In a recent Slate article, planetary scientist David Grinspoon decries the Western analogy, citing the Great Terraforming Debate at the Mars Society's founding conference in 1998. Then, the stage was dominated by advocates of a large-scale industrial transformation of Mars, terraforming it for maximum utility to humans. Panelists called it "Manifest Destiny," a belief in the inevitability and rightness of their views.

History was on their side. Once, the lands west of the hundredth meridian were known as the Great American Desert, a land barely habitable with contemporary technologies, and unsuitable for settlement is it had been known in the more congenial Eastern part of the continent. While not as remote or as inhospitable as Mars, the West seemed nearly as forbidding to European and American explorers.

Then a confluence of new ideologies led to the widespread technological transformation of the Western environment during the 20th Century. Social Darwinism emboldened the view that white Europeans were destined to triumph over other forms of life, and sanctioned violent means. While in Europe, Marxism was claiming the world for the industrial working class - and thus industrializing the world - in America technocracy and Progressivism transferred decisionmaking from elected officials to government-employed technical experts, enabling Soviet-style dreams of industrial gigantism overseen by state officials.

While something resembling a schoolbook republic endured in the East, the West was firmly taken by the technocratic nomenklatura. Most of the land was federally owned; decisions as to its use were made by government engineers in support of - rapid industrial terraforming.

From the late 19th Century until the 1970s, government engineers terraformed the Great American Desert. This happened. What it meant, whether it was a triumph of technology in the service of a better life for millions, or whether it was a cultural and environmental holocaust, continues to be debated.

Until the 1970s, most Americans believed the blandishments of technocrats - until they tried to dam the Grand Canyon. Until Native Americans reclaimed their history, and academic historians, notably University of Colorado-Boulder's Patricia Nelson Limerick demolished the credibility of the technocrats' claims.

Then comes 1998, and a conference ant CU Boulder to discuss the future of the Great Not Yet American Desert. No surprise that an utterly abstruse subject- the technological transformation of the Martian atmosphere - descended into donnybrook. For our grandparents, it would've been pistols in front of the saloon.

We Americans just can't look at Mars except through Western lenses. For the Baby Boom generation, it's flat-out impossible. When they were children, they played Cowboys and Indians - and the game wasn't harvest feasts and multicultural understanding. Boys slept on cowboy-print sheets and wore coonskin caps or cowboy hats. Seven of the top ten television shows consistently were Westerns. They rolled in a dust bowl of Manifest Destiny.

And then - on the cusp of their adolescence - their charismatic young President opened the New Frontier. In response, those boys were inspired to become� technocratic engineers tasked with building heavy industry for the frontier. So, in time, the history of the West would recapitulate itself.

But then things changed: the revisionists and dissidents spoke up. In the 1970s, Westerns disappeared from television. Popular protest stopped the technocratic dominance over the desert, at the Grand Canyon and in Alaska. The technocrats' space program stopped the year of the first Earth Day. And, come 1998, when the chest-thumping Old Guard spoke of nuking Mars to make way for condos, much as they nuked the citizens of Nevada, the audience fought back.

Grinspoon condemns this talk of, as he so precisely puts it, "the Ameriforming of Mars." But he misses the wider point, in the context of that historic evening as much as in the context of the future of Mars exploration.

He labels the perspective of the West "the most unfortunate choice of analogies," calling it "historically inaccurate and culturally clueless." In so doing, like many critics of the analogy, he focuses on the superficial - no sentient natives - and on one side of the issue - the technocratic.

But the American West was where the human species - or at least white Europeans - gained the first stirrings of respect for its environment, the first aesthetic that embraced non-biotic nature as beautiful in itself, the first notion of desire for environmental preservation over transformation.

If there is any hope for us to avoid despoiling Mars, it lies not in our abandoning the Western analogy, but in embracing it until the red dust cakes our pores. We only learn from experience, and our only experience with wilderness preservation is in the American West.

Finally, Grinspoon overlooks the context of that evening for space advocacy. One panelist, Mark Lupisella, a frequent writer on ethical issues relating to Mars, presented a contrasting view.

And the audience itself struck back. Several casual attendees were inspired to take the stage after the event, to debate the technocrats face to face. They all, myself included, went on to active roles in the space community, their activism grounded in their environmental views.

And, to the Mars Society's credit, the next year's plenary panel focused on "What Kind of Mars Do You Want," and pro-environment, anti-technocratic speakers, including two of those stage-stormers, held a majority of seats. A sub-movement, Greens4Mars, formed, along with a consensus that a majority of Society members did not share the extreme technocratic views of the previous panel.

Grinspoon decries those "conquest of nature" throwbacks to a primitive and stupid century. For myself, I'd put them on the payroll.

Every time some yahoo talks of "Manifest Destiny" - racist code for many Americans - or "colonization," implying remote political control and local disenfranchisement, or making way for humans by wiping out Martian microbes "like cleaning a toilet," they increase the likelihood that Mars will be approached in a temperate, respectful manner.

There is a powerful American consensus against the ideology of technocracy and environmental exploitation. We may be the most energy-guzzling, SUV-driving, wilderness-paving society on the planet, but we desperately need to believe ourselves enlightened and green.

Mars allows us a revisionist future history. We look out on the red world and see familiar vistas, from our own environs or from the movies of our youth. But this time there are no Indians to massacre, no salmon runs to obliterate, to desert towns to nuke, no Army Corps of Engineers to dam everything wet and pave the rest.

We Americans look on Mars with the hope of national salvation, with the fresh lessons of our own past, and the desire, this time, as the Navajo say, "to go in beauty."

This is the value of the analogy of the West.

The Spacefaring Web is a biweekly column � 2004 by John Carter McKnight, an Advocate of the Space Frontier Foundation (http://www.space-frontier.org/Projects/Spacefaring ) Views expressed herein are strictly the author's and do not necessarily represent Foundation policy. Contact the author at [email protected]

Author's Note: At this year's CONTACT conference, I will be delivering a presentation elaborating on the Western myth for Mars. I welcome comments to [email protected] beforehand, and especially attendance at this marvelous event.

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