Star Trek and History (38 page)

In a sense, then, Borg mapping is a process of hyperobjectivity—a creepy extension of our contemporary scientific maps. All maps, by necessity, are forced to leave things out, and while most maps that claim to be “accurate” exclude some of the most important parts of any given space (like the weather, or a place name, or a pothole, or the people), the Borg take this process a step further and cartographically eradicate everything deemed insignificant. All that is left are numerical markers—the absolute assimilation of the spatial Other.

“Starfleet could've sent a probe out here to make maps and take pictures, but they didn't. They sent us so we could explore with our own senses.”

—Captain Jonathan Archer,
ENT,
“Civilization”

One of the key differences between the Borg and all other
Star Trek
species is how they make maps. Both methods, however, are derived from our own understanding of cartography and the historical development of maps used in exploration. Moreover, both methods can have potentially negative consequences. For decades, the Bajorans were allowed to suffer under the oppressive rule of the Cardassians simply because the atrocities took place within Cardassian territory, “behind a line on a map” (
TNG
, “Ensign Ro”). Most of the time, however, the Federation and the Dominion use maps to try to find some spatial common ground. Obviously, this is not the case with the Borg, which explicitly use its spatial designations to not only assimilate everything possible but also to define the very being (if there exists such a thing) of its drones.

On a very basic level,
Star Trek
carries forward the historical legacy of cartography by forcing us to rethink spatial boundaries and by encouraging us to continually interact with both maps and history. The struggle to define territory, draw borders, and navigate toward strange new worlds (or home) characterizes, to a great extent, the power and ability of
Star Trek
's characters to map the space around them
for themselves.
To simply allow our spaces to be mapped for us, without consensus or consultation, reeks of Borg-like dreariness and intellectual laziness. If we are to believe Q in the final episode of
The Next Generation
, attempting to understand the spaces within which we exist might allow us to move past simply “mapping stars and studying nebulae” and begin “charting the unknowable possibilities of existence” (
TNG
, “All Good Things . . .”). When dealing with maps and history, then, one of the most important actions we can ever take is—as Captain Picard might order us—to engage!
22

Notes

1.
It should be noted that Captain Picard is not the first
Enterprise
commander to use this term. Apparently, the directive to “engage” is fairly common terminology among Starfleet officers and was used by both captains Pike (
TOS
, “The Menagerie, Part I” and “The Menagerie, Part II”) and Kirk (
TOS
, “The Naked Time” and “The Corbomite Maneuver”), among others.

2.
Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen,
Deep Space and Sacred Time:
Star Trek
in the American Mythos
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 23, 174–175.

3.
John Krygier and Denis Wood, “Ce n'est pas le Monde” [This is not the world] in
Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory
, eds. Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins (New York: Routledge, 2009), 198–199.

4.
Peter Whitfield,
The Mapping of the Heavens
(London: The British Library, 1995), 25, 47.

5.
Ibid., 75.

6.
Renae Satterley, “The Rediscovery of Two Celestial Maps from 1537,” in
Imago Mundi
62, no. 1 (2010): 89.

7.
John Noble Wilford,
The Mapmakers
(New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 60.

8.
Ibid., 64.

9.
Mark Monmonier,
Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 25.

10.
E. Dekker, “Early Explorations of the Southern Celestial Sky,”
Annals of Science
44 (1987): 440.

11.
Dalia Varanka, “The Manly Map: The English Construction of Gender in Early Modern Cartography,” in
Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating Morality and Space
, eds. Lorraine Dowler, Josephine Carubia, and Bonj Szczygiel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 227.

12.
Ibid., 225–226.

13.
Ibid., 226.

14.
Wilford,
The Mapmakers
, 134–137, 140.

15.
Ibid., 154.

16.
Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Debbie Mirek,
The
Star Trek
Encyclopedia
(New York: Pocket Books, 1999), 393.

17.
Neil Smith,
Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space
(New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 69.

18.
John K. Wright, “Highlights in American Cartography, 1939–1949,” in
Comptes Rendus du Congrés International de Géographie: Lisbon 1949, Vol. 1
(Lisbon: Centro Tip Colonial, 1950), 299.

19.
Mary Murphy, “History of the Army Map Service Map Collection,” in
Federal Government Map Collecting: A Brief History
, ed. Richard W. Stephenson (Washington, DC: Special Libraries Association, 1969), 3. In World War I, only (!) nine million maps had been produced.

20.
Julia Witwer, “The Best of Both Worlds: On
Star Trek
's Borg,” in
Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies
, eds. Gabriel Brahm Jr. and Mark Driscoll (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 273.

21.
Ibid., 272.

22.
I owe this essay to my father, Martin Mingus. His enthusiasm for all things
Star Trek
knows no limit. Some of my best childhood memories involve watching
The Next Generation
with my dad, acting out its scenes, and discussing with him some of the show's more philosophical topics. I also want to thank my uncle Steven Mingus, whose
Star Trek
Super Nintendo game cartridge opened up a whole new world of digital distraction to me. I dedicate every book and article I never end up writing to him. May you both “live long and prosper.”

Dolly Jørgensen

Spock:
To hunt a species to extinction is not logical.

Dr. Gillian Taylor:
Whoever said the human race was logical?

—Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

In
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
, the inhabitants of twenty-third-century Earth learn all too well the price of their illogical behavior. By hunting the humpback whale to extinction in the twenty-first century, humankind had sealed its own fate. The humpbacks had been in communication with aliens in the twentieth century, but they had no descendants to reply to an alien probe visiting the planet two centuries later. Earth seemed to be on the verge of destruction, as the seemingly omnipotent probe demanded a reply. Luckily, the
Enterprise
crew saved the Earth inhabitants from a watery grave with the help of time travel, a biologist, nuclear fuel from a naval vessel, plexiglas, and two twentieth-century whales.

Sometimes we think of science fiction as presenting escapist, made-up fantasy worlds. From its beginnings in the 1960s until the present, however,
Star Trek
has commented on contemporary social issues, establishing itself as part of a larger discourse on the state of the world.
1
Contemporary environmental concerns are a major theme in
Star Trek.
In this chapter, we show how the portrayal of animal species' extinction in the television shows and movies traces gradual changes in environmentalist thinking over the last forty-five years.

Although species extinction could include the mass destruction of worlds and the extinction of peoples, like the loss of the Vulcans in the 2009 movie
Star Trek
or the civil war that wiped out the population of Cheron (
TOS
, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”), the focus here is on creatures equivalent to animals rather than civilizations that are considered equivalent to humans. By limiting the discussion to creatures considered to be animals, we can place species extinction within the prevailing environmentalist thought of the twentieth century.

Star Trek
has presented species extinction as a complex problem, one that has evolved over the course of the series' history. In the 1960s, a growing environmental movement stressed the need to save species from extinction, yet there was a tension between species extinction and human needs. In the 1980s, the rising rate of species extinction coupled with our knowledge gaps about the roles of species in the web of life created the sense of ecological crisis. Environmentalists around the world began to concentrate on so-called charismatic species, such as whales, because attractive and compelling species could motivate large membership in conservationist groups. In the 1990s, the prevailing sentiment was that humans needed to take active roles in conservation, including relocating individual animals to preserve the species under threat. These changes in environmentalist thought have made their way into various incarnations of
Star Trek
.

Although not the first episode filmed for
Star Trek
, “The Man Trap” was the episode network executives selected to launch the series on television on September 8, 1966. In the episode, the crew encounters a creature from the planet M-113, which begins to kill members of the crew of the
Enterprise
in order to obtain salt from their blood. It is the last of its kind. Although at the beginning of the episode, the ancient inhabitants of M-113 are called a “civilization” in the captain's comments, the alien is never treated as being equivalent to humans. When the archeologist Robert Crater admits that he knew about the creature, he likens it to the buffalo (technically the animal is the American bison,
Bison bison
):

Crater:
She was the last of her kind.

Kirk:
The last of her kind?

Crater:
The last of its kind. Earth history, remember? Like the passenger pigeon or buffalo.

. . .

Spock:
The Earth buffalo. What about it?

Crater:
Once there were millions of them; prairies black with them. One herd covered three whole states, and when they moved, they were like thunder.

Spock:
And now they're gone. Is that what you mean?

Crater:
Like the creatures here. Once there were millions of them. Now there's one left.

The dialogue implies that the bison had been wiped out like the passenger pigeon, which became extinct in 1914 even though billions of pigeons existed in North America when the Europeans arrived. The bison was almost hunted to extinction in the late nineteenth century by commercial hunters who slaughtered millions for the skins. Privately owned herds and protected herds in Western national parks largely saved the animal from eradication.
2
The near demise of the bison became a widely acknowledged environmental misstep by the turn of the century, and efforts to save the bison were lauded in popular magazines.
3
Although the bison was not a threatened species by the 1960s, it had become iconic as a symbol of near extinction. The writers of
Star Trek
, projecting two centuries into the future, thus decided that bison could still become extinct by the twenty-third century.

Extinction has been called “the great theme of 20th century conservation.”
4
By the 1960s, endangered and threatened species had become a hot topic. In 1961, sixteen of the world's leading conservationists signed the Morges Manifesto, which became the foundational document for the World Wildlife Fund (now known as the WWF). The manifesto poignantly blamed modern civilization for the loss of animals worldwide: “All over the world today vast numbers of fine and harmless wild creatures are losing their lives, or their homes, in an orgy of thoughtless and needless destruction. In the name of advancing civilization they are being shot or trapped out of existence on land taken to be exploited. . . . In thise [
sic
] senseless orgy the nineteen-sixties promise to beat all past records for wiping out the world's wild life.”
5
The WWF, with its focus on saving wildlife from extinction, grew into the world's leading conservation organization, with nearly five million members across the globe by the time of its fifty-year anniversary.
6

The WWF attempted to keep species threatened with extinction in the public consciousness. There were plans to construct a World Wildlife Federation Pavilion for Expo '67 in Montreal, which served as the Canadian centennial celebration and the World's Fair in 1967. The pavilion was planned with three sections, the first to highlight extinct animals such as the dodo, the second to display presently endangered species such as the whooping crane, and the third to show species saved from extinction, including the American bison.
7
Although the pavilion was not built, the plans demonstrate the interest people had in endangered species and the identification of the bison as a species under the former threat of extinction.

Legislators in the United States likewise had become intensely interested in protecting endangered species by the 1960s, although interest in protecting game like migratory birds stretches back to the late nineteenth century. The Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965 offered the first formal recognition of endangered species by allowing Congress to purchase land “for the preservation of species of fish or wildlife that are threatened with extinction.”
8
In 1966, Congress passed the Endangered Species Preservation Act, the first federal endangered species legislation, which stated bluntly, “One of the unfortunate consequences of growth and development in the United States has been the extermination of some native species of fish and wildlife.”
9
These legislative moves demonstrate that endangered species were clearly on the national agenda in the 1960s.
10
The allusion to the fate of the bison in “The Man Trap” fits within this broader social concern about endangered species.