In April 02023, The White House proposed major regulatory changes with huge implications for how the federal government considers the environmental impacts of new projects. The news barely made a blip in headlines.

The proposed changes concern two arcane documents called “Circular A-4” and “Circular A-94” that set recommendations for how federal agencies conduct cost-benefit analyses for social projects. Specifically, the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed lowering the discount rate from between 3% and 7% to 1.7%.

If you’re still there, let me explain.

Unless you’re a policy wonk or a certain kind of federal contractor, you can be forgiven for not knowing what the discount rate is. The discount rate or the “social discount rate” is a modeling rate for discounting the cost of future impacts in terms of present value, and it’s often used in the cost-benefit analysis of social projects that will have a delayed effect. Not to be confused with the discount rate set by the US Federal Reserve, which sets the interest rate charged to banks by the Fed, the social discount rate is mostly used by various government agencies in project planning.

The higher the discount rate, the less we value future impacts in the present. By contrast, a lower discount rate means we place a higher value on future impacts. This often gets applied to financial figures, but it can also be applied to benefits like lives saved.

The social cost of carbon is a good example. This metric seeks to quantify the harm caused by carbon emissions in terms of dollars. In 02021, the federal government used a 3% discount rate to arrive at a cost of $51 dollars per metric ton of CO2, in 02020 dollars. That cost rises every five years, so at a 3% discount rate, the cost in 02020 dollars would go up to $56 in 02025, $62 in 02030, and so on.

Critics of a low-cost calculation of carbon praised the proposed decrease to a 1.7% discount rate — a sharp departure from the 7% discount rate employed by the Trump administration. This set the social cost of carbon as low as $1 — something made possible by ignoring climate impacts on other countries — and made it much easier for fossil fuel projects to get approval. But in the proposed changes published earlier this year, the Biden administration recommends lowering the discount rate even further for projects with more long-term effects.

If all of this still sounds obscure and confusing, it might help to consider an example from the 02020 science fiction novel The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

As far as sci-fi writers go, Kim Stanley Robinson stands out for a few reasons: he’s widely regarded as one of the best science fiction authors alive today, he writes extensively about the climate and ecological crisis, and he likes to do so through the language of political economy, throwing around terms like “carbon quantitative easing” amid the standard science fiction themes of his work. If ever there were a sci-fi writer who had his characters talk about the discount rate, it would be him.

The book follows Mary Murphy, an Irish woman who becomes the leader of a fictional Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) office called the Ministry for the Future in the year 02025. The Ministry for the Future is tasked with advocating for the rights of future people who will suffer from the climate change previous generations caused. In Chapter 32, Mary asks Dick, a minor character, what his team is doing to improve economics for future people. Dick tells Mary they’re studying some changes India has made to its discount rate, saying:

[India’s] idea is to shape the discount rate like a bell curve, with the present always at the top of the bell. So from that position, the discount rate is nearly nothing for the next seven generations, then it shifts higher at a steepening rate. Although they’re also modeling the reverse of that, in which you have a high discount rate, but only for a few generations, after which it goes to zero.

That proposal is, of course, fictional. Yet it raises important questions about our own world — and our own economy. Why do we discount the future so heavily? What does that mean for climate change? What are some different ways we might imagine the discount rate to help fight climate change?

…

Picture this: a ship sails in one direction on an endless ocean. When it stops at various ports along the way, different groups of passengers board and disembark, but the passengers have limited control over where the ship goes next, and therefore, who comes aboard. Like all ships, this one requires regular maintenance and repairs to stay seaworthy, but each group of passengers has finite time and resources it can devote to repairs before passing them off to the next group. How should current passengers spend their time and resources on repairs to be the most fair to future passengers?

This analogy from philosopher Nicholas Vrousalis provides an introduction to the subject of intergenerational equity, or intergenerational justice. Intergenerational justice has ancient roots, with one example being the Seventh Generation Principle found in the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Haudenosaunee Native American cultures.

In the Western tradition, the political philosopher John Rawls provides much of the foundation for today’s discussions. Rawls’ idea of a “just savings principle” suggests people alive today should “save” enough to leave future people just institutions and the ability to enjoy the same benefits previous generations left those of us alive today. It’s sort of like political philosophy’s equivalent to the Golden Rule: live for future people the way you wish people in the past would have lived for you.

Intergenerational justice concerns itself with determining the responsibility current generations have to other generations. These could be people who haven’t been born yet, but it also includes seniors and children. The social discount rate plays an important part in such discussions, and opinions differ on what that role should look like. One of the strongest arguments comes from economist Tyler Cowen and the late moral philosopher Derek Parfit.

In their influential paper “Against the Social Discount Rate,” Parfit and Cowen make the case for setting the social discount rate at 0%, effectively getting rid of it. The basic reasoning goes like this: the problems of future people will be just as real as ours are today when they arrive. How can we morally make an argument for valuing them less just because they don’t exist yet?

Parfit and Cowen’s paper considers a number of arguments against a 0% discount rate, one of the most common of which says we should discount effects on future generations because they’ll be better off than us. Sure, Parfit and Cowen say, some future people will probably be better off than us, but some future people will also be worse off than us. That alone is a good enough reason to ditch the social discount rate.

But The Ministry for the Future takes up another argument against a 0% discount rate, which I will call “The Argument from Infinity.” In Chapter 32, Dick tells Mary:

See, if you rate all future humans as having equal value to us alive now, they become a kind of infinity, whereas we’re a finite. If we don’t go extinct, there will eventually have been quite a lot of humans — I’ve read eight hundred billion, or even several quadrillion — it depends on how long you think we’ll go on before going extinct or evolving into something else…If we were working for [future generations] as well as ourselves, then really we should be doing everything for them. Every good project we can think of would be rated as infinitely good, thus equal to all the other good projects.

Paradoxically, by valuing future people less, we can perhaps be better ancestors and set them up to better cope with their problems. But in an interview, Cowen told me that he doesn’t find the Argument from Infinity convincing.

“The world’s going to end,” Cowen said. “And I don’t mean in a billion years, you know. How long do species last? You could look up the number, but it’s just not that long.”

But what about the remaining issue Robinson brings up about all good projects being infinitely good? Wouldn’t this demand that we sacrifice everything for the sake of future generations?

Parfit and Cowen again reject this in their paper, not because we should be able to demand that the current generation sacrifice everything but because a social discount rate doesn’t actually address this issue. It could lead us to, for instance, forgo preventing a major catastrophe in the future even if it would cost the same as preventing a minor catastrophe tomorrow.

Cowen expanded on this in our interview. “If you just think, ‘What can we actually do for the distant future?’ there’s very little we can do to help those people. The main thing we can do…is to leave them good institutions — a good constitution, good social norms, whatever you might put under that rubric. And that we should be very careful to make sure we do.”

Cowen’s argument for a 0% discount rate, then, doesn’t obligate us to take on every moonshot that could save lives in 03400 or 10320. Instead, by leaving a solid foundation of options for future generations, we can grant them the same wealth of choices prior generations granted us.

…

There’s one last argument in favor of non-zero discount rates worth considering here: The Argument from Special Relations. According to this argument, we all naturally use a kind of discount rate when we prioritize people who are related to us over others. For instance, most people will make sacrifices for their children before they will for strangers. Parfit and Cowen acknowledge this, saying, “Such claims might support a new kind of discount rate. We would be discounting here not for time itself, but for degrees of kinship.”

Earlier, I mentioned the Seventh Generation Principle from various Native American cultures as an example of an intergenerational equity concept. Though this idea is far from new itself, it can help us piece together the “new kind of discount rate” Parfit and Cowen began to sketch out in their work. By listening to indigenous community leaders putting the Seventh Generation Principle into action today, it’s possible to build a roadmap for our societies as we race to reorient our ways of living to be more harmonious within planetary boundaries.

Journalist, professor, author, and Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe citizen Patty Loew writes about this philosophy in her book Seventh Generation Earth Ethics: Native Voices of Wisconsin. In an interview, Loew explained the Seventh Generation Principle.

“Seventh Generation, I think, is a broad notion of stewardship,” she said. “Seventh Generation thinking obligates us in this generation to make decisions that we think are in the best interests of generations seven into the future…And when you think about the really wicked problems that human beings face…I think those kinds of problems really require us to think with more vision.”

Loew said this philosophy is interpreted differently across Native communities, and even within communities. Some communities, she said, interpret Seventh Generation to include three generations forward and three generations back in addition to the present generation.

“The other thing that’s kind of interesting about Seventh Generation thinking is that it also means you look back with gratitude,” Loew said. “So the decisions that my great-great-great grandfather made when he signed two of the three Ojibwe session treaties, he was thinking about my generation and understanding that the land that he was being coerced into giving up — the reservation — was not going to be large enough to sustain the generations that came after. So we were one of the few tribes that insisted on the right to hunt, fish, and gather on the land that we were giving up.”

Of course, the Seventh Generation Principle is part of a larger worldview that stands in stark contrast to modern ways of thinking in terms of commodities. Loew cited examples of Seventh Generation thinking during our interview, especially the sustainable logging and forestry management practices of the Menominee Tribe in Wisconsin. Over the past 160 years, Menominee Tribal Enterprises has been sustainably logging the Menominee forest, resulting in more trees in the forest than it had before their logging operations began. Loew attributed this to a different way of thinking about the forest: instead of viewing it as a commodity, the Menominee see it as a relative.

“Right now, we have more volume of wood in our forests than we did 100 years ago…even though we’ve cut the forest, the volume, over four times since then,” Jonathan Wilber, president of Menominee Tribal Enterprises, said in an interview with Insight on Business. “We do not just manage our forest for the trees. We manage the forest for the animals, the streams, the species of plants that are out there. This forest has to be managed for the long haul.”

In The Ministry for the Future, there’s a part of the exchange between Mary and Dick where Mary asks how the discount rate is calculated. Dick’s clever reply: “Out of a hat.” This is one major critique of the social discount rate: no matter who ends up determining it, it’s somewhat arbitrary. Some might say the same when considering ways to incorporate Seventh Generation thinking into our economic systems. After all, isn’t seven also an arbitrary number?

But fixating on the exact number misses the point. As Cowen noted in our interview, we don’t know what people living 300 years from now will need. Instead, we should focus on leaving them good institutions, which, I would argue, should include a healthy environment. Thinking in terms of special relations — both in terms of relationships across generations and of other beings as relatives — can help us sort out the details of that broader goal. When we are bound in a system of reciprocity, not return on investment, we will be closer to being the kind of ancestors future people need.

The post In “The Ministry for the Future,” New Ideas From Ancient Wisdom appeared first on Stories for Earth.

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!

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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

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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”

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“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”

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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The post “New York 2140” by Kim Stanley Robinson: Summary & Analysis 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!

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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→ 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

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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

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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

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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”

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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”

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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

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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”

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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

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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”

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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”

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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?

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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

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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?”

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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

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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

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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

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Video game: Eco

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The post “The Overstory” by Richard Powers with Lovis Geier: Summary & Analysis 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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Climate fiction (cli-fi) has soared in popularity in recent years with the increased awareness about the dangers of climate change. This is certainly a good thing—cli-fi can help a macro threat like climate change seem more relatable, and many cli-fi readers feel more motivated to demand climate action. While I’m thrilled to see more authors and filmmakers embracing the burgeoning cli-fi genre, readers sometimes feel overwhelmed looking at all the options.

And just like any genre, there are good and bad works of cli-fi. I started getting into cli-fi in the summer of 2019, and since then, I’ve done a lot of research trying to find the best stories to spotlight on the Stories for Earth podcast. Here are my recommendations on where to start with cli-fi, in no particular order.

“Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler

→ Buy on Bookshop from $15.63

If you’ve heard of cli-fi, you’ve probably heard of Parable of the Sower. Widely regarded as a cli-fi masterpiece and loved by none other than John Green, this 1993 novel from Octavia E. Butler might be the best place to start if you’re looking for a cli-fi book.

Parable of the Sower tells the story of Lauren Olamina, a young girl growing up in Southern California in the 2020s. The climate crisis is in full swing, leading to the breakdown of social order and governments around the world, including the United States. After a gang of drug addicts burns her town to the ground and murders her family, Lauren sets off on a journey to Northern California, where things are supposedly better.

Listen to the episode: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Trying to make the trip while struggling with a birth defect called hyperempathy—the ability to feel what others are feeling—Lauren meets a number of misfits along the way who join her on the journey. To survive not only the dangers of the road but also a rapidly changing climate, Lauren and friends must learn to work together, become self-sufficient, and develop a philosophy of resilience to help them navigate a troubled time that feels eerily similar to our own.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Released in 2012, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a stunning, magical movie about a girl named Hushpuppy, melting ice, intense storms, and rising sea levels. When a powerful storm hits the fictional Louisiana bayou town called the Bathtub, Hushpuppy and her father Wink must fight to survive against devastating flooding, a forced FEMA evacuation, and a herd of mythical beasts called Aurochs that come to destroy the Bathtub once and for all.

Listen to the episode: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Hurricane Katrina, and Climate Change

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a tragically underrated film, even though it won numerous awards following its release. In addition to the obvious theme of rising sea levels, this film also explores environmental racism and how climate change disproportionately affects the people least responsible for causing it. In 2012 it may have seemed like a story about Hurricane Katrina, but today it seems more reminiscent of Terrebonne Parish—a Louisiana parish that is literally being swallowed by rising sea levels.

I love Beasts of the Southern Wild so much because of how unapologetically joyful it is. In some ways, it’s a story about the end of the world, but it’s also a story about how painfully beautiful and stubborn life is. Instead of trying to spin a tale of hope, the film uses Hushpuppy to make a courageous statement: “You want to destroy my beloved home? Fuck you. I’m not going anywhere.”

McSweeney’s Issue 58: “2040 A.D.”

→ Buy on Bookshop from $23.92

Recommendation lists like this one sometimes exclude short story collections, and I think that’s a damn shame. Short stories are one of my favorite forms of storytelling, and they can convey just as much meaning and pathos as films and novels. There are many short story collections centered around the theme of climate change, but my favorite collection I’ve read so far is McSweeney’s Issue 58: 2040 A.D.

You may know McSweeney’s for their witty humor pieces, but 2040 A.D. packs a more sobering punch. Featuring ten stories set in the year 2040 in locations all over the world, 2040 A.D. imagines what life might look like if the world continues on a business-as-usual course toward the outcomes outlined in the IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC.

Made in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and with stories from acclaimed authors like Tommy Orange and Luis Alberto Urrea, 2040 A.D. is a creative and, yes, terrifying, glimpse into what kind of world we could inhabit in 20 years’ time. And, if you’re a sucker for books with pictures like I am, illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook make this collection just as nice to look at as it is to read.

“Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn

→ Buy on Bookshop from $16.56

I probably wouldn’t have heard about this book were it not for a past co-worker giving it to me for my birthday one year (thanks Dan!). And while you could quibble about whether Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is cli-fi, I’m including it in this list because I think it gets so many things right about how we should respond to the climate crisis.

Two quotes from the book sum up my biggest takeaways from it. Here’s the first one: “There is no one right way to live.” The second one is slightly longer:

“…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.”

Listen to the episode: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, Climate Change, and Moving Beyond a Vision of Doom

I hear about how the climate movement needs better storytelling all the time, but a lot of people don’t know how to tell stories about climate change. This isn’t their fault—we humans didn’t evolve to deal with macro threats like anthropogenic climate change. How do you scale down something so enormous to make it more relatable?

Ishmael doesn’t pretend to have the answers, either—that’s for today’s artists and storytellers to discover—but it does give us some ideas on where to start. We need to be inspired, and we need to rewrite our society’s suicidal mythology that places humans at the center of the universe. If we can work towards this vision while remembering that there is no silver-bullet solution to climate change, we will have a better chance of navigating the future.

There’s plenty more to explore

These are four of my favorite works of cli-fi, but this genre is exploding right now. At a time when global climate change is one of the biggest threats to life on Earth, I think it’s never been more important to get into cli-fi. Cli-fi doesn’t give us the answers for stopping climate change, but it can help inspire us to take action and teach us what it looks like to be a resilient person, community, and society.

Wherever you decide to begin with climate fiction, I hope you discover something about the urgency of the crisis and why fighting for what you love is always worth it.

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

The post Where To Get Started With Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi) 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

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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

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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?

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 classic Pacific Edge is an inspiring vision of how we might create a truly sustainable society. Part of a three part series—or triptych—the novel presents a utopian or solarpunk imagining of Orange County, California in the 2060s, telling the story of Kevin Claiborne as he and his friends attempt to stop an ecologically destructive zoning proposal on one of the last pristine hillsides in their neighborhood of El Modena.

Overview

Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson (buy on Bookshop from $22.07) is a work of utopian eco-fiction set in Orange County, California during the 2060s. Originally published in 1990 as part of the Three Californias triptych, Pacific Edge includes many solarpunk themes such as energy independence through renewables, flourishing of local communities, green infrastructure and high technology, and strict government regulations limiting the power and size of corporations. The other two books in the triptych depict alternate futures for California—one struggling through a nuclear winter (The Wild Shore) and one being crushed by extreme wealth inequality caused by a giant tech boom (The Gold Coast). Pacific Edge takes a different route, using utopia as the setting with the still-fresh memory of a past dystopia threatening to return.

→ Buy on Bookshop from $22.07 (affiliate)

Jump to

1. About Kim Stanley Robinson
2. Transcript
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 new novel The Ministry for the Future will be published in fall 2020.

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

Transcript

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

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a climate change podcast where we discuss stories that can give us strength and resilience in fighting the climate crisis. I’m glad you’re joining us today for the last episode of our first season.

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

Today, we’ll be building off our discussion from last month by talking about Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 science fiction novel Pacific Edge, part of the Three Californias triptych. If you don’t like spoilers, now would be the time to turn off the podcast, read the book, and come back to finish the episode when you’re done.

But whatever order you decide to do things in, I hope you enjoy the show today.

“Pacific Edge” plot summary

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I want you to imagine that you live in Southern California, in Orange County. Maybe you already do. The year is 2065, and apart from the time difference, most of your story could be happening today. Your job is renovating old houses. You have just won an election to serve in the local government. You’re in your early thirties, and you are in love for the first time.

The subject of your infatuation just separated from their partner of 15 years. Until now, you thought they’d only seen you as a friend. But now after the breakup, things are different. They start approaching you, wanting to spend time with you, inviting you on solo walks and flights around the county. The two of you begin to fall in love, and, for a while, life is good. It almost seems too good.

You see, your lover’s ex just so happens to be the town’s mayor and the CEO of a highly successful medical technology company. Shortly after you begin your term as an elected official, the mayor proposes rezoning a parcel of land that’s set aside for a park. They want to use the land to build a new commercial building for their company, even though your political party has worked hard for years to protect the land and leave it as wilderness. Oh, and the land is the hill that’s practically in your backyard.

Obviously, you want to fight this proposal, but think of how it will look considering you’re sleeping with the mayor’s recent ex-lover. And speaking of which, think, too, about the way this will look to your lover. Will they think you’re simply trying to rub it in the mayor’s face? Will they resent you for fighting against the zoning proposal with everything you’ve got? This is a tricky situation, and to get what you want, you’ll have to navigate it carefully, all while trying to act naturally. You’re angry, frustrated, and torn. Don’t you live in a beautiful place? Aren’t you surrounded by friends? Isn’t this supposed to be a utopia?

This is the plot of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Pacific Edge. Originally published in 1990—two years before Daniel Quinn told us we need to move beyond a “vision of doom”—Pacific Edge is a work of utopian ecological fiction that paints a portrait of what Southern California could look like if humans take swift and appropriate action to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The book is part of a triptych—a picture in three parts—that offers ideas about three different possible futures for California. One book depicts a future California struggling through a nuclear winter, another depicts a technocratic future marked by extreme income inequality, and the third, Pacific Edge, shows a hopeful future, one where humans have learned to live in harmony with the environment, limit growth, and work on restoring places wrecked by years of overdevelopment, overconsumption, and overpopulation.

At this point, it might be helpful for you to go back and listen to our previous episode on Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. You can still get something meaningful from today’s discussion without knowing about Ishmael, but I think Pacific Edge seems much more timely and important when discussed with Ishmael fresh in your memory. You can take this opportunity to press pause and come back to this episode, or continue listening to hear about Kim Stanley Robinson’s utopia.

There is no such thing as a pocket utopia

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The word “utopia” comes to us from Sir Thomas Moore, who created the word for his 1516 book of the same name by joining together two Greek words: ou, meaning “not,” and topos, meaning “place.” By definition, utopias are nowhere to be found. They do not exist. Intended to be a fictional imagination of a perfect world, the very word implies their impossibility. We live in a flawed world full of flawed people; a utopia can never exist.

But even though Wikipedia wasn’t a few keystrokes away in the late 80s, Kim Stanley Robinson was wise to this bit of knowledge when he wrote Pacific Edge. As we discover throughout the book, one of the main characters, Tom, wanted to write a utopia but found it impossible. A constant refrain marks his journal entries: “There is no such thing as a pocket utopia.” A pocket utopia. A small-scale, or island utopia, much like the very first imagining of such a place from Thomas Moore. But what about a utopia on a wider scale? Could that be possible?

The problem with utopias is that—so far, at least—they have all descended into dystopia, the exact opposite of what is supposed to be a perfect place. It turns out that not all visions of a perfect world are the same, and what may be heaven for one group of people is hell for another. Consider Communism in the 20th century. This was supposed to be a perfect society. It was supposed to fix all the problems caused by capitalism over the centuries before. But of course, we all know how that ended.

In China, the Cultural Revolution was an absolute disaster that killed millions of innocent people. In Russia, the rise of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin resulted in widespread killings, starvation, and poverty. By all accounts, Communism was an absolute failure. It might be the best modern example of why utopias are such a bad idea.

So why write a fictional utopia? Why read a fictional utopia? As I’ve already hinted at, Kim Stanley Robinson did his homework on utopias, and he didn’t fall for the same pitfalls that writers before him did. At worst, utopias kill people—as in Communist China and Soviet Russia—and at best, they’re just plain boring, as in the work of utopian fiction Island by Aldous Huxley. If everything is perfect, what is there to do? There can be nothing to work towards, nothing to fix, nothing to solve, nothing to improve, no conflict of any kind. While at first this may sound great, it begins to sound more and more like a definition of death. I don’t think anyone truly wants to live in a world like this.

But the vision of utopia that Robinson presents in Pacific Edge leans more into the “no place” meaning of the word than the “perfect place” meaning. This is a subtle but important distinction. Pacific Edge doesn’t make any pretenses about being able to achieve utopia; rather, it acknowledges that utopia is never an attainment but a striving. In a journal entry at the beginning of Chapter Four Tom writes:

“What a cheat utopias are, no wonder people hate them. Engineer some fresh start, an island, a new continent, dispossess them, give them a new planet sure! So they don’t have to deal with our history. Ever since More [sic] they’ve been doing it: rupture, clean cut, fresh start.

“So the utopias in books are pocket utopias too. Ahistorical, static, why should we read them? They don’t speak to us trapped in this world as we are, we look at them in the same way we look at the pretty inside of a paperweight, snow drifting down, so what? It may be nice but we’re stuck here and no one’s going to give us a fresh start, we have to deal with history as it stands, no freer than a wedge in a crack.

Stuck in history like a wedge in a crack
With no way out and no way back—
Split the world!

“Must redefine utopia. It isn’t the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

“Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.”

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s imagining of utopia, it must be ecumenical. And I use that word intentionally.

Ursula K. Le Guin—another utopian science fiction luminary and a huge influence of KSR’s who actually got a call out in the preceding quote—wrote many novels that took place in something she called the Ekumen. The Ekumen is a peaceful confederation of different planets that all work together for the advancement of humanity and the expanding of consciousness. We see a similar vision of this kind of utopian framework in Carl Sagan’s 1985 science fiction novel Contact. After receiving a series of extraterrestrial transmissions containing the blueprints for a vessel of interstellar travel, a group of scientists from Earth voyage to the center of the galaxy to meet representatives from alien races. The reason behind this meeting turns out to be for nothing other than sharing knowledge in the hopes of making every conscious being better off.

And this is where Pacific Edge truly shines: it gets at a similar kind of utopian society, although Earthbound. In order for humans to make any progress towards utopia, we must widen the scope of who and what we count as stakeholders. Call this society what you will—ecotopia, the Ekumen, the space station at the center of the Milky Way, the Kingdom of God, Earthseed—every one of them emphasizes embracing all living creatures and nature while working under the assumption that there is no one “right way” to live, as Daniel Quinn insists in Ishmael. “There is no such thing as a pocket utopia.” If a very small fraction of us live in palaces built on the rest of the world’s back, we have not achieved utopia.

A practical utopia

Talk about utopia seems to always bend towards the philosophical. And while philosophy is important, we’ll never make any progress in our journey towards utopia without also discussing the practical. In this regard, Pacific Edge walks and chews gum at the same time. The journal entries from Tom supply the philosophical context for why the world needs a utopian work of fiction, and the story of Kevin fighting the new zoning proposal provides the actual boots-on-the-ground examples of what striving for a utopia looks like. We can, in other words, work on building a utopia while we’re still trying to figure out just what exactly that means.

The story focuses mainly on Kevin’s attempts to thwart the mayor, Alfredo, from building a massive development on the hill behind Kevin’s house, but to me, Tom is the most interesting character in the book. Tom is Kevin’s grandfather and a retired lawyer, and while we don’t find out until later on that he wrote the journal entries preceding many chapters, Kevin does let us know from the beginning that Tom played a very important role in helping their town make good progress on reducing its carbon footprint. In fact, as the story goes on, we learn that Tom was a key lawyer in drafting many of the laws that put international limits on the size of corporations, the populations of towns and cities, and the amount of excess water that communities can store.

But Tom didn’t start out so successful. At the beginning of Chapter Two when we read his first journal entry, we learn that he’s living in Zürich, Switzerland in the 2010s while his wife works on her PhD. A so-called “pocket utopia” itself, Switzerland’s society is really starting to feel the pressure from the sudden and massive influx of refugees from natural disasters and armed conflicts around the world. Of course, these are all side effects of climate change, as Tom notes that the world’s climate has increased another degree Celsius above the pre-industrial average and that more and more species are going extinct every year.

All of this combined is causing a rise in Swiss nationalism and far-right politics. “Return Switzerland to the Swiss!” becomes a common chant, and soon Tom and his wife get a letter from the Fremdenkontrolle der Stadt Zürich—The Stranger Control—which results in Tom’s deportation back to the United States. But even after he arrives home, Tom is greeted with hostility from the American government. Classified as a radical anti-capitalist (and therefore anti-American), Tom is imprisoned and quarantined after a federal immigration agency fabricates HIV-positive test results for him.

Writing some of his later journal entries from prison, Tom scraps his ideas to write a utopia and rededicates himself to fighting for a better future on the same front from before his time in Switzerland—the legal system. After decades of hard-won legal battles, Tom emerges as the leader of the newly formed Green Party and leads America and the rest of the world in mitigating the worst effects of climate change and putting adaptation strategies into place.

Tom effectively helped save the world, so when Alfredo, the town’s mayor, tries to build on Kevin’s hill, Tom joins Kevin in trying to stop the proposal from passing. At the end of the book after Kevin and his friends fail to stop Alfredo, it’s Tom who finally manages to save the hill once and for all. Tom dies in a shipwreck right before Alfredo starts construction, and the town council votes to turn the hill into a memorial for Tom. This halts not only this one development but all future developments from destroying the delicate ecosystem on Kevin’s hill. The situation seemed very grim, but the characters fought tirelessly against regressing. It’s a hard-earned victory, but they win nevertheless.

A positive self-fulfilling prophecy

You probably already know where I’m going with this. We are, right now, in the same position Tom was in when he decided to stop writing his utopian novel. In Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis prompted a bolstering and resurgence of nationalism, xenophobia, and outright Nazism, in some cases, with the rise of parties like the National Rally party in France and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Here in the United States, Central American refugees are traveling up through Mexico to seek asylum in our country, something many Americans have shamefully chosen to use as fuel to throw on the fires of nationalism and racism. Whether they’re chanting “America First” or “Blood and Soil,” it all boils down to the same thing.

Within the past ten years, far-right, populist politics have swelled in popularity, the world’s climate has continued on a terrifying heating trend, the oceans have become hotter and more acidic, and more and more species have passed under the crosshairs of extinction. We live in a fraught time, and our actions today and every day have a huge impact on what the world will look like in ten and twenty years, but also in one, two, and five years since we are now experiencing very dangerous effects of global climate change.

In such a time, becoming overwhelmed and hopeless is the status quo, but we must buckle down and fight this feeling if we want to save our future. We hear frightening stories of dystopia all the time that confirm our worst fears about what the future will be like. We devour books like The Handmaid’s Tale and The Hunger Games with a rapacious appetite, but what if we dared to dream of something better, something that looks more like a utopia? Sure, the bad guys never win at the end of these books. If they did, no one would read them. But these stories always begin in a world where the bad guys have already won. It’s up to the heroes to restore justice and goodness to the world.

What if, instead, we set our sights on a future where the good guys won and the bad guys are the very last of a dying breed. I am usually one to shy away from what could turn out to be self-fulfilling prophecies, but in this situation, I think a positive self-fulfilling prophecy could do us all a lot of good. The characters in Pacific Edge may be fictional, but they are a perfect representation of this idea. Tom found the drive to create the future he envisioned only because he thought it was possible, only because he’d already imagined how that future would be.

If it weren’t for Tom and the hundreds if not thousands of other people who fought alongside him, Kevin wouldn’t have even been thrown into a situation where he had to push back against something as seemingly inconsequential as a new zoning proposal. Kevin’s world might still be imperfect to him, but to us reading about it today, it seems closer to utopia than anything else we’ve seen, and that gives us something to work with.

Tom teaches us that now is not the time for despair. Nor is it the time to give up. Now is the time to work our asses off.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

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 joining us on our first season. Things will be quiet over here for a couple of months as my wife, our cat, and I get ready to move across the country from Nashville, Tennessee to Portland, Oregon, but we’ll be back very soon with more stories that can give us strength to fight climate change. Until then, thanks for listening.

Recommendations

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Book: Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

→ Buy on Bookshop from $31.50 (affiliate)

Article: “A Sci-Fi Author’s Boldest Vision of Climate Change: Surviving It” by Russell Gold in the Wall Street Journal (paywall)

Book: Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World by Fabio Fernandes, Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, and Carlos Orsi

→ Buy on Bookshop from $13.75 (affiliate)

Book: Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

→ Buy on Bookshop from $12.88 (affiliate)

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The post “Pacific Edge” by Kim Stanley Robinson: A Future Mythology appeared first on Stories for Earth.