“Dune” is a warning about political heroes and their tribes

Frank Herbert, the author of the science-fiction novel “Dune” on which a new blockbuster film is based, would have been amused to learn that ecologists along the Oregon shore are ripping invasive European beachgrass out of the ground. As a young journalist in the late 1950s, Herbert derived his inspiration for a tale about a desert planet from watching ecologists plant the grass to control encroaching sand dunes. The scheme worked, maybe too well: residents of the coastal towns that the grass helped prosper now long for the beauty of the dunes and regret the unintended consequences for native flora and fauna.“They stopped the moving sands” was the title of the article Herbert never wound up publishing about the Oregon dunes. He admired the ecologists and their project. But as much as he prized human intelligence he feared human hubris, credulousness and other frailties. One character in “Dune” is a planetary ecologist, who, for complicated reasons—the novel has no other kind—finds himself overcome by natural processes he has been trying to manipulate, to help the native population by changing the climate. “As his planet killed him,” Herbert writes, the ecologist reflects that scientists have it all wrong, and “that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”