Biodiversity and Shahlyla Lakshman 

by Anthony John

A Short Story from the Debris Collection.

 

FAO Conner Nugyn-King, Commissioning Editor, System Wide Broadcasting. Hellas, Mars.

Hi Conner,

Well, you didn’t leave me much time for this did you? About 2000 words on Shahlyla Lakshman by what in a few months would have been her 150^th birthday? I should co-co! I never knew much about her beforehand, but she was a fascinating person, who had much more influence on how we live today than I ever knew, that’s for sure. I had to do quite bit of research though, and 2000 words is nowhere near enough, I could easily write a special if you fancy it! But here goes, article below. I hope it’s what you need. If you feel like splashing some cash, see if you can get Bunny Jones to present it; drag her back from her precious Vesta for a few days and send her out to the farms to record it. She won’t like it, but she’s the best. I’ve put a few directors notes in brackets as well as some suggestions for background shots and images, most of them you can probably find in the libraries. Usual fees apply I assume?

Best wishes, and I’ll see you for a beer next time we’re in the same orbit. 

Casper.

Article begins:

(Bunny direct to camera. Clear felled forest in background.)

The wholesale deforestation and destruction of the Earths great forests, the Amazon basin and South Asia for example, which was largely caused by slash and burn or monoculture farming practices, or by illegal logging, during the first half of the 21^st century was almost – but not quite – irreparable. As it is, no one knows exactly how many animal and plant species became extinct in this period, with all traces of their DNA gone forever from Earth’s biodiversity. Some estimates put it as high as 10,000 unique genera lost.

In fact, by the early 2100s most people firmly believed, that nothing could possibly be done to avert the inevitable extinction event, which would probably – and eventually - lead to the complete abandonment of Earth by human beings. There were exceptions though…

(Bunny holds up a copy of Shahlyla Lakshman’s book for this bit.)

I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Shahlyla Lakshman? Or if you have, ever read her book, The Fertility of Lunar Soil, published in 2086? No worries if you haven’t; I hadn’t either until very recently. Her book, especially, is a bit niche, and to be honest, highly technical as well. But in it she details her experiments into mixing the grey dust of the moon with the slurry from the waste digester tanks, to create what turned out to be a highly fertile, but lightweight soil. 

In the beginning, she had a lot of work to do to overcome some people’s aversion to the concept. After all, everything organic eventually ends up in the tanks, from human waste to the corpses of our loved ones. And some found that distasteful; or even disrespectful. This led to many obstacles: on top of people’s attitudes, neutralising the odours took some complex chemistry to resolve. But eventually she achieved both. 

Her original dome, located ironically enough in the Mare Vaporum, was commissioned by Hawking University in 2094 and completed two years later. Working with researchers from other departments as well as her own, she created the environment from scratch.  She was also instrumental in designing and developing the specialist AI control systems needed to stabilise a complex closed ecosystem. 

She had failures, many failures, along the way, insect colonies either died out or ran wild. Trees died when their roots pushed below her active soil level. Sometimes fodder had to be bought in to feed animals, when the harvests failed, because the irrigation channels had dried up. But she persevered, and eventually, succeeded.

Her domes now cover almost twelve square kilometres, and form the largest lunar wildlife park. They are home to almost a thousand species of trees and plants, almost the same of invertebrates, and several hundred exotic bird and mammal species. If you have the opportunity, visit them, and take a walk in Wonderland. Or better yet, stay in the hostel which is located in the centre of the oldest self-sustaining, extraterrestrial, biome.

(Cut to shot of the inside of the dome. Bunny again talking to camera.)

It was the research carried out here that led to the technical feasibility and establishment of the orbital farms. The first of which were located in low-earth orbit, and only produced protein rich high-volume foods, such as chickpeas or wheat. But as they took off, they soon started producing higher value crops as well. Eventually, as they multiplied and expanded, and by United Nations decree, they were forced to include the wilderness areas from which the Amazon and other highly endangered environments, could be put on the road to recovery.

Of course, there are still farms on Earth today, but they mostly produce low-volume, high-quality foodstuffs that fetch the best prices in the market. The finest beef still comes from Argentina or Scotland, the best wines from France or New Zealand; but it must also be said, unless you’re told the schnitzel you’re being served was raised on an orbital farm, you’d never know. 

(Shot from an approaching ship, show a string of the farms then gradually zoom in on one. Going inside, use a floater-cam shot passing over fields of crops, cattle and forests as you go into the next bit. Definitely include a wide shot of Bunny walking toward a bunch of kids camping by one of the central lakes.)

The orbital farms have been producing food for over eighty years now. And today there are hundreds of them, mainly in direct solar orbit, at about the same distance as Earth. From a ship coming in from the outer planets, they look like a shimmering string of colourful opal beads fastened around a prom queen’s neck. A few of the earlier ones are still in Earth orbit of course, and most of the inhabited rocks and stations also have their own hydroponic units, or recycling plants to produce at least some local food. But the orbital farms do all the heavy lifting.

(Maybe include a graphic here?)

Most farms can be described as a disc floating in space, generally about ten kilometres in diameter (although some are up to fifty) and about one point five thick. They stand on their edge in relation to the sun as they slowly spin like a coin on a tabletop, rotating clockwise once every twenty-four hours, so that the sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west each day. The sky, a huge double plexiglass dome, forms a vast greenhouse on the top. While the bottom is generally covered with PV cells, supplying at least part of the power they need.

In the base, a network of built in Mullersphere gravity generators ensure that the gravitational field on the inner surface is as close as possible to Earth-normal. However, inevitably there are variations, and people not used to them, do tend to get a bit seasick at first as they move about, and find the places where it varies slightly.

(Cut back to Bunny walking along by the lakeside.)

Essentially, they are farms, not as the remaining old earth farms still are, but are complex, closed environments, controlled by a powerful AI system that ensures everything is as it should be. In most cases, a lake like this one, in the centre of the disc stores the water which is pumped outwards through a network of underground pipes, and up through the dome’s supporting ribs. From there it sprayed out, to fall as rain, before returning to the lake along the streams and rivers, that radiate out from it like the spokes of a wheel. Operating like this they are almost perfect closed systems, always keeping the soil at the correct moisture level for the plants in each specific area. 

Monitoring and controlling these, and countless other details, are the local AI systems. They make sure that the insect colonies, that are essential for fertilising the plants stay healthy and doing their work as they should be, without their populations exploding - which is a major processing nightmare in itself – and by adjusting the opacity of the dome they maintain the correct temperature across the entire farm. In short, they ensure the stability of the entire environment.

A medium-sized farm, as one this is, of around twelve thousand hectares, generally has a population of maybe a few hundred up to a thousand people; together with various animals, both domestic and wild. 

(Get some sheep or cattle in the background and ideally also some wild animals as well. Savanne Farm (263) even has elephants! A shot of some farm machinery being operated by a few people as well would be good.)

Most of the residents of the farm are the staff who work here, technicians, plantsmen or animal specialists, but some simply choose to live in these utopias. Also, many of the farms have sidelines in the form of holiday resorts, where you can take your family to walk in the woods or swim in the clean, open water. On one farm, Weissmies (315), deliberately placed further away from the sun, it even snows. And by deliberately giving the gravitational fields a gradient, an exclusive, all year, winter sports centre has been created. 

In short, they are the orbital Edens from which all the inhabited worlds are fed, and the Earth’s biodiversity is gradually being restored. Even the children, born and raised on the farms, suffer less from the casadastraphobia, the fear of falling into the open sky, that so blights the Luna or station born, when they first visit earth.

(Cut to image of Shahlyla Lakshman.)

Shahlyla Lakshman herself was born and grew up on Sri Lanka. An island that was once a idyllic, densely-forested, tropical jungle, home to wild elephants and leopards. But by 2056 when she was born, deforestation had gone so far that the remaining protected areas were isolated and no longer self-sustaining. She looked at what remained, compared it with pictures in her grandmother’s old books, and at the age of eight decided she would turn it around.

(Find a holo of a clear-felled or burning forest here and contrast it with pages from an old – ideally paper – book held up by Bunny.)

Shahlyla did not come from a wealthy background however, and for the local school to accept her as a pupil she had to turn up with her own paper and pencils. So, through sheer hard work and determination she managed to sell enough hand-woven palm-frond baskets to buy what she needed, and set about learning all she could. Applying herself diligently in every subject, she especially excelled in mathematics and the natural sciences. And despite having to work in the evenings to help support her family - her mother having died when she was twelve - she won a scholarship to Clarke University in Columbo, the first of her family ever to go beyond the seventh grade.

(Get a few stills from her year book or social to include here, I know there’s one of her graduation ceremony, and I’m sure I saw one of her as a child with some of her baskets somewhere.)

At Clarke she studied biochemistry and graduated with first-class honours. After which she was offered a research position at Hawking University in the Humbolt Crater. Here she began to investigate how isolated space communities could become more self-sufficient. She worked out and proved the minimum size that a dome needed to be, to harbour sufficient biodiversity to be self-sustaining, provided that is that the digester tanks are operated correctly, and it’s sufficiently irrigated. And let’s face it, on the moon at that time, the availability of human waste wasn’t an issue. 

Likewise water, which has since the earliest settlements, been extracted in quantity by the automated plants under the lunar south pole. From that proof, orbital farms were a logical next step.

(Holo of Shahlyla Lakshman and Freya Svendsen together, then fade to one of Carl Svendsen-Lakshman, ideally addressing the UN as Bunny speaks.)

While living on the Shepard Campus in Humbolt, she met the woman who was to be her on-off partner for the rest of her life. Freya Svendsen was a Dane studying the interactions between proteins and fungi in the digesters, so it was inevitable that their work would overlap. Theirs was an explosive relationship however. Passionately in love for most of the time, they would often argue and split up over trivial disagreements, much to the chagrin of their close friends. 

During those frequent separations, they both entered into other relationships, one of which led to Freya becoming pregnant and eventually giving birth to their son, Carl Svendsen-Lakshman; who was later to lead the lunar colony’s bid to join the UN in its own right.

When the UN became the Global Arbiter, new laws enshrining global conservation were enacted. At this point, all those countries that had previously only paid lip service to environmental protection, were forced to comply. Many of them that had simply just looked the other way, as trees that were saplings as Genghis Kahn’s hoards rode through Central Asia or the Spanish Armada set sail, were felled and turned into pellets for power stations or chipped for cheap wooden furniture. Those laws were largely driven by Carl, a committed believer in both of his mother’s works.

(Cut back to Bunny speaking direct to camera, give her a glass of something to raise.)

Next year would have been her 150^th birthday had she lived, but sadly, she died aged just 137 in a decompression accident on one of the farms. A huge loss to every one of us. An unexplained - but suspicious - malfunction of a landing-area dome caused it to vent before her ship was fully sealed, ending the life of a true genius. Her remains were disposed of according to her wishes, in the Sheppard Campus digester tank. And an ironwood tree, the first ever grown from seed in Lunar soil, planted in her beloved dome.

Freya continued their research until her own death aged 157 in 2201, and in the process established the Lakshman Chair in Biodiversity Renewal at Hawking University. 

I ask you all, to raise a glass on the 14^th of June, to a remarkable woman without whose seminal work on lunar soil, what few that be left of us, would be living on a barren world and struggling to find enough to eat.

(Finish with a final shot of Shahlyla Lakshman superimposed over an ariel view of a restored rain-forest as Bunny’s voice fades.)