Tacoma is the only place on Planet Earth to be “Dune’s” plot inspiration, the author’s hometown and the setting for a real-life Dune park.

There are plenty of places you can watch the new movie “Dune: Part Two,” which releases in the U.S. on March 1. And there are countless sand dunes to visit around the country.

But there’s only one place in the whole world you can watch the movie, then explore a park named for the monumental 1965 sci-fi novel it’s based on; a place which inspired the “Dune” world, where its creator Frank Herbert was born and which also happens to have a real-life “Dune” story behind it.

It’s a place of beauty and peace, a shining example of how humans can turn things around from pollution to protection, inspired by both art and literature.

We’re talking about Dune Peninsula at Point Defiance Park in Tacoma, Washington.

“It’s so beautiful,” says Joe Brady, Metro Park Tacoma’s deputy director of regional parks & attractions. “I walk here all the time, and I’m still in awe of how this place has transformed from EPA Superfund site to stunning waterfront park. It’s a story of hope and recovery.”

Dune Peninsula was built on the ruins of a historic lead-and-copper smelter. The park is only five years old, and already it has claimed a place in Tacoma hearts, winning regional and national accolades. The prairie grasses and flowers have grown tall, sending up masses of seedheads in summer and waving like a sea in the breeze that drifts off deep blue Puget Sound. Families and friends walk, children climb the mounds, dogs explore the curving pathways. People have picnics. Harbor seals rest on rocks offshore. A kelp forest blooms. The park has offered Tacomans a way to connect both with each other and the nature that sustains us.

It also comes as near as possible – given its hazardous legacy – to restoring the area to the beauty and abundance that has supported ancestral owners the Puyallup Tribe since time immemorial.

But if you’d told Frank Herbert back in 1965 that folks would be doing yoga and having picnics on the former ASARCO smelter, he might not have believed you.

Herbert, who would have been turning 104 this year, was a writer who was born and grew up in Tacoma. He left town at age 18 but, inspired in part by the toxic plumes and slag waste dumped from the Ruston Way smelter from 1890 to 1986, he went on to change science fiction forever with his groundbreaking, award-winning “Dune” series.

In its apocalyptic world, the cast-out Paul Altreides (played by Timothée Chalamet) joins with the Indigenous natives of the dessicated planet Arrakis, aiming to restore it from a wasteland created by extractive conquerors (Arrakis is mined for the lucrative ‘spice’ drug) to a lush paradise that sustains life.

Fast-forward five decades, and that’s exactly what humans in Tacoma did to this industrial wasteland that in its heyday had made the city one of the most polluted in the country. Sharing the $74.8 million cost with the Environmental Protection Agency, state Department of Transportation, state Department of Ecology, state Recreation and Conservation Office, City of Tacoma, Tacoma Yacht Club and ASARCO settlement fund, Parks Tacoma used voter-approved park bonds to convert the site to a safe, welcoming park.

It wasn’t easy. Beginning in 2016, the work involved shifting 400,000 cubic yards of dirt and installing a woven geotextile cap; adding native, drought-resistant landscaping shaped into “dunes” with paved and gravel paths. Then came building fun elements like giant steps, and the stairs-and-slides beneath the towering Wilson Way Bridge that connects Dune Peninsula with the rest of Point Defiance Park.

Oh, and adding art to tell the story. Nichole Rathburn’s twisting bronze ‘sandtrouts’ half-emerge from the soil in an allusion to Herbert’s massive fictional beasts; and Adam Kuby’s somber metal tower pieces fragment into hyperbolically-increasing multiples, disappearing into the soil just like spaceship ruins on Arrakis – or the arsenic particles dispersed by the smelter for so many years.

It’s no coincidence that just three months after the park opened, Parks Tacoma was awarded the prestigious National Gold Medal Award for Excellence in Park and Recreation Management from the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration (AAPRA) – the top achievement in the industry.

Finally, Parks Tacoma added a trail dotted with “Dune” quotes and named after Herbert himself, who foretold in fiction the massive task now facing humanity – restoring our world from environmental damage and exploitative injustice.

And as Connie McCloud, cultural director of the Puyallup Tribe, blessed the park at its July 2019 opening, a bald eagle circled overhead like an echo.

Dune Peninsula is a poignant story in a poignant place that Parks Tacoma and its partners have turned from toxic to health-giving. It’s a place that has gone from spewing heavy metals to breathing life into our community. The real-life Dune shows that we can, if we want, restore our world and ourselves.

As former Park Board Commissioner Erik Hanberg – himself a sci-fi author – put it: “The characters in ‘Dune’ have a goal to ‘terraform’ their planet back to its inhabitable origins. That’s what we’ve done here. We have terraformed a polluted wasteland into a beautiful environment for all to enjoy.”

From the big screen to real life, Tacoma’s “Dune” stands as hope for the future.

VISIT:

Wander Dune Peninsula at Point Defiance Park, open daily during daylight hours, with free parking. 5361 Yacht Club Rd, Tacoma. metroparkstacoma.org/place/dune-peninsula