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31 Mar 08
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He took a plane to Florence, Oregon, where the USDA was sponsoring a lengthy series of experiments in using poverty grasses to stabilize and slow down the damaging sand dunes, which could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways."[5] Herbert's article on the dunes, "They Stopped the Moving Sands," was never completed (and only published decades later in an incomplete form in The Road to Dune), but it sparked Herbert's interest in the general subject of ecology and related matters.
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The CHOAM corporation is the major underpinning of the Imperial economy, with shares and directorships determining each House's income and financial leverage.
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Melange is crucial as it enables space travel, which in turn is monopolized by the Spacing Guild; its Navigators use the spice to safely plot a course for the Guild's Heighliner ships via prescience using "foldspace" technology, which allows instantaneous travel to anywhere in the galaxy.
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Dune responded in 1965 with its complex descriptions of Arrakis life, from giant sandworms (for whom water is deadly) to smaller, mouse-like life forms adapted to live with limited water. The inhabitants of the planet, the Fremen, must compromise with the ecosystem they live in—sacrificing some of their desire for a water-laden planet in order to preserve the sandworms which are so important to their culture. In this way, Dune foreshadowed the struggle the world would have following Carson's book in balancing human and animal life.
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Environmentalists have pointed out that Dune's popularity as a novel depicting a planet as a complex—almost living—thing, in combination with the first images of earth from space during the same time period being published, was instrumental in environmental movements such as the creation of Earth Day in many nations worldwide.[11]
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The Fremen also are more capable of self-sacrifice, putting the community before themselves in every instance, while the world outside wallows in personal comfort at the expense of others. In all these characteristics, Dune is not alone in drawing from Gibbon's work, as Isaac Asimov creates a similarly declining empire in his Foundation series, as does Arthur C. Clarke in his The City and the Stars.[12]
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