Liberty and Land

Throughout Red Mars, we see the land characterized as something that is connected quantitatively to the pursuit of liberty and a new life. For many of the space colonists, this journey to Mars represents the pursuit of a higher or better way of living, not just a scientific expedition. These people, like Arkady, are excaping Earth’s failures in order to start anew, physically and philosophically. Arkady and his people, while on the Aries and in later stages of colonization, disregard their Terrean hosts and believe a the colonists’ lives off of their own decisions, as Terreans have shown to fail at inhabiting a planet so they must find a new way. However, they are less changing the naturally self-destructive human behavior seen for centuries that is now destroying Earth, than they are reveling in the fact that the whole planet, land and resources, is at their disposal and the promise that such bounty holds. Upon seeing Mars, Maya describes this, “…tabula rasa, blank. A blank red slate. Anything was possible, anything could happen – in that sense they were, in just these last few days, perfectly free. Free of the past, free of the future, weightless in their own warm air, floating like spirits about to invest a material world…” (85). Mindless of the natural state of the planet or the long-term fundamental consequences of repeating the same mistakes as Earth, many of the colonists see fit to colonize Mars exactly as they would colonize land on Earth, and cause the rift between the Reds and the Greens in doing so.

Hardt’s and Negri’s “2.5 Network Power: U.S. Sovereignty and the New Empire” furthers this correlation between land and the spread of democracy by pointing out the concurrence of the emergence of national social classes and the recognition that land is limited even in America. During this Progressive era from the 1890’s to World War I, the paper claims that riots and social unrest based off of class and wealth were in response to the sudden shortage of accessible land: “In effect, when power ran up against its spatial limits, it was constrained to fold back on itself”. This historical event outlines an ideology shown through the Greens of Red Mars, that we exist to expand and to colonize the people, places, and things around us. According to this research, the near imperialism America embraced following this period was a response to a need for further expansion and ownership: since we were limited in what we could do to our nation, we nearly began dominating others, in the name of justice, to appease this hunger. In applying this to the novel, one might argue that the whole mission of the Aries demonstrates self-serving arrogant Terrean behavior in that it aims to dominate even further, beyond the scope of the planet and onto planets that possibly should hold life in the first place.