"There's an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet," Kynes said. "You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life. Life - all life - is in the service of life...." .... From the charts emerged a figure. Kynes reported it. Three per cent. If they could get three per cent of the green plant element on Arrakis involved in forming carbon compounds, they'd have their self-sustaining cycle.
Another prescient theme: We now see increasing discussion of planetary-scale environmental engineering.
Cooling the Earth: CO2, SO2, and The Sunscreen Fix
(Yes, the ideas I warned of in October seem to be gaining traction. We'll see.) Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.
we'd better beat it out of you with a Ouija board then. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
I think that is why Herbert wrote the book. All of the rest of it, the awesome work of world-building, the political gamesmanship of the Great Houses, the psychological imaginings of the spice drug and precognition and the Kwisatz Haderach, the mysterious agendas of the Bene Gesserit, the spacefaring Guild, and all the rest, as magnificent as it is, all of that Herbert created to make an interesting story that would draw the reader. And all of that goes to create believable a universe in which Arrakis, the planet Dune, makes some kind of sense, and in which the very concept of planetary ecological engineering, as presented in the person of Pardot Kynes, makes sense. Now where are we going and what's with the handbasket?
