Central to the story of Dune are ideas of legacy and inheritance. The main character Paul was born into the noble line of the Atreides, presumably raised to think about the power this confers upon him and what he will do in the future once he inherits the title of Duke and all the authority that comes with it.

Throughout the first movie, we also see Paul grapple with a different inheritance as well. Much like the status of heir to the Atreides lineage, this is a legacy he did not choose. Paul is thrust into the role of Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit’s long-planned avenue for achieving greater power through a male with remarkable abilities, including prescience. With this legacy come dire visions of future war and grotesque suffering that plague Paul. In the second movie, Paul struggles to accept this second inheritance. But within his role as the Kwisatz Haderach and the promised Lisan al-Gaib among the Fremen of Dune, Paul encounters still further examples of difficult legacies.

Deep within Sietch Tabr, where Paul first lives with the Fremen, the viewer is given a glimpse of something unthinkable on harsh, arid Dune: a cavernous pool of water. On a planet where perspiration and other bodily fluids are recycled, where tears are a solemn expenditure of a precious resource, and where water scarcity carves bodies lean and thin, somehow exists this vast reserve of water, and this precious cache is fed by the tribe. In fact, we see the water from tribesman Jamis’s corpse added to this reservoir. When Jessica, Paul’s mother, sees this place for the first time, she murmurs, “So many souls.”

Later in the movie, Paul has a vision of his sister speaking to him in the future from a Dune transformed. Aliya stands at the shore of a sea, waves lapping against the previously dry sand. Sietch Tabr’s waters are a powerful declaration that each person is part of a greater whole and that, together, people can change the future of an entire planet.

But there is another powerful legacy hidden under the surface of Dune.

As Paul struggles to figure out how he might lead the Fremen to victory against the might of the Empire and its appointed planetary governing force, the Harkonnens, he is given knowledge of a family inheritance that could change the course of this conflict. The Atreides family atomics are still secure deep within a mountain. This violent inheritance has been passed down through the ducal channels of power to Paul, and it too can steer the course of a planet.

Where one inheritance was amassed drop by drop by generations of a community into a powerful resource, the other is a horrifying force handed from one duke to another. Where one may evoke disgust in viewers because of the use of dead bodies, the other may inspire revulsion because the magnitude of power is simply too great to imagine one family controlling it. 

However, whether subtle or overt, both inheritances hold the potential for great change and great destruction.

In this film, we see that the revered sandworms can drown. A planetary transformation fueled by caches of water collected by many different tribes would make Dune more hospitable to people while robbing them of something sacred. Political transformation fueled by the use of the family atomics could free Dune from the grip of the emperor and the Harkonnens while nudging humanity down a path of galactic warfare that has haunted Paul’s visions.

These possibilities bring up questions pertinent for us today on planet Earth. Namely, what inheritance have we been given, how will we use it, and what will our actions leave for those who come after us?

We do not choose what we inherit, and in the words of climate scientist Kim Cobb, the “crushing and ever-escalating costs of climate change” that are part of our climate inheritance are unfair and wrong. At the same time, in her 2023 convocation speech at Brown University, she stresses that the current moment we have inherited gives us “the opportunity to shape the arc of human history on this planet.”

Much like Paul, we as a collective stand at the precipice of great change with tremendous and terrifying power in our hands. Again, like Paul, we have multiple options at our disposal, each of which has complex appeals and drawbacks and could contribute to very different futures.

Ideas of inheritance and long-term thinking abound in conversations about climate change. As one example, the book The Good Ancestor implores readers to challenge current systems and ways of thinking in order to rise to the challenge of addressing climate change and leaving a better world for future generations. Another example is Grist’s annual climate fiction competition Imagine 2200, which invites submissions that envision successful adaptation and mitigation efforts and sports the tagline “climate fiction for future ancestors.”

If we want to be beneficial ancestors, what will we do with the inheritances left to us? Our forebears started the process of climate change that is violently reshaping life for so many people and ecosystems, and we cannot go back in time to change that. Will we continue to use the destructive systems we have been given to achieve some meaningful benefits at great long-term costs? Or will we shift our perspectives and use innovations from countless brilliant minds to chart a different path forward?

Are we willing to work together to overcome challenges and live in accordance with the best of our values so that we may leave future generations an inheritance that is a gift rather than a burden? I believe we can, and I hope that we do