Author Tim O'Brien once said that the ultimate test of a true war story was whether or not you could feel it in your stomach. But recently I've begun to wonder if the mark of a genuine story of ecology and ecological degradation is the "smell factor". Let me explain.
From the time I was a teenager, I always felt that Frank Herbert's "Dune" wasn't very plausible. To be sure it was a brilliantly thought out work, the likes of which had never been imagined before and which later science fiction writers take as an immense compliment to have their work widely compared to. But all the same, it never passed the smell test.
For one thing I always wondered why the Fremen men weren't all sterile from wearing those stillsuits all the time, and how so much advanced intergalactic civilization building complete with such advanced spiritual and philosophical ideas came from a society where a bunch of guilds and aristocrats primarily fought over shares in a company called CHOAM, which was basically a interplanetary Walmart. Can you imagine a bunch of Bene Gesserit sitting in a roomful of Wal-Mart shareholders, complete with Hillary Clinton? I can't. But going back to the smell test, I always wondered why aristocrats like Jessica and Paul didn't start vomitting upon first encountering the Fremen. Or why the Fremen supposedly had great abilities to hide in caves and rocks, and ambush every enemy, when my guess would be that you could smell a group of them miles away downwind. That is seeing how most them had worn stillsuits and not bathed since childhood.
This week, I was reading another science fiction novel called "Alanya to Alanya", involving the arrival of repitilian aliens disguised as humans in 2076, where the situation with the water really passed the smell test to me. Unlike a certain childhood favorite of mine, where the alien reptiles came to steal earth's water, these reptilians basically came with an ultimatum to humanity to clean up it's act (war, pollution, misogyny, racism, class inequity etc) in a big way, or else have their technology limited by the aliens. Although the aliens had no intention of taking earth's water, it was apparent that the humans in this future had screwed the hydrosphere up colossally on their own. In fact, in this future one of the most obvious class markers involved water and the way people smelled.
Basically in this future municipal water was no longer for drinking, cooking, or watering plants but rather for bathing, washing, cleaning, toilets, and such. Although supposedly the quality was the issue, municipalities added a non-toxic but bitter chemical designed to keep people from drinking it. Water for drinking or cooking had to be purchased. And everyone who bathed and washed their clothes in municipal water smelled faintly of that chemical. Only the elite classes can afford ammenities where their household water didn't contain that chemical, and therefore didn't smell of it. In the book people who had been around the middle classes and working classes for a long time didn't notice it, but to those who spent their time amongst the elite it was very apparent.
Now to me that sounded all too probable. Of course, it has been suggested by some that a lot of energy can be saved by holding bathing and toilet water to a lower quality than drinking water-if the infrastructure could be worked out. But would it really be necessary to add a noxious chemical to the lower quality municipal water? And would selling bottled water for drinking, like the society in the book, be a good solution? If this society were real, I'd be inclined to wonder whether the noxious chemical was added to prevent ill health, or whether it was added to make people depend water sellers for food and drink. Of course, history teaches us that water sellers have often served as a mechanism to control the populus or enforce massive social inqualities both in the past and perhaps in our times with water privatization. The main character although a historian, doesn't seem to make that connection, but rather takes the situation for granted. Similarly in our world although the tap water is generally high quality and does not have a bittering agent added, the bottled water companies have largely hoodwinked the population into drinking their product. Amazing numbers of well educated people as well as low income people who do not need bottled water as an added expense, buy it anyway on the unshakeable convinction that the tap water is unsafe.
Indeed I wonder if the author added this plot device knowingly, or fully believing the myths that so many people buy into. Either way this plot device passed the "sniff test", in that it was ridiculous, mundane, illogical, and used an absurd set of rules for nefarious purposes.
Of course, I've long agreed with David Suzuki's stance that generally people should either trust their local water or raise hell if they honestly couldn't. And sadly many people in today's world are dependent on water sellers for not so much quality as quantity. A surprising number of people rely on solutions such as clay pots containing rice husks as a sort of water filter-the kind of filters sold in REI are a bit out of their budgets!! In the past this was why water sellers were such an effective way of enforcing social heirarchies and various inequities. And water sellers were rarely held liable if their "wares" made people sick. In the 19th century the English speaking world got the idea that beer was safer to drink than water. Which basically meant that cholera began to decline but alcoholism rates were horrendous. Ironically, as it became increasingly accepted that basic access to safe drinking water at least should be a human right and as filters available in the developed world became increasingly high tech, bottled water became an industry associated with class and status.
So while I could never believe that human beings would actually live like the Fremen in Frank Herbert's "Dune", I will never underestimate what, err, fishy smelling, machinations human societies up with involving water.
Say Goodnight Readers!
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