Star Trek and History (39 page)

At the same time, however, there is a tension in “The Man Trap” between the endangered species and harm to humans. Professor Crater defends the creature's actions as a survival mechanism for an almost extinct species. “They needed salt to stay alive. There was no more salt. It's the last one. The buffalo. There is no difference.” Kirk retorts that there is one difference: “Your creature is killing my people” (
TOS
, “The Man Trap”). Saving animals from extinction is fine, as long as the human price is not too high. In the end, Spock pleads with McCoy to shoot the creature as it attempts to kill Kirk by feeding on his body salt. McCoy fires and saves Kirk.

This anthropocentric view of what is worth saving fit with the prevailing sentiments about endangered species during the 1960s. Endangered and threatened species were not seen as valuable in and of themselves, but rather because of their “educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value” to humans, a concept we now call “ecosystem services.”
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The balance between animal and human welfare came under scrutiny in the 1970s when conservationists fought a legal battle over the listing of the snail darter as an endangered species, which delayed the construction of a hydroelectric power dam in Tennessee. In the end, the snail darter, like the “man trap” creature of planet M-113, was sacrificed for human welfare.
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There is a twinge of remorse in the last scene of the episode when Spock asks the captain if something is wrong, and Kirk replies, “I was thinking about the buffalo, Mister Spock” (
TOS
, “The Man Trap”). But there is also an implied contrast between the justification for the extermination of the M-113 creature, which was threatening the ship's crew, and the bison, which had been slaughtered for rampant commercial gain. This contrast between direct threat and commercial gain would appear as a common thread in
Star Trek
's portrayal of endangered species.

Later in the first season, “The Devil in the Dark” presents what could be the same story—an unseen creature is killing miners on Janus VI, a strategic mining planet that produces vital pergium, a radioactive element, and other costly minerals, and it must be hunted. Yet the story twists to reveal that the miners have in fact been killing the soon-to-hatch children of the Horta, leaving the race on the verge of extinction. Captain Kirk turns into a protector of the Horta, recognizing that the creature is only protecting itself. Science and reason factor into the decision to allow the Horta to live—permitting the Horta to exist, in fact, benefits humans.

In the episode, Spock first suggests that the creature may be the last of its kind when he and the captain encounter a maze of tunnels that couldn't have been made by an average animal:

Kirk:
Then we're dealing with more than one creature, despite your tricorder readings, or we have a creature with an extremely long life span.

Spock:
Or it is the last of a race of creatures which made these tunnels. If so, if it is the only survivor of a dead race, to kill it would be a crime against science.

Kirk:
Mister Spock, our mission is to protect this colony, to get the pergium moving again. This is not a zoological expedition. Maintain a constant reading on the creature. If we have to, we'll use our phasers to cut our own tunnels. We'll try to surround it. I'm sorry, Mister Spock, but I'm afraid the creature must die.

Spock:
I see no alternative myself, Captain. It merely seems a pity.

Spock's sentiment is not a moral or ethical argument against extinction, but rather a scientific one. Spock believes the creature would be useful as an object of study because it is the first silicon-based life-form the Federation has ever encountered. This anthropocentric take on extinction reflects both Spock's scientific orientation and the common 1960s environmentalist approach of focusing on the human benefit of killing animals.

Although Kirk insists that the creature must be killed regardless of being the last of its kind, when he comes face-to-face with it, he changes his mind. Because the creature does not immediately attack him, Kirk decides to forgo his plan and to try to figure out what is motivating the creature. Spock proposes to do a Vulcan mind meld with the alien life-form. During the joining, he cries out in the Horta's voice, “Murder. Of thousands. Devils! Eternity ends. The chamber of the ages. The altar of tomorrow. Murderers. Stop them! Kill! Strike back! Monsters! . . . It is the end of life. Eternity stops. Go out into the tunnel. To the chamber of the ages. Cry for the children” (
TOS
, “The Devil in the Dark”).

Through the mind meld Spock learns that the silicon nodules that the miners have been destroying are Horta eggs. The miners are in fact the devils in the dark, not the Horta. As Spock later explains to the miners, “There have been many generations of Horta on this planet. Every fifty thousand years, the entire race dies, all but one, like this one, but the eggs live. She cares for them, protects them. And when they hatch, she is the mother to them, thousands of them. This creature here is the mother of her race” (
TOS
, “The Devil in the Dark”).

The Horta's actions are then justified, because “she fought back in the only way she knew how, as any mother would fight when her children are in danger,” as Kirk explains it (
TOS
, “The Devil in the Dark”). According to William Shatner, this twist of turning the Horta from a killer to a sympathetic creature made the episode “intelligent and highly compelling.”
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Yet the resolution of the Horta's potential extinction does not come from Kirk's moral argument alone—the miners could still have decided that it was preferable for the Horta species to die out in order to protect their mining interests. But Kirk offers up a solution that benefits the miners:

Gentlemen, the Horta moves through rock the way we move through air, and it leaves tunnels. The greatest natural miners in the universe. It seems to me we could make an agreement, reach a
modus vivendi.
They tunnel. You collect and process, and your process operation would be a thousand times more profitable. (
TOS
, “The Devil in the Dark”)

Kirk's suggestion is right on target—the head of the mining operation reports at the end of the episode that the Horta children are tunneling out enormous quantities of minerals, and both sides are content. In this episode, the endangered species was transformed from a threat to a benefit, and thus it was saved from certain doom.

The conflict between conservation and development was a central concern of the twentieth century. The environmentalist movement of the 1960s was a response to the human degradation of nature, but it could not ignore human needs. Unlike in “The Man Trap” when the last individual of a species is killed, the Horta survives because a balance is struck between what is good for nature and what is good for humans.

“The Devil in the Dark” revealed that what we don't know
can
hurt us. The miners did not understand that the silicon nodules were the Horta eggs; by destroying them, they incurred the wrath of the Horta mother and nearly missed out on harnessing the power of thousands of little miners working on their behalf. Creatures and humans could have a symbiotic relationship. This would become the major theme of the fourth motion picture in the
Star Trek
series,
The Voyage Home
.

In
The Voyage Home
, Earth is under siege from an alien probe, and after some quick analysis, Spock deciphers the probe's signal as the song of a humpback whale (
Megaptera novaeangliae
). Unfortunately, humpback whales were hunted to extinction in the twenty-first century, so the crew of the
Enterprise
has to make a trip back in time to find a whale and return it to the twenty-third century.

The environmentalist theme of
The Voyage Home
was no accident. Leonard Nimoy, who directed the film, was reading the Pulitzer Prize–winning book
Biophilia
by the ecologist Edward O. Wilson at the time that script ideas for the movie were being developed. In
Biophilia
, Wilson argued that humans have “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.”
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Wilson believed that humans want to be around nature because they are intimately linked with nature; in fact, all species are linked together in webs that could crumble if even one species is removed. According to Nimoy, this idea caught his attention:

In his work, Wilson talks about the vast numbers of species becoming extinct, and predicted that by the 1990s, Earth would lose as many as 10,000 species per year. That's
one
species per
hour
! Most disturbingly, many of these lost species would never have been catalogued; we would never have the chance to know what they were or what function they performed in the cycle of nature. They would simply vanish without leaving behind a record of their existence. The grim future painted by
Biophilia
haunted my thoughts.
15

The notion that species can be extirpated without us ever knowing their role or purpose was key for Nimoy. In a conversation Nimoy had with a friend about
Biophilia
and endangered species, the humpback whale came up as an example. Because scientists are unsure about the function of whale song, Nimoy decided on a plotline for the movie that focused on how what we don't know—the function of the whale song—can hurt us, because we've caused the whales' extinction and now we're in danger.
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The choice of the whale as the species under threat was fitting for a movie filmed and released in 1986, because of the history of the antiwhaling movement. The International Whaling Commission (IWC), a voluntary international organization founded in 1946 to review and revise whaling standards worldwide, had instituted a ban on all commercial hunting of humpback whales and blue whales (
Balaenoptera musculus
) in 1966.
17
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an international agreement that took effect in 1975 to limit international trade in wild plants and animals, listed several species of whale, including humpback, blue, and grey whales, as endangered species.
18
Two vocal environmentalist protest organizations specifically targeted what they considered illegal whaling activities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Greenpeace launched its antiwhaling campaign in 1975, which included harassing whaling ships at sea, especially in Icelandic waters, and the militant organization Sea Shepherd began targeting whaling ships in 1978, including ramming ships at sea and sinking ships in port.
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Antiwhaling sentiment was growing fierce by 1980.

Very few governments objected to protecting large whales, but the IWC entered a sea of controversy in 1982 when it moved to extend the protection. That year, backed by numerous nonwhaling country members, the IWC implemented a moratorium on all commercial whaling worldwide, regardless of the species, scheduled to begin in late 1985. Several countries active in whaling of smaller whale types, including Japan, Norway, and Iceland, voted against the measure and continued hunting whales.

The action of
The Voyage Home
occurs within this context. When the
Enterprise
crew (who are manning a Klingon Bird-of-Prey) travels back in time to 1985 to search for a humpback whale, they stumble upon the Cetacean Institute in San Francisco. On a guided tour of the facility, Dr. Gillian Taylor introduces Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock to the plight of whales in the twentieth century:

Since the dawn of time, men have harvested whales for a variety of purposes, most of which can be achieved synthetically at this point. One hundred years ago, using hand-thrown harpoons, man did plenty of damage, but that is nothing compared to what he has achieved in this century. This is mankind's legacy, whales hunted to the brink of extinction. Virtually gone is the blue whale, the largest creature ever to inhabit the Earth. Despite all attempts at banning whaling, there are still countries and pirates currently engaged in the slaughter of these inoffensive creatures. Where the humpback whale once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, today there are less than ten thousand specimens alive and those that are taken are no longer fully grown. In addition, many of the females are killed, while still bearing unborn calves. (
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
)

During her talk, graphic video footage of a whale hunt and bloody slaughter is shown to the guests. Dr. Taylor's monologue reflects clearly the antiwhaling sentiment and the controversies over the continuation of whaling practices as of 1985.

When the ship is ready to take on its oceanic passengers, Dr. Taylor discovers that the institute's humpback whales, George and Gracie, have been released into the Pacific. The crew hurries to track the whales and discovers a whaling ship is nearby. As our heroes speed toward the whales, the whaling ship is closing in. The whalers “are largely bearded; they are Northern Europeans, maybe Swedes, Icelanders or Russians, all famous as Humpback hunters.”
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The whalers get ready for the kill; they load their harpoon, and when the whales breech, they fire it. Sulu manages to fly the Bird-of-Prey in between the harpoon and the whale, forcing the harpoon to fall harmlessly into the water. The whole sequence mimics a common antiwhaling practice used by Greenpeace of moving people in Zodiac inflatable boats between a whaling ship and its prey.
21

The Voyage Home
reflects several 1980s ideas about extinction. The twenty-third-century interlopers in the twentieth century know that humpback whales will be hunted to extinction, and this will have a price. Kirk poignantly comments near the end of the movie when gazing at George and Gracie on board the ship: “It's ironic. When man was killing these creatures, he was destroying his own future.” The line picks up on
Biophilia
's emphasis on a web of life facing the challenges of globally rising extinction rates. It also taps into contemporary antiwhaling fervor and the concerns about the future of whales. Many have called
Star Trek IV
one of the greatest environmental movies of all time.