Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle

1972 Hardin, Garrett [James] (1915-2003). Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle. New York: Viking Press. PSt

Four sections of the book, “From the Spaceship Beagle: Embarkation” (3-15), “On Board the Beagle: The Dawn of Responsibility” (91-100), and “On Board the Beagle: Freedom’s Harvest” (155-67), and “The Return of the Beagle” (216-37) are fiction beginning on an Earth failing environmentally, and there is a backlash against ecologists, who are hunted down and killed. The other three sections are set on the spaceship Beagle, which is looking for other planets to colonize. The people on the spaceship repeat in a smaller space all the errors committed on Earth. The author was an ecologist, who spent most of his career at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and who is best-known for his essay “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162.3859 (December 13, 1968): 1243-48, which is reprinted in the book (250-64). He was particularly concerned with overpopulation, and he was attacked from the right for advocating abortion and from the left for supporting eugenics and advocating forced sterilization.