and how do we measure it? What is the risk of even suggesting a recipe for such a thing? A perfect society? Isn’t a Utopia an oxymoron of unresolvable paradox? Science fiction literature has given us many visions of where so-called utopias may descend (e.g., Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, A Stranger in a Strange Land, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Matrix, The Hunger Games, Elysium, Divergent, Clockwork Orange, Delirium, and so many more). The very act of being an individual provides complexity and diversity that promotes stability in change. Stable chaos.
Perhaps, what Orphan Black demonstrates the best is that even clones—who are exactly the same genetically—can differ significantly, given free reign in a diverse environment.
What Orphan Black does exceptionally well is ask those hard questions. OK. It’s not asking the questions so much as presenting the “then” scenario to some pretty important “what if” premises. It’s doing what all good art—versus polemic—does: it’s providing the seeds for viewers to engage in intelligent conversation on emerging social issues via Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media.
Join in.
The clones of Orphan Black
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
My original Diatom Forest illustration in my article “Diatom Spring” in The Meaning of Water
This past spring, Dutch scientist Herman van Dam (Consultancy for Water and Nature) approached me for permission to use my illustration of the diatom forest in a paper he and co-authors were preparing for the Dutch journal H2O. He explained that they wanted to help familiarize water managers who read the journal with the underwater biodiversity for which my illustration would be helpful.
The Illustration
He’d seen my illustration in my article “A Diatom Spring” in The Meaning of Water. Below is a summary of my article about the diatom forest:
Attachment and colonization starts with a ‘clean’ unpopulated surface (usually scoured by turbulence in a storm or some other event or a new surface tumbled into the water). Several stages of succession take place, starting with early colonizers. The adnate Cocconeis placentula, whose frustules attach directly to the substrate, is an example of an early colonizer. When they attach to a substrate they form a biofilm (think moss in a terrestrial forest). Adnate species are eventually overgrown by taxa that produce a mucilaginous pad (e.g. Synedra) or stalk (e.g. Gomphonema). The understory layer is typically occupied by diatoms such as Fragilaria vaucheriae and Synedra radians that attach to the surface at one end (apical) of their rod-shaped frustules using a mucilaginous pad to form “rosettes” that resemble spiky understory shrubs. This allows them to protrude above the adnate taxa and take advantage of more light.
SEM of Synedra radians and Fragilaria vaucheriae that form rosettes as they apically attach to substrate (image by Roemer et al., 1984)
The diatoms Cymbella and Gomphonema produce long stalks that attach directly to the surface, allowing them to form a swaying canopy over the lower tier of cells of Fragilaria vaucheriae, Synedra radians and early colonizer Cocconeis placentula whose frustules attach directly to the substrate (think overstory and understory of a terrestrial forest or a marine kelp forest).
The Diatom Forest Structure
Just like trees, the canopy-forming stalked diatoms effectively compete for available light and nutrients in the water with their vertical reach. They provide the ‘overstory’ of the diatom forest’s vertical stratification. These tree-like diatoms also provide an additional surface for other diatoms to colonize (e.g. tiny epiphytic Achnanthes settle on the long stalks of Cymbella, just as lichen does on a tree trunk).
SEM of three-week colony of Cymbella affinis (larger diatoms on left) and Gomphonema olivaceum attached via stalks (image from Roemer et al., 1984)
The stalked diatom forest acts like a net, trapping drifting-in euplankton, such as Pediastrum sp.andFragilaria spp., which then decide to stay and settle in with the periphyton community. The mucilage captures and binds detrital particles in both lower and upper stories of the diatom forest; these, in turn, provide nutrients for the diatom forest and additional surfaces for colonization. In their work with periphyton communities, Roemer et al. (1984) found several diatoms (e.g. Diatoma vulgare, Fragilaria spp. Stephanodiscus minutula) entangled in the complex network of cells, stalks, and detritus of the diatom forest’s upper story. They also found rosettes of Synedra radians—like jungle orchids—attached to large clumps of sediment caught by the net of mucilage.
Eventually, ‘overgrowth’ occurs as the periphyton colony matures and grows ‘top-heavy’ with all this networking. The upper story of the community simply sloughs off—usually triggered by turbulence in a river from rains, storms, or dam release. This is similar to a forest fire in the Boreal forest, which creates space and light for new colonization and growth. The dislodged periphyton ride the turbulent flow, temporarily becoming plankton, and those that survive the crashing waters provide “seed” to colonize substrates downstream. Others may get damaged and form the ‘dish soap’ like suds or foam you often see in turbulent water. The proteins, lignins and lipids of the diatoms (and other associated algae) act as surfactants or foaming agents that trap air and form bubbles that stick to each other through surface tension.
Diatoms, organics and associated detritus forms foamy ‘crema’ on the river (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Fragmented diatoms and organic material create a surface foam on the river (photo by Nina Munteanu)
The Paper
The paper was published June 13, 2024, in H2O, written by Jako van der Wal, Joep de Koning and Herman van Dam, and entitled “Snel inzicht in de ecologische waterkwaliteit met diatomeeën”(Quick insight into ecological water quality with diatoms). This paper was right up my alley! As a diatom specialist and limnologist who studied them in relation to environmental conditions and perturbations, I was intrigued by the paper and gained some additional insight on diatom ecology.
Van der Wal et al. cited recent advances in DNA-based identification methods that provide fast and cheap diatom identification over the traditional method of using an optical compound microscope to observe morphological characteristics such as size, shape and ornamentations of the silicified cell wall. I can attest that this is a labour-intensive process in which I spent many hours and days hunched over a microscope during my masters research at Concordia University. This efficient DNA-identification has seen a resurgence of using diatoms as a valuable tool for water quality managers, with applications providing insight into both current and historical water conditions. The authors argue that benthic diatoms or periphyton (living on substrates such as plants, rock, sand and artificial surfaces) have been since the 1980s used as indicators of saproby, trophy, acid and salt character in, among other things, ditches and canals. For every type of water and water quality, there are diatoms that have their habitat there, write the authors. They argue that, unlike phytoplankton, fish and macrofauna, periphyton attach to a surface and hardly move; this means that effects of water quality can be demonstrated locally. Because many diatom species tolerances and intolerances are known and they reproduce quickly (over days), diatoms respond quickly to changes in the environment—much faster (often within weeks) than other ecological indicators.
Scientists and water technicians can use diatom species composition to measure perturbations by organic material, low oxygen content, eutrophication, and toxicity. Given that diatoms colonize and develop quickly, this includes unstable and damaged habitats where other indicators cannot develop, such as shipping traffic, waves or where cleaning or dredging is carried out regularly. Historical insight can be provided by diatoms, given that their silica frustules are naturally preserved in sediment.
My Own Work with Turbulence
Periphyton biofilm (of mostly diatoms) on microscope slides left in a stream
During my masters research in several streams in the Eastern Townships, I examined how diatoms colonized artificial substrates;how they formed productive biofilms that sustained an entire periphyton community of attached aquatic life and discovered that their pattern of colonization related to current speed and direction. I submerged glass slides (the kind people use to look at critters under the microscope) in a device in the stream and oriented them parallel or perpendicular to the current.
There are two ways an algal community grows in a new area: (1) by initial colonization and settling; and (2) by reproduction and growth. I studied both by collecting slides exposed for differing lengths of time (collecting young and mature communities) in different seasons.
I discovered that the diatoms colonized these surfaces in weird ways based on micro-turbulence. Early colonizers, like Achnanthes and adnate Cocconeis preferred to settle on the edges of the slides, where the chaos of turbulence ruled over the sheer of laminar flow. They colonized by directly appressing to the substrate, making them the first photosynthetic taxa to establish a biofilm on a clean substrate. Vadeboncoeur and Katona (2022) write that “in waved-washed surfaces, these taxa may be the only algae that persist.” I postulated that the drift velocity was reduced on the slide’s edge, where turbulence was greatest, giving drifting algae a greater chance to collide and settle on the slide over the more shear laminar flow along the slide’s central face.
Once settled, the community was more likely to grow with turbulence. Greater turbulence decreases the diffusion gradient of materials around algal cells, with a higher rate of nutrient uptake and respiration. Turbulence provides greater opportunity to an existing colony by increasing “chaotic” flow, potential collision and exchange. Turbulence is a kind of “stable chaos” that enhances vigor, robustness and communication.
Using Diatoms in Water Quality Assessments
In their paper Van der Wal et al. argued that in environmental assessment the DNA-identification is just one step in a process that looks a population structure and health. Diatoms are already used in 21 of the 27 EU countries as part of a Water Framework Directive (WFD) quality index for flowing waters and in nine EU countries for standing water. Example conditions and associated perturbations where diatoms are a particularly useful indicator include: salinity, acidity, oxygen saturation, organic load (saproby), nutrient richness (trophy), temperature, and toxicity.
Diatom Growth Forms & Deformities
Van der Wal et al. argued that in addition to the different species compositions and the related ecological indices, growth forms and deformations of diatoms are useful indicators of water quality, particularly in relation to specific toxins.
My illustration adapted for the van der Wal et al. paper in H2O
Growth forms of diatoms can be described as attached, short-stalked, long-stalked, mobile and living in mucous tubes (Figure 3, van der Wal et al., 2024). Each growth form has advantages and disadvantages. For example, short-stalked diatoms are more difficult to graze and long-stalked diatoms come into contact with more water, from which they can then absorb substances. Long-stalked diatoms can also absorb more light if there is a lot of competition. Mobile diatoms can adapt to changing conditions by, for example, migrating from surface to subsurface and vice versa. Diatoms in slime tubes are more difficult to prey on and respond more slowly to environmental changes.
Two frustules of Navicula sp; the one on the right shows obvious deformities in the striations of its silica frustule (photo by van der Wal, H2O, June 13, 2024)
According to Van der Wal et al., scientistis (Rimet & Bouchez) noted that long-stalked diatoms declined in waterbodies subjected to various pesticides. Falasco et al. observed diatom deformities when exposed to various toxic substances. Heavy metals were observed to cause deformities in Navicula. Nitrogen toxicity was also implicated in diatom deformities.
Froth from diatoms and organics on the Otonabee river, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)
References:
Falasco, E., Ector, L., Wetzel, C.E., Badino, G. & Bona, F. (2021). “Looking back, looking forward: a review of the new literature on diatom teratological forms (2010-2020).” Hydrobiologia 848: 1675-1753.
Poikane, S., Kelly, M., & Cantonati, M. (2016). ‘Benthic algal assessment of ecological status in European lakes and rivers: challenges and opportunities’. Science of the Total Environment 568: 603-613.
Rimet, F. & Bouchez, A. (2011). ‘Use of diatom life-forms and ecological guilds to assess pesticide contamination in rivers: Lotic mesocosm approaches’. Ecological Indicators 11: 489-499.
Roemer, Stephen C., Kyle D. Hoagland, and James R. Rosowski. 1984. “Development of a freshwater periphyton community as influenced by diatom mucilages.” Can. J. Bot.62: 1799-1813.
Serôdio, J. & Lavaud, J. (2020). “Diatoms and their ecological importance”. In: Leal Filho, W. et al. (eds). Life below water. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (pp.1-9). Springer Nature.
Smolar-Zvanut, Natasa and Matjaz Mikos. “The impact of flow regulation by hydropower dams on the periphyton community in the Soca River, Slovenia. Hydrological Sciences Journal 59 (5): 1032-1045.
Wood, Allison R. 2016. “Attached Algae as an Indicator of Water Quality: A Study of the Viability of Genomic Taxanomic Methods.” Honors Theses and Capstones. 306. University of New Hampshire Scholars’ Repository.
Zuilichem, H. van, Peeters, E. & Wal, J. van der (2016). “Diatomeeën als indicator voor waterkwaliteit nabij rwzi’s”. H2O-Online, 9 december 2016. https://edepot.wur.nl/401202
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press(Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
A man tries to survive In the ruins of a bloody war between Gaians and Technocrats where Techno-clones rule.
Here’s an excerpt:
The ruins of the city rippled in the heat like a bad movie. Gunther raked his fingers through his hair and paced the exposed second floor of the dilapidated building. His gaze panned the city. Haze the color of rust lingered over phantom pools on the horizon.
“It’s hot as hell,” he complained, shrugging his Computerized Automatic Rifle over his shoulder. His camouflage fatigues clung to his body like something he needed to shed. “I’m dying in this heat.” Several flies buzzed around his head and he flapped his gangly arm madly in the air. “Damn flies.”
Slouched against some rubble, Rick ignored him and ran diagnostics on the CARifle stretched out on his lap, verifying the output data on his eye-com. Rick’s sullen face was barely visible under the V-set strapped to his head. Gunther pulled out a stick of gum, unraveled the wrapper and pushed the wad into his mouth. Smacking his lips, he savored the mint flavor and tossed the wrapper.
“Ass hole!” Rick snapped. “Pick that up.”
Gunther snatched the wrapper. The rifle slipped off his shoulder and clattered to the ground. Forcing on a nervous grin he scrambled to pick up the weapon then stepped on the vee-set he’d yanked off earlier.
“We’re Gaians.” Rick’s finger stabbed the green band on his arm. “Protectors of the Earth, ass hole.” He turned back to his CARifle and muttered, “Just like a filthy Techno. . . no idea why you’re doing anything.”
Gunther replaced the V-set on his head and slung the CARifle over his shoulder. He sagged under its weight and let his gaze stray to where the roof had been blasted away. The air smelled of smoke and burning metal. He blinked away the sweat that ran into his eyes and squinted at the sun, suspended in a yellow dust cloud. “Those lousy Technos caused this heat wave. We’re turning into a desert!”
Rick ignored him and kept tinkering with his weapon.
“Hell, if it weren’t for this revolution,” Gunther continued, “the planet would be toast already . . .” he trailed, lost for a moment in a terrifying place. More flies buzzed furiously around his head. “Get off!” he shouted and shook his head violently. He frowned and muttered, “We better see some action soon.” Gunther poked the rubble with his rifle. “When I took this post I was glad I’d be toasting any coward Technos trying to escape the city.” He raised his rifle, aimed at an imaginary target and made clicking sounds with his tongue. “When I asked the Gaian committee for this post—”
“Ass hole!” Rick spat. “You didn’t ask for it; they assigned you.”
Gunther half-grinned, exposing dirty teeth, and shrugged.
Rick spit on the ground. “I know your story, turd. You hid in some hole during the whole clone siege. Waiting to find out who won so you could take their side.”
Gunther inhaled the gum and coughed.
Rick sneered. “I figure they put you with me to keep an eye on you. Make sure you don’t run away like them other Technos.” He rubbed the graying stubble on his creased face and his eyes narrowed to slits. “Hell, you were probably a Techno before we found you. Come to mind, you look like one of them. . . .”
You can read the complete story of “The Spectator” in the Teoria Omicron ezine. An earlier version of this story was published under the title “Frames” in my short story collection Natural Selectionpublished by Pixl Press.
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”—George Bernard Shaw
At Calgary’s When Words Collide some years ago, I moderated a panel on Eco-Fiction with publisher/writer Hayden Trenholm, and writers Michael J. Martineck, Sarah Kades, and Susan Forest. The panel was well attended; panelists and audience discussed and argued what eco-fiction was, its role in literature and storytelling generally, and even some of the risks of identifying a work as eco-fiction.
Someone in the audience brought up the notion that “awareness-guided perception” may suggest an increase of ecological awareness in literature when it is more that readers are just noticing what was always there. Authors agreed and pointed out that environmental fiction has been written for years and it is only now—partly with the genesis of the term eco-fiction—that the “character” and significance of environment is being acknowledged beyond its metaphor; for its actual value. It may also be that the metaphoric symbols of environment in certain classics are being “retooled” through our current awareness much in the same way that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four are being re-interpreted—and newly appreciated— in today’s world of pervasive surveillance and bio-engineering.
I would submit that if we are noticing it more, we are also writing it more. Artists are cultural leaders and reporters, after all. I shared my own experience in the science fiction classes I was teaching at UofT and George Brown College, in which I noted a trend of increasing “eco-fiction” in the works in progress that students were bringing in to workshop in class. Students were not aware that they were writing eco-fiction, but they were indeed writing it.
I started branding my writing as eco-fiction a few years ago. Prior to that—even though my stories were strongly driven by an ecological premise and strong environmental setting—I described them as science fiction and many as technological thrillers. Environment’s role remained subtle and—at times—insidious. Climate change. Water shortage. Environmental disease. A city’s collapse. War. I’ve used these as backdrops to explore relationships, values (such as honour and loyalty), philosophies, moralities, ethics, and agencies of action. The stuff of storytelling.
Environment, and ecological characteristics were less “theme” than “character,” with which the protagonist and major characters related in important ways.
Just as Bong Joon-Ho’s 2014 science fiction movie Snowpiercer wasn’t so much about climate change as it was about exploring class struggle, the capitalist decadence of entitlement, disrespect and prejudice through the premise of climate catastrophe. Though, one could argue that these form a closed loop of cause and effect (and responsibility).
The self-contained closed ecosystem of the Snowpiercer train is maintained by an ordered social system, imposed by a stony militia. Those at the front of the train enjoy privileges and luxurious living conditions, though most drown in a debauched drug stupor; those at the back live on next to nothing and must resort to savage means to survive. Revolution brews from the back, lead by Curtis Everett (Chris Evans), a man whose two intact arms suggest he hasn’t done his part to serve the community yet.
Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton), an imperious yet simpering figure who serves the ruling class without quite being part of it, reminds the lower class that:
“We must all of us on this train of life remain in our allotted station. We must each of us occupy our preordained particular position. Would you wear a shoe on your head? Of course you wouldn’t wear a shoe on your head. A shoe doesn’t belong on your head. A shoe belongs on your foot. A hat belongs on your head. I am a hat. You are a shoe. I belong on the head. You belong on the foot. Yes? So it is. In the beginning, order was prescribed by your ticket: First Class, Economy, and freeloaders like you…Now, as in the beginning, I belong to the front. You belong to the tail. When the foot seeks the place of the head, the sacred line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.”
Ecotones are places where “lines are crossed,” where barriers are breached, where “words collide” and new opportunities arise. Sometimes from calamity. Sometimes from tragedy. Sometimes from serendipity.
When environment shapes a story as archetype—hero, victim, trickster, shadow or shape shifter—we get strong eco-fiction. Good eco-fiction, like any good story, explores the choices we make and the consequences of those choices. Good eco-fiction ventures into the ecotone of overlap, collision, exchange and ultimate change.
In my non-fiction book Water Is… I define an ecotone as the transition zone between two overlapping systems. It is essentially where two communities exchange information and integrate. Ecotones typically support varied and rich communities, representing a boiling pot of two colliding worlds. An estuary—where fresh water meets salt water. The edge of a forest with a meadow. The shoreline of a lake or pond.
For me, this is a fitting metaphor for life, given that the big choices we must face usually involve a collision of ideas, beliefs, lifestyles or worldviews: these often prove to enrich our lives the most for having gone through them. Evolution (any significant change) doesn’t happen within a stable system; adaptation and growth occur only when stable systems come together, disturb the equilibrium, and create opportunity. Good social examples include a close friendship or a marriage in which the process of “I” and “you” becomes a dynamic “we” (the ecotone) through exchange and reciprocation. Another version of Bernard Shaw’s quote, above, by the Missouri Pacific Agriculture Development Bulletin reads: “You have an idea. I have an idea. We swap. Now, you have two ideas and so do I. Both are richer. What you gave you have. What you got I did not lose. This is cooperation.” This is ecotone.
I think we are seeing more eco-fiction out there because ecosystems, ecology and environment are becoming more integral to story: as characters in their own right. I think we are seeing more eco-fiction out there because we are ready to see it. Just as quantum physics emerged when it did and not sooner, an idea—a thought—crystalizes when we are ready for it.
Don’t stay a shoe … go find an ecotone. Then write about it.
Thirty-Six Eco-Fiction Books Worth Reading…
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
I steer away from them. I find them generally tasteless, unimaginative and lacking anything remotely connected to “story”. Most appear, at least from their trailers, to focus on violence and gore with little interest in anything else (what could be more gruesome than a person stalking then eating another?).
Zombies form an ‘ant hill’ as they climb the wall into acaptive city
As a writer of science fiction and fantasy and avid fan of this genre in motion pictures, I lamented that zombies had become the “in thing” in stories and film these days. We’d just gotten over werewolves and vampires. Now I felt doomed by an infestation of the “undead”. I mean, how many ways can you portray such listless deadbeats?
then there’s the action thriller “World War Z”. Despite my intrigue with the trailer, it took my trusted friend’s insistence for me to go see it.
Escaping the first zombie onslaught
I was vindicated in my trust of her good taste.
“World War Z” is not your typical zombie movie. In fact, to call it a zombie movie is to fail to acknowledge the deeper thematic reflections portrayed. What struck most was that this action thriller focused less on what zombies did (all that missing blood and gore that some reviewers lamented over gave me relief and gratitude) than on the effect of a plague that turned most of humanity into them. It actually had a story! While the motion picture apparently honoured the iconic lore and criteria established in the zombie mythos, director Marc Forster and screen writers J. Michael Straczynski and Matthew Michael Carnahan (based on the book by Max Brooks) cleverly did not let themselves be limited by it. In fact, zombies per se serve more as plot tools in a far more interesting and deeper story arc and theme.
I’m referring to the subtle notes of ecology, biology and co-evolution interlaced throughout this visually stunning and rather disturbing film. What happens when you disturb Nature? The opening titles and scenes show a montage of curious and subtly dark reflections on the consequences of our general indifference to Nature and her growing unbalanced ecosystems. “Mother Nature is a serial killer,” virologist Andrew Fassbach tells our hero during his first—and last—ten minutes on screen. During that short time they spend together, Fassbach shares some key insights into how Gaia plays. And she doesn’t always play “fair”. Fassbach also tells us that this zombie plague started with a virus. Which brings up some interesting questions. Was it an “intelligent virus”, manufactured and introduced? Did the virus co-evolve with some organism as an aggressive symbiont and was spontaneously triggered by a disturbance? What was that disturbance and was it an accident or a mistake? How did it come to be?
Brad Pitt’s character faces a zombie
In a 2020 interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Max Brooks (the author of the bestselling book of the same name) shared how uncannily similar the WWZ was to the Corona Virus (COVID-19) outbreak:
“Similarities between Brooks’s imagined outbreak, a virus called solanum (first introduced in 2003’s Zombie Survival Guide) and the coronavirus are uncanny. Never mind that Brooks has said he was using the novel to generally comment on government ineptitude and U.S. isolationism.
Patient Zero was in China. The virus is eventually nicknamed “African Rabies,” which sounds an awfully lot like “The Chinese Virus.” The U.S. greatly downplayed the severity of its threat and reacted too slowly, likely in part because it was an election year. Check. There was a much hyped-treatment that was ultimately ineffective (hello, hydroxychloroquine).”
“I was just being historically accurate,” says Brooks. “I wasn’t looking forward, I was looking back. Everything that’s happening today has already happened throughout history. Pandemics tend to come in very predictable cycles. And everything that is happening today happened with SARS, happened with AIDS, even happened with Ebola.”
Brad Pitt’s character on the run
I also didn’t fail to notice the reference to swarming ant colonies in the title montage that foreshadowed a later scene of zombies piling onto each other on the walls of Jerusalem in a frenzied search for warm bodies to eat. This is clearly a film about Nature’s powers and mysteries. You can be sure that questions about what triggered and defined the zombie plague will be addressed in the sequel, already scheduled. Because, like any serial killer, Mother Nature wants to be caught, says Fassbach.
Swarming zombies form ‘ant hill’ as they climb a walled city
Co-Evolution & Symbiogenesis
Which brings me to what this film really touches on: how Mother Nature takes care of herself and her own… whether we like it or not. The key is evolution and something called co-evolution: this is when two normal aggressors cooperate in an evolutionary partnership to benefit each other. Ehrlich and Raven coined co-evolution to explain how butterflies and their host plants developed in parallel. I wrote about it in an earlier post called “Co-evolution: Cooperation & Aggressive Symbiosis”
Virologist Frank Ryan calls co-evolution “a wonderful marriage in nature—a partnership in which the definition of predator and prey blurs, until it seems to metamorphose to something altogether different.” Co-evolution is now an established theme in the biology of virus-host relationships. The ecological “home” of the virus is the genome of any potential host and scientists have remained baffled by the overwhelming evidence for ‘accommodation’.
Brad Pitt’s character running with soldiers from zombie onslaught
“Today…every monkey, baboon, chimpanzee and gorilla is carrying at least ten different species of symbiotic viruses,” says Ryan.
“Why,” asks Ryan, “is co-evolution [and its partner, symbiosis] such a common pattern in nature?” Ryan coined the term “genomic intelligence” to explain the form of intelligence exerted by viruses and the capacity of the genome to be both receptive and responsive to nature. It involves an incredible interaction between the genetic template and nature that governs even viruses. Symbiosis and natural selection need not be viewed as mutually contradictory. Russian biologists, Andrei Famintsyn and Konstantine Merezhkovskii invented the term “symbiogenesis” to explain the fantastic synthesis of new living organisms from symbiotic unions. Citing the evolution of mitochondria and the chloroplast within a primitive host cell to form the more complex eukaryotic cell (as originally theorized by Lynn Margulis), Ryan noted that “it would be hard to imagine how the step by step gradualism of natural selection could have resulted in this brazenly passionate intercourse of life!”
Brad Pitt’s character fighting for his life
Aggressive Symbiosis
In his book, “Virus X” Dr. Frank Ryan coined the term “aggressive symbiont” to explain a common form of symbiosis where one or both symbiotic partners demonstrates an aggressive and potentially harmful effect on the other’s competitor or potential predator. Examples abound, but a few are worth mentioning here. In the South American forests, a species of acacia tree produces a waxy berry of protein at the ends of its leaves that provides nourishment for the growing infants of the ant colony residing in the tree. The ants, in turn not only keep the foliage clear of herbivores and preying insects through a stinging assault, but they make hunting forays into the wilderness of the tree, destroying the growing shoots of potential rivals to the acacia. Viruses commonly form “aggressive symbiotic” relationships with their hosts, one example of which is the herpes-B virus, Herpesvirus saimiri, and the squirrel monkey (the virus induces cancer in the competing marmoset monkey). Ryan suggests that the Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks follow a similar pattern of “aggressive symbiosis”. All you need is a perceived hostile trigger. A disturbance in an otherwise balanced ecosystem, for instance.
Aggressive Symbiosis & Human History
The historian, William H. McNeill, suggested that a form of “aggressive symbiosis” played a key role in the history of human civilization. “At every level of organization—molecular, cellular, organismic, and social—one confronts equilibrium [symbiotic] patterns. Within such equilibria, any alteration from ‘outside’ tends to provoke compensatory changes [aggressive symbiosis] throughout the system to minimize overall upheaval.”
So…what triggered the zombie plague of “World War Z”? And how will humanity prevail in this new paradigm of nature? The sequel (which I haven’t watched) may provide some answers. Check out author Max Brooks’s interview with Yahoo (link above) for some ideas.
Poster for WWZ with Brad Pitt
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
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