Enunciado
How is Dune so prescient about climate change?
The planet, or what’s left of it, is barely recognizable. Once verdant, it’s now a parched wasteland.
The rich shelter in air-conditioned bubbles, leaving everyone else to face the storms and sand.
This vision of climate apocalypse is all too familiar today, but in 1963, when Frank Herbert started
serializing his science-fiction epic Dune, it was deeply strange. Mr. Herbert’s tale of climate change
no longer seems odd. It is in many ways the story of our time.
How did Mr. Herbert foresee our predicament? The environmentalism of Dune had a source close
to home. Native communities had suffered some of the worst environmental harms in the midcentury
United States, and Mr. Herbert had close contacts among the Quileute and Hoh peoples of the Olympic
Peninsula in Washington State. Indigenous environmentalists alerted him to how much damage
industrialism had wrought. They warned him that it could become planetary in scope, a warning that
he passed on in his influential novel.
