Today I woke up to orange-tinted skies, a beacon of the wildfires up north. I originally planned to send this email next week, but the timing feels more urgent now.
The third instalment of Dune is coming out later this year. The spice must flow. This is the foundational logic of Arrakis — the desert planet of Dune, the most valuable substance in the universe, the resource around which an empire of extraction has been built. The Fremen have lived on Arrakis for generations, in intimate relationship with a harsh ecosystem that outsiders want to mine and destroy. The Empire arrives, extracts what it needs, and does not consider the cost to the people or the planet that produces it.
This is not a metaphor that requires a lot of unpacking in 2026.
Before I dive into the rest of this post, I want to take a beat and check in.
The ecology of Arrakis as colonial critique.
Herbert's world building in Dune is, among other things, a sustained examination of resource colonialism — the way that powerful empires organize themselves around the extraction of resources from lands and peoples they categorize as "undeveloped" and therefore available. The Fremen are not primitive. They are sophisticated ecological technologists who have survived in impossible conditions by building deep reciprocal relationships with their environment. They are also, from the Empire's perspective, obstacles.
The spice cannot be produced without the sandworms. The sandworms cannot survive without the conditions the Fremen maintain. The extraction logic that the Empire has built is, therefore, destroying the very system it depends on. This is not a metaphor unique to fiction.
Herbert introduced us to the world of Arrakis in the 1960s, its commentary was intentional and specific “The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.” he said, comparing the fictional regulator of his universe and the freshly launched Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries founded in 1960.
Annihilation and the environment fighting back.
Annihilation, both the film by Alex Garland and its source written by Jeff Vandermeer, gives us the reverse fantasy: not humans colonizing a natural world, but a natural world that has decided to do something about humans. The Shimmer — the expanding zone of biological transformation at the film's centre — is not malevolent. It doesn't hate. It transforms, replicates, mutates, merges. It is doing what biology does, at a scale and speed that human bodies cannot survive.
What I find most affecting about the story is that it doesn't frame the Shimmer as a villain. It is simply a process, operating according to its own logic. The horror is that human life — human individuality, human continuity of self — is not a special consideration within that logic. We are not the apex of anything. We are one more biological system that can be altered.
This is a theme in much of Jeff Vandermeer’s work, I recently read Hummingbird Salamander which is as depressing as it is hopeful. But most of all explores themes of how despite human interference, nature may find a way to prevail long after we’re gone.
Amanda Leduc and disability in the ecological imaginary.
Canadian author Amanda Leduc's work — including The Centaur's Wife and Wildlife — brings disability and ecological grief into conversation in ways that Canadian speculative fiction has often avoided. Her protagonists exist in bodies that mainstream culture treats as problems to be solved, in worlds that are collapsing, asking what resilience actually means when you've never had the luxury of assuming your body would cooperate. It is fierce and quiet and very much worth your time.
The linkage between the mistreatment of nature, and the oppression of disabled folks is made visceral and clear in a way that I’ve never experienced before.
The Matrix as anti-extraction narrative.
The machines in The Matrix cultivated human beings as batteries — literally farming biological life to power a system that the humans had no awareness of participating in. The metaphor is almost too on-the-nose for a critique of extraction capitalism, but Lana and Lilly Wachowski have never been interested in subtlety when directness will serve. The humans are not considered. They are not consulted. They are resources, maintained at minimum viable conditions to maximize output. In the context of climate fiction The Matrix may not be your first go-to example, but it sure does read as 'what if humans were on the other end of extraction?'.
Mickey 17 and the colony that consumes.
Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 (based on Edward Ashton's novel Mickey7) gives us a resource extraction colony and a disposable worker who is literally reprinted when he dies — cheap enough to use up, easily replaceable, never actually valued. Mark Ruffalo's villain runs the colony with the cheerful brutality of a man who has fully internalized that some lives are expendable in the service of progress. The fact that this is played for dark comedy makes it land harder, not softer.
Like much of Bong Joon Ho's work, class warfare doesn't end at critiquing how human's treat each other as expendable, but how they treat all creatures as either resources to extract from or destroy in the pursuit of wealth. The Creepers of Mickey 17 and the super pigs of Okja carry the same messages across the universe.
Star Trek IV and the humpback whale.
I want to briefly pause on what is perhaps the most earnest film in the Trek canon: The Voyage Home, in which the crew of the Enterprise travels back in time to 1986 San Francisco to rescue two humpback whales because in the future, they are extinct, and an alien probe has come to speak to them and is destroying Earth while waiting for an answer that will never come.
It is a film about extinction and consequence, and it makes its argument with complete sincerity. The whales are not a metaphor. They are the point. Their absence from the future is not dramatic backdrop — it is the specific, irreplaceable loss of a particular kind of intelligence, a particular way of being in the ocean, a particular song. The movie trusts its audience to feel that this matters.
The Voyage Home made me an environmentalist
The reason I wanted to end on this note is because this film is my first memory of caring about the environment, and in talking with my Dad recently I realized it also collided with reality in ways I didn’t understand until now.
In my hazy memory I thought that I had started watching Star Trek around six or seven, and that I had seen The Voyage Home after a summer vacation where we had gone whale watching. But my Dad set the record straight and added some details I forgot… He started putting on Star Trek for me (and let's face it, for him) when I was about three years old. By the time we went on that first whale watching trip and I saw a whale for the first time, I had “probably seen that movie half a dozen times”. It was when I was faced with the beauty and reality of whales in real life that I connected them to the story of George and Gracie.
And here is what I forgot until my Dad reminded me; while my six year old feelings were exploding all over the place there was a volunteer on the boat who was studying to be a marine biologist. She sat with me on the ride back and answered my million questions about whales and extinction, she told my parents about the non-profit she volunteered with and ocean conservation, and I remember that she gave me some really cool stickers.
Faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, it was a volunteer who made me realize that I wasn’t completely helpless. She didn’t sugarcoat things, she told me the science and she told me what she was doing and what we could all do. She gave me a physical reminder that lived on my pencil case for years. I wonder if she knows what an impact she had. In an alternate universe perhaps there is a more apathetic version of Terra who didn’t meet this marine biology student, who stayed in the feelings of helplessness and developed an apathy to the world’s problems.
But we’re in this timeline, which has its issues but at least it is full of people helping each other see and be in the world clearly.
In solidarity,
Terra
