Two Worlds, One's The Past, The Other The Future. Or They're Both Futures

In Maire C. Farca's Earth, two astronauts crash land on a hostile looking world with surprising gravity. They find on this world a dome, with people inside. One astronaut dies shortly thereafter, the other is saved by one of those inside the dome, and lives with them for a time, learning about their world. Then he (Ames) has to decide whether to stay or go.

Except there's no real choice. The technology of his world - called Earth - enables him to return home and stay on this world - whose inhabitants, somewhat similar in design to Ames, also call Earth -at the same time. So there's no particular conflict there. Ames doesn't have any difficulties dealing with the locals, as they're helpful and understanding of his ignorance of their ways. The question of why both groups call their homeworlds "Earth" isn't delved into in any serious way. There's conjecture, but it amounts to "Well I think you must be a lost settlement of ours. Perhaps YOU are from one of OUR lost settlements. Oh, I doubt that.", with no real investigation into the issue.

Farca seems more interested in playing up the myriad differences Ames sees between his world and this one he's currently stuck on. His is a world dominated by humans, overrun with them. They live in cubicles, never really sleep, have no time to themselves, never see the sun, etc. The world he's reached may have been like that, once, but as is typical of humans, they nearly destroyed themselves, and those who survived have begun to rebuild, slowly, while trying to maintain some measure of balance with nature.

What's interesting to me is how they're presented as maintaining that balance. To prevent themselves from growing too powerful, cooperation is a no-no, sort of. They live in a community, and every day one person is responsible for feeding and caring for the children, another for the elderly (each person takes turns). But the children are expected to pay attention to what the adults do, because they'll have to learn those skills if they want to survive. If they haven't by the time they reach a certain age, they'll die because no one is going to lend a hand. If you want to be an adult, you have to build your own home (using whatever materials or design you choose), but you also have to expand the dome to accommodate having more houses. Even if multiple people are building homes and expanding the dome simultaneously, they aren't supposed to work together. They might work adjacent to each other, but no dividing of labor in an efficient manner. I guess the idea is that makes simply surviving harder, as opposed to people specializing in something that helps everyone.

Farca's not advocating it as a superior way of doing things, since she presents it as limiting their ability to advance, compared to Ames' people, but I'd say she's absolutely in favor of their approach to interacting with nature. Since this was published in 1972, I wonder how influential Silent Spring was on this book.