2024-03-09 15:31:22
South of the city of Florence in the western US state of Oregon, a belt of sand dunes stretches between the Pacific Ocean and a dense forest of pines and spruces. These ephemeral hills are constantly changing and shifting – ridges stay in place for mere days, and entire mountains of sand dissolve and re-form each year. They say you never step into the same river twice. Here they do not step on the same dune twice, writes the BBC server.
From a certain angle, Oregon’s dunes can seem endless; it’s like getting lost in the Sahara or even on a completely different planet. There is an unimaginable amount of sand. More than enough to bury an entire city.
The sight of the sand invasion brought the young journalist Frank Herbert to Florence in the 1950s. There was a threat that the sand dunes near the city would cover houses, roads, railway lines and farms and drive out the local residents for good. Herbert watched as environmentalists, as well as experts from the US Soil Conservation Service (SCS), tried to stop the sand with an ambitious plan to terraform the landscape.
The terraforming that Herbert saw on the Oregon coast represents the scientific part of the work in the sci-fi saga. | Photo: Shutterstock
A trip to the Oregon coast made a big impression on Herbert. He drew on this experience when writing one of the most important science fiction works of all time. A prominent theme of the Dune novel is precisely the characters’ ambitions to dominate the sand on the desert planet Arrakis. The book series has also seen multiple film adaptations, with the second part of Denis Villeneuve’s Hollywood adaptation premiering in the United States on March 1.
If the writer, who died in 1986, were to visit the sandy shores today, he would have much to think about. The landscape has changed dramatically since his visit more than 70 years ago.
Frank Herbert was born in Tacoma, Washington, about a six-hour drive north of Florence. As a youth, he swam in the waters of Puget Sound and wandered through the lush and rain forests of the US Northwest Coast, which instilled in him a deep admiration and interest in nature. He worked for a time as an editor at a San Francisco newspaper, and in the early 1950s turned to science fiction, spinning stories inspired by his eclectic interests in religion, sociology, psychology, and more. Herbert was drawn to the esoteric corners of science, and around 1953 he became fascinated by the dunes, which reminded him of rivers of sand, he said in a long-ago interview. When he heard about a terraforming project in Oregon, he had to go to the site.
After arriving in Florence, Herbert flew a small plane over the rolling dunes and then interviewed scientists on the ground. They told him how they plant grass along the dunes near the ocean to stabilize the sand and create a living fortification. The SCS maintained grass beds around the city, hoping to eventually remove the sand completely and transform the coast into a lush oasis of forests and fields.
If the writer, who died in 1986, were to visit the sandy shores today, he would have much to think about. | Photo: Shutterstock
Herbert was intrigued by the environmentalists’ bold plan and amazed by their success in reshaping the landscape. At the time, he sent notes to his agent for an article titled “They Stopped the Shifting Sand,” but the article never came out. He then returned to the Florence experience while writing Dune. In the novel, originally serialized in Analog magazine, the nomadic Fremen work on a generations-long plan to transform their arid world into a paradise, using procedures that almost exactly mimic those of the SCS on the Oregon coast.
“The actions of the Fremen as part of their terraforming project come directly from the dunes,” said literary expert Veronika Kratzová from Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. “In a sense, it’s the Oregon Dunes brought to the whole planet,” she added.
The terraforming that Herbert saw on the Oregon coast represents the scientific part of the work in the sci-fi saga. The fiction is perhaps how successful the project could be in the end.
Today’s visitors to Florence and the surrounding area can see in full force what Herbert must have only imagined. The dunes are dotted with archipelagos of grassy mounds up to one meter high, which prevent the movement of sand. A sand rush is planted there, whose stalks and roots can strengthen entire sand ridges.
But the plant is gradually spreading beyond the areas where experts planted it decades ago. And along with the chamois come invasive species such as the European gnatwood tree or the broom broom shrub, which were brought to these regions by European settlers and which are now displacing the native species. What’s more, the sandy landscape itself, which some say is worth protecting, is disappearing.
Video: Dune: Part Two trailer (2/29/2024)
The film Dune: Part Two is showing in Czech cinemas starting this Thursday. | Video: Vertical Ent.