May 22nd is the UN’s International Day for Biological Diversity. The theme for 2022 is “Building a shared future for all life”. That is a very Star Trek theme so what is the day about and how has Trek shown Biodiversity over the years?
The United Nations’s website describes the day as: “Fitting within the context of the ongoing United Nations Decade on Restoration, which highlights that biodiversity is the answer to several sustainable development challenges, the slogan conveys the message that biodiversity is the foundation upon which we can build back better.”
In 2019 The Marine Diaries blog, an ocean science communication initiative, wrote about Star Trek, focusing of course on the Whales. They make a couple of quite pointed comments about how the world of 1986 was viewing the potential for extinction of Humpback Whales. They suggest that having lost the species the human race only went to the effort of taking them to the 24th Century for their own selfish reasons.
This of course misses the point that Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was actually one of the key shots in highlighting to the general public the plight of Humpbacks, which has led to the recovery of their population. It also misses the current critical issue, that of plastic waste in the oceans. A survey of a dead whale recently found over 30 kilograms of plastic waste in its stomach.
Species exploitation has been a theme running through Star Trek. In the Voyager episode, ‘Equinox’ the crew of that ship uses the nucleogenic aliens as fuel. The first season of Star Trek: Discovery covers the exploitation of the Tardigrade “Ripper”, including Lorca’s attempt to weaponise it.
In the end, Saru and Burnham release Ripper once a way to plug Stamets into the mycelial network had been found. Given Stamets’s subsequent negative experiences of being connected to the Spore Drive, it could be said that this just swaps exploiting one species for another.
Another aspect of the biodiversity crisis here is habitat eradication. Star Trek covered this in the Next Generation episode ‘Home Soil’. Visiting a terraforming colony on Velara III, they find that a crystal-based lifeform is resisting attempts to alter their world, and is fighting back. This can be seen as an analogue for the plight of the Amazon where resistance from indigenous people and species loss through deforestation has become well known.
All of these problems and others highlighted across the various Star Trek shows have direct comparisons to our own world. THE UN and the Convention on Biological Diversity use two slogans that fit well into the Star Trek story. “Biological diversity resources are the pillars upon which we build civilizations”, and “When biodiversity has a problem, humanity has a problem”.
A lesson that it seems we have yet to learn. Watching some of these thought-provoking episodes will hopefully persuade people to reflect on the core message of Star Trek, that there is hope and that we are in charge of our own destiny.
You can watch the UN’s video on IBD day 2022 here...
