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| A scene from The Settler (2000). |
Southern California as a Futuristic Landscape
This article first appeared in the Allen Memorial Art Museum's Bulletin, Volume LII, Number 2, 2001.
Rian Brown-Orso
Related
Links:
• Video clips from The Settler: (Scene
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Scene 3)
• Faculty
Observations Homepage
MARCH 5, 2002--Why does Southern California remind me of Mars? Water, resources, land, and the dream of conquering the next frontier. Sound familiar? There are many parallels between the propaganda-driven colonization of Southern California and the recent campaign to explore Mars. I came to this conclusion after living in Southern California, and conducting two years of research into NASA’s plans to explore and "terraform" Mars. This exploration led to the making of my latest film, The Settler (2000), a science-fiction tale set in the future about the first person to develop Mars. There was no need to go to Mars to make this film, all of the shooting locations happened to be in California: the perfect stunt-double.
The history of California is a complex and layered story. It is fueled by a dream whose cinders still burn hot today. It spans two brief centuries of battling over territory and the plundering of natural resources, resulting in enormous prosperity. Southern California in particular is a region that keeps a tight grip on its image as a land of endless sunshine, surf, and fantasy. The "California dream" is resilient, despite its smog, its polluted shores, earthquakes, endless traffic, and extreme polarization of the "haves and have-nots." What we recognize today as Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego bear the marks of their rapid growth over the last century: overpopulation, and lack of electricity, water, and clean air. In Southern California, the results of man’s inability to control nature or to administer it wisely weigh heavily on the collective consciousness of the region. The development and damage has been so rapid that the landscape is completely transformed from one generation to the next. Norman Klein describes Los Angeles as a city that is built upon erasure of memory, the "new" replacing whatever was without a trace. (1) Grandparents tell stories to their grandchildren about the endless orange groves of Orange County, and green valleys filled with apple orchards. Today the rivers are dry, and the development projects have razed trees to build roads and malls. The "land of plenty" is overextended due to unprecedented population growth in the twentieth century. While nineteenth-century utopian ideologies of Manifest Destiny vs. the consequences of imperialistic westward expansion have been scrutinized critically by scholars as a historical phenomenon, this dynamic is in fact very much alive today.
As we tread into the twenty-first century, the New Frontier happens to be Mars. In 1998, astro-space engineer Robert Zubrin founded the Mars Society, which, since its inception, has sparked an interest in a new kind of interplanetary Manifest Destiny. Thousands of scientists, scholars, philanthropists, artists, and students have joined forces to promote the exploration and eventual "conquering" of Mars. The following declaration was ratified and signed by the seven hundred attendees at the Founding Convention of the Mars Society, held 13-16 August 1998, at the University of Colorado at Boulder: "Civilizations, like people, thrive on challenge and decay without it…we must go for the youth. The spirit of youth demands adventure. A humans-to-Mars program would challenge young people everywhere to develop their minds to participate in the pioneering of a New World...." (2 )
The Mars Society, which is politically aligned with NASA, has grown tremendously since this manifesto was written and has played a pivotal role in informing the masses about Mars. It sponsors conferences, spreads publicity, holds multinational events, and raises money from private organizations to help fund NASA’s biennial missions to Mars. There have been many breakthrough voyages to Mars, fly-by missions like Mariner 4 (1964) and Mariner 6 (1969), and landing missions like Viking 1 (1976), the Pathfinder Mission (1997), and the Global Surveyor (1999). The goal is to send humans to Mars in the next decade. In order to colonize Mars, however, we would have to engineer the planet, otherwise known as "terraforming." According to Robert Zubrin’s book, The Case for Mars, (3) this means heating up the planet with greenhouse gases, causing the temperature to rise, melting the polar caps for water, and creating an atmosphere by breaking its oxygen free from the carbon dioxide trapped beneath the surface. But the first step toward this extraterrestrial environmental feat is simply getting humans to Mars, and then bringing back samples of soil, rock, and atmosphere.
This hype about Mars echoes the turn-of-the-century efforts of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific Railroad to promote tourism of the American West. Industries and special interest groups carefully sowed the seeds of the California dream. Artists, sponsored by the railroads, traveled and painted beautiful scenic landscapes promoting the land of promise to easterners. Agribusiness commissioned idyllic painted labels of bountiful farmlands to be placed on orange crates headed for eastern markets; these and other advertising campaigns targeted a wide range of people from entrepreneurs, retirees, and religious groups. Today, unprecedented government projects, such as the Mars Millennium Project (sponsored by NASA, the U. S. Department of Education, the NEA, and the J. Paul Getty Trust) are reminiscent of this early propaganda, but the dream they are sowing is space travel with youth as the target audience. The mission statement declares:
"The Mars Millennium Project…challenges students across the nation to imagine and design a community for 100 people colonizing Mars in the year 2030…Working in teams with educators, community leaders, artists and professionals in every field, students investigate the best of the past and present, and apply what they learn to plan the future. Their goal is to create a new Martian community, scientifically sound, and offering an aesthetically pleasing, high quality of life." (4) ...<more>
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