John Jefferson
In French, the name “Verne” refers to ferns—but Jules Verne was no green, at least not as we think of the word, in political terms, today. Verne did however, love the Earth, so much so that he wrote prodigiously about making it better for people.
Yet today, we see that the predominant faction of greens is not pro-people at all. Those greens are anti-growth, anti–standard of living, pro-depopulation. And they have burrowed deep into the bureaucracy, as the people of Los Angeles are discovering as they try to rebuild their burned-out city, only to hit the wall of the green regulatory regime.
But of course, every trend engenders a counter-trend, a backlash. Meet Donald Trump, the Scourge of Green. He is, after all, a real estate developer.
Jules Verne (1828–1905) would approve. The Frenchman’s oeuvre was inventing this and building that—environmental impact statements be damned. For instance, his novel Invasion of the Sea is premised on the geologic fact that parts of the Sahara Desert are below sea level; the plotline concerns digging a canal from the Mediterranean Sea to those basins, letting the waters flow forth, and creating an inland “Sahara Sea.”
No doubt a few lizards might have been drowned in the process, but the result would have been more gloire for France, as back then the Sahara was mostly a French colony. Yet even an anti-colonialist would have to admit that a Second Med would have greatly increased economic development for Africa by creating new seaports. (As well as, down the road a ways, new Club Meds.)
Verne lived, after all, in an era of earth-moving exuberance. The French had dug the Suez Canal, and they had tried, albeit honorably failed, to dig a canal through Panama. But then came the First World War and other disasters, and by the time the smoke cleared, the Vernean zeal to transform land had ebbed, at least in the West.
Yet come to think of it, it’s still not too late to create a Second Med—not only to make a riviera or two but also as a new repository for seawater, thus easing the risk of rising ocean levels.
Needless to say, our greens would hate all of this, and they still, even with Trump in the White House, occupy the commanding heights of international decision-making. So until Africans rise up and demand the right to develop their lands the way the Westerners (and Easterners) did theirs—with bulldozers and abundant energy—the Sahara Sea rests.
In the meantime, Verne, author of 55 novels—the best known of which is probably Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (referring to distance traveled, not depth)—is secure in the pantheon of science-fiction immortals.
These days, when people think of sci-fi, they likely think first of space travel—Star Trek, Star Wars, and all that. Amidst his vast output, Verne did, in fact, write about going to the moon, and riding on a comet.
Yet for the most part, he wrote about terrestrial themes, often featuring inventors, businessmen, and adventurers taking bold risks with new tech.
Notably, Verne chose to work within limits. That is, the limits of what was possible, given the laws of physics. In our time, we call this discipline hard sci-fi, as distinct from outright fantasy. For instance, in Verne’s Master of the World, the lead character invents a combined airplane, speedboat, and automobile. Sticking with then-plausible science, Verne suggested the new vehicle could travel at speeds of… 150 miles per hour. Verne’s personal speedometer was much faster, but he wanted to keep his readers with him.
Still, Verne’s prophetic power is unmatched. He amplified or envisioned everything from the submarine to the helicopter to the electronic newscast and video conferencing—even the solar sail.
Yet occasionally, Verne did veer off into fantasy. As this author noted recently here at The American Conservative, his book Journey to the Center of the Earth imagines explorers descending into a dormant volcano, finding subterranean adventures, and then emerging from another volcano 2000 miles away. Not much hard science there—other than pointing to the Earth’s geothermal energy, which could, if tapped properly, provide all the power we need.
Another Verne novel envisions technology, energy, and diplomacy combining in ways proto-Trumpy. In The Purchase of the North Pole Verne recalled the Berlin conference of 1884–1885—when the great powers convened to divvy up Africa—and suggested a similar joint exercise to apportion the Arctic. Verne, an admirer of American can-do, assigned Uncle Sam the lead role:
The United States Government had unexpectedly proposed to put up to auction the circumpolar regions then reing undiscovered, having been urged to this extraordinary step by an American society which had been formed to obtain a concession of the apparently useless tract.
Channeling a certain POTUS to come, one character says,“Certainly Greenland belongs to America.”
Now that’s some Manifest Destiny. “In the United States,” Verne wrote, “there is no project so audacious for which people cannot be found to guarantee the cost and find the working expenses.” In Verne’s telling, businessmen from Baltimore form the North Polar Practical Association. Its mission is to “obtain an indefeasible title to all the continents, islands, islets, rocks, seas, lakes, rivers, and watercourses whatsoever of which this Arctic territory is composed.”
According to Verne, one of the special allures of the boreal region was the presence of coal. Those black rocks were the supreme fuel of the industrialized world, and yet as Verne related, they were much more:
Carbon is something else than a combustible. It is the telluric substance from which science draws the major part of the products and sub-products used in the arts. With the transformations to which it is subject in the crucibles of the laboratory you can dye, sweeten, perfume, vaporize, purify, heat, light, and you can produce the diamond.
To this day, the prophets of carbon capture, conversion, and circularity can’t say it better.
Of course, in that pre-exploration era, Verne couldn’t be absolutely sure there was coal under the Pole. But citing the hard science of coal’s presence all over the surveyed world, one of his characters says, “Why should there not be?”
Trump would love it: The wealth is there, waiting. All you have to do is break a few eggs and smash a couple shibboleths. How fun.
Oh, and a last note that might be relevant to Trump’s idea of relocating Gazans, and to a related idea that this author has, er, floated at TAC. In Propeller Island, Verne imagines a ship—built by Americans, of course—boasting the dimensions and population of a city, shuttling around the Pacific Ocean.
We can see, here, a potential for not only Gazans, but for all humans. Why should humanity let itself be limited to the 29 percent of the Earth’s surface that’s dry land? Why not build new things and live in new places, here on this miraculous blue marble? Going to space is an option, and yet building new arks—and new islands—is a lot easier.
But of course, the Malthusian greens don’t want to make it easy. They want to make it impossible. That and everything else that helps human flourishing.
So we need the spirit of Verne, that anti-green apostle of human betterment. And we need Trump, who might never have read Verne, but embodies his vitalist essence. There’s MAGA, including MABA—Making America Bigger Again, starting with Verneland—oops, I mean Greenland. Then the rest of the world, if it wishes, can embrace the same outward-boundedness.
But who knows what California will do.
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