Timothée Poisot

Few books came close to shaping the way I think about ecology quite like Dune did.

Disclaimer: spoilers for the first volume of a 60 years old sci-fi series, I guess

Part of the reason is that its themes (the instrumentalization of environmental safety for political power, the futility to draw boundaries around planetary concerns, cool big-ass worms) resonate more now than they did in 1965. I grew up at the same time as the biodiversity and climate crises started to unfold, as we realized that our societal endgame would be the control of environmental resources, and Frank Herbert captured this sense of tension extremely well. Reading Dune in high school, and re-reading it a few months before into my last undergrad year, made me realize how much ecology could matter, not as science, but as practice.

But this is something different that cemented Dune as foundational for every piece of ecological research I ended up developing: ecology is a science that deals in equal parts in abstract concepts and real-world consequences. This is to some degree true of all sciences, but the thread that connects ecology to everything else has always seemed more obvious to me.

The ecological message of Dune is simple:

A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

It has become more and more of an ontological foundation of my approach to research, and motivated me to think about mechanisms less for their own sake, and more as a way to understand and anticipate the consequences of these mechanisms playing out.

At the same time, I started to spend more time engaging seriously with the policy consequences of ecology, and the ecological consequences of policy. Throughout this process, I started thinking back about Kynes (the Imperial Planetologist) as a thesis, Liet (the Fremen environmental activist) as the antithesis, and the synthesis of Liet-Kynes.

Thesis: Dr. Kynes was supposed to document the planetary system as a way to uphold political status quo. Although an academic, he was a political appointee. More than that, Kynes was a nepo baby: he inherited the position from his father. Through his position as a scientist, Kynes ends up wielding immense political power, as he becomes a de facto power broker: he can judge who gets to access and benefit from the resources that the planet holds. Does it sound like too much power concentrated into the hands of someone who seems wholly unqualified for it? I agree.

Antithesis: Liet was supposed to understand the planetary system as a way to upend political status quo. Her purpose as a Fremen is to terraform the planet, so that it benefits to the people who live on it, and not to those who seek to exploit its resources. She is fully aware that this work is existential, and that making mistakes will have a very real cost. Nothing in her work is particularly academic, but her knowledge of the system is used to prioritize, over the self-serving economic interests (the exploitation of resources), the needs of the people (a stable environment and self-governance).

Synthesis: Liet-Kynes. They must have slept so peacefully at night. Academic privilege and structural power walk hand in hand, and this give us (academics) the potential to act on the systems in which we work. Stepping into a policy debate without interrogating the motivations of its actors, the consequences of its outcomes, and the values we embody when we speak or remain silent, is how we cause immense, maybe irreparable harm. But academic privilege is not a curse, and we can leave the comfort of neutrality to ensure that we work towards something. This is what fascinates me in the character of Liet-Kynes: the reconciliation between belonging to a system that oppresses, and using this status to work towards more justice.

Feyerabend, in the introduction of Against Method, writes about the need to “[play] the game of Reason in order to undercut the authority of Reason”. Beyond the intended message about the futility of prescriptivism for scientific methodology, I like to read more into this exhortation: that we can hold onto this academic position and privilege to act meaningfully, sometimes in ways that run against the self-interests of academia. This is, as Liet said, the willow’s purpose.