A year ago, a leaked letter from the FAA to Bigelow Aerospace laid the groundwork to “encourag[e] commercial development of the moon.” It is strange to have to point this out, but might be worth bringing up: just because it is our moon, doesn’t mean it is our moon – at least not only ours. We didn’t build it. It is likely we could not restore it if we were to harm it (any attempts to reconstruct it would probably look like a Death Star, anyway.)
Just because something has been made from earth, orbits earth, does not mean that we possess it, inhabitants of this planet as we are for what is really only – as Yuri Gagarin put it before becoming the first cosmonaut – “one happy moment.” We certainly don’t possess any more than Shelley did that “joyless eye.” And ‘joyless’ is a good word for what it would be to see that pale face carved up by commercial enterprise.
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Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
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I am frustrated that pioneers of new technologies seem largely to throw up their hands in the face of ethical questions about what impact their innovations – in this case, private space travel – might have on us, our environment, our future.
It strikes me as a recent development, that those with capacity to alter our human experience, the earth, and even the solar system are able to recuse themselves from the moral considerations of their innovative technologies. Who is to blame if your television records and logs evidence of your unhappy home life? Who do we sue if a self-driving car strikes and kills our pet? How do we avoid grassroots eugenics favoring tall and blue-eyed children, now that greater and greater selectivity of genes possible?
All these questions deserve genuine ethical consideration from those who work to develop the advances that give rise to new moral questions. All too often, inventors cry scientist and leave the legal and moral questions to be sorted out later.
As far as I know, there are no space ethics panels. Those normally concerned with conservation, those who see clear scientific evidence of the unintended and disregarded consequences of industrial demands on earth’s environment fall silent about extraterrestrial iterations of the same concern. Granted, its not exactly well-traveled territory.
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Colonialism has an ugly reputation, and rightly so. But it seems the only reason anyone has begun to feel sheepish over our world’s long history of genocide, disenfranchisement, and exploitation is because painfully, over many hundreds of years, the human cost has begun to be driven home. And what if there is no clear human cost?
The idea of a space colony or a space mine seems innocuous because, as far as we can tell, it is victimless. But our ecosystem, our solar system, is nothing if not interconnected – and exploiting supposedly inert landscapes has always had unintended consequences.
Viewing uninhabited environments primarily in light of their potential commercial value calls to mind an old black & white documentary about Alaska I once saw. As the camera panned over pristine wilderness, the narrator cheerfully exclaimed over the new state as a land of vast resources – look at all that lumber, ready to be sawed down! Look at those mountains, waiting to be mined!
Look at all those ice caps, we notice now, even then melting.
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I am troubled that there are no emerging exo-ecologists. Googling “moon conservancy” pulls up nothing pertinent, though that might be my search terms. “Republic of the Moon,” a recent art show in London engages our relationship with it, as art so often has – but does not, despite its name, advocate for the moon’s political agency. There is no one to speak for the moon rocks, like the Lorax speaks for the trees.
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I don’t want a McDonalds on the moon, though this sounds like hyperbole – and I don’t want mining, either. Over and over, the human history of expansionism (one we are eager to brush aside as long as we get our inexpensive clothing and coffee beans) has served up the same tired tale: a newfound land is wrested out of balance with the ecosystems and economies it had previously supported. Those in power lay claim to these places and make choices to their own clearest benefit – choices with unintended effects that we do not and often cannot know until the damage is done.
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The FAA’s plans are nothing if not modest, offering only to “recognize the private sector’s need to protect its assets and personnel on the moon or on other celestial bodies.” The administration seeks to offer protection to industrial interests on the moon – so no one else’s rover can crash-land on top of yours, no neighboring space station bump yours out of orbit – but there is little clarity as to what this means for an independent space contractor’s legal rights to the specific patch of moon they’ve landed on or, say, begun to mine.
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The tale of the ring of Gyges reminds us that unrestricted power is inherently corrupting – and that those with the most power are often the least visible. Independent companies are essentially invisible under current space law (–which, yes, is a real branch of the legal profession; one that I would like to see a primetime drama about immediately).
Always, technology and exploration have outpaced the slower moving engines of government; but it is most often governmental bodies that have the power to restrain the invisible hand of markets – grasping, in this case, after the moon. The BBC has reported on wealthy, savvy people staking unilateral claims ahead of the law – claims yet to be legally tested. No one knows who owns the moon. We’ve already seen a Space Race. Will our generation live through the first Moon Rush, the jockeying of private prospectors for lunar claims? At this point, it seems more likely than not. Expense and feasibility for private enterprise is truly no longer a barrier; there appear to be few other hurdles.
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Unlike many believed during the Great Moon Hoax (a tabloid fabrication by the New York Sun 
in 1835), there are no flying humanoids on the moon. More’s the pity, perhaps, since charismatic megafauna ususally merit some protection.
When there is no apparent immediate cost to life (relatable, sympathetic life, anyway), competition for short-term gain is often the only directive in apparently unclaimed territory. Currently, Shackelton Energy is looking to mine water and, effectively, put gas stations on the moon. China has aggressive plans to “build a helium-3 empire” through moon mineral extraction. NASA’s Resource Prospector Mission is set for 2018 to see what is extractable. Golden Spike is arranging moon tours for the extremely wealthy. The names of these companies and programs remind us: exploration covers a multitude of sins. And we have been wrong before about what kind of people exactly our bold explorers were.
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It matters that we tread carefully here, in the early years of private access to the moon – and not only because we are moving in a much thinner atmosphere. In a very real sense, we know not what we do. All of history reminds us. On our own ecosystems have been routinely compromised, sometimes altered beyond recognition, because we “boldly went.”
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We know more now than we ever have, of course. These gains are evident in the opening up of 
space flight to anyone besides the world’s wealthiest governments. But to think we won’t continue to refine our knowledge of extraterrestrial environments in the decades and centuries to come would be shortsighted in the extreme. There’s a principle in archaeology: in any excavation, you leave a part of the site untouched, acknowledging that future understanding, future technologies will be better than our own. There’s an operative humility in the face of history.
Stout Cortez on the peaks of Darian also had the best technology of his day, and the drive of discovery – and history has not found him an uncomplicated hero. We shudder now at the expansionist principles of his age. Opportunists have compromised pristine environments across the globe, and may well do so again on a galactic scale. ‘Conquistador’ is an ugly word, but an alluring role.
It’s human nature, of course, to blunder in and try to benefit. We know this and we have put restraints in place – slowly, over years, through the activism of people passionate in defense of unclaimed places. Governments have, over time and after great losses, sought to protected their historical sites and natural wonders. The moon is a treasure it is not yet too late to preserve.
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In a sense, of course, that rocket ship has sailed. We’ve walked on the moon, tromped around in moonboots, and seem to have slid into general agreement that you cannot mildly retreat from where quite a few men and women have gone before. In fact, our dominion over the moon is so presumptive that we think of it now as more of a launch pad to bigger things – a handy location for a space elevator, for instance, to help us heft supplies further out into space. Very clearly, we’ve moved on to Mars – less accessible, farther flung, more enticing because not yet as conquered.
But the universe is not simply ours for the taking, regardless of whether there is life, intelligent or otherwise, besides our own. We know that, for some time still, there will be future human life – life likely to be impacted by any choices made in the short term to extract resources from places we imperfectly understand.
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The moon needs a Muir – someone to stand against commercial competition for an undeveloped landscape. The moon should be preserved. Not only because future generations have some retroactive right to its unsullied loveliness – what the aspirational Moon Treaty of 1972 called “the common heritage of mankind.” Not only because other concerns than commerce should hold some sway over new worlds. Not only because it is crass and so very tired to let the wealthiest mine for profit one of the few constant, equal gifts to all people on earth. The moon should be preserved because the universe beyond us deserves our consideration, our ethical self-restraint in the face of its own kind of ecology, and our own limitations.
The Moon Treaty, by the way, is understood as a failed one, since no space-capable nation has yet signed it. They are, of course, the ones with something to lose.
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John Muir fought tirelessly to save what was known to be beautiful, but which had potential for profit. He wanted to keep landscapes as they were: resources in themselves, rapidly being depleted by commercial expansion.
It is worth recalling, if this all feels too little too late, that there was a time before national parks, and that many, many landscapes had been forever altered by the time they were preserved. Many places we eventually saw the value of saving were far from pristine when they were finally set aside as monuments or national parks – when Muir began his crusade to save the Sierras, sheep had denuded the mountains, loggers were busy carting off redwoods, and the wealthy had crowded the lakeshores with summer homes and resorts.
Of course, Muir lost battles too. Hetch Hetchy Valley, which he thought the most beautiful in the Sierras, was dammed for drinking water. And human life is a valuable thing, a clear trump card in conservationist debate. Rightful reasons to explore new environments beyond our own atmosphere abound. But what we do when we get there, and what we might not be able to undo, deserve serious consideration.
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The comparison to moon mining holds: as with national parks, the genie can be coaxed back into the bottle. But there is a vital difference between preservation of the moon and conservationism on earth: our planet, with rich ecological diversity and still-tenable atmosphere, has an astonishing capacity to self-restore – one the moon lacks. There will be a point of no return, of course, even on this resilient sphere; but there is a vital margin of error, albeit one pushed to the breaking point. That elastic margin vanishes on a place like the moon; our footprints aren’t absorbed so easily. If humankind makes almost irreparable mistakes with great historical frequency on our own planet, I worry what we might do to ourselves, to our solar system, in a game with bigger stakes and different rules.
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And what does all this mean for the moon? Should we hire a monk to rake its face like a Zen garden, in between tourist flights, to cover up evidence of our meddling? Should we deface only the dark side, because what we can’t see won’t hurt us? Will the moon become like the best-kept beaches in Southern California, plowed over every morning to fold our refuse under a tidy new layer of sand?
The site of the first Moon Landing has those who advocate for it as a national park. To me, this says something about how much more we care about anything to do with us than anything we have yet to touch. If I’m not in it, why even take the picture?
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A bit of mining, a bit of commercial exploration, of course, will not spell irreversible effects. The slopes on the moon might not be as slippery as the ones on earth seem to be. But it’s not as if our ventures in outer space have been delicate and considered thus far – and, as more nations and private companies vie for access to lunar resources, there are no signs of slowing down.
People of my generation, born around the time the Berlin wall fell, can forget the nationalist fire that drove the space race, and also the annihilationist fear. Indeed, some interstellar restraint came out of nuclear threat: the Outer Space Treaty, broader in terms and more widely accepted than the Moon Treaty, was ratified by major world powers – but serves mostly to keep us from using the moon as a nuclear launch pad, and does little to protect any bodies besides our own.
Those venturing into space have never done so for the pure scientific joy; that’s not what gets exploration funded, not for Columbus and not for the Apollo. Commercial and political interest bankrolls expansion – which is why there are almost no explorers who do not suffered in hindsight. Except, perhaps, failed polar explorers – those who fell victim to a landscape as harsh and as wild as the moon. Those who die trying are easier to celebrate than those who succeed at conquest, who give us a chance to reap what they have sown.
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Antarctic exploration may, in fact, offer a model for lunar conservation. We’ve ventured into eerie, unpeopled landscapes before – and managed to keep them mostly free of nationalist or commercial claims, at least thus far. The Antarctic Treaty acknowledges a mutual global right to the unpeopled continent, thereby making polar research relatively open and cooperative.
Though the Moon Treaty may read as utopian, the Antarctic Treaty could show a way to move forward, as do national trusts and parks here on earth: sometimes, those with wealth and influence use their power to preserve something of value for all rather than enrichment of a few. Antarctica offers a precedent for a kind of global dedication to research and tourism. It offers precedent, too, for international cooperation in scientific study, though a far from perfect one.
Or, at least, it has. Despite recent Climate talks, Arctic mining is quickly becoming a foregone conclusion, something world powers are even now fighting over, despite the protests of indigenous peoples and of those worried about a fragile environment, and what further imbalance there would mean for the rest of us. The Antacrtic is viewed as a “treasure house of resources,” especially by countries hurrying to catch up in industrialization. For many, under the aegis of research, securing a stake when resources are able to be extracted is a priority. In the Antarctic, as on the moon, mining is the primary interest, and the ban on current mining efforts is likely to be challenged before coming up for review in 2048.
Whether or not you believe anyone has a claim to unpeopled places on earth or elsewhere, some things might still be too precious for us to handle, to fragile to be entrusted without constraint to those who have mucked up any number of brave new worlds already.
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It goes without saying the incalculable artistic, historic, poetic and even spiritual value the moon has had – to all peoples, at all times. In fact, the moon has been so vital to so many of us for so long, it may actually have been eclipsed by its own importance. We don’t think much about the air we breath, until we find it full of pollutants and carcinogens. It’s important to recall the value of the moon to the inhabitants of earth culturally, spiritually, and ecologically – in the interplay of solar system and galaxy and in the intimacy of looking up at the night sky.
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So let’s make the moon an Extraterrestrial Park – a Celestial Park, the first Planetary Reserve. Just because we’re on the cusp of a mining free-for-all, doesn’t mean we can’t step back from it. Part of the job of intergovernmental organizations is to protect the world’s people from the overeager exploitation of industry. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. Just because we have charted one course, doesn’t mean we can’t forge another – a newer, less traveled way of preserving before we pollute.
The moon feels like the least of our worries, I know. But it’s because we’re not currently fighting wars over what we’ve extracted there, because we are not now feeling the effects of its imbalance the way we are feeling the effects here on earth that it’s not yet too late. Some things, like the moon, ought to be enjoyed and protected for what they are as they are. Some things – like national parks, like a blue moon or a blood moon, a new moon, a lunar eclipse – offer us intangible riches, the kind that cannot both be extracted and remain intact.
The moon is a gift to everyone, and should be, for as long as human life is sustained on earth (and some think it would not have been sustainable long without one, pretty much just that size and distance). For once – let’s find a way to keep our hands off something good. For our own sake and for the sake of those who aren’t here yet to tell us what we may do that can’t be undone.
Amy Katherine Cannon is a writer and teacher living in Los Angeles. She was recently awarded her MFA in Poetry from UC Irvine, where she was the recipient of the Gerard Creative Writing Endowment. Her work may be found in BOAAT, Juked, and McSweeney’s, among other places.
