Widely regarded as a masterpiece of climate fiction and solarpunk, New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson is a sprawling novel about how New York City has adapted to climate chaos in the 22nd century. In this special two-part episode, I’ll first offer a plot summary and list of characters, followed by analysis of major themes. This is a long book with a lot to teach us about what a better world could look like and how we might get there, so I’m excited to finally discuss it on the podcast!

→ Buy USED on Better World Books from $7.48
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $16.55 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Jump to

1. About Kim Stanley Robinson
2. Transcript
   1. Introduction to “New York 2140”
   2. Summary of “New York 2140”
      1. Setting
      2. Character list
      3. Plot summary
   3. Outro
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Kim Stanley Robinson is a literary science fiction writer from Davis, California. Born in Waukegan, Illinois in 1952, Robinson moved to Southern California as a child but has also lived in Washington, D.C. and Switzerland. His books frequently incorporate themes of climate change, sustainability, nature, environmental justice, and critiques of capitalism. The author of over 19 books and numerous short stories, Robinson has been awarded the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards for his literary contributions to science fiction. He holds a BA in literature from UC San Diego, an MA in English from Boston University, and a PhD in English from UC San Diego, and he has taught at UC Davis and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. His latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, was published in fall 2020.

Official website: https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/

Transcript

Back to top ↑

I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

You’re listening to Stories for Earth, a podcast about everything climate change in pop culture.

Today, we’re talking about Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140. It’s a long one, so we’re covering it in two parts. You’re listening to part one, where we’ll provide a plot summary of the book. Part two will cover a discussion of major themes and will be available a few weeks after the release of part one.

If you’d like to support further production of the show, consider becoming a member on Patreon for as little as $1 per month. We’re on Twitter and Instagram, and our website is storiesforearth.com.

And now, here’s part one of our discussion of New York 2140. I hope you enjoy.

Introduction to “New York 2140”

Back to top ↑

“The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority.” -Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

“Ecology without class struggle is gardening.” -Chico Mendes, Brazilian trade union leader and environmentalist

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world’s 2,365 billionaires became $4 trillion—or 54 percent—richer, according to a March 2021 analysis from the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). While the pandemic has killed millions of people around the world and doubled the global poverty rate, it’s been kind to the world’s richest people, further widening the already gaping wealth disparity between the haves and the have-nots.

This should come as no surprise if you’re familiar with Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The Shock Doctrine examines how capitalism has taken advantage of and benefitted from moments of crisis, subverting the popular narrative of free market capitalism’s peaceful triumph over the 20th century. From the collapse of the Soviet Union to the rise of the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Klein demonstrates how capitalism pounces on moments of social upheaval and extreme violence to create economic opportunity.

Also read: “Pacific Edge” by Kim Stanley Robinson: A Future Mythology

We’re seeing the Shock Doctrine at play in real time with the COVID-19 pandemic, and many people, myself included, believe we’ll see it again and again as extreme weather events made worse by climate change become more frequent. Given shifting messaging from capitalists and neoliberal politicians, you might say it’s already happening.

Take, for example, recent remarks made by venture capitalist John Doerr, in which he called climate change the “…largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century,” according to MarketWatch. You can also see this in the way shipping companies are gushing about melting Arctic ice opening up new shipping lanes for trade. Or for a more lengthy analysis, consider the 2014 book Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming by Mckenzie Funk.

Summary of “New York 2140”

Back to top ↑

But it’s not just captains of industry and heads of state who hear cha-ching when they think of climate change. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has seen the writing on the wall for the next big money making crisis, writing his 2017 novel New York 2140 about this very phenomenon and exploring a possible solution for escaping it.

Setting

Back to top ↑

Set over a century in the future, New York 2140 takes place after some of the most cataclysmic effects of climate change have been felt. Based on the extremely high sea level rise seen in the novel, it’s safe to assume the world has blown past the Paris Agreement target to limit global warming to 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial average. Much of Lower Manhattan is now partially submerged, with neighboring boroughs like Brooklyn almost totally drowned. The ultra-wealthy live Uptown in superscrapers—dizzyingly tall skyscrapers—and Wall Street is fleeing for higher ground in Denver, Colorado.

Lower Manhattan is now known as “the intertidal,” where flooded roads have transformed into canals and skyscrapers have been converted into partially self-sustaining housing co-ops for the dwindling middle class. Those not fortunate enough to make it into one of these vertical villages survive by squatting in the crumbling ruins of shorter buildings, which now serve as poker chips for investors in a kind of climate-induced housing bubble.

Being a New York novel, finance plays a big role in this story, and it can be easy to feel lost at times if you don’t have a basic understanding of finance or economics. But more than anything, New York 2140 is a massive exercise in worldbuilding, where Kim Stanley Robinson has seemingly imagined every conceivable aspect of a future New York and chosen to follow the lives of ten main characters over the course of about three years. While most of the characters are neighbors living quite different lives as residents of the Met Life Tower, four of them are lumped into pairs and another one represents the city itself as a character.

Character list

Back to top ↑

To briefly summarize, the characters are as follows:

• Mutt and Jeff—two unemployed financial analysts living in a hotello (a sort of pop-up tent) in the vertical farm of the Met Life Tower
• Inspector Gen—an NYPD investigator who works on cracking a series of mysterious and seemingly unrelated cases throughout the novel
• Franklin Garr—a cocky young hedge fund trader who becomes the mastermind behind the largest debt strike in history
• Vlade—a middle-aged Ukrainian immigrant who works as the superintendent of the Met Life Tower
• The Citizen—a somewhat Shakespearean character who embodies the voice of New York City, often providing helpful historical context and snarky comedic relief in what I can only hear as a classic Manhattan accent
• Amelia Black—a futuristic streamer of sorts who hosts an internet show where she rescues endangered species and moves them to more hospitable environments as the climate continues to make ecosystems shapeshift
• Charlotte Armstrong—the chairperson of the Met Life Tower housing cooperative who works for the Householders’ Union, an NGO working to help those in need secure housing
• Stefan and Roberto—two “water rat” young boys orphaned in the intertidal who have had to learn to fend for themselves and are obsessed with hunting for buried treasure

Plot summary

Back to top ↑

New York 2140 is a sweeping novel that contains many subplots, but the overarching plot has to do with changing the global financial system for the good and transitioning to a post-capitalist economic system. Simple topics, I know. Stay with me.

The book starts with a sort of socialist realist version of a Statler and Waldorf skit from The Muppet Show. Jeff is lecturing Mutt on the problems with capitalism and how he has a plan to make tiny tweaks to what he has identified as the 16 financial laws that govern the global financial system. Thanks to computer access granted by a recent freelance project for Jeff’s cousin who works in finance, Jeff can actually deploy the code he’s written to change these laws and hopefully save the world from greed and exploitation in the process.

Except, right after Jeff pushes the code revisions, the two realize they’ve been caught and have to make a run for it. The men go missing, and Charlotte Armstrong—chairperson of the Met Life tower housing co-op—files a police report. While Inspector Gen gets started on the case, a peppy and opportunistic Franklin Garr boats to work at WaterPrice, a hedge fund firm that manages investments in sea level and housing securities.

Has this info helped you?

Stories for Earth is and always will be a free resource to help people imagine brighter futures through the material we discuss. It’s also created and paid for by one person! Apart from occasional affiliate revenue, donations from people like you is the only way Stories for Earth remains financially feasible.

Franklin is somewhat of a wunderkind at WaterPrice thanks to his invention of something called the Intertidal Property Pricing Index, or the IPPI. This is where the book starts to lose some people since it can get a little technical with finance-talk, so I’ll do my best to explain it here.

In 2140, sea level rise is tracked religiously, thanks to the traumas of the past one-hundred-plus years when sea levels rose dramatically and rapidly, mostly in two events called the First and Second Pulse. These were episodes of massive sea level rise in a very short amount of time due to major collapses in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Both Pulses caused incalculable amounts of destruction to coastal communities around the world, and everyone is paranoid about the prospect of a Third Pulse happening.

True to form, Wall Street and other financial hubs found a way to make betting on sea level rise a lucrative business. Now, sea level has its own index on the stock market, just like the top 500 publicly traded companies have the S&P 500 today. Housing has its own index as well. So, to put it simply, this index that Franklin Garr has created—the Intertidal Property Pricing Index—functions to produce an accurate, real-time price estimate of coastal property based on the global rise and fall of sea level.

Also read: “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, Climate Change, and Moving Beyond a Vision of Doom

This helps to explain why buildings in the intertidal zone of New York City are so valuable now. Even though the East Coast is largely drowned, people haven’t totally abandoned their homes, stubbornly sticking around through some drastic adaptation measures. The submerged ground floors of buildings are totally sealed off to prevent flooding, and buildings have been reinforced with graphene to keep them from tumbling into the polluted water.

However, this interest in betting on housing prices has led to a fiercely competitive housing market, which is causing some stress for Charlotte Armstrong. The Met Life tower housing co-op has recently learned of a bid from an unknown party to buy the building, and the size of the bid smells like an attempt at a hostile takeover. Forced to put the bid to a vote among the tower’s residents, the co-op narrowly avoids getting bought out, but Charlotte is rattled by this and determined to find out who’s behind the bid.

To complicate things, it seems someone is trying to sabotage the Met Life tower. Vlade, the building’s superintendent, gets an alert early one morning of a leak in the building’s basement. Upon inspection, it appears someone has intentionally drilled through one of the walls facing the outside canal. Vlade manages to contain and patch the leak, but the event is still unsettling. Charlotte suspects whoever tried to buy the Met Life tower might be behind it.

Meanwhile, we’re introduced to Amelia Black, a “cloud” star who hosts a popular show called Assisted Migration, named after the giant airship she flies of the same name. Amelia is on a mission to relocate some starving polar bears to Antarctica, where conditions are still similar enough to their ideal environment to give them a chance at survival. Stefan and Roberto—two orphaned young boys who live in the canals—make an appearance after Franklin Garr saves them from drowning. Vlade takes them under his wing, and they eventually spill the beans about their plans to salvage the wreckage of an old British ship they’ve found and hopefully recover some sunken treasure.

Vlade goes on a couple of other treasure hunts with the boys, eventually employing the help of his ex-wife Idelba and her boat to recover the gold from the wreckage of the HMS Hussar. It’s on one of these expeditions that Vlade accidentally finds Mutt and Jeff, who have been held prisoner in a kind of underwater facility on the bottom of the bay. This gives Inspector Gen some new leads, who eventually narrows the list of suspects down to Jeff’s cousin, a hedge fund manager named Henry Vinson.

Seemingly unbeknownst to him, Vinson’s hedge fund, Albany Albany, hired a private security firm to kidnap Mutt and Jeff, though we later find out it was Charlotte’s ex-husband and chair of the Federal Reserve who ordered the kidnapping under the guise of placing them in witness protection. Mutt and Jeff’s rescue also provides some evidence that Vinson’s hedge fund was going through Morningside Realty in the attempted buy-out of the Met Life tower.

These discoveries are soon overshadowed by news that a massive hurricane is heading for New York City, and the residents of the Met Life tower scramble to prepare for what is likely to be a nasty storm. Amelia Black is forced to delay her return home, flying north to ride out the storm, and Stefan and Roberto go missing after they’re caught in the storm while trying to find the grave of Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick.

The other main characters hunker down in the Met Life tower, which emerges relatively unscathed compared to some of the other nearby buildings. However, the intertidal zone where the poor live as squatters in crumbling buildings, is completely annihilated, and Vlade and his ex-wife Idelba venture out in her tugboat to save as many people as possible from the lethal storm surge.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, hundreds of people have perished, and thousands more are effectively climate refugees—now homeless and living in a massive open-air refugee camp in the wreckage of Central Park. Charlotte is overwhelmed with requests to the Householder’s Union, and she makes an unsuccessful attempt to convince the mayor to seize all the unused housing uptown that has been bought up by rich investors. A riot ensues after the refugees are essentially abandoned by the city, and the NYPD gets locked into a tense standoff with the same private security company who kidnapped Mutt and Jeff.

Inspector Gen manages to de-escalate the situation, but not without getting some important information on who the security company works for—Henry Vinson. By this point, Vinson’s name has been found to be connected to a number of mysteries throughout the novel, from the hostile buyout of the Met Life tower to Mutt and Jeff’s kidnapping to a private security firm threatening to shoot rioters attempting to breach a pretty much vacant building.

This eventually gets back to the hedge fund trader, Franklin Garr. Remembering a conversation he’d previously had with Charlotte Armstrong about how a debt strike could bring the global financial system to its knees to better serve everyday people, Franklin springs into action. He calls up Charlotte, and the two hatch a plan to make the debt strike a reality. Amelia Black also gets in on the action, using her enormous platform as a cloud star to send the rallying cry.

What is this debt strike? It’s basically an intentional recreation of the 2008 financial crisis. If you recall, the 2008 financial crisis happened because a housing bubble collapsed in the United States. This caused a domino effect of economic consequences that resulted in the global Great Recession.

In very simple terms, banks approved a lot of predatory mortgages to people who most likely could not afford them. And by that I mean they started issuing mortgages like what they called “No Income, No Assets” or Ninja loans. When these people inevitably couldn’t make payments on their mortgages anymore, thousands of houses went into foreclosure, and behemoth investment banks like Bear Stearns went bankrupt. If you want a really entertaining and accessible explanation of what happened, I highly recommend the movie The Big Short.

This is essentially the kind of financial crisis Franklin, Charlotte, and Amelia helped orchestrate. Except this time, mortgage payments stopped because hundreds of thousands of people made a choice to stop paying them all at the same time rather than being forced to stop making payments out of financial necessity. Just as they hoped, this caused a domino effect that brought the global financial system down. The banks asked for a government bailout, but this time was different from the series of stimulus packages Congress passed in 2009.

Governments around the world still bailed out financial institutions but in exchange for nationalization. In other words, governments gave them the cash they needed to survive on the condition that the money go towards buying shares. This effectively made governments around the world majority shareholders in the various failing financial institutions, thereby netting them a lot of revenue for their national budgets.

What happens next is a bit of a blur. With bolstered confidence from the successful nationalization of Wall Street, Congress passed a flurry of legislation straight from a progressive Democrat’s wildest dreams: universal healthcare, free college tuition, full employment, programs, aggressive environmental protections, a corporate tax rate of 90 percent, laws preventing capital flight to tax havens, et cetera.

Thus ends New York 2140. It’s a long and wild ride with lots to say about the fundamental brokenness of our current neoliberal era marked by extreme wealth inequality, climate breakdown, fascism, and disaster capitalism. And yet, despite a tendency to pontificate and perhaps lean too heavily on historical events from the early 21st century, it’s a pleasant and engaging read that has a lot to teach us about human resiliency and the power of collective action.

Outro

Back to top ↑

I’m doing this episode a bit differently from past ones, so be on the lookout for part two of our episode on New York 2140, where we’ll move beyond a plot summary to analyze some of the major themes in the novel.

In the meantime, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram, and check out our website at storiesforearth.com. If you’d like to support further production of the show, consider becoming a member on Patreon for as little as $1 per month.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Recommendations

Back to top ↑

Book: Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson

→ Buy USED on Better World Books from $5.44
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $22.07 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Book: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

→ Buy USED on Better World Books from $5.05
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $20.24 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Book: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland

→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $12.87 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Article: “Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto” by Adam Flynn in Hieroglyph

Like what you see? Become a Patreon member today for as little as $1 a month.

The post “New York 2140” by Kim Stanley Robinson: Summary & Analysis appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Seeing The Day After Tomorrow as a youth was probably the first time I was exposed to the idea of climate change. And 17 years later, this film remains one of the only major Hollywood productions to explicitly engage with the topic. For this special episode of Stories for Earth, I chatted with Dr. Yanas Kisten, a scientist and host of the podcast Geekoscopy, about one of our favorite disaster flicks: The Day After Tomorrow, directed by Roland Emmerich.

• Buy or rent on YouTube: https://youtu.be/K_xwj9bHZm4

Special guest: Dr. Yanas Kisten, host of the Geekoscopy podcast

For this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Yanas Kisten, a South African scientist and host of the Geekoscopy podcast, which explores “…the intersection between science, story, and play.” Yanas is a postdoctoral researcher at Nelson Mandela University in Eastern Cape, South Africa and is interested in science communication. He examines the many different ways that geek culture can help science reach a broader audience through his podcast.

• Website: https://www.geekoscopy.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/geekoscopy
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/geekoscopy/

Jump to

1. About Roland Emmerich
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Roland Emmerich is a German film director and producer known for movies like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Independence Day (1996), and The Patriot (2000). Educated at the Munich Film and Television School, Emmerich’s career began with his student film, The Noah’s Ark Principle (1984), opening the 1984 Berlin Film Festival. The film was a success, paving the way for him to make his Hollywood directorial debut with Universal Soldier in 1992. Roland Emmerich lives in Los Angeles where he runs the film and television production company Centropolis Entertainment.

Official website: http://www.centropolis.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rolandemmerich

Transcript

Back to top ↑

*Coming soon*

Recommendations

Back to top ↑

Article: “The lingering influence of ‘Day After Tomorrow’” by Michael Svoboda in Yale Climate Connections

Interview: Stories for Earth! GKSP101 EP030: Forrest Brown

Video: Everything Wrong With The Day After Tomorrow from CinemaSins

Podcast: “Gun Island” and “The Great Derangement” by Amitav Ghosh: Summary & Analysis from Stories for Earth

• Transcript
• Listen on Spotify
• Listen on Apple Podcasts
• Listen on Stitcher

Like what you see? Become a Patreon member today for as little as $1 a month.

The post A Discussion of “The Day After Tomorrow” with Dr. Yanas Kisten appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue is the story of a decades-long fight for environmental justice. The novel centers around the Nangi family, telling their story from multiple different perspectives over the course of the book. And though How Beautiful We Were takes place in a fictional African country, it bears a close resemblance to some important modern-day climate themes.

In our first episode of season three, we’ll take a look at a plot summary of this novel, exploring the characters, providing an in-depth analysis, and looking at current events in Ecuador as a possible real-life parallel. Listen wherever you get podcasts below, and consider buying your own copy using our affiliate link below. We appreciate the support!

→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $25.76 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Jump to

1. About Imbolo Mbue
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Originally from Limbe, Cameroon, Imbolo Mbue is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Behold the Dreamers and How Beautiful We Were. Her first novel, Behold the Dreamers won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. After working on it for years, Mbue’s second novel, How Beautiful We Were, was published in March 2021. Imbolo Mbue lives in New York.

Official website: https://www.imbolombue.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imbolombue/

Transcript

Back to top ↑

I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a podcast about everything climate change in pop culture. I’m excited to finally share the first episode of season 3. It’s crazy to think how fast time has gone. We just recently had our two year anniversary as a podcast, and I’m looking forward to sharing many more interviews and discussions of important stories.

Our first discussion of season 3 is about the novel How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, and I am sure that I am probably not pronouncing her name correctly. If you want to support further production of the show, consider becoming a member on Patreon for early access to new episodes. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter to keep up with the latest news about the show.
Let’s cut to the chase. Here’s our discussion of How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue. I hope you enjoy.

The literary value of tragedies

Back to top ↑

Some stories don’t have happy endings. And I think it’s worth telling you right off the bat that the story I want to talk about today is one of them. This doesn’t make it any less of a good story, a great story, even. We tend to steer clear of stories without happy endings. We’ll listen to a sad story, sure, as long as it ends on a positive note, but something in us makes us hesitant to commit to stories with unhappy endings. I understand this impulse, but at the same time, I think there’s something sad about that, too.

Some of the best stories ever told have unhappy endings. The Ancient Greeks called these tragedies. And just like their opposite, comedies, tragedies offer valuable insights and observations about life and the human condition.

Has this info helped you?

Stories for Earth is and always will be a free resource to help people imagine brighter futures through the material we discuss. It’s also created and paid for by one person! Apart from occasional affiliate revenue, donations from people like you is the only way Stories for Earth remains financially feasible.

Consider one of the older tragedies you might be familiar with: Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Hamlet wrestles with some pretty tough questions—if you haven’t read it before, you’ll know the famous line: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” This quote has been trivialized to some extent, but it’s actually asking something pretty heavy: is life, for all of its pain and sorrows, actually worth living?

One of my favorite books is also a tragedy. I first read A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway when I was in high school, and even though it was probably one of the saddest books I’d read at that point, I loved it. It’s even sadder when you learn that many parts of it are based on the author’s real life experiences. I was not the same person after reading that novel.

So all that is to say, How Beautiful We Were is a sad book, but just like some of the best tragedies, it’s not sad for the sake of being sad. It is a brilliant novel, and I think it has a lot to teach us about facing the climate crisis.

“How Beautiful We Were” plot summary

Back to top ↑

Set in the fictional village of Kosawa in a fictional African country, How Beautiful We Were is the decades-long story of Kosawa’s fight with the American oil company Pexton. The story begins with news that something in the water is making the village children sick and killing them. We hear heartbreaking accounts of parents burying their sons and daughters with no one left to carry on the family name, and when the villagers seek help from the government, they’re met with gaslighting and denial of any wrongdoing.

Finally, some of the villagers have enough of their children dying, and after kidnapping some of Pexton’s men, things start to escalate. The battle between Pexton and Kosawa rages on for 40 years before reaching any semblance of a resolution, spanning continents and seeing Kosawa fighting in the courts, in the press, in civil demonstrations, and in violent sabotage campaigns to protect their homelands.

Also read: “Weather” by Jenny Offill

Rather than focusing on one main character, the story takes a collectivist approach, unraveling from the perspective of six members of the Nangi family and from a first person collective perspective of an unknown number of people simply called “The Children.” Each character has a different approach of dealing—or not dealing—with the environmental disaster Pexton caused.

The father, Malabo, ventures to the capital city of Bezam to plead with the government, and his younger brother, Bongo, goes after him. Young Thula studies abroad in the US on a scholarship and returns as a tireless activist. Her mother, Sahel, does her best to raise Thula and her brother while mourning the loss of her husband.

Thula’s little brother Juba, comes back from the dead as a boy and spends the rest of his life struggling with the sensation of being half-dead, half-alive. And Yaya, Juba and Thula’s grandmother, reflects on centuries of destruction and exploitation from foreigners—first through the trans-Atlantic slave trade to rubber plantations to oil fields—and laments what appears to be the end of her home. Finally, The Children grow up in desperation, eventually looking to Thula, their peer, as a leader.

Similarities between Kosawa and Cameroon

Back to top ↑

How Beautiful We Were paints a rich story and explores a number of themes, including imperialism, political corruption, environmental destruction, nonviolent versus violent direct action, and courage in the face of certain defeat. And while we never learn the name of the country where the story takes place, it bears many similarities to Imbolo Mbue’s home country of Cameroon, a relatively small West-Central African country that borders Nigeria to the north and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo to the south.

Some people refer to Cameroon as “Little Africa” because it encapsulates so many facets of this vast continent. And just like Cameroon, the story of Kosawa is a familiar one in Africa. Africa is an enormous continent, but many of its people have been the victims of violent Western European and American colonizers. The people of Kosawa, too, were often victimized by Western colonizers, such as slave traders, plantation owners, and oil company executives.

Returning again to Cameroon, this land was historically inhabited by the Adamawa Emirate in the north and by various chiefdoms and fondoms in the south. That is, until the German Empire imposed brutal colonial rule in the late 1800s. The Germans controlled the colony they called Kamerun—after the Portuguese word for shrimp—until the end of World War I in 1916.

After the war, Cameroon was split in half between the English and the French. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Cameroon gained independence from England and France and reunified as one country. In the many years since, one political party has primarily controlled the country and has focused heavily on oil production to grow its economy. Meanwhile, the country has faced many problems, from political corruption to civil unrest to terrorism. In other words, many of the same problems facing the fictional country from How Beautiful We Were.

Parallels between Kosawa and Ecuador

Back to top ↑

But in terms of the plot of this novel, I’m reminded of another country, albeit in the Western Hemisphere. Ecuador is a small South American country on the Pacific coast, sharing a border with Peru to the south and Colombia to the north. The Amazon rainforest extends partially into Ecuador, and in the 1960s, the American oil company Texaco, since acquired by Chevron in 2001, started drilling for oil in the Ecuadorian rainforest in what is known as the Lago Agrio oil field. Literally translated: the sour lake oil field.

You probably don’t need me to tell you the effects were disastrous. Texaco didn’t properly dispose of toxic waste from drilling operations—meaning they dumped toxic wastewater into a river that provided drinking water to many indigenous people. Just like the residents of Kosawa in How Beautiful We Were, indigenous people in Ecuador started getting sick and dying. And just like the fictional American oil company Pexton from the novel, the very real oil company called Texaco—now a brand of California-based Chevron—denied any wrongdoing at first, blaming the sickness and death among the indigenous people on poor sanitation. Which was, of course, a racist lie.

Like the people of Kosawa, Ecuadorians finally had enough of this, and in 1993 some local villagers filed a massive class action lawsuit against Texaco. Seemingly against all odds, the plaintiffs won the class action suit, and in 2011, the Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay $9.5 billion in damages. And sadly, much like the story of How Beautiful We Were, this story is still developing today. Even though Ecuador found Chevron responsible for oil drilling contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Chevron has fought back against the ruling with everything it has.

In 2018, Chevron won a very important appeals case with The Hague in which an international tribunal ruled that the 2011 ruling by Ecuador “…was procured through fraud, bribery and corruption and was based on claims that had been already settled and released by the Republic of Ecuador years earlier.” This effectively rendered the 2011 ruling unenforceable, meaning that in the 25 years that passed since the first class action lawsuit was filed, the indigenous people from the region surrounding Lago Agrio still had not received reparations.

In fact, three years after the 2018 tribunal ruling, the original plaintiffs still haven’t received reparations. Chevron has spent a lot of money on PR campaigns to push its side of the lawsuit and discredit a key environmental attorney, going so far as to create a publication called The Amazon Post, a website that is “…maintained by Chevron to express the company’s views and opinions on a fraudulent lawsuit against the company in Ecuador,” according to the site’s About page. At first glance, The Amazon Post appears to be a legitimate news outlet rather than an aggressive PR initiative from one of the world’s largest oil companies.

And finally, reminiscent of the fates that met Austin, the young journalist from Bézam, and Thula, the quiet-village-girl-turned-fierce-activist, the American lawyer who represented the Ecuadorian villagers in the first class action lawsuit in 1993 has found himself in Chevron’s crosshairs. In August 2020, attorney Steven Donziger was placed under house arrest. His bank accounts have been frozen, he has been disbarred from practicing law, he’s forbidden from earning money, and he faces exorbitant fines, in addition to other hardships.

I’ll be honest: things don’t look good for Steven Donziger. I hate to use this word after hearing it overused to the point of becoming meaningless since the start of the pandemic, but in many ways, Chevron’s legal campaign against him is unprecedented. According to The Intercept, Chevron has flat-out said its strategy in overturning the Ecuador court ruling is to demonize Steven Donziger.

Also read: Joy Harjo: “Crazy Brave,” “An American Sunrise,” And The Land

As you can tell, this is an extremely complicated legal case that will likely be studied by law students for years to come. If you’re interested in learning more about the latest developments regarding Chevron, Ecuador, and Steven Donziger, I recommend listening to season five of the excellent podcast Drilled from journalist Amy Westervelt. I’ll include a link in the show notes.

So what’s the takeaway from all of this? Well, Kosawa might be a fictional African village suffering the consequences of a corrupt government that opened its doors wide to an irresponsible oil company, but it sadly bears a strong resemblance to countries like Ecuador who are now dealing with some very similar problems in real life.

And just like the battles against the fictional company Pexton from How Beautiful We Were, the court cases involving Chevron and Ecuador just go to show how far the fossil fuel industry will go to protect its interests.

As the latest IPCC report makes abundantly clear, there is no scenario in which the fossil fuel industry continues to exist if we’re to have a livable planet. But how we take down the fossil fuel industry is the biggest question that remains unanswered.

Violent versus nonviolent direct action

Back to top ↑

As How Beautiful We Were starts to pick up steam, a clear dichotomy begins to emerge in how different villagers of Kosawa fight back against Pexton. We see this first when Malabo and his friends kidnap the men from Pexton, but this theme becomes more fleshed out after Thula leaves the village to attend university in the United States.

After arriving in New York City, Thula reconnects with Austin, the journalist from Bezam who originally broke the story about Pexton’s misdeeds. Austin starts taking Thula to meetings with activists who work on various human rights issues, and it doesn’t take long before Thula becomes a fierce activist herself. But unlike some of the other villagers taking a stand against Pexton, Thula is staunchly committed to non-violent direct action.

The first-person collective narrator known simply as The Children has a different approach, though. These people are Thula’s peers, and they exchange letters back and forth with her about what should be done to stop Pexton. Thula forbids them from using violence, threatening to withhold funding for their cause if they violate their agreement to remain peaceful. But after a certain point, The Children use funds from Thula to buy guns from a corrupt soldier anyway, using them to murder a number of different Pexton employees.

The Children also carry out sabotage campaigns, setting fire to Pexton facilities in the hopes that they will finally leave after seeing how unwelcome they are. Meanwhile, Thula eventually returns to Africa, becoming a school teacher and organizing massive nationwide protests against the corrupt government that lets Pexton destroy the environment and make the people sick. Thula works her entire adult life trying to enact change through peaceful protest, but in the end, she’s largely unsuccessful.

Also read: “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, Climate Change, and Moving Beyond a Vision of Doom

In fact, the character who seems to be the most well-off by the end is Juba, Thula’s younger brother who came back from the dead as a child after getting very sick from Pexton’s poison. As an adult, Juba can’t shake the feeling that he never fully returned to the realm of the living, constantly feeling as though he’s half-dead, half-alive.

I read this as a metaphor for how Juba chooses to engage with the war between Kosawa and Pexton. Juba isn’t violent, but he also doesn’t have the same activist’s passion that we see in his sister. Instead, Juba goes to the best schools in the country and gets a government job doing the bidding of corrupt officials and politicians. He marries a woman named Nubia, named after one of the earliest civilizations in ancient Africa, who has somewhat of a scammer’s philosophy. She hates the corrupt government as much as anyone else, but instead of fighting it at great personal cost, she prefers to take advantage of the crooked system to benefit herself as much as possible.

Near the end of the book, we see Juba and Nubia living a life of luxury while Thula lives a modest lifestyle as an activist school teacher. Speaking about Thula on page 343, The Children say, “One angry woman did everything, and she failed.” The book ends with a judge forcing the residents of Kosawa to relocate. The judge doesn’t deny the damage Pexton has caused, but he also doesn’t think the law can hold them accountable. Given the extent of the damage, it’s best for the villagers to just find a new home.

The best way forward?

Back to top ↑

After reading How Beautiful We Were and reflecting on the world we currently live in, one that is honestly so much more bleak and dystopian than the one in this novel, I’m not sure of how we should proceed.

High profile climate organizations like Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement are committed to peaceful direct action, but how long can this continue to be a viable strategy? At what point do some people renege on this principle and resort to violence? Many important movements throughout history have been fought with violence. Is that what the environmental movement will one day be forced to do?

But honestly, out of the three responses I see in How Beautiful We Were, I think Juba’s response might be the most relatable to many people. Heartbroken and half-dead, many of us walk through life like zombies, complying with our evil capitalist overlords while we scheme to exploit the broken system to our advantage. Jia Tolentino makes many excellent observations about this phenomenon in her essay “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams” from her essay collection Trick Mirror. Many of us know the system is fucked, but what can we do about it? At a time when one percent of the world’s population owns the vast majority of the world’s wealth, playing the system to our advantage is what’s expected of us. It’s a vicious cycle until some external force breaks that cycle, or the house of cards comes crashing down under its own weight.

I’m sure we’ll see a combination of all three responses, as the environmental movement progresses and our insane society continues to flirt even more with the threat of apocalypse. I strongly believe there is no one right way to tackle this enormous problem. Perhaps a hybrid approach will be the path we take. As for me, I don’t want to see violence and bloodshed erupt as we struggle to save our planet. But I have to wonder: are there limits to peaceful protest, and what will happen if we cross that threshold?

Outro

Back to top ↑

Stories for Earth is created by me, Forrest Brown. The music you heard in this episode is also by me. If you want to support further production of the show, consider becoming a member on Patreon. For just a couple bucks a month, you’ll get early access to each new episode, and you’ll help me keep making Stories for Earth.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll join us for season 3, episode 2 for our discussion on the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow.

Recommendations

Back to top ↑

Book: Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $15.64 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Book: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $20.24 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Article: “How The Environmental Lawyer Who Won A Massive Judgment Against Chevron Lost Everything” by Sharon Lerner in The Intercept

→ Read the article

Documentary: Crude: The Real Price of Oil from Joe Berlinger

→ Watch on YouTube
→ Watch on Prime Video

Like what you see? Become a Patreon member today for as little as $1 a month.

The post “How Beautiful We Were” by Imbolo Mbue: Summary & Analysis appeared first on Stories for Earth.

This is a podcast about the greatest story ever told. It’s actually a story that’s being told because we are all living through it right now, and we will be for the rest of our lives. I’m talking, of course, about the climate emergency.

But the tricky thing about stories unfolding in real time is that we can’t see the whole picture yet. Remember, we’re all characters in this story, and none of us have a narrator’s God’s-eye-view of what this all means or what happens next. So what do we do? We tell stories ourselves to make sense of this muddled reality. We write novels. We program video games. We direct films. We sing songs.

We have so many ways of telling stories, and I believe that paying attention to some of the best ones can help us as we try to navigate the bigger story, the climate story, in our own lives. We’ve already talked about some incredible stories on the show. Last season, we started out by talking about one of the greatest video games ever made, Final Fantasy VII, a tale of an ecoterrorist organization that must persevere against all odds in the fight to save the planet.

The current US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo spoke to us through poetry about what it was like when her people could hear the songs of plants, and why it’s imperative that all of us learn how to hear them now. A farm girl from South Korea showed just how far people will go to save the ones they love and how creating the world we want might just start with how we engage with capitalism.

In her novel Weather, Jenny Offill taught us how a New York City librarian narrowly avoided becoming a doomer by learning to always look for the obligatory note of hope. A heavy metal band from Australia painted a vivid and terrifying audio picture of what kind of future we might expect if we don’t drastically change course immediately.

My friend from across the Atlantic and I had a makeshift therapy session with each other to process the eon-level view of life on this planet from The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Amitav Ghosh, one of the most eminent writers on literature and the climate crisis, took us on a journey through the history of world literature to show us how modern literature is failing to address climate change and what must be done to change that.

This August, we’ll embark on another journey through stories in all forms to discover what they can teach us about living in an age verging on climate chaos. We’ll see how those least responsible for climate change suffer the worst consequences through heartbreaking novels like How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue.

We’ll consider the story of a lone robot left to clean up the mess humans left on Earth while they rocket through space in search of a new planet to inhabit. We’ll find inspiration from a brave young princess in an imaginary world as she struggles to simultaneously prevent a war and save the planet. And we might just revisit one of the first major Hollywood films ever made about climate change.

It’s going to be a powerful exploration into the different stories that can help us better understand the real-life story of climate change, and I hope you’ll tag along. Our first stop is coming up shortly through a discussion on How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue. Thank you for listening, and I look forward to seeing you then for the first episode of Stories for Earth Season 3.

The post Coming Soon: Stories for Earth Season 3 appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Gun Island and The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh could not be more appropriate books for discussion on this podcast—they’re both about the role stories play in fighting the climate emergency! In this episode, I summarize and analyze Gun Island, using The Great Derangement as a critical framework. If that sounds a little academic, don’t worry. Ghosh is a very accessible writer, and I found his ideas brilliant yet easy to understand.

→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $15.64
→ Buy NEW on Better World Books from $15.63
→ Find at your local library

→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $13.80
→ Buy NEW on Better World Books from $13.91
→ Find at your local library

Audio only

Jump to

1. About Amitav Ghosh
2. Transcript
   1. Gun Island plot summary and analysis
   2. Gun Island as a response to The Great Derangement
   3. The role of literature in the climate crisis
   4. Looking to the past for inspiration
   5. Empire and climate change
   6. Imagining a better future
3. What you can do to help
4. Recommendations

About the creator

Back to top ↑

Born in Calcutta, India, Amitav Ghosh is the author of The Great Derangement, Gun Island, and multiple other works of fiction and nonfiction. His 2017 nonfiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable won the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018, and his 2008 novel Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His latest book, Jungle Nama, was released in 2021. Amitav Ghosh divides his time between Brooklyn, Kolkata, and Goa.

Official website: http://www.amitavghosh.com/
On Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3369.Amitav_Ghosh
On Twitter: @GhoshAmitav
On Instagram: @amitav_ghosh1

Transcript

Back to top ↑

One of the first times I can remember eating lobster, I was 10 years old. My family wasn’t one to splurge on expensive groceries, so fried shrimp was about the only seafood we ate growing up. But the lobster and other seafood we got that summer were relatively inexpensive. A man driving a refrigerated van through our neighborhood rang our doorbell, and my mother bought a lot of seafood from him. He had just come up to Atlanta from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit, and he was trying to sell everything before it went bad.

Though I was too young to fully understand it at the time, a lot of people like that man came up after Katrina, some of them driving even further than the eight hours it takes to get to Atlanta from New Orleans. Some of them went back, but a lot of them didn’t—as much as 40 percent, according to Salon. The hurricane itself did a lot of damage, but the flooding caused the worst of it. Many of the levees that held back the Gulf of Mexico burst with the storm surge, which was as high as 30 feet, or 9 meters, in some places.

Also read: “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Hurricane Katrina, and Climate Change

When all was said and done, up to 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater. And even though the mayor had issued a mandatory evacuation order the day before the hurricane hit, thousands of people, consisting mostly of the city’s poorest residents, were homeless, and over 1,800 people had died, including people in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. At $125 billion in damages, Hurricane Katrina was the most expensive storm in US history, tied only recently with Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Even now, almost 16 years later, the city is still recovering, especially the hardest-hit neighborhoods like St. Bernard Parish and the Ninth Ward.

As for the people who hadn’t returned to New Orleans two years after the storm? Many of them still haven’t returned, and they have no intention of doing so. Some people have called this the largest mass-exodus of people in the US after the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. But this isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon. Around the world, there is a refugee crisis of people fleeing conflict zones to seek a better life for themselves and their families. And it is directly tied to the climate crisis.

“Gun Island” plot summary and analysis

Back to top ↑

Immigration and climate change are major themes in the novel I recently finished reading, Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh. Published in 2019 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Gun Island is the story of Dinanath, or Deen, Datta, a rare book dealer from Kolkata, India who splits his time between Brooklyn and Kolkata. And just so you know—yes, many spoilers lie ahead.

Deen is a strict realist; he has no belief in the metaphysical, and he thinks the stories in the antique books he sells are nothing more than just stories. But after a chance encounter with a distant relative in India, Deen sets off on a wild goose chase, if somewhat reluctantly, to crack the legend of the Gun Merchant, an ancient myth in the flavor of the Odyssey that tells of a man’s travels as he tries to escape the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi. Deen’s quest to understand the legend of the Gun Merchant takes him all over the world, leading him to cross paths with an interesting cast of characters in rather synchronous ways. The novel is good by itself, but I found it made for a much more enriching experience to read it alongside Amitav Ghosh’s nonfiction book, The Great Derangement. More on that to come.

The legend of the Gun Merchant

Deen travels first to a shrine on a remote island in the Sundarbans, an Indian national park of lush mangrove forests in the delta region between India and Bangladesh. There, he meets Tipu, a street-smart and tech-savvy teenager who guides Deen to the shrine in the Sundarbans. Tipu, Deen learns, is a smuggler who helps people from India and Bangladesh immigrate illegally to other countries where work and money are easier to come by. This is where we first encounter climate refugees in the novel, as Tipu says on pages 87 and 88:

In these parts, there’s a whole bunch of dirt-poor, illiterate people scratching out a living by fishing or farming or going into the jungle to collect bamboo and honey. Or at least that’s what they used to do. But now the fish catch is down, the land’s turning salty, and you can’t go into the jungle without bribing the forest guards. On top of that every other year you get hit by a storm that blows everything to pieces. So what are people supposed to do? What would anyone do?

Gun Island, pp. 87-88

When they arrive at the shrine, Deen and Tipu meet up with Rafi, a peasant boy from nearby who knows about the significance of the shrine in the legend of the Gun Merchant from stories he grew up hearing from his grandfather. But while Rafi is showing Deen around the shrine, he’s attacked by a cobra, forcing the three to flee by boat so they can get Rafi to a hospital. On their way, the venom causes Rafi to start convulsing and having disturbing hallucinations about someone who’s chasing him, and Tipu tries to provide comfort by staying with him below deck.

Deen in the US

Once they arrive at the hospital and Rafi stabilizes, Deen has to leave abruptly to catch his flight to New York. Not liking the cold, Deen winters in Kolkata and spends the rest of the year in Brooklyn. But it would seem whatever haunted Rafi after being bit by the snake has also latched onto Deen. He becomes paranoid and hardly leaves his apartment until his old friend Cinta invites him to an academic conference in Los Angeles. Cinta is one of Deen’s oldest friends, and she’s currently researching the role of Venice, Italy in the ancient spice trade. Unlike Deen, Cinta is somewhat of a mystic, believing she’s seen the ghost of her dead daughter and scolding Deen for dismissing the legend of the Gun Merchant as some silly folk tale.

After much indecision from Deen, he eventually decides to meet Cinta in LA, though he’s paranoid about the city’s encroaching wildfires and haunted by strange visions of the snake on his trip, leading to an embarrassing and scary incident at the airport. Deen manages to make it to the conference, which is mostly full of stuffy, old-fashioned academics who scoff when a younger researcher gives a presentation on literature and climate change.

However, Cinta is sympathetic to the young scholar, talking to Deen later about why he’s wrong to think the legend of the Gun Merchant is just a story. Cinta says on page 176:

At that time people recognized that stories could tap into dimensions that were beyond the ordinary, beyond the human even. They knew that only through stories was it possible to enter the most inward mysteries of our existence where nothing that is really important can be proven to exist—like love, or loyalty, or even the faculty that makes us turn around when we feel the gaze of a stranger or an animal. Only through stories can invisible or inarticulate or silent beings speak to us; it is they who allow the past to reach out to us.

Gun Island, pg. 176

This is part of a larger theme in the book—the role of literature in addressing the climate crisis—which matches Ghosh’s argument in The Great Derangement that we should look to literary traditions further in the past than modern, realist literature if we’re to write the kind of literature climate change demands of us.

Eventually, Deen’s fears about the California wildfires materialize, and the conference has to be evacuated because the fires get too close. This seems almost too perfectly-timed to be merely coincidence, given the discussions that were just going on at the conference. But Deen insists on believing that the events are meaningless—nothing more than bad timing—heading back to the hotel and flying back to Brooklyn.

Venice

A good while later, Deen leaves New York again, this time bound for Venice, Italy to stay at Cinta’s apartment while she’s out of town and to clear his head from the persistent snake visions he keeps having. While in Venice, Deen discovers that many of the people responsible for creating an authentic Venetian experience (cooking the pizzas, steering the gondolas) are actually Bengali migrant workers. In fact, he almost hears as many people speaking Bangla as he does Italian. Notably, he hears the Madaripur dialect of Bangla, which is where Deen’s family was originally from before the region was split after West Bengal became part of India and Bangladesh became an independent country.

This has a double effect on Deen: on one hand, it’s a point of pride for him to think of Bangla becoming an international language like English or German, but on the other hand, he realizes that more people are leaving West Bengal and Bangladesh than he perhaps previously thought. The latter really hits home when he runs into Tipu, who’s working multiple jobs as an illegal migrant worker. At first, Tipu is evasive—he doesn’t want to see or talk to Deen, but after some prodding, Deen eventually gets Tipu to talk to him, who tells him that he and Rafi left India together but got separated along the way while crossing over into Turkey from Iran.

Also read: “Weather” by Jenny Offill

Tipu hasn’t seen Rafi since then, but he has good reason to believe he might be crossing the Mediterranean on a small blue boat from north Africa along with other migrants and refugees. However, they don’t have a way of confirming this, so Deen sets off to learn more about the migrant community in Venice, trying to get someone to agree to an interview for a friend who’s making a documentary about the refugee crisis.

Around this time, Cinta returns to Venice, and in the coming days she shows Deen around to some of the most meaningful places in Venice to her. In doing so, the two have conversations about uncanny events and experiences they’ve had that can be connected to climate change. Deen, especially, keeps coming back to a spider that scared him while staying in Cinta’s apartment. It was a brown recluse spider, a species that recently migrated north to Italy due to rising temperatures in Africa. This prompts an important dialogue in which Cinta asserts that the world is “possessed” since individuals no longer have to assert their presence in the world but are shuffled through life by machine-like systems.

She says on page 296:

“Just look around you, caro [dear].” There was a touch of weariness in her voice now. “Everybody knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a liveable place, if our homes are not to be invaded by the sea, or by creatures like that spider. Everybody knows…and yet we are powerless, even the most powerful among us. We go about our daily business through habit, as though we were in the grip of forces that have overwhelmed our will; we see shocking and monstrous things happening all around us and we avert our eyes; we surrender ourselves willingly to whatever it is that has us in its power.”

Gun Island, pg. 296

After an accident that sends Cinta to the hospital one night as she’s showing Deen around Venice, news breaks of the little blue boat from north Africa that Tipu was talking about. Deen’s documentary filmmaker friend, Gisa, wants to go on a boat to meet it, and she asks Deen to go with her. Cinta tags along, too, despite hardly being able to walk, and Deen takes Tipu so he can see if Rafi is indeed on the blue boat.

In search of Rafi

It takes a couple of days to sail out to the part of the Mediterranean where the boat is supposed to appear, but when they get there, they’re also met by the Italian Navy and private ships from far-right protesters and pro-immigration counter-protestors. The rightwing protestors have flags and do chants like, “Close borders now!” and “L’Italia agli Italiani!” or “Italy for Italians!” This was the name of an actual coalition of neo-fascist Italian political parties in 2018, one of whose leaders was the Italian politician Roberto Fiore, who self-identifies as a fascist. Deen joins in with the crew of his boat and the counter-protestors to shout, “NO to xenophobia! NO to hate!” A short while later, on page 379, he reflects on what he’s witnessing:

I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the upending of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe.

Gun Island, pg. 379

This is one of the strongest commentaries in the novel on the relationship between colonialism, imperialism, and the climate crisis. Something seems to click for Deen in this scene, as he realizes that hundreds of years of European colonialism is the root cause of the climate crisis. And now that Europeans are facing the consequences of the enormous ways in which they changed the planet, a significant number of them don’t want to accept it.

Despite the calls for them to be turned away, the little blue boat carrying Rafi and the others makes it through the blockade. Just as the boat is coming into Italian waters, a multitude of different sea creatures—some of them quite rare—surge to the surface of the sea and charge right between the Italian battleship and the little blue boat. The weather also starts going haywire, with waterspouts appearing all around them, making for a spectacular display of nature’s power. Gradually, the animals all pass through, the weather calms down, and the admiral of the Italian battleship makes an announcement over loudspeakers that the little blue boat is safe and that the Italian Navy will guide them to shore.

These final, almost supernatural scenes of the novel fulfill the legend of the Gun Merchant. After he makes it to the same boat as Deen and Tipu, Rafi looks back at where he came from in astonishment and remarks, “It’s just as it says in the story—the creatures of the sky and sea rising up…”

Later, the Italian media is buzzing about the admiral’s decision to let the little blue boat pass—a decision to disobey orders from the Italian prime minister directing the admiral to prevent the boat from landing in Italy. Earlier in the novel, the prime minister said it would take a miracle for the blue boat to land, to which the admiral calmly replied at a press conference, “What the Minister has said, in public, was that only in the event of a miracle would these refugees be allowed into Italy…And I believe that what we witnessed today was indeed a miracle.”

The ending of “Gun Island,” explained

In the last several paragraphs of the book, Deen reflects on everything that’s happened to him in the span of a few months. He remembers one of the places Cinta took him to when she was showing him around Venice: Santa Maria della Salute, or the Salute, an old Roman Catholic church built after a severe outbreak of bubonic plague in 1630 that was dedicated to the Virgin Mary to thank her for restoring health, or salute, to Venice. Inside the basilica, an image of the Virgin Mary stands at the altar that bears the inscription Unde Origo Inde Salus, which translates to “Whence our Origin Hence our Salvation.”

Thinking about how the little blue boat was seemingly saved by the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy is significant to Deen. On page 389 he writes:

In that instant of clarity I heard again that familiar voice in my ear, repeating those words from La Salute—Unde Origo Inde Salus—“From the beginning salvation comes,” and I understood what she [Cinta] had been trying to tell me that day: that the possibility of our deliverance lies not in the future but in the past, in a mystery beyond memory.

Gun Island, pg. 389

It seems that in the final moments of the novel, Deen finally comes around to Cinta’s belief that the legend of the Gun Merchant wasn’t just a story, but an important and meaningful message that remains relevant today.

“Gun Island” as a response to “The Great Derangement”

Back to top ↑

On the surface, Gun Island may seem like a fun, fast-paced adventure story, but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface that’s easy to miss on a first read. To really get the most out of this novel, it’s helpful to read it critically using Amitav Ghosh’s nonfiction book The Great Derangement as a guiding framework.

Published in 2017 by the University of Chicago Press, The Great Derangement is based on a series of four lectures Amitav Ghosh gave at the University of Chicago for the Berlin Family Lectures. In the book, Ghosh explores the hesitancy of literary fiction to address climate change and questions why books that do address climate change are often disregarded or looked down upon by the literati as pulp or science fiction.

The role of literature in the climate crisis

Back to top ↑

Ghosh begins by discussing what is considered serious, literary fiction and how it came to be, arguing that modernist, individualistic, so-called realist fiction is anything but realistic. He points to stories outside of the modernist and realist movements as more accurate depictions of real life—stories that weren’t as self-aware, usually more collectivist and which featured abrupt and dramatic events that modernists might dismiss as fantastical.

Ghosh argues that the modernist tradition of telling stories that focus on one main character with lots of interiority are actually shortsighted, quoting Charlotte Brontë writing to a critic, “…is not the real experience of each individual very limited?”

Ghosh is also critical of the way in which modernist and realist literature depicts nature, sharing passages from the realist novels Madame Bovary from the French literary virtuoso Gustave Flaubert and Rajmohan’s Wife by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a 19th century Bengali writer who aimed to incorporate Western realism into Indian literature.

Realism gave rise to what Ghosh calls filler, a storytelling device where  “…instead of being told about what happened we learn about what was observed.” He turns to the Italian literary historian Franco Moretti to explain why this trend may have taken hold. On page 19 of The Great Derangement, Ghosh quotes Moretti saying, “…fillers are an attempt at rationalizing the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.”

Flaubert and Chatterjee, Ghosh says, wrote about nature as something very tame and gradual. If your perception of nature comes largely from reading books like Madame Bovary, for instance, you might be shocked to see a real-life event like a tornado or a tsunami, two natural phenomena that are very spontaneous and violent.

You might also balk at events like the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, which many scientists believe caused a volcanic winter responsible for the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816. This event was so sudden and dramatic that it actually caused a drop in global temperatures, giving Europe and other parts of the world record-setting cold temperatures and causing famines due to crop failure. In fact, some historians credit this as the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s groundbreaking novel Frankenstein, an ironically realist novel itself despite its fantastical elements.

Looking to the past for inspiration

Back to top ↑

What Ghosh is getting at is this: nature is not tame or neat, so why do we write about it like it is? If you take a fiction writing class, some of the first pieces of advice your teacher will give you are to drive the plot by asking yourself what the main character wants and to be wary about using sudden, unexpected events.

Your protagonist is walking down the sidewalk one day when suddenly they’re hit by a car that jumped the curb. Too abrupt—take it out. Your protagonist is at a party when suddenly the deck collapses, sending everyone to the emergency room. This isn’t driven by any character’s will or desire—consider using a different device for developing the plot.

Also read: “The Overstory” by Richard Powers with Lovis Geier: Summary & Analysis

There is an age-old argument about whether or not fiction should accurately depict real life, but senseless, random events happen all the time. It seems silly to reduce them to a minimum or to eradicate them altogether from our novels. In the age of the climate and ecological crisis, it seems even sillier. Sudden, unexpected, and unforeseen events are on the rise as global temperatures increase, a phenomenon that Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute termed “global weirding.”

To be clear, not all modern fiction is like this. There’s a whole subgenre of speculative fiction called ecological weird fiction, and works of magical realism are replete with bizarre and sudden events. Take, for example, the gypsy merchant Melquíades dying and coming back to life multiple times in One-Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, or ancient beasts called Aurochs causing a massive storm in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Ghosh acknowledges magical realism, but he also grapples with its role in addressing climate change. At a time when the fossil fuel industry spends exorbitant amounts of money on climate change disinformation campaigns, Ghosh worries about the implications of telling climate change stories through the lens of magical realism.

Rather, Ghosh suggests we should look to older traditions of storytelling, like the legend of the Gun Merchant in Gun Island, for inspiration on how to write about climate change. As we’ve seen already, this is one of the central themes of the book: the argument between Deen and Cinta over whether or not older stories remain relevant in the modern world. Remember, Deen is a dealer of rare, antique books, but he sees them as commodities, more of collector’s items than living stories. But by the end of the novel after Deen has watched the legend of the Gun Merchant play out in real life, he realizes ancient storytellers were more intelligent and wise than he previously gave them credit for.

Empire and climate change

Back to top ↑

We often point to carbon emissions as the root cause of the climate crisis. And while carbon emissions do cause the greenhouse effect that leads to global warming, Amitav Ghosh would argue the roots of the climate crisis run deeper.

A brief history of colonial India

In the second section of The Great Derangement, Ghosh gives us a history lesson, going back to the beginning of British colonial rule in India in the 17th century when the British monarchy granted the East India Company permission to establish a trading post in what was then the Mughal Empire.

Over the next couple hundred years, the East India Company came to dominate the Indian subcontinent despite conflicts with other European colonial powers like the French and the Dutch. The Mughal Empire gradually collapsed in addition to the other kingdoms of India, and the East India Company built a private army to exploit India before the British crown had to eventually intervene and assume power in the 19th century. The British remained in control of India until 1947, two years after the end of World War II, at which time the colony was split into the independent countries of India and Pakistan.

This span of over 300 years was a dark time for India, with cruel, violent treatment from the private armies of the East India Company and massive famines that killed tens of millions of people. Europeans were originally drawn to India to establish a spice trade, but shortly after the Industrial Revolution came around in the late 18th century, another commodity from the East started to see a spike in demand: oil. Oil was plentiful in Burma (Myanmar), and Ghosh notes that after the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852-53, oil became big business in the region.

Many oil fields in present-day Myanmar were controlled by King Mindon Min, the king of Burma, until the British invaded in 1885. This paved the way for the Burmah Oil Company of Scotland to basically establish a monopoly on oil production in the Indian subcontinent, which it maintained until the American oil company Standard Oil set up Burmese operations in the early 20th century. The Burmah Oil Company was eventually acquired by British Petroleum (BP), shifting operations away from India after the discovery of oil in the Middle East.

This might seem like a lot of history, but it’s an important backstory for understanding how we got to where we are today. As Ghosh takes care to note in The Great Derangement, if it weren’t for British invasion, the beginnings of the modern fossil fuel industry might have originated in South Asia. Under colonialism, the British and other European colonial powers repressed technological and economic development in the territories they occupied, effectively hindering them from developing fossil fuel economies until much later.

In recent years, China and India have made major contributions to the climate crisis, contributing 28 and seven percent of global CO₂ emissions, respectively. But Ghosh argues that if it weren’t for European colonialism, we might have seen this spike earlier. To be clear, the United States of America and the 28 countries of the European Union are responsible for the lion’s share of historical emissions between 1751 and 2017. According to Our World In Data, the US and the EU make up 25 and 22 percent of historical emissions, respectively. Compared to historical emissions from China (12.7 percent) and India (three percent), it’s clear that modern emissions stats don’t show the full picture. In fact, China’s emissions didn’t even eclipse American emissions until 2005, according to Climate Watch.

Ghosh is also quick to point out that there were outspoken leaders in many Asian countries who opposed industrialization. On page 111, Ghosh quotes some of Mahatma Gandhi’s writing from 1928: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions [sic] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

And yet, we’re in a far worse position today. In 2019, the population of the United States was 330 million people. In the same year, India’s population was 1.3 billion people. I don’t bring this up to say that overpopulation is the cause of the climate crisis but to emphasize that even nearly a hundred years ago, people knew the high-consumption, carbon-intensive cultures of industrialized countries were unsustainable. Now we’re reaping the consequences of failing to heed that wisdom, and, tragically, countries like India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines—some of the countries least responsible for global warming—will suffer the worst effects.

Reaping the consequences of colonialism

So what does any of this have to do with the novel Gun Island? First of all, Gun Island is a story about many modern issues, but you could make a pretty convincing argument that above all else, it’s a story about climate refugees—people from colonized countries fleeing the effects of a climate crisis caused by colonialism. We see this most clearly with characters like Rafi and Tipu, and especially at the end of the book with the little blue boat crossing the Mediterranean.

The legend of the Gun Merchant itself might also be interpreted as the story of a climate refugee. The legend tells the story of a merchant on the run from the goddess of snakes because he refuses to be her devotee. The goddess is relentless, and she chases him everywhere, sending natural disasters to make him change his ways. Ghosh has commented on the legend as well, saying in an NPR interview that it was written as an allegorical tale to represent the dichotomy between nature and the “profit motive.”

Reading the book with an awareness of colonialism and climate refugees makes this pretty obvious, but Ghosh makes a clear statement about this theme on pages 363-64 through a Bengali immigrant Deen meets named Palash:

But everyone has a dream, don’t they, and what is a dream but a fantasy? Think of all the people who come to see Venice: what’s brought them there but a fantasy? They think they’ve travelled to the heart of Italy, to a place where they’ll experience Italian history and eat authentic Italian food. Do they know that all of this is made possible by people like me? That it is we who are cooking their food and washing their plates and making their beds? Do they understand that no Italian does that kind of work any more? That it’s we who are fuelling this fantasy even as it consumes us? And why not? Every human being has a right to a fantasy, don’t they? It is one of the most important human rights—it is what makes us different from animals. Haven’t you seen how every time you look at your phone, or a TV screen, there is always an ad telling you that you should do whatever you want; that you should chase your dream; that ‘impossible is nothing’—‘Just do it!’ What else do these messages mean but that you should try to live your dream?

Gun Island, pp. 363-64

Put another way, Ghosh writes on page 92 of The Great Derangement:

It is Asia, then, that has torn the mask from the phantom that lured it onto the stage of the Great Derangement, but only to recoil in horror at its own handiwork; its shock is such that it dare not even name what it has beheld—for having entered this stage, it is trapped, like everyone else. All it can say to the chorus that is waiting to receive it is “But you promised…and we believed you!”

The Great Derangement, pg. 92

People in wealthy western countries enjoy a very high standard of living. Of course, there are massive inequalities—especially in the US—but many of us still live in relative comfort thanks to machines like cars, dishwashers, washing machines and dryers, refrigerators, and air conditioners. We like to believe that we have these things because we worked hard or persevered or followed our dreams, but the truth is we have such massive material wealth because we used colonialist practices to exploit countries like India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar for their natural resources.

At least in the United States, there’s a strong tendency to believe that colonialism is a thing of the past, that it’s a relic of the 19th century. Even though the United Kingdom retained India as the so-called “crown jewel” colony until 1947, many westerners still think of colonialism as something distant. But a practice like colonialism that lasted for hundreds of years and had such profoundly disastrous effects on its victims won’t just go away in less than a century. The refugee crisis we’re experiencing today in Europe and in North America is a consequence of colonialism, and it stands to get worse as more vulnerable countries begin feeling the effects of climate change.

Also read: “Infest The Rats’ Nest” by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

This is further intensified by the culture of consumerism that Western countries have fostered that has now spread around the globe. Palash is right—we are constantly told to follow our dreams and to buy things that will supposedly make our lives better. But consumption of this kind is totally unsustainable.

Every year, Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when the world has collectively consumed more ecological resources than the Earth can regenerate in a calendar year, and the date keeps coming earlier and earlier. In 2020, Earth Overshoot Day was August 22nd, but this date also varies by country. In 2021, the United States hit Earth Overshoot Day on March 14th. By contrast, Indonesia will hit Earth Overshoot Day on December 18th. Even a country like Switzerland—which is considered green by so-called developed countries—will hit Earth Overshoot Day on May 11th this year. If everyone on Earth lived like the Swiss, we would need 2.79 planet Earths to remain within sustainable ecological limits. And remember, that’s by good standards compared to most other Western countries!

The fact of the matter is that humanity as a whole cannot continue living the way we’re living if we want to have a habitable planet by the end of the century. Living truly sustainably will require massive changes to our fundamental systems of society. This is not only a scientific, economic, sociological, and political challenge, but also a challenge of our imagination and creativity.

Imagining a better future

Back to top ↑

Last year, I did an episode about Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, and it remains one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read. Ishmael tells the story of a gorilla named Ishmael who has learned to talk to humans. He manages to escape from the circus where he’s being held, and he puts an ad in the newspaper telling anyone who’s interested in saving the world should come see him. At least one man—the narrator—takes him up on the offer, and the rest of the book is a Socratic dialogue between the narrator and Ishmael.

Also read: “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, Climate Change, and Moving Beyond a Vision of Doom

Ishmael explains that the core delusion of humanity that has caused the climate and ecological crisis is that we are somehow above nature rather than part of nature. Or, as Lizzie from the novel Weather by Jenny Offill puts it, “The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.” This is what Ishmael calls our mythology, and he proposes that the key to saving ourselves lies in recognizing this mythology and creating a new mythology that works for all life on Earth.

The problem is that people don’t realize the trap they’ve fallen into. Just like Ishmael had to realize he was in a cage before he could be free, we have to do the same. In Gun Island, Deen and Cinta come to a similar conclusion when Cinta tells Deen that the world is possessed. On page 380 when Deen goes to meet Rafi on the little blue boat, he makes a profound statement: “The world had changed too much, too fast; the systems that were in control now did not obey any human master; they followed their own imperatives, inscrutable as demons.” So how do we free ourselves from this demonic possession?

Up until recently, a dominant narrative in the environmental movement has been one of shame. If only more people would take public transit instead of buying SUVs, if only more people would stop eating meat, if only more people would stop using single-use plastics. But rather than continuing with these pleas, Ishmael suggests a different approach. Near the end of the book he says, “…people need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them.”

Amitav Ghosh echoes this sentiment in The Great Derangement, saying on pages 128-129:

And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be.

The Great Derangement, pp. 128-29

This is where I think stories come into play, but not just any stories. The stories that will help save us from ourselves must challenge the fundamental ways in which we unconsciously view the world. They must stoke our imagination and creativity and inspire us. I think these stories can come in many, many different forms, but for Ghosh, at least in Gun Island, some of these stories were already written a long time ago when humans lived in closer connection to the Earth.

Also read: “Pacific Edge” by Kim Stanley Robinson: A Future Mythology

On page 389 of Gun Island, Deen reflects on everything that has happened to him, saying:

In that instant of clarity I heard again that familiar voice in my ear, repeating those words from La Salute — Unde Origo Inde Salus — “From the beginning salvation comes,” and I understood what she had been trying to tell me that day: that the possibility of our deliverance lies not in the future but in the past, in a mystery beyond memory.

Gun Island, pg. 389

Thus, Deen—a dealer of rare, antique books—realizes the answer he’s been searching for has been there the whole time.

What you can do to help

Back to top ↑

So now you’re probably wondering, what do we do with these stories that inspire us? How do we follow their example to change the way we live? Daniel Quinn says we need to act as if they’re already true. Of course, this is easier said than done, but there are some small actions we can take today that can turn into big actions over time.

If you were moved by Gun Island and you want to help with some of the issues raised in the novel, I would suggest looking into ways to get involved with the following organizations:

International Rescue Committee

Website: https://www.rescue.org/
Charity Navigator Rating: 86.92/100 (source)

The International Rescue Committee responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster to survive, recover and gain control of their future. In more than 40 countries and over 20 U.S. cities, our dedicated teams provide clean water, shelter, health care, education and empowerment support to refugees and displaced people.

“The IRC’s impact at a glance,” https://www.rescue.org/page/ircs-impact-glance

Doctors Without Borders

Website: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/
Charity Navigator Rating: 92.25/100 (source)

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is the world’s leading independent international medical relief organization, implementing and managing medical projects in close to 72 countries worldwide and as a worldwide movement of 33 offices and associations.

Our work focuses on emergency medical and humanitarian relief. We are guided by the principles of independence, neutrality and impartiality, as described in the MSF Charter. We implement our medical programs in areas where no health or sanitary systems exist, or where health structures are overwhelmed by the needs of populations.

“About us,” https://www.linkedin.com/company/medecins-sans-frontieres-msf

Amnesty International

Website: https://www.amnesty.org/en/
Charity Navigator Rating: 89.39/100 (source)

Amnesty International is a global movement of more than 10 million people who take injustice personally. We are campaigning for a world where human rights are enjoyed by all.

“Who We Are,” https://www.amnesty.org/en/who-we-are/

Chintan

Website: https://www.chintan-india.org/
Charity Navigator Rating: Not available

Our mission is to ensure consumption is more responsible and less burdensome on the planet and the poor. We strive to reduce waste and unsustainable consumption and enable better management of that waste which is generated. We also focus on fighting air pollution through making science and policy more accessible to everyone, thus creating public vigilance and action. In all our work, vulnerable populations—the poor, the marginalized, children and women—will remain the sharpest on our radar.

“Our Mission,” https://www.chintan-india.org/who-we-are

Greenpeace India

Website: https://www.greenpeace.org/india/en/
Charity Navigator Rating: 84.95/100 (Note: score for Greenpeace Fund in the US, source)

We believe optimism is a form of courage. We believe that a billion acts of courage can spark a brighter tomorrow. To that end we model courage, we champion courage, we share stories of courageous acts by our supporters and allies, we invite people out of their comfort zones to take courageous action with us, individually in their daily lives, and in community with others who share our commitment to a better world. A green and peaceful future is our quest. The heroes of our story are all of us who believe that better world is not only within reach, but being built today.

“Our Vision,” https://www.greenpeace.org/india/en/about/

It may sound corny, but building a better world starts right now. These are only five charitable organizations working to help with issues like the refugee and climate crisis, so I’d encourage you to do some research of your own as well to find organizations or causes that resonate with you.

Recommendations

Back to top ↑

Book: The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

→ Buy USED on Better World Books from $3.98
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $15.63
→ Find at your local library

Article: “Amitav Ghosh: ‘The World Of Fact Is Outrunning The World Of Fiction’” by Ari Shapiro in NPR

Book: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

→ Buy USED on Better World Books from $6.30
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $17.47
→ Find at your local library

Like what you see? Become a Patreon member today for as little as $1 a month.

The post “Gun Island” and “The Great Derangement” by Amitav Ghosh: Summary & Analysis appeared first on Stories for Earth.

If epic fiction is your thing, you will love The Overstory by Richard Powers. Published in 2018 by W. W. Norton, The Overstory is an ambitious environmental fable of nine main characters (yes, nine) that explores our relationship with nature, the psychology of why we’re so bad at acting on climate change, our perception of time, the meaning of hope, and so much more. Garnering praise from legends like Bill McKibben, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and Ann Patchett, it’s easy to see why this novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019.

→ Buy USED on Better World Books from $10.78 (affiliate)
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $17.43 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Truth be told, I finished reading this book late last year, but I never could find the right words when I sat down to write about it. My new friend Lovis Geier had similar feelings when we connected earlier this year, so we decided to tackle this behemoth together. The product is a departure from the typical episode format when I discuss a work of literature, but I don’t think I could have done it any other way for The Overstory. Be sure to check out Lovis’ YouTube channel Ecofictology, and join us on the Rewilding our Stories Discord server to participate in engaging conversations about eco fiction and cli-fi.

Audio only

Audio and video

Become a Patreon of Ecofictology for the full 2-hour video discussion!

Jump to

1. About Richard Powers
2. Transcript
   1. Nicholas Hoel (Watchman) character analysis
   2. Olivia Vandergriff (Maidenhair) character analysis
   3. Mimi Ma (Mulberry) character analysis
   4. Douglas Pavlicek (Doug Fir) character analysis
   5. Adam Appich (Maple) character analysis
   6. Mimas character analysis
   7. Meaning of the characters’ tree names
   8. Dr. Patricia Westerford character analysis
   9. Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly character analysis
   10. Theme: legal rights for nature
   11. Theme: humans are part of nature
   12. Neelay Mehta character analysis
   13. Dr. Westerford and “unsuicide”
   14. Ecofiction in video games
   15. The role of hope in “The Overstory”
   16. The significance of multiple characters and why climate action needs everyone
   17. “The Overstory” ending analysis and our take on “Still”
   18. Our favorite aspects of “The Overstory”
   19. Is “The Overstory” literature?
   20. “The Overstory” paints a realistic picture of activism and its dangers, especially for indigenous people
   21. Should you read “The Overstory?”
3. What you can do to help
4. Recommendations

About the creator

Richard Powers is an American novelist from Evanston, Illinois and the author of multiple novels, essays, and short stories. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, Powers is known for his sprawling novels that often incorporate elements of science fiction and speculative fiction. At the time of writing, The Overstory is his most recent novel, but he is also known for The Echo Maker, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2021, The Hollywood Reporter announced that The Overstory will be adapted for a Netflix series by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the creators of Game of Thrones. Richard Powers lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Official website: http://www.richardpowers.net/

Transcript

Back to top ↑

Lovis: Well it’s nice to meet you.

Forrest: Yeah. Nice to actually talk to you.

Lovis: Messages back and forth, but face to face. Well, virtual face to face.

Forrest: Yeah. I was about to say, I don’t even…can’t remember the last person I actually talked to face-to-face. It wasn’t just like immediate family, which is weird. It’s yeah. It’s been like almost a year. My wife and I were talking about it last night. We were just like, oh my God. Yeah, it has almost been a year and very, very strange. I don’t know what the timeline was like in the UK or in Scotland, but…

Lovis: Well we went into lockdown kind of mid to late March.

Forrest: Yeah, it was like the same here.

Lovis: So yes, I am Lovis Geier. I run a YouTube channel called Ecofictology where I talk about everything and anything ecofiction, mostly focused on how it can be used as a science communication tool, kind of—a way to access a new audience with some scientific facts for people who don’t really read the academic papers but who are always taken in by a good story. And maybe can ninja some science into there, into ecofiction. So that is kind of, kind of what I focus on with Ecofictology. Today we’re doing something a little bit different. Normally, my book reviews are just me, but today I have a very special guest. This is Forrest Brown. And we’ve connected over the Rewilding our Stories Discord server and realized, you know, there’s really no reason why we shouldn’t do a collaboration video. And we both just finished The Overstory. So we thought this is the perfect opportunity. So welcome, Forrest. Thanks for being here.

Forrest: Hey, Lovis, thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to be on the show. A little nervous, but excited. Yeah.

Lovis: Yeah, that’s, it’s a shared emotion. We’re good. Yeah. And who better to talk about a story called The Overstory. And it’s all about trees and with someone whose name is Forrest Brown.

Forrest: Oh, my gosh. Somebody—when I was doing an interview recently, after it was over, somebody was like, “I have to ask, is Forrest your real name?” I was like, yes, it is. I didn’t just make it up because it sounds like trees.

Has this info helped you?

Stories for Earth is and always will be a free resource to help people imagine brighter futures through the material we discuss. It’s also created and paid for by one person! Apart from occasional affiliate revenue, donations from people like you is the only way Stories for Earth remains financially feasible.

Lovis: But it’s so fitting, isn’t it?

Forrest: Synchronous? Yeah. Happy coincidence.

Lovis: Yeah. Well, why don’t you do a little introduction to what you do, because you’re also very active in the ecofiction community. Let everyone know what you’re what you’re up to.

Forrest: Yeah. So hello Ecofictologists and also Stories for Earth listeners. My name is Forrest Brown and I make a podcast called Stories for Earth, which is a podcast that’s all about just climate change and pop culture, really just climate change depicted in any kind of work of fiction. And we are medium-agnostic. So I talk about books. I talk about movies like I haven’t done a TV show yet, but I’ll do it one day.

Lovis: You did a music album, didn’t you?

Forrest: Yeah, I just did one. It’s coming out this coming week. It’s on Infest the Rat’s Nest by a band called King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, who are like an Australian psychedelic rock band. Yeah, that was like a lot all in one sentence.

Also read: “Infest The Rats’ Nest” by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

Lovis: Did you, did you have to practice how to say that so that you didn’t get tongue tied?

Forrest: Yeah, it’s like one of those say it five times fast kind of band names. But yeah, it was…had to like go slowly whenever I’d say King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, but yes.

Lovis: I love it. Definitely going to listen to that episode. Yeah. I’ve been listening to the podcast for a little while and I love it. It’s so good, it’s so good to spread, spread my, my horizons a little bit. Just out of the world of just books. Today we are talking about The Overstory by Richard Powers. And um, I read this. It was a library book, so I don’t have the physical book to hold up to show you.

Forrest: I was going to ask if you had the UK cover version. I wanted to see it.

Lovis: No, no, I don’t. I don’t even know what the, what the cover looks like. I only know the one cover the one that has like the brown and. Yes, that’s one that’s, that’s the cover. Yeah.

Forrest: It’s a cool cover.

Lovis: It is, yes, so this is a really—it’s one of those stories I didn’t want to do a regular book review of this one because it’s so—I just didn’t really know how to put it into such a short discussion episode. It’s just one of those books you have to talk to someone.

Forrest: Yes, I felt the same way. That’s why I hadn’t done an episode on it yet. I finished reading this…when did I finish reading it? It’s been a long time, actually. It was months ago. It was last year. And I took a really long time to read it, which we’ll probably get to you while we’re talking about it.

Lovis: All will be explained.

Forrest: But yeah, like you were saying, it is just a thick book. It’s like, I don’t know, like eight hundred pages or something like that? There’s a lot going on. There’s nine main characters, which is a lot. Yeah. And it covers decades. Has a lot to say. So yeah I’m kind of in the same boat as you, felt like I had to talk it out with somebody else about it.

Lovis: Yeah. We’ll get along fine. We’ll be fine. But that actually brings me to a spoiler warning because normally my book reviews are spoiler free, but because we’re just going to be chatting, we’re not really going to censor ourselves. So there may be spoilers contained in this video. If you don’t want any spoilers and you might want to stop watching now. Just take our recommendation that you should read The Overstory by Richard Powers it’s a great book.

Forrest: And come back in six months when you finish reading it.

Lovis: Yeah, exactly. This is one of those episodes that you can come back to. But from here on out, there might be spoilers, so watch out.

Forrest: And by “might be,” we mean there are going to be spoilers.

Lovis: Yes, there are going to be speaking.

Forrest: Speaking of spoilers, should we spoil some of the book by providing a summary?

Lovis: Let’s. I’ll leave that, I’ll let you take it away if you like.

Forrest: Oh gosh. Yeah. So like we were saying there’s a lot going on in this book. It’s a very long book. It’s a very good book. I really enjoyed it. So yeah, the story, the book really starts by introducing our nine main characters and that’s really like the first, what, first half of the book? It’s a pretty solid chunk of the book is just introducing the characters.

Lovis: That’s what I thought. That’s why it was a little bit, it’s one of those books that, like, you pick up speed as you go through it. And the first half, like one of the big pieces of advice that I would give people reading this book is just stick with it, just don’t give up, because it is kind of you lose the speed a little bit if every chapter you’re switching to new perspective. And like at first, they kind of, you learn so much history about these characters. You’re like, when is something going to happen? It is all necessary and it all is packed full of symbolism and things that just get passed through the generations. So. Just stick with it.

Forrest: Yeah, yeah, and like each introduction of the character is probably like the length of a novella almost it’s pretty long, like we say chapter, but it’s like so-and-so was born in this year and then here’s the 30 years leading up to when this actually matters to the real story of this book. But it all kind of, it’s kind of cool how it all sort of coalesces. And you get to see how the different character timelines eventually, I guess, kind of intersect. And then from there we like see the main story of The Overstory, which begins like after all the characters have finally met or are starting to meet, I guess. And actually some of the characters don’t ever meet. I should say that too.

Lovis: No, they don’t. But they’re like they’re all kind of intertwined, like something happens over here and it affects something that’s happening over here. So eventually it is kind of, you’re moving forward in a, you know, maybe a little wavy, but you’re moving in one direction. Yeah, but for the first half you’re kind of jumping around. But the thing that every…every character storyline, it starts with a tree. And that is something that I thought was really beautiful, that just every, every family was so affected by a certain tree.

Nicholas Hoel (Watchman) character analysis

Back to top ↑

Forrest: Yeah. And I actually, I was like preparing for this episode this morning, like frantically going back through the book and trying to find which trees were with which people. But yeah. So I guess we could just name the characters and maybe briefly kind of introduce what is going on with them. So I think yeah, I think the first person that we meet is Nicholas Hoell. I don’t know how to pronounce his name. He lives in Iowa and the book just kind of details a very long history of, you know, like I think how his grandfather emigrated from Sweden or a Scandinavian country. Yeah. Immigrated to the United States. They have like this homestead in rural Iowa. And throughout Nick’s family history, they’ve been, there’s been kind of this like folk art project sort of where they’ve been taking a picture of this one tree for generations. And you can kind of see like do like a time lapse, I guess, of how the tree has grown over the generations. And this was an American chestnut tree, which all the reviews and the summaries I was reading kept saying it was a chestnut tree, which it has chestnut in the name, but it is specifically an American chestnut tree, which is significant because those are basically extinct now. And if you say like a redwood tree, everybody will probably know what you’re talking about. These big, huge behemoth trees grow on the west coast of the United States and up to Canada as well. But the American chestnut was kind of like the East Coast version of a redwood, and we’ve basically lost all of them now, which is just horrible. There are some efforts by some universities in the United States and in Canada to sort of like revitalize the species and restore it. And they’re starting to actually make progress on that, which is pretty cool. It’s pretty amazing that they’ve been able to do that. But basically there was like a blight and it wiped out like. All of the trees from Canada all the way through, like the American Midwest, which is just an enormous swath of land, just like tons and tons and tons of trees were lost. So, yeah, this American chestnut tree that Nick Hoell has is kind of like one of the last of its kind. And it’s really special that they’ve been able to take pictures of it for so long. But yeah, Nick is an artist and he’s kind of like. Fallen on hard times and ended up back on the family farm in Iowa after—I think he was in Chicago doing his art thing and then, yeah, kind of wound up back there. So when we meet him, when the story actually starts, he’s kind of just like waiting on the insurance money from his family to run out. He’s the last person left, essentially, like all of his family and friends are gone. And he’s just kind of living the sad little life on the farm, painting pictures.

Also read: “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler

Lovis: And he just has these memories, this flipbook of memories. And he just he just feels kind of the weight of past generations. And he paints all these trees and he does all this art that reflects his kind of fascination with nature, because he also he, he was the one that did the little. Oh, no, that was a different, you know, the little ant things…

Forrest: It’s so easy to get them mixed up. I’m probably going to the mixed up at some point.

Lovis: So when we meet him he’s kind of a down in the dumps. Waiting for his life to really start. Yeah.

Olivia Vandergriff (Maidenhair) character analysis

Back to top ↑

Forrest: Yeah so the next character is Olivia and she—Olivia Vandergriff. Excuse me. She’s a college student. I don’t remember where she is living when the story starts, but yeah, she—

Lovis: There’s so many details to retain in this book. That was not one of the ones I chose to retain.

Forrest: Olivia is a college student and she’s kind of painted as like this typical, like kind of cynical artsy college student. And one night she, I guess, is back in her house that she rents with some other students and she’s getting out of the shower, I think. And as she’s like getting out of the shower, she turns on the lights and it’s like an old house, so like the wiring. The electricity is kind of like, ehh, it’s a little iffy. And yeah, she like, basically electrocutes herself and nearly dies. So as she’s kind of like in this in-between state, like between life and death, she has sort of like an epiphany, I guess you might say. And these like beings of light kind of come to her and are telling her she needs to go somewhere. And I—we never really find out what they are. I don’t know if it’s just like a hallucination, like if she’s kind of fried her brain in some way.

Lovis: I don’t know but the voices just stay with her throughout the entire story and they tell her like, yes, you’re going in the right way. Or you should, you should stop along the side of this road and follow the sign for the art gallery down there.

Forrest: Yeah. And that leads her to Nicholas. Yeah. On his farm in Iowa. So. Yeah. They…I don’t know how they wind up…I can’t remember now how they wind up deciding that they should go on this trip together. But I think for Nick it’s probably just like “Yeah sure, got nothing else to lose.”

Lovis: So I guess first she has to convince him that she’s hearing these voices and that she’s not just. Off on a wild goose chase, but she has a goal and a motivation. And so they’re headed west to join with some protests that are protesting the clearing of old growth forests for the lumber industry.

Forrest: Yeah, and I was trying to go back and find I don’t think that Olivia actually had a like a special relationship with a certain kind of tree. I think for her it was maybe another tree, which we’ll probably talk about in just a minute. But other than that, it was like the voices, which I guess are kind of like, like spirits of the trees, almost is kind of how I interpreted that.

Lovis: Yeah. Some kind of natural beings. Nature’s voices kind of speaking to her, telling her where she needs to be in order to set some kind of domino effect in motion.

Mimi Ma (Mulberry) character analysis

Back to top ↑

Forrest: So they go off and they head to I guess like Oregon, California. And then we’re introduced to another character, Mimi Ma who is, she’s the son of a Chinese immigrant or Chinese immigrants.

Lovis: She’s the daughter of Chinese immigrants.

Forrest: I’m sorry, I said son. She’s the daughter of Chinese immigrants. And her father, he was really big on taking them to go see the national parks. And he had this mulberry tree that was in their backyard. When they were growing up, she and her sister, growing up, and that was always like a really big thing in her life, was that mulberry tree and she kind of like associated it with her father. Because he just kind of doted on it all the time and it was kind of like a prized possession, I guess. So she’s an engineer and I think she’s living in Portland, Oregon, when we meet her. And yeah, there is like a tree outside her window that she’s sort of attached to.

Lovis: Well, there’s like this this grove of pine trees, and that’s where she goes and has her lunch and kind of. In the rest of this kind of developed business park, it’s like the one little patch of green. And her father had this ancient scroll that he brought from China that had like paintings of…and I forget the words now. But paintings of these old wisemen and trees and and kind of words of wisdom and things that she’s locked away, but is still kind of in the back of her mind.

Douglas Pavlicek (Doug Fir) character analysis

Back to top ↑

Forrest: Yeah, it’s like one of the only things she has left from her father. So it’s really important to her. Yeah, that’s kind of around the time when she meets another character named Douglas Pavlicek. And Doug is a Vietnam veteran, Vietnam War veteran. And after—also one really important detail about Douglas that I feel like a lot of, like if you go online and you read like a summary of this book or if you read a review of this book, a lot of people for some reason leave out the fact that Douglas was a participant in the Stanford Prison Experiment, which is kind of a huge detail to leave out.

So, like, if you’re not familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment, it was this, I guess, kind of like a psychological experiment that was done in the I believe it was the 60s, early 60s. Don’t know the dates, but, yeah, there’s there’s a good movie about it that I think you can watch on Netflix or Hulu. But yeah, basically they, these group of researchers at Stanford University in California, they got a group of volunteers who were mostly like young, young men, and they created like a prison scenario where some of the people were assigned to be prisoners and some of them were assigned to be prison wardens. And it was kind of just like a study of how humans behave in situations like that, where there’s a power dynamic. And yeah, long story short, like the wardens became horrible and they were like abusing the prisoners and it got really, really out of control and they had to shut down the experiment. So, yeah, Douglas was part of that! And as you might imagine, that had a pretty profound effect on him. And like the way that he…like his world view and the way that he views other people, the way that he views humanity. So, yeah, that’s kind of like in the background as we’re going through his story. But he ends up going to Vietnam. There was actually a tree in Vietnam that was kind of his introduction to trees, I guess, which was like the banyan tree, I think.

Lovis: Yeah. Because he fell—he…his plane or helicopter. I can’t remember…some kind of flying craft was attacked and blown out of the sky basically. And he he fell and was caught by this banyan tree. So he was basically saved by this banyan tree thing, I think his parachute got caught in it.

Forrest: After the war, he obviously comes back home and he realizes that deforestation is a really big problem in the United States at that time, still is. So he kind of devotes himself to trying to reforest different parts of the country. Yeah. And then he has a really kind of sad realization.

Lovis: It is really sad. It’s really sad. He spends I think it’s decades that he spends just walking along and planting a tree and he gets paid like a penny, a seed or something miniscule. And and he reaches the point where he plants, was it fifty thousand trees? It’s a lot of trees. And he goes to, to celebrate in a pub and somebody is like well. You know, who’s paying you to pay to plant those trees are the people who are going to chop them down and when they’re big enough to turn them into lumber. You’re just feeding the machine. And this, of course, breaks Douglass’s kind of sanity and his idea that he’s doing something good and then he realizes that actually. It’s not making any difference to like replacing what’s been lost.

Forrest: Yeah. He’s just working for the logging companies who are, this is like part of forestry, which is a very deceiving field title because it sounds like something it’s like yeah, it’s basically just like studying how you can make money off of trees. But yeah, he’s just like planting trees so that they can eventually be cut back down for lumber, you know, in so many years. But yeah, this is kind of when like after he has this realization that’s I guess kind of when his story and Mimi Ma’s intersect and he’s in Portland because they’re starting to cut down the trees in the clearing that Mimi takes her lunch in. And I think he actually gets hit by a cop or somebody when he’s like trying to protest.

Lovis: Yeah, he tries to intervene because they posted something that says they’re going to they’re going to cut down these trees. You should go to the meeting in a couple of days time if you have a problem with that. And so, Mimi’s like, well, I’m going to go to the meeting. I’m going to protect my trees. And then they actually cut down the trees, like in the night before the meeting. So they haven’t actually given anybody a chance to say that they have a problem with that. And Douglas just happens to be there, I think, and intervenes. But of course. You wonder where his problem with authority comes from. But so and of course, he’s not supposed to do that, so he gets sent to jail, I think for a couple of days, and then when he gets out, obviously the trees are cut and Mimi is there and is heartbroken because they’ve cut down these trees that reminded her of her father and the places that they used to go when she was a child.

Forrest: Mm hmm. So this is kind of like the I guess, like the catalyst for when Mimi sort of starts to become radicalized, I guess you could say, and like Douglas was involved with these protests. So they kind of become pals and protest buddies and they start going to like these protests to object to the logging companies coming in and cutting down all the old growth like redwood forests in the Pacific Northwest. And, yeah, that’s…this is kind of around the time when all the characters or at least the characters that do meet end up meeting each other. There’s a couple more that we should talk about.

Adam Appich (Maple) character analysis

Back to top ↑

Lovis: Yeah, definitely. I think the last one that actually joins those, that group is Adam.

Forrest: Yeah, Adam Appich. Yeah. And he’s a psychologist.

Lovis: Yeah. Yeah, he’s a student. He’s studying psychology and he chooses…for his, it’s a masters, I think, for his thesis topic he chooses to study the protesters. And it’s a question of. Well, I don’t even know how to phrase his question, but the question of like, why are people standing up for trees? What is it about trees that people feel pushed to—sometimes violence—to protect them? Yeah, and also the other side, everybody cutting down the trees. How do they not…you know, what are they not seeing about the trees that make them cut them down? I think is kind of what he was doing. So he was going around interviewing a lot of the a lot of the protesters.

Forrest: Right. He was kind of interested in the psychology behind it. But, yeah, he kind of ends up getting caught up in all of it and he kind of falls prey to the very psychological phenomenon he’s studying. And he ends up actually becoming a protester, too.

Mimas character analysis

Back to top ↑

Lovis: When he meets Olivia and Nick up in the tree platform on one of the oldest trees on the West Coast, a tree called Mimas. This storyline…

Forrest: A moment of silence for Mimas.

Lovis: A moment of silence for Mimas.

Forrest: Pour one out for Mimas.

Lovis: This is one of the most heartbreaking parts of this book.

Forrest: I know it was like soul crushing.

Lovis: I think when this happened, I nearly I was like, I don’t want to finish this book! You built me up to these heights of hope and then…ugh.

Forrest: Yeah, so Mimas is like this, I think it might actually be based off of a real tree, although in real life we actually don’t know where this tree is.

Lovis: Probably better that way.

Forrest: Yeah, I think that’s why we don’t know it is so that they can protect it. There is like this really, really, really big old redwood tree somewhere on the US West Coast. Like I said, nobody knows where, but it’s like massive. And these trees are really, really, really big like you can. There are places like in Redwood National Park where unfortunately some genius was like, oh, I should cut a tunnel through this. You can drive your car through it one day and you can do that. But surprisingly, the trees survive. They’re actually pretty resilient, but still not good. But yeah, Mimas is like this tree, kind of like that. It’s this big, huge, like behemoth of a tree. I kind of saw a lot of parallels between it and like the Tree of Life in the Genesis story in the Bible. I kept thinking about that. I don’t know if that was the intention or…I guess like a more…how do I put this? Maybe a different way of thinking about mimesis, like Big Tree of Life at the Animal Kingdom at Disney World, which is a very American capitalist way to think about it. But yeah, I kept thinking of that. That tree is like plastic. It’s so sad, but yeah. So Mimas is like this giant tree and Nick and Olivia and then eventually Adam are trying to protect it from the logging companies who want to come in and chop it down for lumber.

Lovis: Yeah. Because they’re cutting just, they’re just clearing swathes of land around Mimas, which is all old growth. And so they’re doing a tree sit protest. So they don’t come down off the tree in the hopes that the logging companies then can’t cut down the tree because then they would be responsible for three deaths. But of course, I mean, well, they actually stay up there for, like a year or something? They stay up there a long, long time

Forrest: Like kind of an unbelievably long time.

Lovis: So they just become these, like, tree creatures.

Forrest: Yeah, they kind of do. I don’t really understand the physiology or how realistic this would be, but I’m sure like impossible. But yeah, they were like living on this sort of raised platform, almost like a tree house, I guess, up in Mimas. And there were like huckleberries, I think? This tree was like so big that basically it had its own ecosystem, like at the top of it.

Also read: “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, Climate Change, and Moving Beyond a Vision of Doom

Lovis: Yeah, in like little crevices, water would collect and there were like fish up there there or something. And they had berry bushes growing and everything. So this tree is gigantic and it’s like what did they say? Like two hundred meters tall or something.

Forrest: Very, very tall. Yeah. It was like you could see the clouds when you’re up in the top of—like you were looking down on the clouds almost.

Lovis: Yeah. So they were up there and they were just watching the land around them get cleared by these like bulldozers and loggers and, and the, the men, the loggers at the base of the tree were always shouting up to them, trying to convince them to come down. And Nick was drawing the whole time and he was creating art and he was sending the pictures down there to show them what they were threatening and what they were going to lose if they cut down this tree and then Adam comes up to interview them. And of course, that is when he gets swept up in the whole movement and he sees kind of the intrinsic value of nature, I suppose, and he sees the destruction and desolation left behind him when companies get hold of old growth forests. And eventually they cut down Mimas. This was the thing! This is the thing that just, it just destroyed me, just this whole epic battle and then they lose! And the heroes aren’t supposed to lose. But it was like, you lied to me when you made me read this book and the heroes are supposed to win, and then they lost. I couldn’t believe it.

Forrest: Yeah. I felt very betrayed as a reader at this point in the story.

Lovis: How dare you? How dare you kill Mimas!

Forrest: Yeah, because he spends so much time talking about Mimas and really, you know…

Lovis: Creating this character! He killed a main character!

Forrest: Yeah Mimas was a character. So yeah we said there are nine main characters. I guess there’s really like 10 if you include Mimas. He spent so much time talking about how special Mimas like how beautiful it is, how it’s just kind of life-sustaining being and then, yeah, the logger win, and basically the protesters were doing all of that for nothing. So yeah that was a pretty crushing moment of the story, and I will not lie to you. It doesn’t really get a whole lot better from there. This book is. Yeah, it’s…this is this is why it took me so long to read it! But yeah. So they cut the tree down and then after this I think this is about the time when they meet the last two protesters, Mimi Ma and Douglas, or maybe they met a little bit before this?

Lovis: This has really lit a fire under them now. And so they head north because now they have…I think yeah. This was in California, I think. And then they head to Oregon. And they meet up with Mimi Ma and Douglas for further protests.

Meaning of the characters’ tree names

Back to top ↑

Forrest: Yeah. So somewhere around this time after the, after all of the protesters finally meet, they, I guess it’s to protect themselves because it is pretty dangerous to be an environmental protester, especially probably in the 90s when the collective consciousness around like what we’re doing to the environment had not really clicked for a lot of people yet. But yeah, so they kind of take on these aliases, which are tree names. So it’s a little bit like a full circle moment in some ways. They go from admiring these trees like earlier in their lives to then like taking on their names. So in some ways they kind of like embody the trees in that respect. But yeah, Nick becomes well, his name is Watchman. He doesn’t actually take a tree name, but again, like he had the American chestnut and then Mimas and then Olivia becomes Maidenhair.

Lovis: Yeah, this was, this was the way that the protesters referred to each other because they preferred not to use real names. They decided to take on some kind of natural name. And Watchman, I think he he took inspiration from—or Olivia because she named him—and took inspiration from the way the trees just watch. So he was kind of the Watchman. He just represented all the trees.

Forrest: So modest. And then Mimi was Mulberry, which is kind of a no-brainer because of the tree that her dad used to have in their backyard. And then Douglas probably picked the worst alias out of all of them.

Lovis: Because he became Douglas fir?

Forrest: Yeah, he had—his name was in the name of the tree species.

Lovis: He couldn’t be Banyan? Come on!

Forrest: Yeah. Banyan would have been a cool one, but yeah, he was Doug Fir instead, which maybe did him some disservice later in his life but. Yeah so, and then Adam, I can’t, I was trying to remember if Adam, I was trying to find it in the book, if Adam took an alias. I thought that it was Maple because.

Lovis: Yeah I think so. I think he was Maple.

Forrest: I didn’t mention this back when we were introducing Adam, but I guess his kind of connection with trees earlier in life was…this was kind of cool. He he had a bunch of siblings and when he was young, his dad basically was just like, I’m going to plant a tree for each one of my kids. And then I think Adam was the one who got to pick who was which tree, basically. And then he was Maple. So that’s kind of where that name comes from. Those are all the characters that—there are some that meet like very briefly later on. But those are kind of like the main group of characters that are together, I guess. And then there are some other ones as well.

Lovis: Yeah. So, whoo.

Forrest: I know, that feels like an entire book right there.

Lovis: I know, that’s only half the flippin characters.

Forrest: I know. So maybe we can go through these a little bit quicker because I feel like they don’t get as much screen time, if you will, as the other characters do.

Dr. Patricia Westerford character analysis

Back to top ↑

Lovis: Yeah, I guess so. But I guess the the logical next step would be Dr. Westerford, because she’s involved with the court case against these protesters, so she gets called into as a witness, an expert witness, because she is a botanist and she’s a plant biologist and has studied plants, her whole academic career. Her major discovery was that plants communicate and that they, they have their own language, that they’re not these inanimate objects that we think they are. And so she discovered that they send, they send cues to each other so they can communicate when they’re being attacked so that other plants and trees and everything can deploy their defense mechanisms. And yeah, so basically, she was trying to give them a little bit more identity, I suppose, and saying that they communicate and the scientific community just dumped on her. They just said that she was crazy and that her findings were completely unfounded and couldn’t be backed up and that they were ridiculous. And so her name was pretty much slandered. And and she she kind of pulled away. She pulled away from the scientific community completely and vanished into the forest for a while to hide.

Forrest: Yeah, she was, like, super depressed.

Lovis: Yeah, because she couldn’t get a job anywhere, nobody wanted to hire her.

Forrest: Yeah, she was kind of a laughing stock.

Lovis: Yeah. Which was so sad. I mean, you kind of hope that the push towards something, towards seeing nature as something other than like can’t feel any pain or can be used by humans would come from the scientific community and then it’s the scientific community that just destroys it, which is so sad for me.

Also read: “Weather” by Jenny Offill

Forrest: Yeah, I know. Yeah. Because you’re a scientist.

Lovis: I am a scientist. And I was like, no. Because obviously, she ends up being right. That is exactly what happened. It’s been proven multiple, multiple times. They can see, they can hear, they can feel. They have all kinds of cool adaptations to take in their environment and communicate to each other so that if.

Forrest: Yeah. And cooperate too.

Lovis: Yeah. So that they can cooperate and they, they act as a community and it’s, and it’s all true. So she was vindicated in the end. But still, she had to go through most of her academic career being this laughing stock. But I guess. Silver linings, it did, it did drive her to meet the people who are working in the forest and kind of solve things more her way. And and she started writing books. Which made her a very sympathetic character to me. She wrote books and tried to teach nonscientists everything she knew about trees.

Forrest: Yeah. And she eventually I think that, just like a side note, I believe that Richard Powers, the author, actually based this character off of two real life scientists. So one of them, I’m like so irritated with myself because the name is escaping me. But she is a Canadian scientist who has kind of done similar research in real life. And then the other one that I’m thinking of is a…I think he’s a…I’m trying to remember his exact title. Basically, he works in like managing forests in Germany. And his name is Peter Wohlleben. But he wrote a book called I think it’s The Hidden Life of Trees that was published a few years ago. And like here in the US, it was like all on like NPR’s best books of the year lists and stuff like that. I don’t know why, but yeah, it was kind of like a surprising bestseller, which also happens to Patricia Westerford. And all these people are like, wow, that’s amazing. Like I had no idea trees could talk to each other and yeah, she’s yeah. That’s kind of how she’s vindicated later in life and basically gets a lot of speaking gigs and stuff like that going around the world talking about this.

Lovis: Yep, and eventually that’s why she gets pulled into the court case against the protesters because she’s. She knows so much about trees and she is brought in to kind of testify to the value, the natural intrinsic value of leaving trees where they are and not cutting them down. So basically, trying to defend the, the protesters stance in an economic, financial way, because sadly, that is the kind of language that speaks to people who make this decision. And that is the language that they speak, so that is the language that we also have to speak. So she was making the case that you should just leave forests alone because of all these things that they do. They give you medicines and they produce air and they clean your water and they do all of these wonderful things that you don’t even realize until you’ve cut them down and then they stop doing it. And then you have to figure out a way to do it yourself.

Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly character analysis

Back to top ↑

Forrest: Yeah, yeah. I guess that might be a good segue to talk about two other characters who appear in the book, which would be Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, I think is how you say your last name, but they’re a husband and wife pair and Ray is a—I think he was an intellectual property lawyer. And then Dorothy was a stenographer, which is kind of an interesting career. But, yeah, basically they, they never have kids. And I think Dorothy is kind of upset about that, that they never have children, whereas I feel like Ray was more of the one who was like, it’s okay. Like you don’t have to have children to have a meaningful life. Like we can fill our lives with art and like knowledge and, you know, sort of that kind of more like a humanistic, I guess, approach. So, yeah, later in life, Dorothy is like having an affair with Ray and with somebody else, like a colleague or something. I forget his name, but. Yeah, and then right after she tells Ray that she’s like going to leave him, he conveniently has a seizure and is basically bedridden for the rest of his life.

Lovis: So, yeah, he’s almost quadriplegic, isn’t he? He can like move one hand but he can’t really move his face and he can’t really speak, he can make some sounds and eventually she starts understanding the sounds. But yeah, she, he’s completely dependent upon her which, and obviously at that point she doesn’t feel that she can leave him because he needs her. So she’s she feels kind of stuck and so they’re looking for ways to, to get through the days. And she’s reading to him because they always both had a fascination with books. And they read to each other and eventually they pick up this book this Everything about Trees book that Dr. Westerford has written. And, and just opens a whole new world for them. And they look out their window and they try and identify all the trees that they have in their garden and in their neighborhood. And they realize, wow, our garden is not as natural and wild as it could be. And so they go on this rewilding project, which I love.

Forrest: Yeah, that was a cool story line.

Lovis: It took a while to get there! I was like, where are we going?

Forrest: I know. I was like, what’s the point. Yeah. But yeah, this was an interesting thing that got brought up because like, like I said, Ray’s background was in law. So they kind of get into this legal battle with the city, I think. And because they’re just like, screw it. Like we’re letting our yard go natural, like we’re going to let whatever wants to grow in the backyard grow or even the front yard, too, I think. So, like you said, they were like rewilding their property.

Lovis: I think I have, I think I took a screenshot of that page. Of course, now I have to find it. Right.

“If you could save yourself, your wife, your child, or even a stranger by burning something down, the law allows you. If someone breaks into your home and starts destroying it, you may stop them however you need to…He can find no way to say what so badly needs saying. Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm…The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.” -Ray Brinkman in The Overstory, pp. 497-498

Forrest: That was such a great quote, there are so many good quotes from this book.

Theme: legal rights for nature

Back to top ↑

Lovis: Yeah, so many good quotes. “The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.”

Forrest: Yeah. Which is another really big theme in the book, too, that we’ll probably touch on in a little bit. So, yeah, they, they get involved in this legal battle with the city. And just like the quote that Lovis just read, basically Ray starts to kind of make a legal case for rights for nature. And that’s like a whole thing that the book goes into, which is pretty interesting and has a lot of parallels to real life, too. So I know there was some—I was looking for like examples of this in real life. And there are, I think the article that I found was in Yale Environment 360, which is put out by the Yale University School of the Environment. But it was an article about just like how a lot of indigenous peoples around the world are basically kind of petitioning their governments for rights for nature because those are such, it is such an integral part of their culture and their livelihood in a lot of  examples. The particular one that I was looking at, I think was in Chile, and it was this huge river in Chile, which the author of the article compared to, I guess, the equivalent of kind of like the Rio Grand in the Grand Canyon in the United States. But in Chile, there are a lot of rivers. So to the government, that’s a good source or like a good opportunity to build hydroelectric dams for energy. So, yeah, the, the Chilean government had built a hydroelectric dam and basically it permanently changed this river. So it’s been turned into like parts where there are huge reservoirs now, which has like led to things like landslides happening. Yeah. And it’s really affected the environment in a pretty negative way, which is so deceiving because hydroelectric dams are like a source of renewable energy. So you’d think it’s a good thing, but it’s kind of complicated. So, yeah, that’s, that’s kind of been a big movement among indigenous peoples around the world. I think it actually may have started with the Maori people in New Zealand.

Also read: Joy Harjo: “Crazy Brave,” “An American Sunset,” And The Land

Lovis: Yeah, yeah. They sought legal rights for a river as well that passed through kind of sacred land. And the government was trying to was trying to develop something around it. And and they, they won I think.

Forrest: Yeah. So that’s a pretty good example, I think, of where. I mean, I don’t know a ton of details about that situation, I’m sure it’s still very imperfect, but it seems to be like the start of a good sort of—I hate to use the word compromise, but sort of like a compromise between like traditional ways of living, like indigenous ways of living, and then like just sort of like Western colonial sort of ways of living where these two have kind of merged now and clashed a lot of times—or most of the time, I should say. But it feels like a good start to maybe sort of. Making up for some of that or reconciling a little bit of it?

Theme: humans are part of nature

Back to top ↑

Lovis: I mean, a lot of the discussions about, oh, well, how do we get back to nature? There’s a, there’s some talk about going backwards and some talk about developing and going forwards with new methods. And I think it has to be a combination of both. We do have to use new methods because it’s just not going to happen that people are going to give up this convenient lifestyle that we have. But in other things, I think we do need to go backwards. I think especially in this idea of how, how important nature is to us culturally and how much value we lay on it. I think we do have to go backwards to a time when nature was much more culturally important

Forrest: And wasn’t just seen as a commodity or a “natural resource.”

Lovis: Yeah, exactly it’s not beneath us, it’s around us. And we’re part of this system rather than just the system is there for us to use. And and so I think this is a really good, a really good start. And you sent me a really interesting quote by the author for the kind of the motivation behind behind writing the book. And that is kind of linked to this.

Forrest: Yeah. It kind of comes in here as well. I just had it up. Or do you have it up?

Lovis: Yeah, I have it. Richard Powers said [in an interview with SIERRA Magazine], “The real question for humanity now is whether we can find stories that confront what it will take for us to live among non-humans in a permanent way. Writers need to turn their eyes outward and start asking what kinds of values we would need to develop, what myths we need to tell ourselves, and what perceptions we need to cultivate to truly live here and not in an imaginary, self-exempting place that externalizes all costs and acknowledges only private and individual meaning.”

Forrest: Yeah, retweet Richard Powers!

Lovis: Which is a much more beautiful powerful way of saying, we really need to stop being so egotistical and realize that we’re part of a bigger system and appreciate the bigger system.

Forrest: Right. We’re part of nature, not apart from nature I guess.

Lovis: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Forrest: So, I think that that might be a good place to, I guess, put a pin with Ray and Dorothy and kind of come back to them a little bit later. But just to finally finish talking about all of our characters.

Lovis: An hour later we’re finishing the last storyline!

Forrest: That’s the episode! Hope everybody had fun.

Lovis: You don’t need to read this book now, you’ve heard it.

Neelay Mehta character analysis

Back to top ↑

Forrest: We just told you the whole book. Good thing we put a spoiler warning at the beginning. But yeah, the last the last character is Neelay Mehta, who is a video game developer, which I thought was a pretty cool narrative. But he, like all the other characters, he also has a relationship with trees, except his is kind of a bad one at first. He basically…I forget what he was doing…he was kind of like doing something mischievous, I think, and he was trying to hide. So he climbed up into a tree and then he fell out of the tree and broke his back and became wheelchair-bound. And he was like paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. So, yeah, he ended up becoming a very successful video game developer. He kind of becomes like a sort of like Silicon Valley magnate, I guess, or like a billionaire and makes this really successful video game franchise called Mastery, which I guess I don’t know what the modern equivalent would be, would kind of like Minecraft, I guess, something like that, or like The Sims?

Lovis: I guess so. It’s basically a world that you as the player influence what it looks like and how it develops and how it builds. So you have power as a player to use up resources and, and things like that. And he took inspiration from trees. He wanted to he wanted to replicate kind of the intricacy and the complexity of the perfection of what they are and what they create and the balance that they have. And a myriad of different things and processes happening at the same time. And so he yeah, he created this world that people could escape to. That was hugely complicated and made it, just became a new addiction for people to disappear into this world rather than reality, which is what he did too because he didn’t like his reality so much.

Forrest: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Lovis: And so he he kind of became who he really wanted to be in this world, but eventually kind of realized that. What people were asking for and thinking, “Oh, what will make us more money, and how will we keep people addicted to this game?” What it created was just a replica of our world now where people are using up resources and…

Forrest: All the worst parts of our world.

Lovis: Yeah, we just we just took the worst parts of our world because that is all we understand. That’s how we know how to comprehend a world, I suppose, in a capitalist kind of way. And he was like, no, this is wrong. But he only realized it after he had millions of people kind of addicted to this game. And so he had to.…

Forrest: And a board of directors who was very not on board with his new idea.

Lovis: No, because the new idea would lose them money! Heaven forbid!

Forrest: Yeah cause they already have like billions of dollars.

Lovis: There’s like these 30 year old billionaires sitting around a table and he’s like, well, I think we should do something that doesn’t, you know, pollute people’s minds. And they’re like, nah, I’d rather continue raking in my money.

Forrest: Yeah, of course. So I forget, was this, um. So yeah, the game was Mastery and like you’re saying, like it got to a point where basically he was just like, oh, I don’t know how to make this any different. Like we kind of have run out of tricks. So then I think it, was it after he saw Patricia Westerford speak that he had this kind of change of heart and wanted to change the video game design? Or was it around the same time? I can’t remember now.

Lovis: Well, he met someone in-game that that was like, “Oh, I thought this was going to be something great, but actually, it’s just turned into another money machine.” And Neelay was like, “What are you talking about? My game is great!” Yeah. But he was like, the game doesn’t show us anything better. And Neelay realizes, yeah he’s right. And then yeah I think at some point he sees a speech given by Dr. Westerford, and we also hear about this during her storyline. She, after the court case was dismissed because, of course, it was dismissed, she went around the world collecting seeds from all the tree species that she thought were going to go extinct in the next century or something and created a seed bank in Colorado. And she just traveled the world collecting these trees and she would see the most magnificent trees and ones that were threatened by landscape development or temperature change or just anything human made. And and so she had the seed bank and and she wrote another book and she was invited to this talk, and she basically…the talk was about home redevelopment or something. That was what it was. And it was supposed to be about ideas of how we could rebuild, how we could renovate our world to make it, to make us do better. Her answer was kind of like. “Get rid of humans!”

Dr. Westerford and “unsuicide”

Back to top ↑

Forrest: Yeah, basically, and this was like one of the big…I don’t want to say climax, but this is like a really big moment in the book. So yeah, Neelay is at this event, which is not very clear from the beginning of the scene, but. Yeah. And it’s kind of told from two different perspectives. So it’s told first from Patricia Westerford’s, Dr. Patricia Westerford’s and then from Neelays.

Lovis: And also from Mimi’s, she was there too.

Forrest: She’s. Yes. Yes. She was there too. That’s right. So yeah, she was, Dr. Westerford was giving this talk, and yeah. Like you were saying at the at the end, basically concludes that like, sort of the best thing that you can do for the environment is not exist as like a 21st-century human living in, you know, like a developed Western country. So she says, I think her last words are here’s to un-suicide. And then she actually takes poison from a tree that she found in the Amazon, I think, and just kills herself in front of everybody. And obviously Neelay was like, “No, don’t do it!” And it was too late. But yeah. So like after that, that obviously probably had a pretty profound and traumatic impact on Neelay, I would imagine, and everybody else who was in the audience. But I think that’s when he like—unless I’m getting my timelines mixed up—that’s like when he really started to push for making this update to his video game to make it more like, oh, you have these constraints now. You can’t just do exponential growth, like now you’re in a closed system. You will run out of resources eventually. That will have consequences. So he was, I guess, kind of realizing that his video game wasn’t as true to reality as he maybe thought it was before, and trying to get people, I guess, to think a little bit more about sustainability.

Ecofiction in video games

Back to top ↑

Lovis: Yeah, exactly, and gamification is a huge thing, and people are using it now to try and get this message across as well. I did an episode on ecofiction in video games, and there were a few, a few examples of video games that were trying to just send environmental messages, ecological messages. And one of them is called Eco, where it is pretty much exactly like this. There’s a world and you have to save it and you have to develop it. But you have finite resources and it has to be a collaborative effort. You don’t really do things by yourself because you won’t get very far. So you have to collaborate and you have finite resources. And your goal is to not kill everything.

Forrest: Yeah, basically to build a sustainable society.

Lovis: Which sounds so hard. And there was a big discussion about it, whether it was useful because people—because it’s hard, people will stop playing it.

Forrest: Oh okay, interesting.

Lovis: The discussion, I guess, is whether they toe the line enough to make it hard so that it’s a challenge so that people want to beat it, but not so hard that people are like, oh this is not fun.

Forrest: There was another video game that this reminded me of too, which, probably nobody will know what I’m talking about. Like maybe? But when I was a kid, there was this computer game, back when games actually came on, CDs or discs. And it was a Star Wars video game called the Gungan Frontier, which was, of course, made after the most beloved character in the entire Star Wars franchise, Jar Jar Binks. But basically you had to…you kind of got this like virgin world, this planet that was like, had all the conditions for life, but there was no life on it yet. It was kind of like, I guess the…I don’t remember what they call it, but back when Earth was still without life and it was basically just like ocean and like chemicals and stuff in the water.

Lovis: Primordial?

Forrest: Yes, that’s it. That’s what I’m thinking of, the primordial soup? I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. So it’s kind of like that. But you have to basically, like…

Lovis: Go through evolution? Oh my goodness.

Forrest: No, not exactly. But basically, you are like the planter of the seeds of life, I guess. So you are like, you have to build an ecosystem, basically. But it’s very fragile. It was such a hard game. It was kind of like you were saying with Eco. It was so frustrating at times, but it was also super addictive, so I would play it a lot. But yeah, you had to be like, oh, you put too many predators in the environment, now they’re eating all of the herbivores. And oh, you put too many herbivores in the environment, now all the grass is gone and now they’re dying and now the predators have no food source. So it was kind of like that, I guess.

Lovis: That sounds ike a great game that a scientist would love!

Forrest: It was a lot of fun! It was actually before—because I think we had kind of talked a little bit on the Discord about Eco, that video game. And I was trying to see if there was a way that people could still play that game that I was thinking of today. But I don’t really think you can, which is sad. Maybe, maybe it’s like on Steam or something? I don’t know.

Lovis: We can have a little search.

Forrest: Yeah. Anyway, that just made me think of that, it kind of like brought me back to a childhood memory.

The role of hope in “The Overstory”

Back to top ↑

Lovis: So I think we’ve covered all the storylines now all finally, finally. And so now I guess I guess we can, we can just talk about how how we found it. I mean.

Forrest: Yeah.

Lovis: There’s so many—there’s so much to talk about, there’s so many storylines and so many massive messages that he, that he has, and I guess one of the, one of my big things was that I just felt no hope while I was reading this book. On my channel, I talk a lot about the need for hope in our fiction because the lack of hope is so demotivating. And people say, oh, well, if it’s that bad, then if there’s no hope, then why should I try?

Forrest: It’s just like a video game, it’s too hard.

Lovis: Yeah, exactly! It’s just, I’ll just stop. And actually when I was first. Looking up ecofiction and discovering the genre, a lot of people sent me to The Overstory to search for, because it was a title that they said had a lot of hope.

Forrest: Oh?

Lovis: I do not, and they swindled me!

Forrest: Yeah, you’ve been bamboozled.

Lovis: I’ve been bamboozled! This story is full of scientists and activists and protesters, and—

Forrest: And they all get crushed!

Lovis: And they did. Oh, my goodness! They all lose!

Forrest: Yeah. We didn’t even get to the like the worst parts for the characters, which I don’t think we need to go into.

Lovis: But no, I mean we talked about Mimas, and the rest are like. Just so much loss, there is so much loss, and it focuses a lot on the treatment of protesters and how horrible that is, and the people are putting their lives on the lines and their bodies to protect something that other, you know, the opposition doesn’t see has any value. And they lose! And I just! Ugh!

Forrest: I know. It’s awful.

Lovis: I mean, I ranted to you about this before and you had a really good comeback. Which I understand, but…still.

Forrest: I don’t disagree with you, though, I should say that. Like, I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I had the same feelings when I was reading the book. And yes, like one of the things that drew me to ecofiction also was this problem of—because I remember like when my sort of understanding of the climate crisis was starting to expand and I was kind of just frantically looking for things to hold on to, to, like, not lose hope. And, yeah, ecofiction was one thing that brought me to that. But a lot of ecofiction is dystopian. It’s not really a happy ending. It kind of starts from the premise of like, “We have failed. Now what?

Lovis: And this is the consequence of our failing.

Forrest: Yes. And here’s all the bad stuff that’s going to happen. So you better change your ways! And it’s kind of like that.

Lovis: Yes. Fear tactic.

Forrest: But yeah, one thing that I was really interested in, I was reading about, like the…I think somebody who works for the UN, I don’t remember who now, but they were talking about the need for narratives in the climate action movement and how important stories, like what a big role stories will play in this. So I was starting to read more about that. And one of the big things was like hopeful stories or like stories that don’t paint such a bleak picture. So all that to say, I don’t necessarily think that The Overstory is a dystopian novel. There are, there’s a very strong counterargument for that statement, as you were saying. But, yeah, it, um, I don’t know, it’s, it’s hopeful in some ways, and it’s very…I don’t know if I should say like pessimistic in other ways and maybe even sort of misanthropic a little bit? But yeah, I think like the, the source of hope from this book that maybe people were talking about is taking the long view. So Richard Powers will talk about, you know, like we need to stop thinking—and it also comes up like when you were talking about Ray and how like the law only looks at like a human timeline, but it needs to look at more of like an ecological timeline. That’s kind of also where Richard Powers is coming from in this book. Like he’s talking about like, um, like we’re only thinking in terms of us as a species, we need to take the long view and think of life on the planet in general. If you look at the whole history of life on this planet, like we’re a very small blip on that little timeline. So maybe it’s kind of conceited of us to think of ourselves as so important, but also like we’re animals, just like every other…animal…on this planet. And we have, like, this instinct for self-preservation and we don’t want to die, obviously! So, yeah, he—I don’t know, it’s all about like, you know, like life comes from death. It’s like the circle of life. And like, even if we go extinct as a species, which like, I think the verdict is still kind of out on whether or not climate change could make that happen. But I mean, regardless, it still would not be a great situation to end up in. But I think where he’s kind of coming from is like, even if, like, everything goes as wrong as it could go wrong, like, life will still find a way to go on, basically. It’s like in Jurassic Park when he’s like, “Life finds a way!” Or whatever. So I think that’s maybe where people are getting the hopeful aspect of this book from?

Lovis: Potentially. And you did have a good point that said, the, the point of the purpose of resistance is to resist. I mean, yes, your goal is to win. But it’s not brave if there’s no risk of loss, I suppose.

Forrest: Yeah, exactly.

Lovis: Just the fact that there are people who are standing up for for it and using their voices to speak out against it. That is, that is comforting. If only they would win sometimes!

Forrest: I know. I know. So yeah. I guess I was kind of rambling there a little bit, but. Yeah I guess my main—not rebuttal, but maybe like response to what you were saying—is that. Yeah. Hope is important, and like hope in a lot of times is the only thing that keeps people going when the going gets really hard. And you know, like we’ve heard all these things from people like Elie Wiesel, who was a Holocaust survivor and wrote this book called Night about like how hope is like the only thing that can keep people going. Like if you lose hope, you’ve lost everything, basically. And I think when people hear that, they think like. I guess it’s sort of like faith, like having hope, in a way, is sort of like having faith, like just. “You have to just believe!” And like, you just have to believe that things will be OK in the end and just keep going. And it’s kind of like this discipline, I guess, and a lot of personal rigor in maintaining that viewpoint. But also, I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that hope is an act, it’s a verb. It’s not just a philosophy or a viewpoint that you have. It is like showing up to protest. It’s planting trees. It’s basically just like defying the forces that are seeking to destroy us, I guess, in a word. So that’s where I guess that’s what I kind of feel hopeful about this book was just the courage and the bravery on display from all the characters in the book. Even though they are up against impossible odds, there’s realistically no way they could have won in their situation. And it’s important to also remember that this book, I think, was set in the 90s, at least when all of the big protests were happening with the main characters. So like, again, this was a time when, like, the collective consciousness was not as awake to the climate emergency as it is now, even though it still could be better, like in the 90s. You know, like that’s like when Al Gore came out with An Inconvenient Truth and a lot of people were like, “Oh, this is great!” And then way more people were like, “This guy’s crazy!” So they were just up against impossible odds. But despite that, they fought basically until the end anyway, even though they knew they were probably going to lose. And they just did it because it was the right thing to do and because they had such a strong moral conviction.

The significance of multiple characters and why climate action needs everyone

Back to top ↑

Lovis: I love that, that hope is a verb. I like that, that you—yes, you can hope for it to get better, but you also need to act for it to get better. And just standing by and and letting it happen in whatever way is decided by the people who do act is good enough. We all need to contribute and you know, we don’t all need to tie ourselves to a tree and get pepper spray in our eyes.

Forrest: And not everybody has the privilege to be able to do something like that too, like not everybody can do that.

Lovis: No, exactly. But I think that’s something else that I really like about all the different storylines is that they all do what they can to try and make something better, even if it’s Ray and Dorothy in their back garden, and just rewilding their garden. That is something that they say in the scope of my life, this is something that I can do. And yeah, Dr. Westerford writes her books and collects her seeds, and Neelay builds his builds his game that he thinks can bring people in. And yeah, the rest of the characters, they do join protests and they are very what we kind of typically think of as activism. They are very active. And they, and they, you know, experience all the horrible responses. Violence and hate and death and, oh, it’s, it’s, it’s awful. And they experience all of it. And so I think, I think that’s something that’s really nice about these storylines. They kind of give you this idea of activism, that there are levels of activism. These little things.

Forrest: Yeah. And it kind of just drives home the point that a lot of scientists try to make, which is just like like you were saying, like not everybody has to be out in the streets, like you need, like we need just everybody to be doing what they can do in their own way because there is no silver bullet to stopping something as colossal and horrible as climate change, like it’s going to take a billion different people coming at it from a billion different approaches to really make any kind of meaningful impact. So, yeah, I think that was cool. And I hadn’t really thought of that until you just said that. But yeah, the ways that the the different characters in the end, even though they have been, for all intents and purposes, kind of crushed and defeated, they still find a way to kind of be defiant in their own way.

Lovis: Yeah, they still defy. You see Nick’s art everywhere, and graffiti, and he’s just, you know, speaking the language that he knows and and communicating through art and reminding people, kind of. This is something important. This is, this does affect you. You should get involved.

“The Overstory” ending analysis and our take on “Still”

Back to top ↑

Forrest: Yeah. And then, of course, we have like his masterpiece, I guess you could say at the end of the book where—this is the biggest spoiler alert, I’m sorry. This is just giving away the entire book. This is the literal last page of the book. But yes, at the very, very end we see him. I think he might be in British Columbia. I can’t remember now. He’s somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and out in the woods, basically, and he’s starting to build this, I guess, like structure that can be seen from the sky. And he’s basically just dragging logs that have fallen to spell out a word and then having a really hard time going at it by himself. And then he meets a Native American man, who, I don’t know how they meet, but…

Lovis: He shows up I think. The guy says I heard there was a crazy man doing something in the woods, and Nick is like, “Yep, that’s me!”

Forrest: Yeah, so Nick is in the woods. And he built this kind of superstructure that you can see from—not from space—but if you’re in a plane probably flying over, you could see it. And it’s just the word “still.” And yeah, I was very perplexed by that ending for a long time, I’ll be honest.

Lovis: It’s kind of anticlimactic, isn’t it?

Forrest: Yeah, I was like, “‘Still?’ What the hell does that mean?” It’s like, are you kidding? That’s how it ends. You had a good interpretation on that that you were telling me, because I was still kind of like trying to make sense of it.

Lovis: Well, I had kind of two, so “still” I mean, just in language “still” has several meanings, like “still” very quiet, something is very still. And I thought that might apply to how trees are just standing very quietly and they’re just growing on their own kind of this is what I do. And they’re just surveying and watching everything happen. And yeah, time is so much slower for them and their lifetime is so much longer. So each bit of time just seems so much less significant. Yeah, they’re just still and they’re just waiting. And we, who are moving at such a faster pace, we’re just kind of. Yeah. We’re just kind of crashing into things. We’re always going. And so I kind of like this idea that, that he was just saying, “Just be still. Learn from trees, and be still.” And then the other interpretation was “still” like “still here.” We’ve spent decades and centuries just cutting down everything so that we can use it and destroying land and all these things and these old growths and these trees are still here, and we can still save them. And we can still turn this around. So there’s a lot of stills that you could use. And I suppose if you look at it that way, then it does end on a slightly hopeful note.

Forrest: Yeah, it’s open to interpretation for sure.

Lovis: Yeah. Like this whole story has been such a crapshoot, but there’s still time and you can still do something. I kind, of I like that interpretation better. There’s still something you can do.

Forrest: It’s like “even still.” Yeah. I thought that was good.

Our favorite aspects of “The Overstory”

Back to top ↑

Lovis: Yeah, for sure. What was something that you really liked about the book?

Forrest: Well, I did like several things. One, that trees were kind of like characters in the book, so they were sort of like non-human characters, which I think is a powerful thing that you can have in works of ecofiction or just any kind of story you’re trying to tell. It will make the reader more empathetic to what’s going on. Also, the multiple perspectives, the whole cast of characters that we had. One problem that a lot of people have with books about that talk about issues like climate change or just other environmental issues, and one problem that a lot of writers have in trying to write about those issues, is that, at least coming from, I guess, kind of like a Western literature perspective, our stories are a lot of them follow like the hero’s journey, which is, you know, like Lord of the Rings, like Harry Potter, just like those classic, like, epic stories about good versus evil. But it always kind of follows this one character who’s like the main protagonist. He’s like a hero. I’m saying “he” because it’s usually a man, which has its own set of problems as well. So it’s usually not a very inclusive way of looking at a story. It’s also usually kind of dualistic, like there’s good versus evil. There’s not a whole lot of room for nuance. Usually the bad guy dies in the end and it’s like a good thing that the hero killed the bad guy. Yeah, hero wins! Good versus evil. Somebody has to die. So, yeah, it’s like I was saying, there’s not like a ton of room for nuance. And this is not to say that there are not some great stories that have been told using the hero’s journey, because there have been. The two series I just mentioned are pretty great examples of that. But when you’re talking about something like climate change, which is not so simple, it kind of falls apart when you’re trying to do that. So I think that the use of multiple characters and approaching it from like myriad different ways was a very good thing that was working for this book. Trying to think of what else. Yeah, I. I did like and I didn’t like the sort of perspective that he has of we need to take the long view of things and think in more of like epochal terms, I guess, more in terms of centuries than in individual years. Which is great if you’re a tree, but not so great if you’re a human who, you know, like I don’t know what the average life expectancy is like in both of our countries now, but yeah, it’s not a hundred years in most cases. So, yeah, that was one thing that was like OK, like yeah, but. And then yeah. Just like the whole, like we were talking about the whole concept of thinking of nature as something that has intrinsic value. It doesn’t have to be, it doesn’t have to have a potential to be extracted for it to have value. I guess like it’s valuable in its own right, just like humans are.

Lovis: Yeah, for sure, I second everything that you just said. I did, I did like that about, about the book. It has so many facets. It’s really, it’s really—just it is kind of a masterpiece. I mean, there are not that many other books that you can spend an hour and a half talking about them and still not even have talked about half of the things that happen.

Forrest: Maybe some Russian literature.

Lovis: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s so much. And I guess, what did I like that you haven’t said? I mean, the writing is one. He’s an absolutely beautiful writer, and I guess this kind of ties in with what you said about the trees becoming characters. That’s, and isn’t it funny that for us to empathize with something we have to make human? But he just—it’s really, it’s not that easy to make a tree a character, and he does it so beautifully and it’s just—it’s a joy to read his writing. And the other thing is that he has put so much information into this book, like real information. Stuff that you can fact check. And you learn something. You learn so much by reading this book and it’s not a book that you will finish and not be impacted by. I think it’s a very impactful book. Of course, the fact that it has so much information and so many stats and so many kind of…just the research he must have done to write this book.

Forrest: He read so many books to write this one. He read like nearly 200 books I think I read.

Lovis: That’s just insane! But I guess that is also something that might turn some people off. I mean, this is not a subtle book, let’s put it that way. I mean, sometimes I talk about ecofiction being this like science communication ninja because you’re reading a really great book with great characters and you’re drawn into it. And just along the way you pick up some nuggets of information that you then keep. This is not that kind of book. This book has all the problems and all the facts laid out and then it just smashes them into your face. You cannot miss the messaging in this book. The narratives revolve around these messages. And that might be a lot for some people, especially if it’s not coupled with this hope. And so I think it’s like a bull in a china shop. It’s just destruction everywhere. Yes, but it is very heavy on the stats and the information. But that is something that I quite liked because I when I finished it, I felt like I had a better grasp of the situation that it was talking about. And it didn’t just pass over me. It’s something that I kind of kept.

Forrest: Yeah, I learned a lot from it too, from like a non-fiction point of view.

Lovis: Yeah, exactly. It’s almost like creative nonfiction. You kind of forget that you’re reading fiction. It’s like a documentary series.

Is “The Overstory” literature?

Back to top ↑

Forrest: Yeah, it does in some of ways kind of feel like a documentary. Yeah. Because like I mean, I’m American, was like born here, I’ve lived my whole life here. I didn’t even know an American chestnut tree was a thing until I read this book. And there have been like so many other things like that, like I didn’t know about, like the way that trees can communicate to each other and like how they cooperate and share resources and that sort of thing. So all of that was really interesting and useful information. I also didn’t know that much about, like the forestry industry. Um, I didn’t realize that that’s kind of how it works. Like they basically just like clearcut old growth forest and then usually will plant, a lot of times, just like one species of tree to replace what they cut down, which is a horrible idea. Terrible, terrible, terrible idea. But yeah, I take your point. Like it could be, it could be a turnoff for some readers. And I think like, this was a criticism I came across, too, when I was reading about the book, after I had finished it, as I was going back and like reading reviews and stuff. There is another author, Nathaniel Rich, who has also written books of ecofiction. I think the one that he’s most known for is called Odds Against Tomorrow.

Lovis: Yes, yeah, I know that name.

Forrest: And he just, um, either it’s about to come out or he’s just published it. There’s another book he has. I think it’s a work of nonfiction called Losing Earth, which sounds so cheery and hopeful. And I think it’s about like, basically, like the big PR campaigns that oil companies made in the 20th century to essentially sow doubt in climate science and to create people who are climate deniers, essentially. Which is just like mega evil, level evil.

Lovis: Bad people!

Forrest: Yes, can’t believe that happened. That’s like something out of a science fiction book. But yeah, he was, he was saying [in The Atlantic] like, “Okay, everything that’s in this book. Yeah, like I agree with it, I get where he’s coming from. I myself have written books like this. I am an advocate for environmentalism and for taking action on climate change. But this book is kind of preachy.” And like you were saying, the whole in-your-face thing, he was like it is very clearly written to change somebody’s mind. And he was like, and that’s not literature, which was kind of a big stab at this book.

Lovis: That is a big stab.

Forrest: Yeah. Which I was like, oh dang. Like this book won the Pulitzer Prize.

Lovis: You’re saying it’s not literature, that’s just rude.

Forrest: Yeah. So yeah. Which like I think if anyone was going to say that, like I think somebody like Nathaniel Rich could get away with saying it because he has the qualifications to back up a statement like that. But yeah, I get where he’s coming from. It is, he was saying like, you know, like if you were going to write something like this, why didn’t you just write it as like a tract or like an essay or a work of nonfiction, like you said? Which I guess like kind of gets back to why Richard Powers wrote this. It’s an interesting dialogue, I guess, on that kind of point. Like one of the main things, one of the main themes in the book is storytelling and the power that it has to change people’s minds. And, you know, like Adam Appich said, I’m paraphrasing here, but he said, like, “All the statistics in the world won’t change somebody’s mind, but a good story can.” And then you’re like, OK, I see what you’re doing here. But yeah, but I mean, yeah, I get that criticism of the book saying that it’s not literature for that reason, that it’s like very polemical and like trying to change people’s minds. And it’s kind of a diatribe against, you know, like everything that we’re doing wrong. But at the same time, like, we’re kind of at the point where, like, might as well try it, like we’re kind of…

Lovis: For sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s one of the criticisms that ecofiction as a kind of genre or category or however you want to think of it gets a lot. Is that, “Well, why would I want to read that? I don’t want to be preached to.” And it’s, it’s true. I don’t want to be preached to, either. And so I don’t know if I would necessarily—like if you, if you type, if you Google “ecofiction” and it’ll come up with loads of lists, “The Top 10 Ecofiction Books, Books To Get You Started In Ecofiction,” and The Overstory is always on there. And I’m thinking, this is not the one to start with.

Forrest: No, no, no. It’ll probably turn you off from the whole genre.

Lovis: This is not a soft entry into ecofiction. This is a hard crash landing entry to ecofiction. It’s not subtle. It’s very, I mean…it’s like saying it’s preachy. It just makes it sound like, oh, well, I don’t want to read that then, but it’s…

Forrest: Yeah, it’s not like in a finger-wagging kind of way. It’s just like, it’s very obvious what the author’s trying to do.

Lovis: Yeah it’s like, here are the facts. This is the situation. You want to learn about it? Here you go. And I appreciate that. And I enjoyed the book but I am already a convert. It’s like a preaching to the choir kind of situation here.

Forrest: Yeah. I kind of had that thought too.

Lovis: Someone who is on the fence? I don’t know if they would have made it through this giant book.

Forrest: I’m glad you said that because that is a thing that I struggle a lot with ecofiction. And it’s also something I struggle with myself when I am setting out to write something that could be categorized as ecofiction. Because I’m like, OK. Yeah, like stories are important, but like if I make this too overt or if I make it too obvious, if I show my hand like what I’m trying to do here, only the people that already care about this are going to read it.

Lovis

Yeah, exactly. And the magic trick is over.

Forrest: Yes. And it was kind of like what you were saying earlier when we were talking about how the law fits into all of this, like how Patricia Westerford was talking about, like the, the financial and legal reasons, I guess, to not cut down trees. And you said that it’s unfortunate that we have to talk that way, but that’s like the language that people speak, so that’s how best to reach them. That’s like essentially what you said. So I kind of think in the same terms when we’re talking about ecofiction. I mean, like realistically, we’re talking about a book that’s like that thick. It’s a Pulitzer Prize winner. It’s very literary. I mean, think about the types of people who would be reading a book like this, like they probably read The New Yorker. Some people might think they’re kind of pretentious, like they probably already care about climate change, and I don’t know. So that was, I guess, one big criticism that I had of the book. And I think a lot of people also had that, but.

Lovis: And it’s a fair one, it is a fair criticism. I mean, it’s. Yeah, I don’t I don’t know who his target audience is. I don’t know if like the logging industry will read this book or something. I don’t know if he’s going to change those minds. Yeah, and it’s, it’s interesting, because that’s the whole point of ecofiction being kind of a science communication, tool or having the potential to be a science communication tool, that it’s going to reach people who don’t read academic papers and they don’t read the news stories on climate change and inform themselves about the facts and things. And this is the way to reach people who, they don’t confront it in their everyday lives kind of thing. And so they start reading a book for the story that it tells and they end up being exposed to things that they aren’t normally exposed to. And that’s something that I think is super powerful. But yeah, this this one, even though it is definitely ecofiction and it’s strong and it’s, and it’s impactful when you do read it, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to reach people who are like, “I just wanted a nice story!”

Forrest: Yeah. ecofiction kind of has to pass a pretty strict litmus test to be considered like a good work of ecofiction, I would say. And that is something that I struggle with a lot when I’m trying to think of works to talk about on my podcast. And I’m sure you probably go through the same thing. But it’s like, OK, like it’s one thing that this book talks about these issues. It’s another thing if it’s actually like a good book, like it has to be a good book in its own right. Like we have to kind of put on our blinders for a second and pretend it doesn’t talk about climate change. Is it still a good book? OK, great. We can talk about it. But otherwise I’m not sure if it is very effective at, like, achieving what it sets out to do in a lot of cases.

Lovis: Yeah, well exactly. I mean, this is…the question of “Is this a good work of ecofiction?” is such a slippery slope, isn’t it? Because like what I think of as a good work of ecofiction is going to be very different from what you think of as a good work and what the next person thinks of as a good work. And I think that’s the beauty of the genre, that you can decide that for yourself. There’s so much out there that you can, you know, I had this conversation with another group on Goodreads or something where the discussion was, “ecofiction should be earthbound because the Earth is so, so important and so beautiful that it deserves its own genre. And everything that is fantastical or science fiction should just not be included in ecofiction.” Which I don’t agree with. I don’t agree with that at all. But they are completely within their rights to only read Earthbound ecofiction. Because that is what is powerful to them. And that’s, that’s fine. I don’t, I don’t need you to read only what I think is good.

Forrest: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And that again is like what makes something literature is that it allows for a diverse number of viewpoints, I guess.

Lovis: Yeah, exactly. And so to some people who really want that, like punch in the face, this is really good! This is a really good book.

Forrest: It will punch you right in the face.

“The Overstory” paints a realistic picture of activism and its dangers, especially for indigenous people

Back to top ↑

Lovis: It will punch you! But for people who, you know. They’re kind of tentative, maybe is word. Or they don’t want to be overwhelmed with it. This is already, ecofiction is already the compromise that they’re making to even confront any of these topics. Then this is maybe not the book. So I think in recommending it to people, I think I would put a couple of conditions in there.

Forrest: Yeah. And maybe it is written more for people like you and I who are already fired up about this topic. And are like, like you were saying like, this feels like a weird thing to come back to now, but looking for reasons to be hopeful just because like, in some ways it’s kind of like a warning of like, here’s what you’re getting yourself into if you decide to start doing this in a committed, serious kind of way. And I think it’s also worth mentioning that, just as a side note, that even though this was set in the United States and like it took place, I guess, like about thirty-ish years ago now, give or take a few years. But like people around the world still are up against opposition like this, especially in like South America. Like if you’re an environmental activist, you can get murdered a lot of times and a lot of people do get murdered for standing up to logging companies like in the Amazon.

Lovis: And environmental journalists as well who try to try to break open a story of corruption and stuff. That is super dangerous place to be.

Forrest: It is. I think one thing that I took away from the book that I had to sort of learn myself in real life—and I think I’d kind of sort of come to understand this before I had picked up this book. But if you’re first getting involved in a movement like this, it is extremely frustrating when you’re first starting out. Because, I mean, it continues to be frustrating. But especially when you’re first starting out, you’re like, “I don’t get it. Like, why aren’t things getting better? Like we’re doing so much work, like, why don’t people get this? Like, you know, I’m putting everything into this. Why isn’t the message clicking?” And I think that this kind of is a representation of some other movements that we’ve seen over the past couple hundred years. Whether you’re talking about like the civil rights movement in the United States, any kind of big movement like this doesn’t happen overnight. And I think that is maybe like one good thing that can be said about the book is that it draws attention to that fact and it’s realistic in that way. There is this really great essay by a writer that I like a lot named Mary Annaïse Heglar, and she wrote an essay. I forget the name of the essay now, but it was something like, “Climate Change Isn’t The First Existential Threat.” I don’t know if you’ve read this or not. She is a black American woman from Mississippi. She lives in New York now. But she also makes a great podcast with Amy Westervelt, if anybody’s interested in checking that out. But, yeah, basically the point of the essay was like, if you’re a Black person living in America, just living in America is kind of an existential crisis for you because, you know, for like four hundred years, you know, you’ve either been, like, enslaved or you’ve gone through Jim Crow, which, as she points out in the essay, is a very like mild term for what was happening to people. And like what, just like white people in general were doing to Black Americans in that time. So she’s like, this is not like the first kind of existential threat that people like me—and she also calls attention to like indigenous people—have been up against, you know, like. I keep bringing it back to the United States, I’m sorry, but. You know, like here, like if you’re a Native American, and you’re alive today like, your people have survived genocide from like White Americans. This still goes on, like we see it still today with things like the Dakota Access Pipeline and then also in Canada with like the recent events that were going on there with the lobster fishermen. And there’s a slew of other examples you could pull from, too. But, yeah, I mean, I’m not trying to get everybody down in the dumps by talking about this, but which I’m probably doing. But the point is, you know, like struggles like this just—they don’t happen overnight. So you have to acknowledge that. And it takes perseverance, I guess. And you may, like, die before you see things get better. And that’s just something that you have to accept going into it. Otherwise, you’re going to get burned out and you’re going to become hopeless and you’ll give up. And then, you know, if that happens, if enough people do that, the whole movement loses steam, everything kind of falls apart. So.

Lovis: Yeah. And I guess that’s. That’s exactly—I mean, the, the size of some of those issues that you were just talking about, it’s not going to be solved by one person, two people. It needs to be solved by so many people taking action and raising their voice and taking a stand, even though just the task is so huge. And so, yeah, maybe that’s a really good parallel, like the task of protesting against this kind of development and progress and all of these things is so huge that it’s going to need everybody to stand up. And if the activism that gets people’s attention happens to be chaining yourself to a tree or whatever, then sometimes that’s what is needed. So I guess getting the ball rolling, maybe that’s what the book is doing. It’s getting, you know, showing all the different forms of activism to get the ball rolling and open our eyes to some of these other social injustice issues that are, that are happening all around us as well.

Forrest: Yeah. When when you think about things like the events in this book, they led to bigger movements like what we have today with like the Fridays for Future Movement in Europe. And you have like the school children, which is horrible, that school children are having to be the people to sound the alarm on this and to get people to wake up, but it’s happening, and it’s working. And you have things like Extinction Rebellion in the UK, which does a lot of really great stuff. And then in the US, you have things like the Sunrise Movement and you have movements like these all around the world. So in that sense, I think it is encouraging. Just because you didn’t see it necessarily at the end of this book, things like that, laid the groundwork for bigger, arguably maybe more successful movements that we have today.

Should you read “The Overstory?”

Back to top ↑

Lovis: So The Overstory by Richard Powers, as recapped by us. It is fascinating. It is heartbreaking. It is huge. It is complex. It will make you feel all the feelings.

Forrest: It’s controversial.

Lovis: It’s super controversial. Not subtle. But I still recommend reading it if you feel up to it.

Forrest: Yeah. If you’re like in the, I guess the headspace to read it, then it’s a good read for sure.

Lovis: Well. I guess that’s it! Thank you very for joining me to talk about this book!

Forrest: Thank you for inviting me! This was a—I feel like I’m talking to a celebrity—this was a massive honor to be on the Ecofictology YouTube channel. I was so geeking out when you told me you wanted to do this together, so thank you.

Lovis: Oh that’s so sweet, thank you! Oh I’m blushing! Which, you probably can’t see because I live in Scotland and it gets dark out early.

Forrest: Oh you can see me blushing. I’ve been blushing the whole time because I’m nervous.

Lovis: This was good.

What you can do to help

Back to top ↑

Deforestation is a massive problem around the globe that eliminates natural carbon sinks, harms indigenous communities, and contributes to the climate crisis. Here are some organizations you can support to help stop deforestation.

Fairy Creek Blockade

Website: https://www.fairycreekblockade.com/
GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/95e503d7

The Fairy Creek Blockade is a direct action campaign led by grassroots organizers in British Columbia, Canada to protect old-growth temperate rainforests on unceded Pacheedaht territory in what is now known as Vancouver Island. These activists are standing up to a Canadian logging company to protect ancient trees, and they even have their own version of Mimas—a 2,000 year old yellow cedar tree named Titania.

World Wildlife Fund

Website: https://www.worldwildlife.org/
Charity Navigator rating: 80.32/100 (source)

The World Wildlife Fund is a conservation organization that operates in over 100 countries. Their work focuses on six main areas, including the conservation of the world’s most important forests.

Rainforest Alliance

Website: https://www.rainforest-alliance.org/
Charity Navigator Encompass Rating: 100/100 (source)

The Rainforest Alliance is an international non-profit organization that advocates for sustainable business practices. Their work focuses on four main areas: forests, livelihoods, climate, and human rights.

Recommendations

Back to top ↑

Podcast: Timber Wars from Oregon Public Broadcasting

Article: “Climate Change Isn’t the First Existential Threat” by Mary Annaïse Heglar

TED Talk: Suzanne Simard: How trees talk to each other

Book: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

→ Buy USED on Better World Books from $14.49 (affiliate)
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $15.59 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Video game: Eco

Like what you see? Become a Patreon member today for as little as $1 a month.

The post “The Overstory” by Richard Powers with Lovis Geier: Summary & Analysis appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Infest The Rats’ Nest by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is an adrenaline-fueled concept album about a group of people forced to flee Earth due to climate collapse while the rich live it up on Mars. Released in August 2019 on Flightless (Australia) and ATO Records (North America), it is the Melbourne-based band’s fifteenth studio album and their second album of 2019, following Fishing for Fishies in April.

→ Listen on Spotify
→ Listen on Apple Music
→ Listen on Bandcamp

Infest The Rats’ Nest received critical acclaim following its release and was nominated for the 2019 ARIA Award for Best Hard Rock or Heavy Metal Album. The band’s lead vocalist, Stu Mackenzie, produced the album, with songs written by Stu Mackenzie, Joey Walker, and Michael Cavanagh.

Jump to

1. About King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is an Australian psychedelic rock band based in Melbourne, Victoria. Since its formation in 2010, the band has released sixteen studio albums, with a seventeenth album due in 2021. Ten of the band’s albums have charted on the Top 20 in Australia, and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard has headlined festivals around the world. Known for their eclectic style, refusal to be bound to a specific genre, and proficiency, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is one of the most innovative and interesting rock bands in Australia, let alone planet Earth.

Official website: https://kinggizzardandthelizardwizard.com/

Transcript

Back to top ↑

I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a podcast about everything climate change in pop culture. Before I go any further, let’s all just take a deep breath. [exhales]

Doesn’t that feel good? I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think I’m actually feeling something that feels like a glimmer of hope. Do you feel that? If you’re listening at a later time, I finished recording this episode right after the inauguration. We actually have a president who says the words “climate crisis” now. At his inauguration speech, Biden actually said, “A cry for survival comes from the planet itself.”

I don’t know, personally, Biden wasn’t even close to my first pick, but I’ve gotta say, I’ve been impressed so far by how progressive his climate plan is. I hope he follows through on it, and it’s up to us to hold him accountable. Anyway. This isn’t a political podcast, but everything is political, especially climate change, unfortunately, so it seemed appropriate to briefly express that it feels like I can actually breathe a sigh of relief for the first time in four years. And what a tumultuous four years it’s been.

I hope you’re feeling good too. It’s okay to let yourself feel good when good things happen while still knowing there’s a lot of work to do. It’s good to celebrate victories. But just to keep our egos in check, we’re talking about an album on the podcast today that might feel a little gloomy. This is not in any way a criticism of the album—it’s actually one of my favorite albums from the past couple of years—but it’s maybe just a heads up if you thought we were going to actually be happy on this podcast! [laughs]

I’m joking. Today, we’re talking about an album called Infest The Rats’ Nest by the Australian psychedelic rockers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. What an incredible name for a band. 

If you want to support further production of the show, visit our Support Us page at storiesforearth.com/support-us/. You can get early access to new episodes in addition to other perks by becoming a member on Patreon, or you can make a one-time donation through PayPal or buy some of the books we talk about using the links on our website. Okay, I’ll shut up now and get to the episode. I hope you enjoy.

Humans tell stories in a million different ways.

Before we had a written language—or before many people were literate—we passed down stories verbally. Sometimes these were spoken words, but often they were songs. You can find examples of this all throughout history, and we still do it today, even though our literacy rates are much higher. There’s a reason music has stood the test of time as a storytelling medium—it’s concise, memorable, and emotionally compelling.

One of my favorite artists is Jason Isbell, a Nashville-based singer-songwriter. Isbell got started playing music in the Drive-By Truckers with his buddy Patterson Hood, but he’s been doing his own thing for several years now, usually backed by his band, The 400 Unit. He’s an amazing guitarist and a great songwriter, but I think he’s also an incredible storyteller. Many artists from an Americana or country background are steeped heavily in storytelling, and Jason is a master.

Take, for example, Isbell’s song “Elephant” from his 2013 album Southeastern. Isbell sometimes writes from personal experience, but a lot of the stories in his songs are purely fictional. I don’t know which category “Elephant” falls into, but either way, it feels real. The song is about a man named Andy whose friend is dying of cancer.

Jason Isbell breaks your heart. The melody, the timbre of his voice, his restrained strumming, the imagery of his lyrics. Any element of this song alone would be good, but taken together, it’s a really moving story and a beautiful piece of music.

I love Jason Isbell, but this episode isn’t actually about him. My point in bringing him up is that music moves people, and we write songs about everything from getting blackout drunk partying on a Friday night to friends dying of cancer. So at a time when there is an extremely important message the world needs to hear, why not use music to spread the word? Why not write songs about climate change?

Meet King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

Climate change is kind of having a moment in pop culture. While this may have seemed ludicrous only five years ago, it’s true. Ecofiction and works of cli-fi have soared in popularity. Documentaries from high-profile actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Natalie Portman are easily accessible from Netflix or Hulu. The British pop-rock band The 1975 included a spoken word track with Greta Thunberg on their 2020 release Notes on a Conditional Form. Teenage pop star Billie Eilish sings about uncontrolled wildfires ravaging Southern California in her song “all the good girls go to hell.” And maybe the very existence of this podcast says something about the current state of climate change alarm in the general public.

As the climate crisis intensifies and becomes a part of everyday life for more people, we will start to hear more climate-related music. Climate change is now part of the human experience in a very tangible way, and it will naturally permeate throughout our culture. One band from Australia is particularly conscious of this. The marvelously named King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard departed from their usual trippy psychedelic rock to release a thrash metal album in 2019 called Infest The Rats’ Nest. Reminiscent of Black Sabbath, Rammstein, and early Metallica, Infest The Rats’ Nest goes hard on the greatest threat facing humanity today: climate change.

This is a concept album about a future Earth that’s been wrecked by ecological destruction. The wealthy elites have left Earth to join the burgeoning colony on Mars, and the poor are left behind to farm and send dwindling resources to the Mars colony. Each track tells a new chapter of a story of climate collapse, covering topics ranging from class struggle to factory farming to the spread of infectious disease. And eerily enough, the major cause of conflict in this story is the emergence of a deadly super virus that escalates into a pandemic, causing a small band of survivors to flee the diseased Earth.

Infest the Rats’ Nest deals with heavy subject material, but King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard still manage to stay true to their psychedelic rock status. Spoiler alert, but the album ends with the virus survivors crash-landing on Venus, which turns out to be the portal to Hell. Dying a bitter and fiery death, the survivors return as demons, and Satan himself sends them on a special mission to attack the Mars colony—or, to “infest the rats’ nest,” as he puts it.

Environmental messaging aside, Infest the Rats’ Nest is a great album featuring gritty vocals, fuzzy guitars, and aggressive drums. As a fan of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, I actually listened through the album several times before realizing it was a story about environmental destruction and climate collapse. And if you’re wondering, my favorite song happens to be “Mars For The Rich.”

Infest the Rats’ Nest, track by track

In my humble opinion, the best way to experience Infest the Rats’ Nest is to blare it over your car speakers while hurtling down the highway at an unsafe speed. But since this is a family podcast and I would never endorse or encourage dangerous behavior, not only for legal reasons, an optimum listening experience for this album might also be blasting it over the biggest stereo system you can find and moshing solo in your living room.

No matter how you choose to indulge, may I suggest it be loud. Of course, this advice comes from someone who suffers from hearing damage and tinnitus caused by both playing in loud rock bands as a teenager and attending rock concerts. Please follow this advice at your own risk.

But if we’re to really get the most out of this album from an environmental messaging perspective, it might not be a bad idea to go through the album track by track, blending commentary with snippets of the songs.

Planet B

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard kick off the album with “Planet B,” a driving metal dirge complete with chugging guitars and double bass drums. It’s a bleak picture—the world has obviously failed to mitigate climate change in any meaningful way, as Stu Mackenzie sings about the browning fields, the lost seasons, and the Earth as a blank verse. The chorus makes it pretty clear what’s going on:

Only way through is colonization
Acclimatization
Population exodus
There is no Planet B

Earth is ruined, and colonizing Mars is our only hope of survival as a species. The song ends with the repeated refrain, “There is no Planet B,” a statement made even more tragic by its irony. It’s so tragic, in fact, that the song ends on the line, “Baby Jesus sheds a tear,” bringing to mind John 11:35, which says, “Jesus wept.” Creation, so to speak, has been destroyed.

Mars for the Rich

For me, the second track is when things really start to get interesting. “Mars for the Rich” begins with a bluesy guitar riff before a snare drum fill cues in the rest of the band. This song might be my favorite on the album, featuring a killer bassline that I think gives the song what Stuart Berman describes in Pitchfork as a “…brontosaurus chug.” Take a listen and you’ll immediately hear what he’s talking about:

I’m just a poor boy
Living frugally
I see Mars on TV
I see people happy
I work fields with
Blistered fingers
I look starward
That world has no place for me

We get a few more visuals in the lyrics to describe Earth’s fallen state, but this song really says a lot about inequality and environmental injustice. And while the album never provides many details about the narrator—or even if there is a consistent narrator, for that matter—we can probably safely infer some commentary on environmental racism from “Mars for the Rich.”

The chorus talks about how the “tsars…live large” on Mars, which probably refers to billionaire industry captains like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who, of course, started his private space company SpaceX to build a “mega colony” on Mars. And in the second verse, Stu Mackenzie states pretty explicitly, “Mars for the privileged / Earth for the poor…That world has no place for me.”

So, while humans have ruined Earth and are seeking to escape to Mars, we learn pretty quickly that not everyone is worthy of living on a pristine planet. Just like our version of Earth today where local governments decide who’s worthy of living in a clean residential area and who’s worthy of living in an industrial area likely contaminated by toxic chemicals and polluted air, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard don’t foresee humans becoming any more…well, humane by the time Mars becomes a more attractive option for life.

Organ Farmer

The next track is titled “Organ Farmer,” a galloping screed against factory farming that also gets at the heart of the idea that nature is simply a resource at humanity’s disposal. Framing factory farms as organ farms makes for some grisly visuals that are probably more true to reality than what most people think of when they hear the word “farm” by itself.

Make the incision
Careful precision
Blood minestrone
Decomposition
New life christened
Fatty rolls of brie

The first verse begins with a gruesome visual of a modern slaughterhouse, but as the song goes on, you begin to realize Stu Mackenzie is singing about more than meat farms. In the bridge, he almost chants:

Wiretap divinity
Human laboratory
Kill the squid, cut the tree
Arrogant human being

Humans are basically playing God by thinking they can control nature and bend it to their will, and the narrator is clearly disgusted by it.

Superbug

Now, my second-favorite song on the album is “Superbug.” This song has more of a bluesy swagger to it than some of the more in-your-face metal songs on the album, and its message feels eerily prescient at a time when the United States just recorded over 4,000 deaths from COVID-19 complications in a single day. As of now, we are trending toward 400,000 deaths from coronavirus—roughly the same number of Americans who died fighting in World War II.

Superbug coming up
H1N1 was a flop
Anti-microbial
Resistance is futile
Superbug is like a truck
Penicillin is a duck
That’s sitting on the road for luck

One thing that really caught my attention about this song was its reference to H1N1, which, if you recall, was the Swine Flu—another pandemic that happened in 2009 when a novel influenza strain emerged. While the superbug from Infest the Rats’ Nest varies greatly from COVID-19, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is correct in drawing attention to the increased risks we face from disease.

In August 2020, a paper published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature revealed disconcerting information about how deforestation increases the risk of spreading diseases like COVID-19. The paper, titled “Zoonotic host diversity increases in human-dominated ecosystems,” shared findings from a study of over 6,800 ecological communities on six different continents which revealed that there is a link between increasing human development, decreasing biodiversity, and new disease outbreaks.

Even now as far too many people continue pushing conspiracy theories claiming the Chinese government created COVID-19 as a biological weapon, or—perhaps even worse—that the virus doesn’t even exist, scientists are warning us that if we don’t learn to change our destructive relationship with the other living beings on this planet, we are on a fast track to commiting suicide as a species.

Venusian 1

Our future Earthlings have finally had enough by the fifth track on the album, “Venusian 1,” an angsty, rebellious declaration of their intent to leave the broken Earth. The first verse reveals Earth is basically uninhabitable at this point:

Forest desertified
Ocean wave amplify
Constant tornado sky
Black water, no supply
Otherworld, surrogate
Interstellar our escape
Sulfur star liberates
Gotta beat the outbreak

So there’s a lot going on here. Deforestation has led to desertification around the world, it sounds like storms have gotten really intense, and we seem to be running out of drinking water. Right now these crises are visible on the horizon but not quite so bad as to necessitate leaving Earth.

According to Seeker, we’ve already lost about 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest, and we’re dangerously close to a tipping point that could turn the so-called lungs of the Earth into savannah. It goes without saying that that would be very bad. On top of this, we are running out of water. According to a 2015 study in Water Resources Research based on NASA satellite data, 21 of the world’s 37 largest aquifers—you know, the giant underground lakes where we get most of our drinking water from—have passed their sustainability tipping points. Basically, that means we’ve taken more out of these aquifers than nature has been able to replenish.

If we don’t manage to get our act together, we might find ourselves in a very similar situation to the poor rebels in Venusian 1.

Perihelion

“Perihelion” is like a science fiction re-telling of the ancient Greek myth of Icarus. Just like Icarus and his father escaping from the Labyrinth on Crete, the band of rebels seen on Infest the Rats’ Nest take to the skies to escape our dying planet. Unfortunately, they don’t learn from Icarus’ mistake, flying too close to the sun and falling to their deaths. Except the rebels don’t drown in the Mediterranean—instead, they get caught in the sun’s gravity and basically burn up in the star.

Giver of life and the giver of speed
Ever we take even her gravity
Her glowing beauty is something to see
Bigger and brighter, she cometh to me

It feels mean to charge the rebels with hubris or insubordination considering they were fleeing the dying Earth, not disobeying their father. Regardless, they meet the same fate, with Stu Mackenzie singing, “Grinning sun has sinners for dinner,” in the second verse.

Venusian 2

A fast drum beat kicks off “Venusian 2,” the story of the second spaceship of rebels fleeing Earth for Venus. Judging from the lyrics, it sounds like both spaceships left around the same time, because the spaceship in “Venusian 2” seems to have watched the first spaceship explode in the sun, or as Stu Mackenzie puts it, “In the lap of the gods.”

Thankfully, the second spaceship manages to escape the sun’s gravitational pull, closing in on Venus as the rebels realize they’re actually going to make it. Mackenzie sings in the second verse:

Fingers getting warm
And eyes are turning gold
Evil twin is coming in

This is great imagery here—I love imagining the camera, so to speak, capturing a closeup of a rebel’s eye with the reflection of Venus, Earth’s “evil twin,” shining back at us.

Self-Immolate

You didn’t really think this was going to have a happy ending, did you? As the name implies, “Self-Immolate” is the account of the second group of rebels essentially setting themselves on fire. They’ve fled Earth to escape a heated world ravaged by plague only to find themselves on Venus, a fiery planet with an atmosphere of sulphur where a new sickness apparently awaits them.

I have gone insane-o
I lust for volcano
Be with molten lava
Give me my nirvana

Mackenzie goes on to sing in the chorus:

Venusian sickness dire
I want to be set on fire

Something happens after the rebels land on Venus, and they go insane, becoming sort of infatuated with fire and wanting to fling themselves into volcanos. In some ways, this kind of reminds me of the very first episode we ever did on Stories for Earth, which was about Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. In the book, there are these gangs who pillage towns to get money to fuel their addiction to a drug called Pyro, which makes the act of staring into fire intensely pleasurable. The draw to stare into flames is so intense that many of the people addicted to Pyro actually ended up falling into the fire themselves and dying.

Obviously the rebels aren’t doing Pyro, but the way they talk about wanting to self-immolate as a way to get an almost sexual sort of gratification bears close resemblance to the gangs in Parable of the Sower.

Hell

The rebels do end up being consumed by the fiery and hostile conditions on Venus. And, in maybe the most perfect way Infest the Rats’ Nest could end, they find themselves in hell, where the “Antichrist has tempted [them]” with a purpose: to infest the rats’ nest. In the chorus, the rebels sing to themselves:

Remember where to enter
Remember where to enter
The door to hell is amber

Would this really be a thrash metal album if Satan himself didn’t make an appearance? As it turns out, Venus is the door to hell, and now that the rebels have opened it, Satan has tasked them with taking revenge on the people who got them into this whole mess: the frivolous upper echelons of human society who treated the Earth as a bottomless treasure chest for the plundering. It’s here that we finally learn the meaning of the album’s title. Satan wants the rebels to infest, or attack, the rats’ nest, which is the colony on Mars for rich people.

At first, this may seem like nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek ending for an album that you could argue is kind of funny in a very dark way, more as an homage to heavy metal acts like Black Sabbath or Alice Cooper than an attempt to make light of the climate crisis. But I think there’s a little bit more to the last song on the album.

In real life, some of the world’s wealthiest countries have been the biggest contributors to the climate crisis. And especially if you recognize colonialism as the root cause of the climate crisis like I do, Western European countries and the United States are mostly to blame for the predicament we find ourselves in. On average, Americans, Canadians, and people from European countries like the UK, Germany, France, and Sweden—just to call out a few countries—consume far more resources than people in developing countries do.

As an American, I have an enormous responsibility to push for serious climate action—not because I should be afraid that people from the Global South might one day want to take revenge on my country, but because it’s the right thing to do. If you are also from a country that’s had an extremely disproportionate harmful impact on the planet, I would encourage you to also reflect on the responsibility you have to do the same. Although, if you’re listening to a podcast like this one, it might be safe to assume you already do this.

Regardless, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are right in concluding that if we don’t change as soon as possible, we will create a living hell for everyone.

Conclusion

At a time when climate change fiction is becoming increasingly popular in books and in movies, it’s really cool to see a musical project like Infest the Rats’ Nest take a good, hard look at global warming. This album isn’t the only musical project that grapples with climate change, but it might be the biggest musical project I’ve come across that does so. I hope that as time goes on, more artists will take a page from the book of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and create their own musical projects to advocate for humans being better stewards of our planet.

Indeed, there is no planet B. We might one day be able to colonize Mars or inhabit other more hospitable planets, but now, Earth is all we’ve got, and we have to take care of it, both for ourselves and the millions of other species of life that share this precious planet with us.

Outro

Back to top ↑

I was so very excited to make this episode, and I was really, really hoping I would be able to use the actual music from the album to bring the episode to life. Thankfully, my wish was granted, and for that I’d like to thank everyone from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, especially Stu Mackenzie, Joey Walker, and Michael Cavanagh. I also want to thank Michelle from Panache Booking and Tyler from Kobalt Songs Music Publishing for helping with the legal stuff.

Stories for Earth is written and produced by me, Forrest Brown. The intro and outro music is also by me. If you want to support further production of the show, be sure to become a member on our Patreon page or buy some of the books we talk about using the affiliate links on our site.

We’re on Twitter at stories4earth and Instagram at storiesforearth, and of course, our website is storiesforearth.com. Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

Recommendations

Back to top ↑

Video: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Interview: Stu and Cavs on Triple J

Video Game: Rat Game from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

Like what you see? Become a Patreon member today for as little as $1 a month.

The post “Infest The Rats’ Nest” by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Weather by Jenny Offill is a work of environmental literary fiction about a woman named Lizzie who gets sucked into the world of climate doomers and doomsday preppers. This short novel (right around 200 pages for the hardback edition) was published in February 2020 and made it on to several best books lists for 2020, including lists from NPR and The Guardian. Weather is Jenny Offill’s fourth published novel, following 2014’s Dept. of Speculation, which was named one of the ten best books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review.

Weather tells the story of Lizzie Benson, a mildly disappointing former humanities student who works in a New York library. After reconnecting with an old college professor who’s in town for a seminar, Lizzie finds herself managing the email inbox for a climate change podcast called Hell and High Water. As Lizzie gets more and more involved with the podcast, traveling with her old professor Sylvia and meeting all kinds of eccentrics, her mental health takes a turn for the paranoid and conspiratorial.

→ Buy USED on Better World Books from $13.64 (affiliate)
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $14.72 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Jump to

1. About Jenny Offill
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Jenny Offill is an American author from Massachusetts and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. The author of three acclaimed novels, multiple short stories, and four children’s books, Offill received her bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, going on to study at Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction. She lives in New York.

Official website: https://www.jennyoffill.com/

Transcript

Back to top ↑

I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a podcast about everything climate change in pop culture. My name is Forrest Brown, and I’m glad you’re joining us today for our discussion of Weather by Jenny Offill.

Weather is a short book, but I found it very impactful. It’s about a topic I know quite a lot about from personal experience, something I like to call climate doomerism. I’ll talk more about that in today’s episode and probably overshare a little about my personal life. But it is 2020, and I haven’t been around anyone except for my immediate family for months, so hopefully you can cut me some slack.

Stories for Earth is a labor of love, but I do sincerely appreciate all the help I can get. It takes a lot of time to read these books and write something that I hope you find meaningful, and it also costs money to host our website and buy new material. If you want to support further production of the show, you can pledge $1, $3, or $5 through Patreon every time I publish a new episode. I only publish one episode per month, and if I ever publish more than that, I will not charge for it.

If Patreon isn’t your thing, you can also make a one-time donation through the support page on our website at storiesforearth.com, or you can buy a book from our Bookshop.org page. If you want to lend your financial support to the show, our Patreon is patreon.com/storiesforearth, and our Bookshop.org page is bookshop.org/shop/storiesforearth. You can also find these links on our support page at storiesforearth.com.

If you’d rather support us by spreading the word on social media, you can find us on Twitter at stories4earth and on Instagram at storiesforearth. I truly appreciate any way you’re able to help.

But enough of that. Here’s our conversation on Weather by Jenny Offill. I hope you enjoy.

I was a climate doomer

Back to top ↑

When I started Stories for Earth last summer, I was in a state of despair. I was constantly trying to find ways to do what I could to help the climate action movement. I started volunteering with a tree planting organization. I joined a political advocacy group. I was trying to get my employer to make our office more sustainable. These were all good things, but I was doing them all at the same time, spreading myself thin in a desperate attempt to control the earth’s warming. I was, frankly, spiraling.

Months later, after my mental state had thankfully improved, I heard about Jenny Offill’s new book, Weather. Weather is the story of one woman’s descent down the climate doom rabbit hole after she gets a side hustle responding to emails for an old college professor’s podcast, Hell and High Water. The protagonist, a librarian named Lizzie, attends seminars where her old professor speaks to concerned people from all walks of life. They want to know where they can move to be safe, what kind of skills they should be teaching their children, whether we can engineer our own bodies to adapt to a warmer world. The emails Lizzie fields are even worse, leading her to remark at one point, “I really hope all these people who write to Sylvia are crazy, not depressed,” and, “Environmentalists are so dreary.”

I certainly have been both depressed and dreary about the issue of climate change. I’ve been a person who, like Lizzie, could rattle off a list of the many ways in which we are screwed, livening up parties and social gatherings with the delight I seemed to take in accumulating knowledge about the end times. Perhaps you can relate to this obnoxious person too. Hopefully you, like Lizzie, can overcome it to some extent, or at least learn to cope with it. There are good days and bad days, but I think I might finally be on the other side of climate doom.

Weather covers a lot in a short amount of time. I was first introduced to the novel as an audiobook, which I finished in one sitting. A few weeks later I borrowed a hardback copy from the library and finished it over the course of several lunch breaks. But in this narrow span, Weather manages to reflect on the mundanity of everyday life, the slippery passage of time, the feelings of despair and hopelessness that can accompany an intimate knowledge of climate change, and the similar feelings many people had following the 2016 US presidential election.

Yet Weather is not simply an account of misery. It offers glimpses into how we can cope with the climate crisis psychologically without sounding desperate or corny. It’s a real look into the psyche of someone who is seriously struggling to wrap their head around the implications of a world that is, best case scenario, 2.7ºF (1.5ºC) hotter than the pre-industrial average. Some people have cast it as bleak or resigned, but I think it’s a brilliant, intellectually honest book with lots of heart. In other words, maybe exactly what many people need to hear.

“Weather” plot summary

Back to top ↑

Weather takes place in 2016, covering the build-up through the aftermath of the election season when the United States elected a climate denying, xenophobic, fascist president—Donald Trump. None of this plays a central role in the book’s plot (Trump’s name doesn’t even make an appearance), but it serves more as a chaotic backdrop to mirror the main character’s own spiral into paranoia. Speaking of the main character, we’re introduced to her as the anonymous narrator of the book, the would-be author of the many tweet-like streams of thoughts and stories that make up the novel. Later, we learn her name is Lizzie, a modestly disappointing former humanities student who works as a librarian at some university in New York. 

Lizzie lives in a city apartment with her husband Ben, her son Eli, and, for a brief while, her recovering drug addict brother, Henry. She seems to live a life that slipped through her fingers, as she realizes that she disappointed her professors who all had high hopes for her. Our hero works an unfulfilling, routine job for which she isn’t technically qualified, and her body is beginning to turn on her with a recent diagnosis of arthritis in her knee.

Lizzie’s plight might sound like a typical one for someone at or approaching middle age. Someone who realizes one day, their life has not panned out quite how they’d hoped. But at the same time, it seems like Lizzie is okay with that. Maybe not okay with it, but perhaps resigned to the conclusion that this is just the way things are now and that it may be impossible to change it. And besides, it’s not like Lizzie has a bad life. She loves her family, she lives in New York City, and she has a stable, if unfulfilling job. Her life isn’t bad, it’s just average.

But Lizzie’s life takes a turn for the anxious and conspiratorial when an old professor, Sylvia, offers her a part-time gig responding to the emails she gets from her podcast listeners. The podcast centers on climate change, and it features interviews with experts in the field who typically spend their time warning of our impending doomsday triggered by climate collapse. For this reason, Sylvia has become a Doomer herself, progressively becoming more and more hopeless as the novel goes on. Working closely with Sylvia, attending conferences and seminars with the equally hopeless, the hopelessly naive, and the hopelessly out-of-touch, Lizzie herself becomes caught in the quicksand of the doomer-slash-prepper mindset.

Her descent into paranoia about the climate apocalypse climaxes when she almost has an affair with a French-Canadian wilderness survival instructor and conflict zone photographer she meets one night at a bar. Her husband and son are out of town on a trip together, and Lizzie leans into the possibility of having an affair with this mysterious man, even though she knows it’s a terrible idea. As Lizzie quips on page 161, “Sometimes your heart runs away with someone and all it takes is a bandana on a stick.” But just like a pouting child threatening to run away from home and never return, Lizzie doesn’t follow through with her potential affair, choosing instead to settle back into her comfortable, average life.

After Lizzie step back from the ledge and the dust from the surprising Trump victory begins to settle, she learns to take ownership of her life, or perhaps to reclaim control of her life from the feeling that she must rescue her family from climate change, her brother from drugs and his annoying wife, and her elderly mother who needs someone to drive her to a dentist. Answering a question repeated by Lizzie’s yoga instructor throughout the book, Lizzie ends with a beautiful realization: “The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.”

Climate change doomers and doomsday preppers

Back to top ↑

One of my favorite dynamics at play in this book is the surprising yet rational contrast between so-called climate change doomers and doomsday preppers. I first heard the term doomer on Twitter, where it was then being used pejoratively by climate science skeptics to describe people concerned about climate change. I’m not sure if these people deserve credit for inventing this term, but I’m going to co-opt it for describing a certain toxic brand of environmentalist. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I have been this person myself.

A doomer is someone who—like myself and Lizzie during our spiraling phases—is absolutely convinced that it’s too late to effectively mitigate climate change and that we all should give up and strap in for the apocalypse. In my case, I thought my family and I might go north to somewhere like Alberta where we would perhaps be better insulated from the threats of heat waves, vector-borne illnesses, sea level rise, and civil unrest stemming from a mass influx of climate refugees. For Lizzie, she had something she called her Doomstead, a kind of doomsday bunker.

To be totally clear, there are people who have real-life Doomsteads. Perhaps the most high-profile owner of one such Doomstead is PayPal co-founder, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, billionaire, and Trump mega-donor Peter Thiel. Thiel has a house in Queensland, New Zealand where he apparently intends to ride out the apocalypse, should he live to see it. And while it’s a slightly different take on a Doomstead, Thiel’s old business partner Elon Musk is dead-set on building a colony on Mars. In fact, this is the reason Musk founded his aerospace company SpaceX. While they are still years away from making it to Mars, SpaceX has now started a sort of taxi service for transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Musk has been quoted at SXSW in 2013 saying he wants to “…die on Mars, just not on impact.” But whether it’s hunkering down in New Zealand or on Mars or in a doomsday bunker, it all amounts to the same thing— believing you can somehow survive apart from the vastly interconnected web of life that sustains everything, counting on your own money and cunning to save you from the terrible fate that awaits everyone else.

It’s unfortunately true that the people who are and will be the least affected by climate change are the very rich. This is true today, but it could become much more pronounced as the climate crisis intensifies. At least where I live, in the Western Hemisphere, we see this today as climate refugees flee north from Central American countries like El Salvador and Honduras to the United States. We see it in places like the Bahamas and Puerto Rico when they are left absolutely devastated after powerful hurricanes pummel them harder and harder. Indeed, we see it also in the United States when hurricanes hit some of our poorest communities along the Gulf Coast, when inland hurricanes and so-called hundred-year floods strike already struggling farming communities in the midwest, when incarcerated people are sent to fight uncontrolled wildfires in Southern California. As meteorologist and climate writer Eric Holthaus frequently reminds his readers, “We are in a climate emergency.” In my view, the greatest tragedy of the climate emergency, the greatest injustice, is that it impacts the people least responsible for it and most poorly equipped to protect themselves from it the most.

It’s true that American billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates are putting a lot of leadership and money into addressing climate change, but it’s also true that the various economic and social systems that put them in a position to do so are also the ones responsible for creating a planet in need of saving. This is not a simple “capitalism, man” explanation for how we got here, but I do believe that what got us into this mess will not get us out of it. And the whole idea of building a Doomstead lies the heart of that mindset.

Obligatory note of hope

Back to top ↑

Near the end of the book, Sylvia succumbs to despair and becomes a sort of hermit—moving off into the middle of nowhere and telling Lizzie, “There’s no hope anymore, only witnesses.” Lizzie eventually snaps out of doomerism and rejoins the normal world, realizing she can’t just disappear like Sylvia. Lizzie has a son to care for, an elderly mother to fret over, and a recovering drug addict  brother to constantly talk off a new ledge. But even if she didn’t have any of these people in her life, she still realizes it won’t do any good to abandon the world. Even if she can’t save the world by herself, she must do what she can given what she knows. Hopelessness is not an option.

And like Lizzie in some ways, I came to the same conclusion after my own bout of doomerism. In some ways, it’s the only option apart from choosing to turn a blind eye to what’s happening in an attempt to return to blissful ignorance, a philosophical position tantamount to nihilism, in my opinion. A 19th century German philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche put it another way: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” (Beyond Good & Evil, pg. 89). Whatever you call it—burnout, hopelessness, despair, deciding it’s too late—this is perhaps the greatest danger of engaging in the work of tackling climate change. We must carefully guard our souls. Thinking back to our episode on Spirited Away, we must not forget our real names.

How we do this becomes the natural next question. The answer will manifest itself in as many ways as there are people, but I’ve come to believe it boils down to taking action. Lizzie discovered the same thing through her almost-affair, of all places. On page 165, Lizzie says about her French-Canadian wilderness survival instructor almost-homewrecker, “He tells me that at the wilderness camp they teach the kids something called ‘loss-proofing.’ In order to survive, you have to think first of the group. If you look after the needs of others, it will give you purpose, and purpose gives you the burst of strength you need in an emergency.”

We are not all meant to organize demonstrations in the streets or enter the scientific field to collect evidence of our dying home. But I think we are all meant to look around us where we are and consider, “What can I do to help?” None of us as individuals can save the world—not even if we happen to be Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. But if we all work together from many different angles, we will make great progress on preserving our pale blue dot. The hardest parts are taking the first step and not letting ourselves become overwhelmed.

Hopelessness is not an option

Back to top ↑

On the last page of Weather, there’s something you perhaps wouldn’t expect to see—a website link. The website is a creation of Jenny Offill, a site called Obligatory Note of Hope that features resources on how you can get involved in the climate movement, words of wisdom and encouragement from works of literature, and a list of inspiring individuals called “People of Conscience.” Unlike many websites today, Obligatory Note of Hope is a source of genuine positivity and hope. I encourage you to visit it, bookmark it, tell a friend about it. I think it’s a helpful place to turn when the going gets hard.

Weather may be a short book, but it packs a powerful punch. And as always, I would recommend you read it for yourself if you haven’t done so already.

Outro

Back to top ↑

Stories for Earth is written and produced by me, Forrest Brown. The intro and outro music is also by me.

If you want to keep up with new episodes, be sure to subscribe wherever you get podcasts, and give us a follow on Instagram or Twitter. Our website is storiesforearth.com, where you can find transcripts of every episode in addition to links for our Patreon and Bookshop.org pages.

Thank you for listening, and I hope you’ll tune in next time for Season 2, Episode 5.

Recommendations

Back to top ↑

Book: Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

→ Buy NEW on Better World Books from $14.72 (affiliate)
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $14.71 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Book: No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg

→ Buy NEW on Better World Books from $10.31 (affiliate)
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $9.20 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Website: Obligatory Note of Hope

→ Visit website

Article: “Jenny Offill on our Climate in Crisis” by Jenny Offill in Greenpeace

→ Read the article

Podcast: “Jenny Offill: Weather” from Between the Covers with David Naimon

→ Listen to the podcast

Like what you see? Become a Patreon member today for as little as $1 a month.

The post “Weather” by Jenny Offill: Summary & Analysis appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Okja is a 2017 film from South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho. The film premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a four-minute standing ovation. It was later released on Netflix on June 28, 2017.

Okja tells the story of Mija, a young girl from South Korea, who raises a genetically modified pig named Okja on her grandfather’s small farm in South Korea. After the evil Mirando Corporation takes Okja to be slaughtered in America, Mija embarks on an epic quest to save Okja and return her to the farm in South Korea.

Jump to

1. About Bong Joon Ho
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Bong Joon Ho is a filmmaker from South Korea known for films like Parasite and Snowpiercer. Born in Daegu, South Korea in 1969, Bong attended the Korean Academy of Film Arts at Yonsei University, graduating in 1995. After working on other projects for several years, Bong Joon Ho released his directorial debut, Memories of Murder, in 2003. Since then, he has created some of the most successful films in South Korea and has been named one of the greatest film directors of the 21st century by Metacritic.

Transcript

Back to top ↑

I’m Forrest Brown, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a podcast about everything climate change in pop culture. Today, we’ll be talking about the 2017 film Okja, a Netflix-exclusive movie from the creator of Parasite and Snowpiercer, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho.

In our last episode, we talked about US poet laureate Joy Harjo and about the importance of rekindling our relationship with the land and restoring rights to indigenous people. These are important steps the world needs to take, both from a social justice and environmental perspective, and today, we’ll be diving a little bit deeper into some of the ways we can restore our bond with the Earth.

If you like what you hear today, please consider supporting us on Patreon. I say “us,” but Stories for Earth is a one-man show, and I currently cover all the costs of producing the show and maintaining the website out of pocket. You can become a patron at patreon.com/storiesforearth to make a recurring, monthly donation, or you can go to the “Support us” page on our website at storiesforearth.com/support-us/ for other ways to help keep the show going. Again, those links are patreon.com/storiesforearth for Patreon and storiesforearth.com/support-us/ for other ways to contribute. We’re also on Instagram and Twitter if you want to keep up with us on social media.

This is a really hard time for everyone, so please only donate if you’re in a position to do so. I certainly appreciate any way you’re able to support the show. And speaking of the show, let’s get to it. I hope you enjoy.

“Okja” isn’t trying to convince you to go vegan

Back to top ↑

I was first seriously introduced to the idea of veganism several years ago. And before I go any further, here’s a disclaimer: this episode is not about veganism. Anyway, I had a car back then, and I had accidentally run over a nail, which was kind enough to stick around in my tire. Bored, sitting in the waiting room at the mechanic, I downloaded an ebook copy of Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer on a whim. I don’t remember how long I sat there, but I read a sizable chunk of Eating Animals that day, and what I read disturbed me.

Startling statistics about the amount of carbon dioxide and methane that comes from beef production. Convincing arguments about the ethicality of killing another intelligent form of life for no real reason other than taste preference. The fact that pigs are smarter than dogs. Glimpses inside factory farms where the author actually broke into farms at night with animal rights activists. Crazy stuff.

Prior to this I had experimented with going vegetarian. Not for any environmentally or ethically motivated reasons—I was a broke college student, and meat is expensive. But after reading part of Eating Animals, I was ready to go vegan for what you might call the right reasons. And I tried to, multiple times! Perhaps it was a lack of cooking know-how, time, creativity, or money, but by the time I graduated from college, I had been a vegan at least several times, resigning myself to failure by the time I had my diploma in hand.

I don’t follow any kind of strict diet now, though I do eat far less meat and dairy products than I once did. But recently watching the movie Okja from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho made me seriously think about going vegan again.

“Okja” plot summary

Back to top ↑

Okja is the story of a young girl from South Korea named Mija. Mija lives in the countryside of South Korea with her grandfather and her pet pig named Okja. Except, Okja isn’t any normal pig. Unlike past pig-flicks that feature porkers who herd sheep, talk to spiders, or predict the future, Okja is special for being genetically modified and enormous.

In fact, Okja isn’t really a pig—she’s a creation of the Mirando Corporation, a giant agrochemical company based in New York City. If you already noticed how similar its name sounds to Monsanto, you might have an idea of where this is going. Mirando created a bunch of animals like Okja and sent them to small, family farms all over the world to be raised. This was somewhat of a beta test to see how the animals would fare, and at the end of several years, Mirando would send a company representative to each of the farms to check in on the animals. The biggest, healthiest animal would win, and it would be taken back to New York City as part of a parade Mirando would throw to make the announcement.

Mija and her grandfather’s farm was one of the ones to receive an animal from Mirando. Once the animals were mature, the company representative—played by Jake Gyllenhaal—visited every farm. When he got to Okja, he was blown away and declared her the winner. But Mija didn’t know this meant Okja had to leave. Without her knowing, her grandfather arranged for Mirando to take Okja back, paying him a nice sum of money for raising such a fine animal. Worst of all, Okja would be turned into GMO bacon.

Once Mija realizes what her grandfather has done, she’s furious, and she runs away to Seoul to try to catch Okja before she can leave South Korea. The rest of the movie follows Mija’s journey to save Okja with the help of an eco-terrorist organization known as ALF—the Animal Liberation Front. Thanks to ALF, Mija manages to break into a factory farm where Okja is taken to be slaughtered, eventually buying Okja back from Mirando, paying for her with a miniature pig statue made of solid gold.

How “Okja” treats greenwashing

Back to top ↑

This film hits on a lot of important environmental themes—industrial farms versus traditional, family-owned farms, overconsumption of meat, runaway capitalism—but the most obvious issue it touches on from the beginning is greenwashing.

Greenwashing is a marketing strategy companies use to make their products seem more sustainable or environmentally-friendly when they are, in fact, not. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this recently comes from the oil company Shell. There is a Shell station near where I used to live, and back when I had a car, I stopped there to and from work whenever I needed gas. Last year, maybe when they finally realized a lot of people really hate them for the work they’ve done to destroy the Earth, Shell decided to launch a new marketing campaign focused on planting trees. This gas station was covered in little signs advertising that if you pumped gas with Shell, you were planting trees. Cute, right?

As it turned out, there are at least several Shell stations in Nashville, and the one where you could find all these tree-planting marketing materials was in a very affluent part of town, right across the street from a Whole Foods. Interestingly, the other Shell station near my apartment didn’t have any of these ads, nor did the one near my old office. There could have been many reasons why this single Shell station across from Whole Foods—which also had perpetually out-of-order pumps for biodiesel—had marketing materials advertising how buying their gasoline helped plant trees. But being a marketer by trade myself, I have to wonder if Shell was trying to target a certain demographic.

In Okja, the Mirando Corporation engages in greenwashing as well. The film’s opening scene shows a lavish conference-type event set in what appears to be an old factory in New York City. It’s a big to-do with lots of seemingly important people who are eagerly awaiting a speech from the CEO of the Mirando Corporation, Lucy Mirando, played by Tilda Swinton. When Lucy finally takes the stage, she’s met with applause before she begins her big speech. She strides confidently across the stage with a headset microphone and presentation clicker, reminiscent of Steve Jobs at a past Apple Worldwide Developers Conference preaching about the life-changing wonders of new consumer technology.

Lucy Mirando tells a similar story of life-changing technology, except she talks about biotechnology—a genetically modified animal that produces more delicious meat for the rapidly increasing human population while requiring less food and water from our parched and overworked planet. On top of that, animal rights’ activists would be happy to know that the animals would be raised on sustainable, family-owned farms. They would be happy and live in pastures, just as God intended. Through an Elizabeth Holmes-esque grin, Lucy Mirando proclaims, “We needed a miracle, and then we got one.”

But of course, the animals Mirando created were nothing like this, and they would not live on cutesy Charlotte’s Web-type farms. They would be raised in environmentally-disastrous factory farms, living out their short and miserable existences among huddled masses in a slaughterhouse yard—so-called pastures that have more in common with the yards of a concentration camp than a farm. Hearing Lucy Mirando’s speech, you would never know this. It is the dirty secret behind the Mirando Corporation’s glossy, progressive public image.

The ugly side of capitalism

Back to top ↑

Lucy Mirando took the helm of the Mirando Corporation for a reason—she wanted to turn around its nasty reputation after years of negative brand perception from previous leadership. The previous CEO, Lucy’s cold, meanspirited twin sister Nancy, ran the business like an old-school industrialist à la Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood—a practical machine operator hell-bent on maximizing production efficiency and shareholder returns at any environmental cost. Even before Nancy Mirando drove the company’s public image into the ground, the company’s founder, Grandfather Mirando, didn’t do much to win the company any ethics trophies.

But Lucy is supposed to change all of that, betting on her genetically modified animals project to paint Mirando in a new light. It’s one of many plot devices Okja uses to convey the message that a lot of time with modern capitalism, what you see isn’t what you get, that you are both figuratively and literally being fed a lie. This ties back into greenwashing, but it’s a much more pervasive problem that goes beyond blatantly misrepresenting what a product is. In every industry, companies sell attractively-marketed products that seem harmless or even good for bargain prices. One of the best examples of this comes to us from the industry at which Okja takes aim—agriculture in general and the meat industry in particular.

In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture is one of the biggest emitters by sector. According to the IPCC’s fifth Assessment Report (AR5), 24 percent of the global emissions in 2010 were linked to “Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use.” This puts agriculture in second place for most greenhouse gas emissions by sector—one percentage point behind electricity and heat production from burning fossil fuels. Many factors go into this sector. GHGs like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane are produced from various land management techniques, and clearing forests to make room for more farmland destroys invaluable carbon sinks.

Not to mention the other negative effects of modern industrial farming. The U.S. Geological Survey reports that in 2005, irrigation for crops accounted for roughly 63 percent of freshwater use in the United States. We get most of our freshwater in this country from surface water sources, but we also get a significant amount from groundwater. Groundwater is stored in aquifers—essentially giant underground lakes—and we are using it up at an alarming rate. Granted, a lot of our drinking water comes from underground aquifers, but pumping that water up to irrigate crops uses the majority of it. And just like many of the gifts from nature we rely on, we are using up groundwater faster than it can be replenished.

We have to water crops for people to eat, but we also have to give drinking water to the livestock we raise for meat and dairy products. According to PETA, it takes nearly 700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of cow’s milk and more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. That’s a lot of water. Raising animals—especially cattle—for meat also produces an incredible amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Project Drawdown says that if cattle were their own nation, they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. For this reason, switching to a vegan or vegetarian diet is often cited as one of the most impactful steps you can take to reduce your carbon footprint.

Regenerative agriculture as a promising solution

Back to top ↑

Veganism or vegetarianism are what is called demand-side solutions to mitigating climate change. But what about production-side changes?

Our current method of industrial farming is destructive and deadly, as Okja explores. We not only raise animals for slaughter in shockingly inhumane and filthy conditions, but we are also killing the nutrients in the soil that allow us to grow food for the world’s increasing human population. According to Scientific American, humans have already degraded about one-third of the Earth’s soil, mostly from destructive farming practices. If we continue at this pace, we will be completely out of arable land by 2050. That would be very bad, to put it lightly.

Modern farming practices like tilling and compacting dirt with giant tractors, killing thousands upon thousands of insects with pesticides, poisoning the ground and water with nitrogen-based fertilizers, and reducing biodiversity through monoculture are still widely believed to be necessary evils for feeding a world home to billions of people. But maybe that’s not true.

One solution to our ecological crisis that’s quickly gaining in popularity and awareness is regenerative agriculture. As its name implies, regenerative agriculture seeks to restore or regenerate the land used for farming instead of extracting from and effectively killing the land, as our current system generally does. Instead of relying on enormous, corporate-owned farms, regenerative agriculture emphasizes small, family farms that practice permaculture and organic farming. It also includes farming techniques like crop rotation, composting, conservation tillage, and growing cover crops to put nutrients back in the soil and create healthier farms and communities.

The major selling point of regenerative agriculture is that it doesn’t lead us toward a future where the Earth no longer supports growing food while simultaneously producing plenty of food to keep us from starving. But it also has other great benefits, like increasing biodiversity, helping farmers earn living wages, and improving human physical and mental health. That last part is especially important given the current suicide crisis facing farmers in America.

But farmers aren’t only struggling in the United States. While preparing for this episode, I came across a short documentary on YouTube about an Australian farmer named Charles Massy who wrote a book about regenerative agriculture called Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth. The documentary is called “From the Ground Up—Regenerative Agriculture,” and it shows how Massy and his farm workers were able to reverse desertification, increase crop yields, and also increase profits. You should watch it. It’s astounding to see how drastically regenerative farming turned things around for Massy on his farm.

Charles Massy also spoke about regenerative agriculture at a TedX event in Canberra, the capital of Australia. For me, the most moving part of his presentation came when Massy shared an anecdote about his then seven-year-old grandson, Hamish. This was before Massy started practicing regenerative agriculture. One Saturday morning, as they were driving down the road on their way to a soccer game, Hamish looked out the car window at a farmer spraying pesticides and asked, “Grandpa, why do we have to kill things to grow things?”

This question, Massy said, was a wake up call. He had been farming using modern industrial practices, and it was getting him into a lot of debt, destroying native Australian grasslands, and ruining his farm’s top soil. Massy ended up going back to school to study regenerative agriculture, and today, he is a major advocate for this different approach that he believes can feed the world, save the planet, and improve human physical and mental health for his grandson and future generations.

Another farmer echoes Massy’s message. In his non-fiction book The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry writes, “But the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.”

The meaning of the end of “Okja”

Back to top ↑

Spoiler alert, but at the end of Okja, Mija and Okja return to their small farm and to an apologetic grandfather in South Korea. There, they live happily ever after, but getting to this point wasn’t easy. To rescue Okja, Mija had to go undercover into the factory farm where Mirando intended to slaughter Okja along with thousands of others of her kind. Mija snuck into the farm with the help of ALF, and saved Okja’s life by paying for it with her miniature golden pig statue.

I think a lot of people find this scene to be cynical. The whole movie is about a little girl who risks her life to save her best friend, Okja, whom she loves more than anything. The people helping her in the Animal Liberation Front are also incredibly passionate about their mission to save Okja and other animals, and there are a couple times in the movie where ALF’s leader, played by Paul Dano, sheds tears through heartfelt words about why this mission matters so much. Yet, the only tactic that ends up saving Okja in the end is purely transactional.

By this point in the film, Nancy Mirando—the all-business half of the evil Mirando twins—assumes control of the Mirando Corporation after her sister Lucy suffers a nervous breakdown. Nancy only sees dollar signs when she looks at animals like Okja, and Mija’s golden pig is the only thing that convinces her to keep from killing Okja at the factory farm. This scene really plays up the fact that Mija makes a business agreement with Nancy, so much so that you almost expect Nancy to ask Mija if she wants a copy of her receipt. With her life now paid for, Okja is free to leave with Mija, even though the other animals at the farm will still be slaughtered.

I’m honestly still on the fence about this ending. On the one hand, I think it’s kind of brilliant. In a lot of stories, the hero triumphs over the bad guy by killing or banishing them at the end. In others, the bad guy has a change of heart and turns out to not be so bad after all, just damaged. But in Okja, neither scenario happens. The bad guy keeps on being bad, and they’re actually revealed to be just as bad or worse than we suspected.

I don’t know if Bong Joon Ho was trying to say anything specific with this scene or if he’s just a really good study of human character. But the way I interpret it, the ending of Okja says corporations only speak one language: money. We can pen impassioned essays, march in protests, and even vandalize, trespass, and commit felonies to try to change our food system, but the most powerful tool in our belts might just be our place in this capitalist system as consumers.

I am not advocating that we cease writing impassioned essays or protesting or even breaking into factory farms like Jonathan Safran Foer did for his book to expose the heinous acts being committed inside. But I do want to remind you that you are powerful. I believe you are much more than just a consumer. I don’t think your identity should be or has to be tied to what you do or don’t consume. But that doesn’t mean you can’t leverage the weight of this identity society has assigned you to push for positive change.

That can start with choosing to buy less meat or to buy no meat or animal products at all. It could mean spending just a little more than you normally would to support farmers who raise their food lovingly and responsibly. It could even mean buying seeds to grow some vegetables and herbs for yourself. Whatever that looks like for you—and it does not have to look like going vegan—remember that it does make a difference, no matter how small it feels. It may be one transaction, but one transaction repeated multiple times by millions of people equals big change. If we want to change the world, maybe we can start by changing how we spend our money.

Outro

Back to top ↑

Stories for Earth is written and produced by me, Forrest Brown. The intro and outro music is also by me. If you want to learn more about what we’re up to, you can find us on Instagram at @storiesforearth and on Twitter at @stories4earth. That’s the word “stories,” the number “4,” and the word “earth.” Our website is storiesforearth.com, where you can also find links to support us financially through Patreon and through our Bookshop.org page.

Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you’ll tune back in next month for season two, episode four.

Recommendations

Back to top ↑

Book: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

→ Buy USED on Better World Books from $6.48 (affiliate)
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $16.55 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Book: The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry

→ Buy USED on Better World Books (affiliate)
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $15.59 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Film: Snowpiercer from Bong Joon Ho

Documentary: Kiss the Ground from Josh and Rebecca Tickell

→ Visit official website

Like what you see? Become a Patreon member today for as little as $1 a month.

The post “Okja” From Bong Joon Ho appeared first on Stories for Earth.

In this episode, we take a deep dive into Crazy Brave and An American Sunrise by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Crazy Brave is Harjo’s 2013 memoir, while An American Sunrise is a poetry collection published in 2019. Both offer invaluable Native American perspectives about humanity’s relationship with the Earth (or lack thereof), how racial injustice and environmental injustice are deeply intertwined, and the need for us to reckon with our past as we look to a brighter future.

Overview

“Crazy Brave”

Crazy Brave is a memoir by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2013, the book details Joy’s life growing up and her path to becoming a poet. Written in Joy’s musical voice and interspersed with moments of deep personal introspection and poetry, Crazy Brave is a memoir that reads like jazz sounds—spontaneous, sublime, and vivacious.

→ Buy on Bookshop from $14.67 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

“An American Sunrise”

An American Sunrise is the latest poetry collection from US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2019, An American Sunrise grapples with the scarring legacy of the Trail of Tears that saw Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, and Seminole peoples forcibly removed from their lands in what is now the Southeastern United States. Featuring brief moments of reflection from Harjo, transcripts of interviews with survivors from the Trail of Tears, and Harjo’s masterful poetry, An American Sunrise is a story about the resilience of the Muscogee and other Native tribes against all odds.

→ Buy on Bookshop from $14.67 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Jump to

1. About Joy Harjo
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations for further reading

About Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo is an internationally acclaimed writer and performer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. In 2019, she was named the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States of America—the first Native American person to receive the honor. Joy is the author of multiple poetry collections, a memoir, and several children’s books and plays in addition to being a musical artist with several albums under her belt. The recipient of multiple honors, including the Ruth Lilly Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, she lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Official website: https://www.joyharjo.com/

Transcript

Back to top ↑

Intro

I’m Forrest Brown, and this is Stories for Earth.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a podcast about everything climate change in pop culture. I’m glad you’re joining us today for the second episode of season two.

For a transcript of today’s show, more information about the author, recommendations for further reading, and links to buy the books that we’ll be talking about today, visit our website at storiesforearth.com. That’s storiesforearth.com.

If you want to support further production of the podcast, you can make a recurring, monthly donation on Patreon at patreon.com/storiesforearth. We have three different tiers to choose from, with perks ranging from things like early access to new content, exclusive episodes of the show, eligibility to perform readings for future episodes, and personal shout-outs. Again, that link is patreon.com/storiesforearth, or you can check out the support page on our website to make a one-time donation.

Today, we’ll be talking about a memoir and poetry collection from US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo of the Muscogee Creek Nation. I hope you enjoy the show today.

Telling stories, banning stories

Back to top ↑

There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
    -“How to Be a Poet” by Wendell Berry

When I was a young boy, my mom used to tell me about my great-great grandmother. She had no hair on her arms. Even in her old age, her face showed no wrinkles. She had beautiful, olive skin, and supposedly when she and my great-great grandfather got into it, she would lower herself down into the well until she calmed down. My mom always said she was a “Cherokee princess.” These are the only details I know about my great-great grandmother. Or, thought I knew, until I learned about the myth of the Cherokee princess.

According to Native Languages of the Americas, the myth of having a “Cherokee princess” great-great grandmother is a pernicious one among White Americans. It’s unclear why or how this myth got started, especially since the Cherokee people have never had princesses in their culture. There’s a theory that some indigenous men used a term of endearment for their lovers that roughly translates to the English word “princess.” Another theory states that dubbing a native woman “princess” might have made it more socially acceptable for an interracial relationship between a man of European descent and a native woman. Whatever the reason, the tribe of the princess in question always tends to be Cherokee, regardless of where the myth-spreader is from.

In my case, there is a chance I could have a Cherokee relative, if I do have any American Indian ancestry, but it’s also just as likely for me to have a Creek or Choctaw or Catawba relative. My family are all from the Southeastern United States, at least going as far back as my great-great grandparents, so we’re scattered all over Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, and the Carolinas. But that’s beside the point. The point is, at least for many of us White Americans, we have somehow invented a fictitious story about our relationship to the people who called this land home for thousands of years before any European settlers showed up, erroneously thinking they’d found India. From the beginning, we’ve been very wrong about who Native peoples are and about who we are to each other.

The “Cherokee princess” story is a White American story, but for many, many years, it was illegal for Native Americans to share their own stories. From the time it was ratified on March 3, 1819, the Civilization Fund Act attempted to “civilize” American Indians by setting up a fund to help churches work with the government to establish schools for Native children. These schools were eventually set up as boarding schools where children would be sent to unlearn their tribal culture and practices to adopt Christianity and American culture. With many schools established and operated by the Catholic Church, Native children sent to these schools were subject to what has been described as “harsh” and “militaristic” rules and punishments.

Students were not allowed to speak their Native languages, only English. Their long hair—a point of pride for many American Indian cultures—was cut, their families were not allowed to visit them, their tribal religions were banned, and they were often subject to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. In one account published in The Atlantic, Mary Annette Pember writes about her mother’s experience, who was a student at one such Indian boarding school, as they were called. The nuns at this particular school frequently made students like Pember’s mother scrub the floors for hours, while the nuns called them “dirty Indians.” These and other memories haunted Pember’s mother for decades, up until she passed away.

Pember writes: “Although she died in 2011, I can still see her trying to outrun her invisible demons. She would walk across the floor of our house, sometimes for hours, desperately shaking her head from side to side to keep the persistent awful memories from entering. She would flap and wring her hands over and over again, as though to rid them of a clinging presence.”

The attempt to totally eradicate Indian culture via these boarding schools, a form of ethnic cleansing, thankfully ended in 1978, but the wounds it inflicted left deep scars in surviving Native communities. This is an example of generational trauma, something Native people in North America are tragically all too familiar with. These events and many others should have never happened. They are unspeakable crimes, and as a White man descended from other White men and women who committed such crimes or benefitted from their being committed, I feel deep shame and sadness learning more about them.

But to not learn about and confront this history is to allow it to go on hurting—both the people and the land that was stolen from them, and from which they were eventually driven not long after. This is not a history that affects only one group of people, though it would still demand reckoning if it were. This history affects all of us, and it is directly connected to the extreme destruction of the natural world we are now seeing today. There is no single solution for the United States of America and other “desecrated places” like Canada and Australia to reckon with their long and violent history of persecuting indigenous people, but I think we have a seemingly unlikely gift to help us navigate the road to healing—poetry.

Who is Joy Harjo?

Back to top ↑

“The power of the victim is a power that will always be reckoned with, one way or the other.”
-Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave

At a reading hosted by UC Berkeley on Earth Day, US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo of the Muscogee Creek Nation, said, “A poem is like an energetic construct made out of words…it will hold what you cannot hold.” Forms of art, like poetry and dancing, are really “forms of medicine,” according to Harjo, and her poetry and music exist as ways for her to process atrocities like the boarding schools created by the Civilization Fund Act and the Trail of Tears, which is a major theme in her latest poetry collection An American Sunrise.

An American Sunrise talks not only about the ongoing trauma to the Indian community from the Trail of Tears, but also of the beauty and resilience of her people and how the current refugee crisis in Central America is another chapter in the Trail of Tears story. In the prologue of American Sunrise, Joy writes:

“There were many trails of tears of tribal nations all over North America of indigenous peoples who were forcibly removed from their homelands by government forces.

“The indigenous peoples who are making their way up from the southern hemisphere are a continuation of the Trail of Tears.

“May we all find the way home.”

According to the Cherokee Historical Association, the Trail of Tears was the “…forced and brutal relocation of approximately 100,000 indigenous people” from many different places in the eastern United States to land west of the Mississippi River, in what is now Oklahoma. In 1830, Congress, under US President Andrew Jackson, passed the Indian Removal Act, which officially started the forced removal of many different Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. These tribes included the Cherokee, Muscogee—or Creek—Chickasaw, Seminole, and Choctaw peoples, over 4,000 of whom died on the Trail from disease, exposure, and starvation. It should be noted that Stories for Earth is currently written, recorded, and produced on unceded Cherokee land.

The Trail of Tears is one of many dark chapters in the history of North America, and the effects it had on American Indians were devastating and lasting—even to modern times. The land the United States stole from indigenous people became a new point of expansion for White settlers, many of whom started plantations worked by enslaved Africans until the end of slavery in 1865.

Plantations and the way by which they operated—slave labor—naturally exhausted Southern soil, leading plantation owners to push further westward in search of new land. And of course, the cash crop for many Southern plantations—cotton—is a very thirsty plant that drains rivers, streams, and aquifers. Not to mention the heavy use of pesticides to defend the plant against harmful pests in more recent times, which in turn releases toxins into the environment and destroys large numbers of insects.

Also read: “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, Climate Change, and Moving Beyond a Vision of Doom

From the forced removal of American Indians to chattel slavery to topsoil depletion, the American South is a “desecrated place” indeed, but somehow, throughout all the unimaginable heartbreak, pain, and loss, Joy Harjo sees justice and a returning in the future. In her poem “How to Write a Poem in a Time of War” from An American Sunrise, Joy writes:

Someone has to make it out alive, sang a grandfather
to his grandson, his granddaughter,
as he blew his most powerful song into the hearts of the children.
There it would be hidden from the soldiers,
Who would take them miles, rivers, mountains
        from the navel cord place of the origin story.
He knew one day, far day, the grandchildren would return,
generations later over slick highways, constructed over old trails
Through walls of laws meant to hamper or destroy, over stones
bearing libraries of the winds.
He sang us back
        to our home place from which we were stolen
            in these smoky green hills.
Yes, begin here.

There has yet to be a literal reclaiming of the lands from which American Indians were driven during the Trail of Tears, but I have to wonder—could Joy have been referring to herself when she writes about “the grandchildren?” She writes frequently about her grandfather Monahwee in An American Sunrise, and how she returned to his old home at Okfuskee, near what is now Dadeville, Alabama.

Joy also taught as an English professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Located at the base of the “smoky green hills”—the Smoky Mountains—Knoxville is built on traditional Muscogee land, and Joy talks about how old mounds from Mississippian mound-builder communities still exist on the UT Knoxville campus. To move there from her home in Oklahoma, Joy says she took one of the “most traveled trails” in traditional Muscogee territory, much of which is now covered by Interstate 40. When I lived in Nashville, I used to take I-40 to get to work every morning. Reading these words now, it seems strange to me that I had no knowledge of the road’s history until recently, how it follows a trail some of the indigenous people of this continent built hundreds of years ago.

Whether Joy is writing about herself in this poem or not, it’s difficult to miss this kind of theme in many of the poems contained in this collection, a sort of inevitability that history will come to redeem itself. It reminds me of the famous quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “…the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And maybe poetry is the way Joy Harjo herself contributes to the bending of this arc. In another poem from An American Sunrise, “For Earth’s Grandsons,” Joy writes:

All through the miles of relentless exile
Those who sang the path through massacre
All the way to sunrise
You will make it through—

Joy has said before that poems are songs. Her ancestors sang songs to their descendants to give them strength. In the same way, Joy’s poems sing to younger Native American generations today, helping them make it through, “all the way to sunrise.”

Joy Harjo’s life

Back to top ↑

If anyone else wrote about Joy’s experiences, it might sound hopeless or depressing. But the way she writes about it—whether through her poetry, her music, or in her memoir writing—goes to show how truly resilient American Indian peoples are.

Joy was born to an Irish-Cherokee mother and a Muscogee Creek father. In her memoir Crazy Brave, Joy describes her father as a man made tight by the death of his mother and the racist Oklahoma society of the 1950s. While Joy’s mother liked to sing and dance around the kitchen with her newborn daughter, Joy’s father used royalty money from an oil well on family property to support a classic car habit. He wanted a boy, but he still loved Joy and took care of her, even if he did play a little too rough with her sometimes.

Joy’s biological father died of alcoholism when she was still young, and her mother remarried. The man who became Joy’s stepfather seemed good at first, but he turned out to be verbally and physically abusive to Joy, her mother, and her siblings. He forbade Joy’s mother to sing, and he beat her if she ever did anything to upset him, like going out to dinner with her girlfriends or letting Joy go to a friend’s house. Joy eventually fled her parents’ home in high school to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe, New Mexico where she immersed herself in art, alcohol, drugs, and for one of the first times in her life, meaningful relationships with other Indian children.

After leaving the Institute of American Indian Arts, Joy battled through an abusive marriage that ended in divorce, worked a series of service jobs, and studied pre-med at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, eventually switching her major to art. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1978.

Speaking about her decision to pursue art, Joy writes in Crazy Brave, “I believe that if you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.” Joy Harjo is immensely gifted. She is a writer, a painter, a dancer, and a musician, and she uses these gifts to speak truth to power. In 2019 she became the first Native American to be named the US poet laureate, and she also plays saxophone and flutes in various bands.

But above all else, she is a poet, discovering this about herself after having already faced hardships many people might encounter over a lifetime, if at all. Writing about this discovery, Joy writes in Crazy Brave, “I became aware of an opening within me. In a fast, narrow crack of perception, I knew this is what I was put here to do; I must become the poem, the music, and the dancer.” But to hear Joy talk about writing poetry, it sounds more like a spiritual experience than the honing of a craft. In fact, she talks about the “spirit” of poetry in Crazy Brave, not in the same sense as you might say the “nature of” or the “disposition of” poetry, but as an actual spirit.

She writes: “To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of the knowing. It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear or a hummingbird. It is a hundred horses running the land in a soft mist, or it is a woman undressing for her beloved in firelight. It is none of these things. It is more than everything.”

This kind of openness or connection with something beyond herself is a constant theme throughout Joy’s poetry and memoir work, and I think it’s crucial to her idea of what it means to be a poet. Whereas many writers tend to see themselves as sort of craftsmen or skilled trade workers, I get the impression that Joy Harjo sees the role of the poet as more of a vessel for communication from something beyond our everyday lived experience. The closest words I can think of to describe it is “shaman” or “medium.”

When I read Joy Harjo, I get the sense that she and other poets are here to help us reconnect with each other, with ourselves, and with the planet. Or rather, they are here to help us realize that we already are part of such intricate and beautiful connections, that we are part of nature and that the lines dividing us all up into individuals are perhaps more blurry than we’re conditioned to believe. Even though we might never be able to see the full picture of reality, poets and their poems are cracks in the cave wall of how we perceive the universe.

Indigenous people’s rights are crucial to climate justice

Back to top ↑

I say that Joy Harjo’s poetry can help us reconnect with the planet because many of us living in developed countries have lost our connection to it. In wealthy, high-tech countries, people enjoy high standards of living, which usually means distancing themselves greatly from nature.

We live in air-conditioned homes with appliances like refrigerators, washing machines, and dryers to reduce manual labor. We buy food wrapped in attractively branded packaging from organized and neatly stocked supermarket shelves. We travel around town sealed off from outside, either in cars, buses, or trains, and for many of us, we spend hours on end each day staring at little lights flashing on a screen.

Joy Harjo writes in her poem from An American Sunrise, “Tobacco Origin Story:”

Flowers of tobacco, or
Hece, as the people called it when it called
To them. Come here. We were brought
To you from those who love you. We will help you.
And that’s how it began, way
Back, when we knew how to hear the songs of plants
And could sing back, like now
On paper, with marks like bird feet, but where are
Our ears? They have grown to fit
Around earbuds, to hear music made for cold
Cash, like our beloved smoke
Making threaded with addiction and dead words.

We like to think we have conquered the so-called “natural world.” But as Joy Harjo reminds us, to do so means killing ourselves at some point, since we are inseparable parts of nature. This form of suicide may come to industrialized nations unintentionally, but for centuries, colonial powers have been killing indigenous people very much on purpose. Looking back on the age of colonialism, it’s impossible for me to ignore it as the driving force behind our current triple crises of racial injustice, public health, and ecological destruction.

In North America, native peoples were massacred and driven from their lands in the name of European colonists seeking wealth, were repeatedly cheated in broken treaties, and yes, forcibly removed from their land in the name of conservation projects like US national parks. Enslaved people from West Africa were taken from their homes, tortured, maimed, and murdered in forced labor on plantations, and their descendents are still denied basic human rights today. And we now know that humanity’s destruction of nature caused the current coronavirus pandemic, according to leaders from the UN, the WHO, and WWF International. We will continue to cause more disease and illness if we keep on this way.

The colonizer mindsight has royally desecrated our only home, but taking steps toward justice can help us restore the planet. We can start with giving indigenous peoples their land back. This is not only the right thing to do, but research also shows that biodiversity is highest on land managed by indigenous people. At a time when roughly one million species are in danger of going extinct, this could be a double-edged sword doing right by native peoples and the planet.

Indigenous people make up less than five percent of the world population, but they support almost 80 percent of global biodiversity, according to a paper published in Nature. And in a National Geographic article (gated), Jon Waterhouse, an Indigenous Peoples Scholar at the Oregon Health and Science University, said, “Indigenous peoples have mastered the art of living on the Earth without destroying it. They continue to teach and lead by example…We must heed these lessons and take on this challenging task, if we want our grandchildren to have a future.”

The fight continues

Back to top ↑

In Crazy Brave, Joy Harjo writes, “The power of the victim is a power that will always be reckoned with, one way or the other.” But I’ll be honest—I sometimes have a hard time believing statements like these when I hear them. It could be I’ve grown cynical. It could be I’m still learning about a lot of this dark, heartbreaking history and I’m in a kind of hopeless daze. But Joy is correct here and in her other writings—the path toward justice is not guaranteed to be short. Looking at this cause and many others—the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements of course come to mind—the path is often long and hard. But this doesn’t make it pointless.

For years, Native American activists have been fighting in and out of the courtroom for their rights, and recently, they scored a major win. Earlier this month, on July 6th, Indian Country Today broke the news that a federal judge ordered the shutdown of the Dakota Access Pipeline, requiring that all oil be removed within 30 days of the order. Kolby KickingWoman, who wrote the article, called this a “…huge win for Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the other plaintiffs.”

Also read: “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Hurricane Katrina, and Climate Change

Just three days later, NPR reported that the US Supreme Court ruled that almost half of the State of Oklahoma—the land where American Indians were forcibly sent on the Trail of Tears—is Indian land. The article quotes Justice Neil Gorsuch writing in the decision, “Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of fed­eral criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.”

The following Tuesday, on July 14th, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Joy Harjo in which she wrote, “The elders, the Old Ones, always believed that in the end, there would be justice for those who cared for and who had not forgotten the original teachings, rooted in a relationship with the land.” She went on to say, “Justice is sometimes seven generations away, or even more. And it is inevitable.”

At a time when I think many people, including myself, are looking for reasons to be hopeful, to believe that, somehow, the environmental movement will result in justice, these are soothing words to read. It’s understandable that we want to hear these words. Again, I am new to this fight, but people have been fighting environmental and racial justice for decades, for centuries. I don’t want to downplay the significance or the joyfulness of these two major victories, but I also think to end on this note without acknowledging the pain and hard work it took to win them is disrespectful for the people behind them.

Joy doesn’t let us forget this either. She writes in her op-ed about the struggle behind these victories. This is true here in the United States and around the world. Especially in Central and South America, indigenous people are being forced from their land en masse, whether by the violence of drug cartels by logging companies or by government agents. Just as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in Letter from the Birmingham Jail, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

I said it earlier, and I will say it again: I am an American man of European descent. No matter who my ancestors were or when they arrived here, I have benefited and continue to benefit from the oppression of Native, Black, and other peoples. Reading Joy Harjo has helped open my eyes to the enormous responsibility I have to help right the wrongs of the past and to fight for justice and reparations. If you are listening to this now as a person of similar privilege, I ask you to do the same. Part of this involves seeking out voices like Joy Harjo’s and listening intently to all they can teach us, but there is so much more work to do, even more than can be achieved in a lifetime. This will be long, hard work, and those of us alive today will probably not live to see the end of it. Maybe we will. What matters is that we keep at it—that’s the only way justice will ever be achieved.

Recommendations for further reading

Back to top ↑

Poetry collection: Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo

→ Buy on Bookshop from $14.67 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Book: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

→ Buy on Bookshop from $16.56 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Book: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

→ Buy on Bookshop from $14.72 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Book: There There by Tommy Orange

→ Buy on Bookshop from $14.72 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Like what you see? Become a Patreon member today for as little as $1 a month.

The post Joy Harjo: “Crazy Brave,” “An American Sunrise,” And The Land appeared first on Stories for Earth.