Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis

5. Out of the Silent Planet: Re-imagining Ecology

What I do know is that here and now, as our only possible practical preparation for [meeting extraterrestrial beings], you and I should resolve to stand firm against all exploitation and all theological imperialism. It will not be fun. We shall be called traitors to our own species. We shall be hated of almost all men; even of some religious men. And we must not give back one single inch. We shall probably fail, but let us go down fighting for the right side. Our loyalty is due not to our species but to God. Those who are, or can become, his sons, are our real brothers even if they have shells or tusks. It is spiritual, not biological , kinship that counts. —C. S. Lewis, “Shall We Lose God in Outer Space?” Life in general is mobility itself; particular manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. —Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution In recent decades biologists have discovered life in some very unlikely places. Extremely hot or cold environments, such as deep-sea vents and pools under Antarctic ice, harbor an abundance of creatures. Just decades ago, conventional wisdom held that nothing could live in such places. Now we find that things do live there, things that have expanded our notions of what animals may be like. In the past, we have ruled out the possibility of life in certain places because our imaginations would not allow us to believe life could be there or because the life in those places escaped our detection. Saltwater microbes don’t grow under the Out of the Silent Planet Chapter 5 Re-imagining Ecology  152 Out of the Silent Planet 153 same conditions as freshwater microbes, and so most of the saltwater microbes we know of went undetected for centuries. It is a risky business to assume that what we have not yet seen is not there, especially since we often do not see what is right in front of our eyes because our imaginations have blind spots. This is one of the main themes of Out of the Silent Planet. Our imaginations have been formed by our myths; our myths have made us think our planet is either alone or under siege by hostile alien species; and so our myths have reinforced our hostility to other species. What we needed, Lewis thought, was a myth that restored some old but neglected ideas about who we are and what our world is like. We have rejected many old myths about angels and fairies because we cannot see angels or fairies. But maybe the problem was not in the old myths but in the eyes of our imaginations. Out of the Silent Planet is a story about space travel, but its setting is decidedly pastoral and earthbound. The first novel of Lewis’s Space Trilogy begins under the shelter of a tree in rural England. In the opening chapter, Cambridge professor of philology Elwin Ransom is on a walking vacation.1 A rainstorm has just passed, and we first glimpse Ransom emerging from the branches of a large chestnut tree, where he had sought shelter. Lewis’s description of the landscape calls attention to fine details, pushing the beauty of the natural environment into the foreground of our imagination: “Every tree and blade of grass was dripping, and the road shone like a river” (OSP, i). This thoroughly terrestrial introduction serves to inform the reader that Lewis is not interested in space travel for its own sake. Lewis held that the point of fantastic travel to other worlds ought to be to help us to see something about our own world that we could not see from our current vantage point. As Lewis wrote in The Magician’s Nephew, “What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing” (MN, x). For Lewis, space travel stories were an ideal vehicle to help us arrive at a new place to stand and see our own world. Worldviews and Other Worlds So this image at the beginning of the book is not accidentally pastoral, nor is it the last time Ransom will find sanctuary under great trees. Just as we see in Lewis’s other works, trees as protectors of life are a recurrent theme in this book. In the story, Ransom will find sanctuary sev- 154 Narnia and the Fields of Arbol eral times under the great...