Turning the Red Planet Blue

In the pages of Odyssey magazine we have often discussed Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic series of novels and short stories about the terraforming of Mars. The trilogy of novels culminates in Blue Mars when terraforming allows the creation of rivers and oceans on the planet’s surface. Presumably the seeding of these bodies of water came about as a result of fish stocks originating in the oceans of Earth. Fish and other aquatic animals that came from the settler’s home world.

Planetary architect: Kim Stanley Robinson

This part of the story assumes that Earth’s oceans are sufficiently healthy to contribute to this process. In reality, over the last fifty years, wildlife populations have experienced a staggering 73% decline, so unless some rewilding of Earth’s seas does indeed take place, Robinson’s fictional storyline is likely to faulter at this stage in the narrative.

Thankfully, efforts are being made to rewild our seas and to restore some of the species we have either lost in some areas of the ocean, or brought to the brink of extinction elsewhere. Many of these pioneering projects are described in Charles Clover’s excellent book Rewilding the Sea – How To Save Our Oceans. The book reads like a manual on how to achieve such acts of reclamation; the chapter on the almost magical way in which oysters attract other sea fauna, many of them keystone species, is worth the purchase price alone. And anyone who has ever visited that famous sea wall in the harbour at Lyme Bay (made famous in John Fowles’ novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman) will want to read the chapter on how marine wildlife now flourishes once more in that iconic stretch of the Jurassic coastline.   

So, in a sense these acts of rewilding are saving not just the oceans of the Earth but those that may one day exist on Mars. Which means that at some point in this predicted future (one of the many timelines that run through the canon of speculative fiction), the Solar System may have two blue planets in its retinue of life bearing worlds instead of just the one.

The oceans of “Barsoom” – rewilding the Red Planet with the offspring of the Earth’s own seas.

In Blue Mars, the colonisation of what has sometimes been described as Earth’s sister planet, and the transformation of its ecology, is so successful that the planet becomes a staging post for human expansion out to other worlds, including the colonisation of asteroids. It may well be that in this imagined future, the descendants of the first settlers on Mars one day return to Earth to help with the ongoing efforts to salvage its oceans, which would surely be a generational project requiring many decades of intervention, ingenuity and investment. In the real world of the here and now, there is arguably no greater priority for us as a species than the restoration of those seas.