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.

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)

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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)

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

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

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is a story of nature making its case for stopping humanity’s destruction of Earth. Told as a Socratic dialogue between a talking gorilla named Ishmael and an anonymous narrator, Ishmael challenges the notion that humankind is somehow separate or above the rest of life on this planet, and it offers some ideas for building the framework of a sustainable society.

Overview

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (buy on Bookshop from $16.56) is a work of philosophical ecofiction that was published in 1992. Written as a Socratic dialogue between a gorilla with the ability to speak telepathically, Ishmael, and an unnamed narrator, the book argues that the way modern humans live is unsustainable. To correct this, humans must re-examine their fundamental beliefs about their place in the world and work towards creating a future where all life can thrive. Before its publication, Ishmael won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship as a work of fiction that offered excellent solutions to global problems. The book garnered praise from Ray Bradbury and has been taught in high schools and universities around the United States.

→ Buy USED on Better World Books from $3.98 (affiliate)
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→ Find at your local library

Jump to

1. About Daniel Quinn
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

Daniel Quinn was an American freelance writer and author from Omaha, Nebraska. Before he became a writer, Quinn intended to be a Trappist monk, studying under the theologian Thomas Merton at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky. Following Merton’s advice, Quinn left the Abbey and gave up on his dream of becoming a monk. He found a job at a publishing company in Chicago, where he worked as an editor of several encyclopedias and educational books. Quinn went on to leave his career in publishing to become a freelance writer, writing several books including Ishmael, The Story of B, and Beyond Civilization. He died on February 17, 2018 in Houston, Texas at the age of 82 years old.

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 about stories that can teach us lessons about emotional resilience in fighting the climate crisis. For a transcript of today’s show, a full list of sources, further recommended reading, articles, and more, visit our website at storiesforearth.com. If you’re listening on Apple Podcasts and you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a review. Reviews really help us reach more people.

Today we’ll be talking about a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. If you haven’t read the book before, don’t worry about feeling lost. I’ll cover everything you need to know for you to get something meaningful out of our discussion. By the same token, many spoilers lie ahead. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like spoilers, I’d suggest listening to this episode after you’ve read the book.And now, here is our discussion of Ishmael. I hope you enjoy the show today.

How “Ishmael” came to be

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Let’s be honest—talking about climate change can be depressing. The biggest news about climate change is never good. In fact, it keeps getting worse. Scientists are alarmed by how much faster the climate is changing than they thought it would, and we as a planet might be a few years away from reaching frightening tipping points that we only recently thought were decades away. This is truly terrifying stuff, and it seems to be all we hear about in the news and in circles where people talk about global warming.

No one wants to be around that person at the party who brings up such news, the person who drops morbid, startling statistics and then basically says, “We’re all screwed!” with a dark laugh. And yet, I have been this person more often than I would care to admit. Sure, climate change is scary. It’s frustrating and hopeless feeling to see the lack of serious action to do something about it, but it does no one any good to spread that feeling of despair and cynical resignation.

I later found out this kind of behavior is a symptom of climate grief, which is a natural response to learning about the dangers climate change poses to humanity. A British psychotherapist named Rosemary Randall talks about this particular brand of doomsday porn on an episode of the Ecosia podcast. She says it’s a natural part of processing the feelings of complex grief and the hopelessness that can accompany it. She says this stage doesn’t have to be permanent, and to move to a healthier state of mind, people should focus on what they can do to help.

I imagine this might have been what author Daniel Quinn was doing when he wrote his famous novel Ishmael. Quinn actually started writing Ishmael by writing another book first. It was called The Book of the Damned, a book Quinn described as “a book born in hell…a collection of damnable ideas, ideas to be cursed and denounced.”

He published it through his own independent press in serialized form, but when it came time to write the last part, he couldn’t summon the words the same way he had before. The whole book was a diatribe against humanity, excoriating humans for the damage they had wrought on the environment. But according to Quinn in the foreword to my copy of Ishmael, “…the rest of what I had to say simply could not be written in lightning strikes and thunder.”

What Daniel Quinn had to say next ended up being the book Ishmael. And while it was almost never published, it went on to receive Ted Turner’s Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, a prize awarded to a work of fiction that offered excellent solutions to global problems.I imagine that if The Book of the Damned was a product of Daniel Quinn’s state of righteous rage and cynical resignation, Ishmael was his response to “What can I do to help?” that pulled him out of despair, even if only for a short time. Today, it has a lot to teach us about how to reach other people so we can make a difference in fighting climate change.

“Ishmael” plot summary

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Ishmael is a novel formatted as a Socratic dialogue between the narrator of the story and a telepathic gorilla named Ishmael. The story begins with the narrator, a man who is agonizing over how to save the world, when he just so happens to see an ad in the newspaper one day with a potential solution to his exact predicament. The ad reads, “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.” Ecstatic, the narrator visits the address listed in the ad only to find himself alone in a small apartment with a massive gorilla in a cage.

The narrator soon discovers the gorilla can communicate telepathically, and he introduces himself as Ishmael, the author of the newspaper ad. Ishmael goes on to explain, through the Socratic method, what is wrong with the world today and how humans might begin to fix it. Humans, Ishmael explains, are like a person driving a car as fast as they can towards a cliff. If we don’t take our food off the accelerator and hit the brakes soon, we’re going to hurdle off that cliff to our certain death.

Who are the Takers and Leavers?

But not all of us are doing this. For simplicity’s sake, Ishmael tells the narrator there are two main groups of people living on Earth: the Takers and the Leavers. The Takers are the members of people in modern, developed countries who see the world as theirs for the taking. If you’re listening to this podcast, there’s a good chance you’re a Taker according to Ishmael’s lectures. Takers use words like “natural resources,” implying that the universe exists to serve them. Humankind rules the world, and we can do with it whatever we please.

Leavers, on the other hand, are the kinds of people the Takers used to be before they developed the psychotic notion that everything belongs to them. Leavers are people who live off the land. They might be hunter-gatherers living in tribes, but they don’t necessarily have to be. Before I read Ishmael, I read several summaries of the novel that essentially said Leavers all live in nomadic tribes in undeveloped countries. That is not the case.

While Leavers certainly could fall into this category, their defining trait is that they don’t believe the world belongs to them. Rather, they believe humans belong to the world—that is, they believe other species, every one of them from salmon to songbirds, have just as much of a claim to Earth as we do. According to Leavers, humans are no more fit to “rule” than any other animal. We all share the same home, and we should do our best to be good neighbors to the other life on our planet and to live sustainably.

But the world hasn’t always been this way. Ishmael says that a long time ago, we all used to be Leavers. There was a time when, for centuries, human beings lived sustainably. We took what the land provided, we lived in small communities, and we respected the Earth, even if we probably didn’t yet have modern notions like environmentalism or ecology. We simply lived as other animals do—we didn’t take any more than we needed, and we didn’t kill off other species for the sake of safeguarding a surplus of our own food supply.

A new take on the Garden of Eden story

But one day, that all changed. Ishmael takes the story of the Garden of Eden from Genesis in the Old Testament to illustrate how this change might have happened. According to Ishmael’s interpretation of this creation story, Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden not because they were disobedient, but because they became like gods, thinking they had the right to decide who gets to live and who gets to die—or, as the Bible originally put it, “knowing both good and evil.” After God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he told them that moving forward, they would work have to work for a living instead of living off the abundance of nature.

This, Ishmael says, is really the beginning of agriculture. It started when God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden, and it kicked into high gear after Cain, one of the first so-called “modern agriculturalists,” murdered his brother Abel. Abel was a shepherd, and Cain was a farmer. According to Ishmael’s reading of this Bible story, there was real significance behind this fact.

The dawn of human agriculture is when we as a species apparently started heading down the path to our own self-destruction. At first, this statement sounds ludicrous, even laughable. The discovery of agriculture might be the most significant event in human history.

Because we learned how to grow our own food, we no longer had to live as hunter-gatherers. We could put down roots—no pun intended—build villages that became towns that became cities that became empires. You could say that agriculture is the reason we have civilization and culture and technology today. Without it, the modern world would not be possible, and we’d still be living as, well, animals.

But Ishmael isn’t sold on this argument. Remember, he’s a gorilla, after all. I won’t go into all the details because I’d essentially be reading the book to you at that point, but Ishmael argues that life isn’t so bad for Leavers and all the other animals on Earth. In fact, he thinks everyone else has it pretty good. They may not have air conditioning or Beethoven or Tokyo, but they also don’t have to worry about driving themselves to the point of extinction. If it weren’t for Takers, in fact, life on Earth could probably continue unimpeded for millennia.

Ishmael doesn’t offer any concrete solutions to the problem of Takers living this way, but he does tell the narrator that more people need to know about the problem and that to survive, Takers must abandon their destructive mythology that places them at the center of the universe. Easy, right?

What is mythology?

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Mythology plays a huge role in this book. In fact, Ishmael sees a certain mythology as the underlying sickness plaguing the Takers. The way Takers live is merely a symptom of this illness. According to Ishmael, Takers believe in a myth that says the world was created for humans and that creation ended with them.

But what is myth anyway? If you’re like the narrator of the book, your mind will probably go to stories of Greek and Norse mythology. I know mine did. We tend to think of myth as something only primitive societies used to explain things they didn’t have answers for. Today, we think we’re beyond needing myth. After all, we have science, and science can explain everything, right?

But this is not what Ishmael means when he talks about myth. Here is his definition: “A scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods.”

We may not think we have something like this today, but we do. The funny thing about mythology is that no one knows they believe in it while they’re alive. Mythology is so embedded in the culture that you don’t think twice about it. Ishmael explains it like this: if you went back in time to Ancient Greece and asked any random person on the street about their mythology, they would probably give you a funny look. “We don’t have a mythology,” they would probably say.

To this you might respond, “But what about all those stories of Zeus and Athena and Aphrodite?”

The person from Ancient Greece would be taken aback. “What do you mean ‘stories?’” they would say. “Those aren’t just made-up fairytales, they’re the account of the way things came to be.”

Before Ishmael introduces this way of thinking about myth, he tells the narrator he’s interested in teaching a lesson about captivity. At first, we’re inclined to think Ishmael is talking about the captivity of animals, as in the way he lives in captivity as a circus gorilla, but it soon becomes clear that he’s getting at something a little more philosophical. As people with a mythology about the way the world came to be, we all live in captivity. Ishmael puts it like this:

“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

The narrator agrees, but he laments the fact that he doesn’t know how to escape this system. Ishmael explains that to escape, we first need to find the bars of our cage. The bars are a metaphor for our culture’s mythology, and to break them, we need to imagine a new mythology and enact it. Enacting a mythology means living in a way that will make it come true, and that’s the task we’re currently faced with.

How do we change our mythology?

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This book can be so compelling at times that it almost tricks you into thinking it holds all the answers. Unfortunately, it does not, but it does leave us with the tools we’ll need to forge our next steps. At this point, I think it’s helpful to do a quick recap on everything Ishmael teaches the narrator:

1. Human beings are not the problem. The problem is the belief that, “The world belongs to Man,” when in fact, “Man belongs to the world.”
2. To ditch the belief that the world belongs to us, we need to imagine a different mythology and live to make it come true.

I think people are finally beginning to wake up to this idea, even if they’ve never heard of the book Ishmael before. Around the world, scientists, activists, school children, and everyday people are calling for humans to stop destroying the planet and to adopt a sustainable way of living. We now have a Zero-Waste Movement. Countries are beginning to declare climate emergencies. As a global trend, renewable energy is set to become more affordable than fossil fuels.

There are many reasons to be hopeful in the face of climate change, even if at times it seems like an impossible challenge. But turning towards living sustainably is still very much not the status quo.

The culture is changing, yes, but it’s not changing fast enough. In fact, many people see this cultural shift as a threat to their way of living. Some people—a few prominent Republican politicians come to mind—say that proponents of a Green New Deal want to make hamburgers and airplanes illegal. This is obviously untrue to the point of being absurd, but some people really think this.

Change is never easy or void of controversy, and that’s certainly true about the push for building a sustainable world.

We need more than a “vision of doom”

Ishmael makes an observation towards the end of the book that I think might be the most powerful and relevant one to us today. 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.”

This statement was very ahead of its time. Today we have an emerging field of study devoted to figuring out the best ways to communicate the risks of climate change so that human behavior changes for the better. Many universities around the world now offer courses on climate change communication, including Yale and George Mason University. In fact, climate change is now a central part of public health communication.

And what does the research show? Time and again, people are best motivated to make positive behavior changes when they are first warned about the dangers of climate change and then presented with a positive vision of what the future could look like if we take appropriate actions. This second part is crucial. Without it, people tend to shut down. They feel hopeless and lost. Sometimes, they react the way people do when they’re grieving—denying that something terrible has happened or is happening and pretending they can go on living the same way they always have.

What we have now is a vision of doom. And while this is a necessary first step to waking up the world to fight climate change, it’s only half the battle. What we need to start working on now is writing the mythology of the future. This is a future where humans can exist alongside all the other forms of life on Earth without killing them. It’s a future where we learn to make civilization work so that it contributes to the flourishing of all life. It’s a future that we don’t have a very clear vision of yet, but we can change that.

Creating a canon for the mythology of the future

I hadn’t heard of Ishmael when I started this podcast. A co-worker gave it to me as a birthday present. But after reading the book and thinking about all that it says about Taker mythology and the need to change that mythology, I realized that this gets at the heart of what I want to do with this podcast.

It would be foolish to think that one book or movie could change the Taker mythology that we all subscribe to. But I do think that, taken together with other like minded cultural narratives, we can begin to curate a sort of canon for the mythology of the future. This canon won’t be bound by genre or medium. The only requirements for works to be added to it is that they adequately warn us about the catastrophe we’re headed towards and provide us with an alternate vision of a better future.

This might sound very pie-in-the-sky, but I think if we’re going to have any chance of averting a climate apocalypse, we’ll need a canon like this, among other devices, to inspire us to be better. Ishmael opens our eyes to why this is so necessary, and it leaves us with a powerful commission that may sound slightly familiar: go out and tell as many people as you can, warning them about their current path towards destruction and inspiring them to live up to their full potential for saving the world.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

That’s it for our discussion of Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast to get notified every time we release a new episode, and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts if you feel so inclined.

Visit us online at storiesforearth.com for transcripts of every episode and additional content, and consider making a recurring monthly donation to support our show through Patreon. You can find us at patreon.com/storiesforearth. That’s patreon.com/storiesforearth. Until next time, I’m Forrest Brown. Thanks for listening.

Recommendations

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Book: The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry

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Book: The Story of B by Daniel Quinn

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

Movie: Instinct

Director: Jon Turteltaub

Album: Yield

Artist: Pearl Jam

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The post “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, Climate Change, and Moving Beyond a Vision of Doom appeared first on Stories for Earth.

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Overview

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a 2012 film from director Benh Zeitlin and Court 13 Arts. Originally released in New York and Los Angeles, the film was later sold to Fox Searchlight Pictures and distributed worldwide. The film enjoyed mostly positive reviews from critics and viewers alike, and it features an Oscar-nominated performance from Quvenzhané Wallis, who played Hushpuppy. Director Benh Zeitlin co-wrote the screenplay with his screenwriter friend Lucy Alibar, basing the movie on Alibar’s play Juicy and Delicious.

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1. About Benh Zeitlin
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About the creator

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Benh Zeitlin is an American writer, director, and composer who is best known for his 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Born in New York City and raised in various boroughs and suburbs, Zeitlin is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Connecticut and a co-founder of Court 13 Arts, a “…film and multi-disciplinary arts organization” that works to advance filmmaking in New Orleans, Louisiana. Zeitlin co-founded Court 13 shortly after moving to New Orleans in 2008 to make his first short film, Glory at Sea. In October 2019, Zeitlin revealed work on his next feature-length film Wendy, a modern adaptation of Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie.

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 about stories that can teach us lessons of resilience for fighting the climate crisis. For a transcript of today’s show, further recommended reading and viewing, articles, and more, visit our website at storiesforearth.com. We’re on Instagram and Twitter, and you can also support our show via Patreon with a recurring, monthly donation. Click “support us on Patreon” from our website, or visit patreon.com/storiesforearth to become a patron.

Today’s show is about the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the movie before, as I’ll tell you everything you need to know about it for our discussion. If you’d rather find out for yourself, stop the podcast right now, go watch the movie, and come back when you’re done. There are lots of spoilers ahead.

Regardless of whether you’ve seen the movie or not, I hope you enjoy today’s show.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” plot summary

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Beasts of the Southern Wild is the story of Hushpuppy, a little girl who lives with her father Wink in a fictional southern Louisiana town called the Bathtub. The Bathtub is a sort of utopian anarchy. It’s a secluded and wild place on the frontlines of sea level rise, separated from the rest of civilization by a massive levee that holds back the encroaching salt water.

The people who live there are whimsical and free, and they all take care of each other for the greater good of the community. Hushpuppy lives with Wink in a trailer home on stilts, and when she’s not at school, she spends her time playing in the woods around their house and learning lessons from Wink.

Wink seems like a bad father at first. In fact, many viewers might think he’s abusive. He threatens, screams, and shouts at Hushpuppy, and he lets them both live in nothing short of squalor. But Wink loves Hushpuppy more than anything, and he’s hard on her because he’s afraid he won’t be around for long. He wants to prepare her for life.

The movie never says what it is, but Wink seems to have some sort of heart problem that causes him a lot of pain and even makes him pass out from time to time. He’s worried about what will happen to Hushpuppy when he dies, and he especially wants to train her for what Hushpuppy calls “the Big One.”

The Big One is a powerful storm that will bring about the end of the world. Hushpuppy describes it best:

“One day, the storm’s gonna blow, the ground’s gonna sink and the water’s gonna rise up so high ain’t gonna be no Bathtub, just a whole bunch of water…But me and my daddy, we stay right here. We is who the earth is for.”

And the Big One definitely comes. One night, Hushpuppy and Wink get into a fight, and Hushpuppy hits Wink in the chest. This seems to trigger Wink’s heart condition, and he collapses on the ground, appearing to be dead. But something else happens here. We see shots of Arctic ice sheets breaking off into the ocean, unleashing ancient pig-like beasts called aurochs and sending the Big One. Wink regains consciousness just before the storm hits and gets Hushpuppy to safety, but not everyone is so lucky.

In the morning, once the storm has subsided, Wink and Hushpuppy survey the flood damage from their makeshift boat made of an old truck bed with an outboard motor. The survivors soon discover that the salty flood water has contaminated the Bathtub’s fresh water, so Wink and a few other men hatch a plan to blow up the levee separating the Bathtub from the mainland.

Wink and his friends build a pipe bomb and successfully destroy the levee, draining the Bathtub just before FEMA comes to force everyone to evacuate to a hospital on the mainland. The hospital represents everything the Bathtub isn’t, and the Bathtub survivors have a hard time trying to adapt. Wink gets surgery to try to fix his heart condition, but at the first chance, he breaks out and frees the others so they can escape.

Once they arrive back in the Bathtub, Hushpuppy must confront the aurochs before they trample over everything. She’s brave and defiant, and she tells the aurochs, “I have to look after my own.” They seem to understand her somehow, and they turn around to leave. This fulfills something Hushpuppy said earlier in the movie:

“Everybody loses the thing that made them. It’s even how it’s supposed to be in nature. The brave men stay and watch it happen, they don’t run.”

Wink dies shortly before the aurochs leave, and Hushpuppy lights his funeral pyre. In one of the final scenes, we see Hushpuppy marching down the beach in a sort of rag-tag parade with the other residents of the Bathtub, boldly meeting her future and reclaiming her home.

Making the film

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Beasts of the Southern Wild was not made the way most Hollywood films are made. Director Benh Zeitlin and his production studio, Court 13, made the entire movie in a southern Louisiana town called Montegut, of the quickly eroding Terrebonne Parish. Court 13 worked out of an abandoned gas station throughout production of the film, and they built all the sets for the Bathtub using found materials in the area. I don’t know if it gets more authentic than that.

Zeitlin calls Court 13’s approach to filmmaking “community-based,” and he uses words like “utopia” when describing how they work together. This way of creating collaboratively worked better in New Orleans than in any other city, according to Zeitlin, which makes sense to me based off what I think I know about New Orleans. I’ve unfortunately never been.

When I watched interviews with members of Court 13 to prepare for this episode, I got the sense that they were just as much a crew of pirates as they were a crew of filmmakers. They seemed totally immersed in the process, but they’re hardly the only ones.

None of the actors you see in the movie were professionals—they’re real members of the community in Louisiana, which actually makes them better than professionals. Dwight Henry owned a bakery in New Orleans before playing the role of Wink, and the unforgettable Quvenzhané Wallis was only five years old when she auditioned to play Hushpuppy. Five years old! She went on to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress after the film’s release, making her the youngest person ever to be nominated in that category.

Beasts of the Southern Wild blew audiences and critics away all over the world, and it’s easy to see why. The people who tell the story of the Bathtub aren’t some actors from out of state. They actually lived the story of the movie. They know what it’s like to go on the roof to escape hurricane flood waters. They knew what it was like to almost have their home completely annihilated yet choose to rebuild it and stay anyway.

Above all else, this film is a love letter to the joyful, resilient people of southern Louisiana and to the home they hold so dear. And just like Hushpuppy loved her dying father and refused to give up on him, these people love where they’re from even while the ocean slowly takes it back.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” and Hurricane Katrina

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You can’t talk about Beasts of the Southern Wild and not talk about Hurricane Katrina. The film is a response to the hurricane, particularly to the way people from outside of the affected area reacted to it. Director Benh Zeitlin said it himself in one interview I watched, talking about the reactions he’d hear from people who couldn’t believe residents of New Orleans would want to move back. I remember hearing these takes too.

People would say things like, “That’s what you get when you build a city below sea level.” It was like they were blaming the people of New Orleans for what happened to them. “Of course your city was destroyed,” these people seemed to say. “You people were dumb enough to put it right in front of a hurricane.”

Zeitlin left this out of his interview, but I heard much worse reactions. Perhaps you did too if you ever watched any Fox News around this time. A lot of the Christians in my life growing up tried to compare the destruction of New Orleans to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible. This is the story from the book of Genesis, chapters 18 and 19 in the Old Testament in which God destroys the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone because the cities were so wicked. Abraham, an Old Testament patriarch, begged God not to destroy the cities if he was able to find even ten good people there. God agreed to Abraham’s terms, but he still sent two angels to the cities to destroy them in the end.

Abraham lived elsewhere, so God sent the two angels to warn Abraham’s nephew Lot to evacuate along with his wife and daughters. God was so mad at Sodom and Gomorrah that he even instructed Lot and his family not to look back as it was being destroyed. Lot’s wife famously looked back anyway, and God turned her into a pillar of salt for her disobedience.

It was the same situation with New Orleans, supposedly. A girl I went to school with even told me about her dad, a preacher, who spent an entire sermon series talking about why New Orleans got what was coming to them. To this day, I don’t really know what exactly New Orleans was supposed to have done wrong. Was it the voodoo? The large queer community? The partying and gambling on Bourbon Street? I honestly don’t really care to hear about it.

But Beasts of the Southern Wild is a direct rebuttal to that line of thinking, in my mind. The Big One or God or climate change or whatever you want to call it destroys the Bath Tub, and what does Hushpuppy do? She looks back. Hell, she goes back—everyone does, including the dying Wink. Their home was already destroyed by the hurricane, and even with the aurochs on their way, the people of the Bath Tub go back. Why? It has everything to do with love and with standing up for what’s right.

Throughout the movie, Wink’s health gradually deteriorates. From the beginning of the movie when we first see evidence of his heart condition, we can tell his days are numbered. But does Hushpuppy give up on him? No. They have a tumultuous, even traumatizing relationship as father and daughter, but Hushpuppy still doesn’t leave him. For the characters in the movie, Wink is a symbol of the Bath Tub—both he and the Bath Tub are dying. One has a heart condition and one is slowly drowning. But this is no reason to give up on them. Even as Wink’s funeral pyre goes up in flames and the Bath Tub lies in ruins, Hushpuppy confronts the aurochs to defend her people. For her, it’s not a question. Wink was her father and the Bath Tub is her home. For Hushpuppy, it’s simply the right thing to do. “The brave men stay and watch it happen, they don’t run.”

It’s the same story for the people of New Orleans and southern Louisiana in general. They didn’t give up on their home just because a hurricane tried to blow it away. A lot of the people who were lucky enough to evacuate, maybe most of them, went back. I’ve heard people describe the ones who didn’t go back as some of the first climate refugees in America. But those who did go back helped rebuild their city, and today, New Orleans is doing okay.

Climate change is making hurricanes stronger

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That isn’t to say recovering from Katrina was easy by any stretch of the imagination. In 2010, a group of researchers from Princeton University, Washington State University, the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and Harvard University published a paper about the long term mental health effects of Hurricane Katrina on 532 low-income mothers in the New Orleans area. The researchers started surveying people in 2003, two years before the storm hit in August 2005, and they followed the same people for nearly five years after the hurricane.

And what did they find? The mothers’ mental health never really returned to baseline. In other words, after Hurricane Katrina, these people were never the same. Four years after the storm, about 33 percent of the mothers still showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, and another 30 percent suffered from psychological distress. While the researchers saw the worst effects on mental health during the first 11 months after the hurricane, many more people suffered for years afterward.

These people had lost their homes and loved ones, and they had to go for stretches of time without knowing if they would have food or clean water. They were also scattered across 23 states immediately after the hurricane. They were refugees—of course their mental health suffered. But studies like this one are sadly rare.

The researchers who published this paper got kind of lucky. Their paper started out as a study of low-income adults enrolled in community colleges around the US. It just so happened that three of those colleges were in New Orleans, and the researchers had the good sense to draw the study out even longer to fill a knowledge gap in what we know about the mental health impacts of natural disasters.

Hurricane Katrina was just one storm. Imagine how other natural disasters around the world might be affecting people there. I think back to March 2011 when a horrible earthquake and tsunami killed hundreds of people in Japan and nearly caused a nuclear meltdown. As recently as October 2019, a typhoon hit the very same region, testing Japan’s resilience and recovery progress over the past eight years.

A month before this typhoon hit Japan, Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas as a category 5 storm—the strongest category designation for hurricanes. The storm essentially sat on the country for three days, killing 70 people and causing nearly 300 people to go missing. The total cost of this disaster tallied up to $3.4 billion USD. For a country with a GDP of about $12 billion USD, this is an unfathomable cost to rebuild.

According to Yale Climate Connections, the verdict is still out on whether or not climate change will cause more hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones. But for now, scientists feel confident that climate change will make hurricanes that send more rain and cause more destruction. These storms will be beastly—pun intended—and we should be putting in work now to develop the emotional resilience we’ll need to face them head-on and recover from them afterwards.

What are the beasts in “Beasts of the Southern Wild?”

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Resilience is not so uncommon. We humans are a resilient bunch, and we’ve so far done a pretty good job of recovering from everything history has thrown our way. Take, for example, the Black Death pandemic in Europe during the Middle Ages.

In just four years, the Black Death killed about 25 million people, nearly a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century. Even before the Black Death, a 6th-century plague pandemic called the Plague of Justinian killed nearly half of Europe’s population. During this plague outbreak, nearly 10,000 people died every day in Constantinople. Yet somehow, Europe made it through plague outbreaks like these, and the period of European history between about 900 and 1300 was “…one of the longest periods of sustained growth in human history,” according to The Great Courses Daily.

And this is only one example of humanity’s ability to bounce back from major setbacks. We’ve been doing this ever since we started walking upright. In fact, we nearly went extinct in the year 70,000 B.C. after the eruption of the supervolcano Toba. I could keep listing examples, but the bottom line is this: we are hard to kill. This fact served as one of the main points of inspiration for the aurochs in Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Director Benh Zeitlin said in an interview with Pop Omnivore that his idea to use aurochs came from cave paintings he’d seen in France of cavemen fighting them off. Zeitlin said:

“The young girl in the film, Hushpuppy, sees herself as the last of her kind, on the verge of extinction. ‘How are people going to look back on my civilization?’ she wonders. And she sees herself as being in the same position as cavemen: We look back on them and understand them by their paintings. So it’s that parallel that inspired us to use the aurochs. What Hushpuppy sees as coming to destroy her is literally what a caveman painted.”

If you’re looking for a metaphor to represent the beasts we face today in the climate crisis, I can’t think of a better one than aurochs. Aurochs weren’t just made up for the movie—they were once real animals until they went extinct about 500 years ago. Unlike the porcine animals in Beasts of the Southern Wild, real-life aurochs were more like extremely aggressive bulls. Hushpuppy’s world is about to end because fossils come back to life. Sound familiar?

I suppose you could interpret this in a number of ways, but to me, aurochs have to represent fossil fuels. And just like Hushpuppy stood up to the aurochs to save her home, we must stand up to the fossil fuel industry if we want to survive. Life and death are two sides of the same coin, but in the case of drilling for oil, it’s better that some things remain dead. Hushpuppy teaches us that we can stand up to such agents of chaos. And maybe, if our convictions are strong enough, we can win.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

That’s it for our discussion of Beasts of the Southern Wild and climate change. Be sure to hit subscribe if you enjoyed today’s show, and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts if you feel so inclined. Doing so will help us reach more listeners who could benefit from our message.

Visit our website at storiesforearth.com for transcripts of every episode as well as additional content, and become a patron at patreon.com/storiesforearth if you want to support further production of the show. Until next time, I’m Forrest Brown. Thanks for listening.

Recommendations

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Article: “Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast“

Author: Elizabeth Kolbert

Film: Okja

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Film: Glory at Sea

Director: Benh Zeitlin

Book: Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island by Earl Swift

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The post “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Hurricane Katrina, and Climate Change appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Spirited Away from Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese animated fairy tale film released in 2001. The movie tells the story of Chihiro, a young girl on a mission to rescue her family from the evil witch Yubaba, who turned them into pigs. Widely considered to be a coming of age story about the importance of staying true to yourself, Spirited Away also incorporates many environmental themes through characters like the Stink Spirit, Haku, and No-Face.

Overview

Spirited Away is one of Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s most-loved films. Originally released in Japan in 2001 by Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, Walt Disney Studios brought it to the United States in 2002. This is one of the most financially successful films in Japanese film history, and in 2017, The New York Times named it the second-best film from the 21st century so far. There are many different ways of interpreting this film, but for this episode, we take a look at the film’s environmental themes. We explore the meaning of various characters and look at what they can teach us about fighting climate change.

→ Buy the DVD on Bookshop from $19.96 (affiliate)

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1. About Hayao Miyazaki
2. Transcript
3. Recommendations

About the creator

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Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese animation director. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest living animated filmmakers in the world. Born in Tokyo in 1941, Miyazaki is famous for classic films such as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke. Though he retired in 2017, he is reportedly working on a new movie for his production studio Studio Ghibli.

Transcript

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Hello. 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 about stories that can teach us strength and resilience in the era of the climate crisis. Today we’ll be talking about Hayao Miyazaki’s classic film, Spirited Away. But first, we have some basic housekeeping to take care of.

Two things: first, we have a website at storiesforearth.com. There you can find transcripts of the show, articles about the stories we discuss, and recommendations for further reading, among other content. We’re also on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube if you want to follow us on social media.

The second thing is Patreon. We want to provide this show for free, and you can help us do that by supporting us through our Patreon. To make a recurring, monthly donation to Stories for Earth, go to patreon.com/storiesforearth, or visit our website and click “Support us on Patreon” from the navigation menu.

Now, without any further ado, let’s get on to today’s episode. And don’t worry, if you haven’t seen Spirited Away before, I’ll fill you in on all the details so you can still get something meaningful from our discussion.

“Spirited Away” plot summary

Spirited Away is the story of a young girl named Chihiro who gets stranded in a spirit world after she and her parents wander into an abandoned Japanese amusement park. They’re in the process of moving to a new town, and they find the amusement park after Chihiro’s dad tries to take a shortcut on a dirt road through the woods.

Chihiro’s time in the spirit world begins with her parents eating enchanted food, which turns them into pigs. To turn her parents back into humans and to escape from the Spirit World, Chihiro has to get a job at the local bathhouse, which is run by a witch named Yubaba.

If you’ve ever seen a movie from Hayao Miyazaki, you’ll instantly recognize this as a signature Miyazaki story. Miyazaki’s movies usually feature young—often female—protagonists who have to overcome some sort of great evil to save the day, and there are usually many fantastical or fairy-tale like elements involved.

For example, in another one of Miyazaki’s films called Howl’s Moving Castle, a young girl named Sophie is transformed into an old woman by an evil witch, and the only way for Sophie to break the curse is to work for a wizard named Howl in his enchanted castle.

Along the way, Sophie meets a scarecrow who turns out to be a cursed prince, and she winds up having to keep two kingdoms from going to war on behalf of Howl. Sophie succeeds in turning back into her younger self, and she breaks the prince’s curse, restoring him to his human form and averting the war.

Howl’s Moving Castle is heavy on a theme Miyazaki is known for playing with in most of his films: pacifism. This doesn’t come as much of a shock when you look at his personal life. He was born in Tokyo in 1941 and lived through World War II when Japan was part of the Axis Powers along with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Miyazaki experienced some horrors of war firsthand, like firebombings, and he of course witnessed the aftermath of America dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians.

Against this apocalyptic backdrop, I can’t blame Miyazaki for being a pacifist and for promoting pacifism. But in addition to the human suffering war causes, Miyazaki also realized its capacity for tremendous environmental destruction, especially from pollution and nuclear weapons.

Spirited Away doesn’t depict a nuclear war, but it does focus heavily on the pollution aspect, which Miyazaki sees as an adverse result of consumerist greed and industrialization.

We see this the most in the movie through three different characters. The first is called the Stink Spirit.

The Stink Spirit

The Stink Spirit appears after Chihiro first starts working at the bathhouse. Also, it’s important to note that after getting a job at the bathhouse, the witch who runs it, Yubaba, gives Chihiro a new name: Sen. I’ll talk about the significance of this in a little bit, but for now, just keep in mind that when I say “Sen,” I’m talking about Chihiro, our protagonist.

The Stink Spirit looks like a giant sludge monster, and based off the way the characters in the movie react to its presence, you can tell it really stinks. The other bathhouse workers try to keep it from entering, but it trudges forward, insistent on getting a bath.

Naturally, no one wants to take care of the Stink Spirit, so Yubaba makes Chihiro do it as a sort of hazing or initiation task. Chihiro, never one to be stopped, carries out the work of bathing the Stink Spirit dutifully. In fact, she works so hard to get it clean that she accidentally falls in the bath with it.

And it’s in this scene, while Chihiro is struggling to get out of the bath, that she feels something pointy coming out of the Stink Spirit’s side, like a thorn. Once she gets back out, Chihiro enlists the help of the bathhouse staff to pull this thing out of the Stink Spirit. But when they’re finally able to yank it out, Chihiro realizes the thorn is really a bicycle handlebar, and pulling it out releases a deluge of trash and pollutants.

With the pollution gone, all the sludge surrounding the Stink Spirit dissolves to reveal a River Spirit. People throwing pollution into the river made it a Stink Spirit, but Chihiro saved it, and it thanks her by giving her a ball of medicine before leaving.

Shintoism in “Spirited Away”

In some ways, this story really happened. Miyazaki got the idea after working on a river cleanup when he pulled a bicycle from the river.

Hearing this made an impression on me because it sounds like animism, which is the belief that everything—including plants, animals, so-called “inanimate” objects, and natural phenomena—have souls. And of course, animism is central to the ancient Japanese religion Shinto, or Shintoism.

Practitioners of Shintoism, usually called Shintoists, believe in supernatural beings called kami. Kami inhabit the landscape, and they can either be benevolent or malevolent towards humans, depending on whether or not humans honor them properly. In Japan, there are shrines to kami all over the place, and you can also see them in the opening scenes of Spirited Away.

In an interview with Robert Epstein from The Independent in 2010, Miyazaki said, “I do not believe in Shinto…but I do respect it, and I feel that the animism of Shinto is rooted deep within me.”

But Spirited Away pays homage to another important aspect of Shintoism as well: the purifying power of water. In Shintoism, cleanliness is very important. It’s just like that old saying in English, “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Yubaba’s bathhouse, then, is a place where spirits can come to be purified. It just so happens that a number of these spirits turn out to be nature spirits, like rivers.

The importance of Haku

There’s another important river spirit we meet in Spirited Away, though we don’t realize what it is at first. Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the movie, but I’m talking about Haku, a young man who helps Chihiro when she realizes she’s stranded in the spirit world. Haku is the one who tells Chihiro she must get a job working at Yubaba’s bathhouse, and he also teaches her the importance of remembering her name after Yubaba gives her a new one, warning her that if she forgets it, she’ll be stuck in the spirit world forever.

Haku, it turns out, has firsthand experience with this. He’s really the spirit of the Kohaku River, but he can’t escape the spirit world because he’s forgotten his name. Near the end of the movie, Chihiro realizes she met Haku several years before when he saved her from drowning in the Kohaku River. Now, Chihiro says, the river has been filled up to make way for apartment buildings.

Harnessing the power of rivers

Japan is a beautiful country full of mountains, lakes, and streams, though its rivers are known for being shallow and short due to the country’s mountainous topography. Rivers hold historical significance for supplying drinking water and for creating alluvial plains, which are perfect environments for growing rice. But in modern times, Japan builds a lot of hydroelectric dams on rivers to generate power.

This is common practice all over the world. Where I grew up in the United States, I lived near the Buford Dam just north of Atlanta, Georgia. And while it doesn’t generate electricity, it does hold back water from the Chattahoochee River to create Lake Lanier, a giant reservoir that supplies drinking water to Metro Atlanta. Out West, we have the famous Hoover Dam, which straddles the Nevada-Arizona border on the Colorado River.

This giant hydroelectric dam supplies power to nearly 8 million people across Southern California, Southern Nevada, and Arizona. But even it pales in comparison to a hydroelectric dam in China called the Three Gorges Dam, which is located in the Yangtze River Basin. The Three Gorges Dam cost $31 billion to build, and it produces roughly eight times the electricity of the Hoover Dam.

Oh, and it also holds the unique distinction of being both the world’s biggest dam and the world’s biggest power station. The reservoir it created is bigger than Lake Superior in the American Midwest. It’s extremely difficult to overstate the sheer enormity of this dam.

As you can imagine, the Three Gorges Dam didn’t come without resistance from scientists and environmentalists who were concerned about the potentially devastating effects the project could have on the local environment. Not to mention the effects it would have on the 31 million or so people who lived in the area.

According to a Scientific American article from 2008, construction of the dam required about 1.2 million people scattered across two cities and 116 towns to relocate, and scientists were concerned that building the dam would cause an increase of landslides and waterborne diseases, which would further impact the people who didn’t have to relocate.

These fears turned out to be true after construction of the dam was complete. The Chinese state-owned China Yangtze Three Gorges Development Corporation began raising the water level in 2003, triggering a landslide that created waves big enough to kill 14 people. Years later, increased pressure on the land from raising and lowering the water level led to a landslide that swallowed a bus, killing 30 people.

At one point in 2007, residents of a nearby village watched as a giant crack in the earth spread 655 feet wide just behind their homes. The crack was so huge that concerns for public safety led Chinese officials to evacuate the town, forcing villagers to camp out in a mountain tunnel for three months.

The worst part of all of this is that landslides were only part of the problem. Building the Three Gorges Dam also led to decreased rainfall and water shortages in other cities and towns, and building the reservoir caused great harm to endangered species of plants and animals in the extremely biodiverse areas surrounding the Yangtze River.

But fixing these problems won’t be as simple as demolishing the dam and trying to put everything back the way it was before. China spent tens of billions of US dollars building this dam, and tearing it down would surely be just as destructive as building it in the first place. Plus, the Three Gorges Dam was, at the time of its construction, an important piece in China’s plan to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

China relies heavily on coal for electricity generation, and the Three Gorges Dam was a huge effort to source more electricity from hydro, which is a renewable energy source. Cutting reliance on coal is important, but I think—and I’m sure you would agree—that China didn’t go about this in the best way with the Three Gorges Dam project.

No Face and self-destructive greed

We’ve already talked about the environmental implications of the Stink Spirit and Haku, but I can’t help but thinking of another character here. And honestly, what would a discussion of Spirited Away be without mentioning one of its most iconic characters: No Face.

No Face comes to the bathhouse after the Stink Spirit leaves. It’s been raining for a long time, and Chihiro sees him outside in the garden. She feels sorry for him, so she lets him in.

Now, just after No Face enters the bathhouse, Chihiro has to attend to a sick Haku, so she doesn’t really get to know anything about No Face. But No Face almost immediately starts wreaking havoc, offering the bathhouse staff huge amounts of gold nuggets for all the food they can bring him. In the process, he actually eats several staff members.

The bathhouse staff remain undeterred by this, and they keep bringing him food to get more gold. When Chihiro finally returns and tames No Face, all the gold turns into mud. The bathhouse staff were risking getting eaten alive for a kind of fool’s gold.

I thought of this when reading about the Three Gorges Dam because the No Face incident seems like the perfect metaphor for what happened in China. Some people see an opportunity for wealth and power, and even though it will cost others their lives, they decide to keep building, keep bringing more resources to feed the monster. We aren’t quite there yet, but what will happen when all the gold we get from projects like the Three Gorges Dam turn to mud, so to speak? Will it have been worth it?

Chihiro’s relationship with Haku

Before we wrap up our discussion, I want to go back to Chihiro’s relationship with Haku. Yes, Chihiro winds up saving Haku by remembering his name, but Haku actually helped Chihiro remember her name first.

In the beginning of the movie, just after Chihiro gets the bathhouse job and Yubaba gives her her new same, Sen, Haku reminds her of her real name and warns her never to forget it. Frightened, Chihiro confesses she had already forgotten her real name and thanks Haku for reminding her.

This is significant because of who Haku really is, the spirit of the Kohaku River. And whether you believe in kami or stink spirits or animism in general, there’s no denying that what we do to the natural world has consequences, and these consequences can be dire. Water is precious for its life-sustaining and purifying qualities, but when we pollute it, it can become a source of disease and destruction.

We see this with the Stink Spirit and No Face, but Haku shows us how water and nature in general give back to us. Chihiro only knows Haku’s real name because he saved her from drowning as a young girl. And Chihiro may have even forgotten her name if Haku hadn’t reminded her.

This is what the natural world does for us. It provides us with the resources we need to live, and it even helps us remember who we really are. As humans, it’s easy to forget our identities amid our grand aspirations and innovative new ideas, but nature brings us back down to earth, so to speak, reminding us of our place in the universe. In a way, it helps us to remember what makes us human to begin with.

In terms of climate change, Chihiro’s relationship with Haku shows us that if we care enough and try hard enough, we can save the things we love. We’ll need all the help we can get along the way, sure, but sometimes saving someone or something starts with remembering their name—who they are and who they’re supposed to be.

[music: “Cold Descent” by Forrest Brown]

That’s it for our discussion of Spirited Away. If you like what you heard today and want to learn more, visit our website at storiesforearth.com for more episodes, articles, and recommendations for further reading.

If you got real value from today’s show, please consider supporting us through Patreon so we can keep doing it. You can find us at patreon.com/storiesforearth.

Until next time, I’m Forrest Brown. Thanks for listening.

Recommendations

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Film: Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind from Hayao Miyazaki

Film: Princess Mononoke from Hayao Miyazaki

→ Buy the Blu Ray on Bookshop from $29.95 (affiliate)

Film: The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness from Mami Sunada

Article: “Animating child activism: Environmentalism and class politics in Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fox’s Fern Gully (1992)” by Michelle J. Smith and Elizabeth Parsons

Essay: “The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki: A Retrospective on Four Fantastical Worlds” by Isaac Yuen in Orion Magazine

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The post “Spirited Away” from Hayao Miyazaki appeared first on Stories for Earth.

Octavia Butler wasn’t setting out to prophesy when she wrote Parable of the Talents and its prequel, Parable of the Sower. She was trying to warn us of what the future could look like if we don’t take drastic efforts to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

But today, it’s hard not to get chills reading this supposed work of fiction. Parable of the Talents depicts a president who campaigned on the slogan “Make America great again,” and it shows the ocean reclaiming America’s coastal cities. There are even concentration camps set up where children are separated from their parents and put up for adoption. Sound familiar?

Thankfully, not everything in this book has become a reality yet, but based off what Butler has accurately predicted so far, I think it’s wise to heed her warning. Her book has a lot to teach us, from how to resist violent and oppressive forces, to how to adapt to a changing world, to how to show compassion towards others through hard times. By taking these lessons with us, we can work to save our planet and become more resilient at the same time.

Summary of environmental themes in “Parable of the Talents”

Parable of the Talents is an expansive novel, covering a variety of different themes. But for the sake of this article, I’ll focus on the themes that I believe are the most relevant to the climate crisis.

• Chaos: Two of the main characters, Lauren and Marc, both agree that the universe is chaotic, but they choose to respond to this fact in very different ways. Marc believes chaos is not the natural or intended state of the universe but the consequence of sin. According to Marc’s worldview, belief and faith in God are the only ways we can hope to put chaos in order. Lauren sees chaos more as a neutral, objective phenomenon. To Lauren, the universe being chaotic is no more punishment for moral failure than the sky being blue. Lauren might say, “Chaos is all around us and there’s nothing we can do to change that, so the best use of our time is learning how to adapt to it.”

Also read: Parable of the Sower and Climate Change

• The importance of purpose: Lauren recognizes that without purpose, humanity tears itself apart. Especially in the face of what seems to be certain extinction, people need meaning in their lives to go on and work together. When people feel that their lives are meaningless, they give up and succumb to death or violence.
• How we construct meaning: This book offers four different perspectives on how humanity can create meaning for itself in relation to climate change. Lauren thinks humans should explore outer space and colonize other worlds to preserve our species. Marc believes people should have faith in a higher power like God to give order to the chaos of our lives. Bankhole advocates for taking care of the sick and injured to restore the earth. Larkin (or Asha) seems to suggest that stories can give meaning to our lives so that we can rebuild or change the world.
• Remaking the world: Near the end of the book, Lauren tells Len that history repeats itself in destructive cycles. These cycles don’t only kill untold numbers of people, they also have a devastating effect on our natural environment. And of course, we are part of the natural environment. Lauren proposes that the only way to live in harmony with nature is to recognize these cycles and break them, once and for all. To do this, we must rebuild society from the ground-up. This is lengthy, difficult work that will take hundreds—maybe even thousands—of years to finish. This work may never be done, but in order to survive, humans must attempt it.

Analysis of environmental themes in “Parable of the Talents”

It’s hard to identify pure so-called environmental themes in Parable of the Talents because Octavia Butler addresses climate change as an intersectional issue. But that doesn’t mean Butler shies away from getting at the heart of the crisis. Rather, I would argue that Octavia Butler’s message is all the more effective for taking a subversive approach.

This may seem like an odd comparison, but I liken the way Octavia Butler talks about climate change to the way scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann thinks the Old Testament prophets talked about the big issues of their time. Or rather, the ways they didn’t talk about the big issues of their time.

In what might be his best-known work, The Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann argues that prophets “…nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” Brueggemann says prophets achieve this through poetic language, or through what he calls elusive language.

I don’t mean to say that Octavia Butler was a prophet sent by the God of the Bible—she identified as an atheist from the age of 12. However, she did think religion has a role to play in life and that it can be used as a tool for good. Her decision to make the character Lauren Olamina the founder of a religion called Earthseed is a prime example of this belief.

Lauren communicates the tenets of her faith through poetry. These poems express a number of different ideas, but the main idea Lauren always comes back to is “God is change.” On the surface, Lauren writes about how we should respond to chaos, why we need purpose, how we should shape our meaning as a species, and how we can remake the world, but deep down, she’s really writing about how humans should adapt to Earth’s changing climate.

Similarly, Walter Brueggemann often points to the way Martin Luther King, Jr. used poetic language—especially in his “I Have a Dream” speech—to talk about civil rights. In an interview with Krista Tippet on the On Being podcast, Brueggemann said:

“I think at his best [Martin Luther King, Jr.] was a biblical poet. If you just think of ‘I Have a Dream,’ it just kind of soared away. He wasn’t really talking about enacting a civil rights bill, except that he was. But it was language that was out beyond the quarrels that we do.”

In this way, we might also think of Lauren Olamina as a prophet of sorts. We might even think of Octavia Butler herself as a prophet, given that she actually penned the words Lauren wrote in her journals. Parable of the Talents may not talk about climate change in the explicit terms of sea level rise, food insecurity, and ocean acidification that we’re used to hearing on the news, but it does talk about climate change by providing alternatives to the dominant culture’s perception and consciousness of our relationship with nature.

Discover more stories that can teach us about responding to climate change

This article concludes our two-part series on Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler, but there are many more stories about climate change to explore. Subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts to get notified when we release a new episode every month.

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The post “Parable of the Talents” And Climate Change: Summary And Analysis Of Environmental Themes appeared first on Stories for Earth.

The second installment of the incomplete Parable trilogy, Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler picks up where Parable of the Sower left off. Now that Lauren, Bankhole, and the rest of their party have successfully made it to Northern California, it’s time to get to work on establishing their community, a small communal-style town called Acorn.

Lauren continues writing about Earthseed, but her vision is interrupted by the rise of a far-right, Christian fundamentalist nationalist president named Jarret Donner. Over the course of many turbulent years, Lauren remains determined to spread Earthseed to help correct the course of history.

Overview

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler (buy on Bookshop from $15.63) is the sequel to Parable of the Sower and the second book in the Parable duology. Originally intended to be the second book of a trilogy, Octavia Butler unfortunately passed away before she finished writing the next and final book. This book picks up where Parable of the Sower left off, telling the story of Lauren Olamina, the founder of a religion called Earthseed, during the early days of Acorn and in the years that follow its fall. Written as a series of journal entries from the perspectives of Lauren, her brother Marc, her husband Bankhole, and her daughter Larkin, Parable of the Talents is an epic conclusion to the Parable story that presents readers with a powerful vision of what humans can accomplish.

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Table of contents

1. Plot summary
2. Chaos: to embrace or fear
3. Different ideas about humanity’s purpose
4. Religion, community, and belief
5. Ideas can be dangerous

“Parable of the Talents” plot summary

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Today, we’re going to be taking a look at a book called Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler. If you listened to us the last time, we talked about the prequel to this book, which is called Parable of the Sower. And if Parable of the Sower is about our main character Lauren Olamina discovering the, depending on who you ask, cult or philosophy called Earthseed, Parable of the Talents is about her sort of like…the early days of the church, if you will, the early days of Earthseed as she’s trying to get it off the ground. It’s about persecution of the practitioners of Earthseed, and it ultimately covers when Earthseed becomes successful. Much like Parable of the Sower, this book is a collection of journals. However, instead of just being journals from Lauren, this book is actually told from the perspective of four people, which sometimes can be a little bit confusing.

So it features writing from, of course Lauren from her books Earthseed, Stories from Other Worlds, and a few others that are referenced throughout the book. It also features journal entries from her daughter Larkin, who kind of serves as an editor of this collection of journals that we have to tell the book, to tell the story of the book. It also features journal entries and excerpts from a book written by Lauren’s younger brother Marcus who goes by Marc. He was kind of a minor character in the first book, but he plays a really big role in the second book, Parable of the Talents. And then lastly, we have some writings from Lauren’s husband, Bankhole. So a lot of people talk about Parable of the Talents now because of a certain slogan that I am not so fond of.

You may have heard it before. It’s make “America great again.” Yes, Octavia Butler actually predicted the rise of Donald Trump. Well, maybe not so much. There is, to be clear, a far-right nationalist president who wins the election in the book. His name is Jarret Donner, and he does run on the campaign slogan, “Make America great again,” which is super weird considering this book came out in 1998 I believe. It almost kind of feels like she predicted a lot of, like we were saying with the last book, it almost kind of feels like she predicted a lot of what we’re seeing today. You know, there’s refugee crises, there is this far-right nationalist president, we have like a resurgence in hate crimes, white nationalism—slavery actually kind of comes back through indentured servitude, and then we actually do have real slavery in this book that we see up close.

It was kind of mentioned in the first book, but in this book we actually do see slavery firsthand, and it’s very, very violent, very realistic, and has a lot of echoes of the enslavement of black people in America for centuries up until, you know, the end of the 19th century. So we have this character who’s similar to Donald Trump. Jarret Donner is the name of the president in the book. He is definitely different. He does have an authoritarian personality. He is a far right nationalist, but he’s also a Christian fundamentalist who thinks that America is in such a bad state because it has strayed too far from God. Which I don’t really think you could make the case that Trump is like that, but maybe if you mixed Trump with Mike Pence and threw in a little bit of Ted Cruz, you’d have someone who’s sort of like Jarret Donner.

But regardless of the book, kind of being famous for predicting, if you will, “make America great again,” Jarret Donner himself doesn’t really play that big of a role in the book directly. What we see more of, which is, I think, probably more accurate to our present day reality, is these kind of extremist offshoots of President Donner’s, I guess philosophy, if you will. And they kind of wreak havoc. In my mind, the parallel to modern times is the increase in white nationalist hate crimes that we’re seeing now. I think especially of Charlottesville, Virginia and the Neo-Nazi rally that happened there that ended up in some protesters being killed. So yeah, it’s kind of scary stuff, especially to be reading this nowadays. But we’re going to be focusing on more of the environmental themes of this book, which all this kind of does tie into, but just we’re going to put a pin in that and come back to it in a little bit.

For now though, I want to go through a plot summary of the book. I’ve already given away some spoilers, but I will say it now: if you’re one of those people who really, really hates spoilers I would turn the podcast off right now. Go read this book. It might take you a minute. It’s roughly 400 or so pages long. I kind of marathon read it and it still took me a little while to get through it, but it’s a really, really great book. I’d highly recommend that you read it. But to go through sort of high points on the plot the book starts with Acorn. It’s kind of an established community now. It’s thriving, and Lauren and her fellow citizens are taking in a bunch of people from the road and rescuing people and adopting children who have been orphaned. And on one of these trips, Lauren is actually helping to look for the little sister of a boy that she’s recently rescued.

And while they’re off looking for this little girl, she accidentally finds her brother Marcus, who I already said that we saw in the first book, but never really knew that well. But in this book it actually turns out he survived. Lauren previously thought he was dead, but he’s been sold into sex slavery. He’s got a collar on him and Lauren finds him at one of these like squatter camps where like a pimp, I think his name is Cougar, is basically pimping out these children to people. So Lauren buys Marc out of sex slavery. She saves him and takes him back to Acorn where she is hoping to raise him as a good little Earthseed—I don’t know what you call them—Earthseed person to grow up in Acorn and live there for the rest of his life with Lauren.

Who as far as we know, is his only remaining family at this point. That doesn’t necessarily happen. Marc actually, once he kind of starts to recover a little bit from his trauma, he actually kind of clashes with Earthseed. He thinks it’s a cult, he thinks it’s at odds with what the Bible teaches and he actually ends up joining Christian America and leaving Acorn. So Christian America is kind of the sect of Christianity that President Jarret Donner has created. There’s like the church of Christian America. It’s this very nationalist version of evangelical fundamentalist Christianity that, if you’re asking me, we kind of already do have in this country, but he, President Donner, he actually makes it an official branch of the church and he is the head of the church as well as the president of the United States of America.

So Marc leaves Acorn to become a minister in Christian America. We’ll talk more about that in a little bit. And meanwhile, while all of this is going on, Lauren finds out that she’s pregnant with a baby girl, but she and Bankhole, her husband, start arguing a lot about what this means for their future, whether or not they should stay in Acorn or if it’s actually best if they leave and go move to a more well-established community that’s safe or that’s going to be more stable and that’s going to offer a better future for their daughter. Bankhole wants to move. There is a coastal community that’s very wealthy and well-protected called Halstead. And they actually want to hire Bankhole to be their doctor, so Bankhole wants to move there. But Lauren is very invested in Earthseed.

She believes that Acorn has the potential to be a safe and good place to raise her daughter and she doesn’t want to leave. She’s worked so hard to make this a reality, and the idea of leaving Acorn behind is completely incompatible with her thinking. So this actually doesn’t turn out so well for Lauren. An extremist offshoot of Christian America called the Crusaders invades Acorn and they basically turn it into a concentration camp, but they call it a re-education camp. They think that Earthseed is a cult and that the people who live there are heathens and that they worship trees and they basically think Earthseed is like this revival of paganism or druidism. And they enslave everyone who lived at Acorn if they haven’t killed them already, they put collars on them and they force them to work. And a lot of people die as a result of that.

As this happens, Lauren’s daughter Larkin is stolen from her and she’s sent off to live somewhere else. Lauren doesn’t know where she is sent to. We find out later that she is adopted by some parents in Seattle where she’s renamed Asha Vere. We’ll talk more about that in just a moment. And then Lauren and everyone else are kind of left to be re-educated at Acorn, which has been renamed a Camp Christian. So everyone who survives the attack on Acorn is turned into slaves. They get collars put on them. We see this in Parable of the Sower, but collars control people, they can be used as torture devices without, you know, the enslaver really having to touch you. If you’re wearing a collar and you try to run away, you essentially are tortured to death. And then it’s just this horrible way to control people. Like collars are this new kind of dystopian technology that keeps people in slavery.

So the men and the women are worked sometimes to death. And then the women are also routinely and frequently raped. During this time, Bankhole dies, sadly, kind of unceremoniously. It just kind of happens one day and Lauren doesn’t really even see it happen. It’s mentioned that he dies, Lauren sees him get thrown into a mass grave, and there’s not really a ton of explanation given as to how Bankhole was killed. But I think what happened, if I remember correctly, is that he was essentially worked to death and was later buried in a mass grave with a few other people. So a landslide, or a mudslide, rather, destroys the control unit for the collars the enslaved members of Acorn are wearing. This all happens one night. A mudslide comes, knocks out the control unit, and then Lauren leads a kind of mutiny, a retaking of Acorn, and they kill all the Crusaders and send the ones who they didn’t kill running away.

So after this happens, Lauren realizes it’s not safe for Acorn to exist right now. So she actually, this is very painful for her to do, but she dissolves Acorn and sends everyone kind of scattered all over the country. And then she begins the long work of looking for her daughter Larkin who has been renamed Asha. So while all of this is happening, Lauren’s brother Marc has become a famous pastor in the Christian America church and he’s actually looking after Asha from afar, but he lies to Lauren repeatedly and tells her that he doesn’t know where her daughter is when in fact he knows that Asha has been adopted by a man and a woman from Seattle, and she’s actually being raised in the Christian America Church there. So during this time, Lauren kind of goes into hiding. There’s this period where she works as like a tutor and a teacher.

She starts using a different name, and she I think lives in a community in Southern California. All the while she’s kind of like pestering Marc and trying to follow him wherever he moves to see if he has some more information about where her daughter might be since he is a high ranking minister in Christian America. So Lauren never really learns about Asha. She winds up meeting this girl named Len who is walking North to find her family in Alaska, which is by now a separate country. So she’s going to walk towards the Canadian border and presumably walking all the way to Alaska. She doesn’t really care if she dies on the way there. She’s kind of lost all hope by this point. But Lauren meets Len and she kind of finds a companion in her. She starts talking to her about Earthseed and they eventually become traveling partners.

Lauren decides she’s going to go look for Asha or Larkin as Lauren still believe she’s called in the Pacific Northwest. So Lauren and Len start walking North and then they kind of just stop in Portland, they never really make it all the way to Seattle, but Lauren finds a foothold for starting a new Earthseed community there. There’s kind of a wealthy community of people who are receptive to the ideas that Lauren has. And this is really when Earthseed starts to take off and become a legitimate, successful religion as opposed to just this kind of fringe cult that people look down on. So by the end of the book, Lauren has become very successful as the leader of Earthseed. She’s being flown all around the country to talk to different universities and other organizations about her ideas. All the while she’s never found Asha and she’s sort of given up on finding her though she obviously would still love to see her again.

Around this time, Marc finally spills the beans and tells Asha who her mother is. And then Asha goes to find Lauren so they can finally be reunited. When they do finally meet., I think it’s an upstate New York, it’s not a happy reunion. Asha holds a serious grudge against Lauren for never finding her. And she kind of feels that Lauren has prioritized Earthseed over her and she can’t ever forgive her for that. Asha in her mind thinks that Lauren loves Earthseed more than she loves her own daughter, and that’s just kind of a, a wound that never really heals. So we’re left with this kind of sad resolution at the end of the book. Lauren feels confident that she did the right thing by working on Earthseed while also spending a lot of time trying to find her daughter and traveling all over the country in search of her, but Asha still feels burned by Lauren.

She never really forgives her for working on Earthseed more than on finding her. And we’re kind of left this with this sort of unresolved ending where Earthseed is taking off like the destiny of, you know, humanity taking root among the stars is becoming more of a reality every day. And Asha is finishing compiling this sort of anthology of her mother’s journals after her death. So now that we’ve covered the plot summary of Parable of the Talents, let’s take a look at some of the themes that this book gets into. There’s a lot of them, and I’m probably not going to get to cover all of them. I’m going to do my best at covering the ones that I think are the most important. There’s four of them. The first theme that I think is really readily apparent from the very beginning of the book is sort of this response to chaos.

Chaos: to embrace or fear

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So in the first book, there’s really, there’s kind of this dichotomy presented of two ways that you can respond to chaos. You can respond in fear to chaos. You can, you know, fight back against it and you can lash out against chaos, try to, I guess bring back the old days in a way. Or you can do as Lauren proposes, which is being open to chaos and sort of folding in with it while at the same time trying to shape the reality you want to see. In Parable of the Talents, we still have this dichotomy, but it’s fleshed out a little bit more and we definitely get to see way more of the first response to chaos, which is the sort of fighting back against it, which is what Marc adopts. But first, just to kind of show you the contrast.

There are two really good quotes that I think show this very well. The first quote is from Lauren. This is a verse of Earthseed. It says, “God is Change / And hidden within Change / Is surprise, delight, / Confusion, pain, / Discovery, loss, / Opportunity, and growth. / As always, / God exists / To shape / And to be shaped.” So here we see this kind of openness to change this adaptability that Lauren proposes. But conversely, we also have this verse from Marc. He writes in his book called Warrior: “The child in each of us / Knows paradise. / Paradise is home. / Home as it was / Or home as it should have been. / Paradise is one’s own place, / One’s own people, / One’s own world, / Knowing and known, / Perhaps even / Loving and loved. / Yet every child / Is cast from paradise— / Into growth and destruction, / Into solitude and new community, / Into vast, ongoing / Change.”

So we both have change as a central focal point for these two different philosophies. Lauren sees change as something that’s inevitable. Instead of fighting against it, we should learn how to use it for our own purposes. Marc sees change as something that’s foreign. It’s unnatural, it’s dangerous, it’s evil. Larkin or Asha actually does a really good job of kind of summarizing Marc’s attitudes toward change later. A couple chapters after that last quote, she writes, “My Uncle Marc, on the other hand, hated the chaos. It wasn’t one of the faces of his god. It was unnatural. It was demonic. He hated what it had done to him, and he needed to prove that he was not what it had forced him to become. No Christian minister could ever hate sin as much as Marc hated chaos. His gods were order, stability, safety, control.”

And this is really interesting. I think it’s cool to Octavia Butler does this because she doesn’t just present Lauren’s way of thinking as like the end all be all response that you should have to change. She actually shows some genuine concerns that I think all of us have about change and chaos. Chaos is scary. It’s, it doesn’t feel natural to us at all. Like humans spend their entire lives trying to avoid chaos. We spend our entire lives shaping meaning out of chaos so that we don’t have to deal with it anymore. So it’s very normal and human, I think, for Marc to be scared of chaos and change like he is. And I would say that Lauren’s view is actually the more unnatural view. It requires a little bit more disciplined thought and it requires more of like a concerted effort to not just respond out of gut instinct when confronted with change. In Lauren’s philosophy, there’s a lot more practice that has to be done.

Different ideas about humanity’s purpose

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You have to really condition yourself to respond to change with openness instead of fear. And on this note we get to our second theme, which is kind of some difference of ideas about what our purpose as a species should be. There are four different views here. They are all told from the four different perspectives of the people who wrote journals that constitute this book. We have Lauren, we have Marc, we have Asha/Larkin, and we also have Bankhole. So starting with Lauren, Lauren’s idea obviously is the destiny, which is the destiny of Earthseed. She says it’s to take root among the stars. At the beginning of the book, Earthseed is doing great. Acorn is thriving. They even have this armored truck so that they can safely leave the community to trade with other towns. But Lauren’s beliefs are put to the test when Acorn is taken over by the Crusaders and becomes Camp Christian.

Lauren’s still comforted by Earthseed, but she doesn’t really try to gloss over the fact that life still is really hard and there is still a lot of awful things that happen. And just because you acknowledge that God is change and that change is inevitable, doesn’t always make things better. She writes, “Earthseed prepares you to live in the world that is and try to shape the world that you want. But none of it is really easy.” So for awhile it seems like Lauren has given up on spreading Earthseed after she retakes Acorn from the Crusaders, but at the end of the book, she meets some wealthy people in the Pacific Northwest, in Portland who are receptive to her ideas. After this happens, Earthseed grows into a major movement with lots of money behind it. A lot of which Lauren ends up spending trying to get humanity closer to the destiny.

Because of this, she doesn’t really find Larkin/Asha until she’s much older, when she’s traveling all over the country speaking about Earthseed at various universities and such. So while Lauren’s idea of purpose is humans literally leaving earth to go plant colonies on other planets, this has shaped her life. It’s given her a reason to keep going, to keep pushing for Earthseed, even though it seemed like all hope was lost. It has also sort of robbed her of her relationship with her daughter, and at the end of the book Lauren is sort of portrayed as this sad, desperate, obsessed old lady who will never have the kind of relationship that she wants to have with her estranged daughter. The second I guess, view of purpose that I want to focus in on is Bankhole’s. Bankhole doesn’t really get to say too much in this book.

There are a few passages that Asha includes of his writing, but for the most part it’s all Lauren, Asha, and Marc. But Bankhole’s view I think is worth considering as well. He is advocating that Lauren leave Acorn so that they can go live in Halstead, which is the coastal community I mentioned before. It’s really wealthy. It’s got natural barriers. It’s protected by mountains in the East, so that’s really hard for them to be invaded from the East. And then on the West obviously is the Pacific Ocean. So very difficult to invade from there. And this is kind of where Bankhole’s profession comes into play. Bankhole, as we’ve mentioned before, is a doctor. He heals people. So Lauren is interested in shaping the world into what she wants it to be. Bankhole’s a little bit more interested in putting the pieces back together.

He wants to repair the damage that’s been done, which is natural. He’s a doctor, he wants to heal the world, so he wants to go take care of people like Lauren does, but he doesn’t necessarily have this huge grandiose vision like she does. He’s a little bit more pragmatic. He wants to focus more on like day to day, immediate security and make sure that they will have a safe future. In the end, he was actually right. Acorn gets destroyed and they would have been much safer if they moved to Halstead. That being said, he also dies at Camp Christian. So I don’t want to read too much into this, but perhaps this was Octavia Butler saying this isn’t necessarily the right way to move forward, though it is obviously understandable to see where he’s coming from. The most at odds with Lauren’s philosophy of purpose is Marc’s.

So Lauren says at the beginning of the book, “Consider— / We are born / Not with purpose, / But with potential.” And Marc is kind of the converse of that. He says, we are born with a destiny. Our destiny is to go to heaven and the thing that we’re working on is not some elaborate idealistic vision of leaving earth. We are working on our eternal souls. We already have eternity at the end. We don’t have to create it for ourselves. It’s already there. We just have to follow what God wants us to do. So according to the journals of Asha, Marc does not like the idea of God being change as we talked about. Marc sees the universe as chaotic and that scares him to death, though to Marc, the only way to escape this is to cling to God because God is what restores everything to its right state, which is order.

Marc agrees with Lauren on the fact that chaos is something we have to live with on a daily basis. But to Marc the consolation or the light at the end of the tunnel to all this chaos is heaven, not leaving earth and going to start colonies on another world. There’s a really good quote from Marc that explains all of this. He says, “If you’re looking for immortality in outer space, you’ve been misled. You already have an immortal soul, and where that soul spends eternity is up to you.” And he kind of goes on from here to liken Earthseed’s aspiration for colonizing space to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. If you’re not familiar with this story of the Tower of Babel, this is a story from the Old Testament in the Bible. There were a group of people who decided that they wanted to build a tower that was so tall that they could reach the gods.

They thought that at the end of this construction project, they would be on par with the gods and they would be all powerful. So they start to build it. All these people congregate to help build the Tower of Babel. Everyone speaks one language. They’re all working on this together. But God sees this as pride and God is like, “Oh, these people are trying to usurp my throne. Essentially I’m going to scramble this construction project and I’m going to confuse their languages so that they can’t do this anymore.” And as the story goes, this is kind of when humans all get a different language and they’re scattered all over the face of the earth because of their pride in trying to become God. So to Marc, Lauren trying to lead Earthseed in leaving the earth to go colonize other planets is akin to Lauren trying to lead people and becoming God themselves, which is obviously blasphemy.

While Lauren’s idea of purpose is very interesting, I think to me the most interesting vision of purpose in this novel actually comes from Asha or Larkin as Lauren named her. Asha is interesting because she’s very critical of Lauren. Throughout the book, she’s obviously very resentful that Lauren decided to focus more, or as it seems, decided to focus more on Earthseed than on finding her. And she’s very pragmatic. She’s very focused on like, “Oh, we shouldn’t be trying to leave the earth and start a new world on other planets when there is so much wrong here that needs to be worked on.” She has this idea, but at the same time, she designs virtual reality games, which are an escape from everyday life. So there’s this kind of interesting paradox going on with Asha. She’s very intelligent. She has a PhD. She’s hired by this company that makes this product called Dreamasks, which are sort of like virtual reality, except instead of essentially being set loose in a playpen like fake world you’re given these storylines that you follow where you can fully identify with different characters.

So it’s kind of like novels, like this almost seems like a metaphor for literature to me when I read this book. So on the one hand, Asha is very critical of Lauren for wanting to leave earth and start colonizing other planets, but at the same time she’s creating these sort of escapist stories for people to retreat to. And also here I think it’s important to talk about Asha’s name because we mentioned that she’s no longer Larkin, but we never really gave an explanation for this. Her full name becomes Asha Vere after she’s adopted by her parents in Seattle and this was a character from a Dreamask game that she had when she was a kid. She does a really good job of explaining it herself. She writes, “Asha Vere was a tall, beautiful, Amazon-like, Black Christian-American woman who ran around rescuing people from heathen cults, anti-Christian plots, and squatter camp pimps…Strong female characters were out of fashion in the fiction of the time. President Jarret and his followers in Christian America believed that one of the things that had gone wrong with the country was the intrusion of women into ‘men’s business.’…In fact, I’ve discovered that Asha Vere was originally intended to be a man, Aaron Vere, but a Dreamask executive convinced his colleagues that it was time for a hit series starring a tough-tender, Christian American female. He was right.”

So out of everyone’s idea of purpose in the novel Asha is actually kind of the least vocal about what that looks like. She creates these Dreamasks that let people escape to other worlds, but we never really see what those look like. So we’re kind of left to speculate that perhaps Asha’s vision of purpose is not so much escaping from reality as it is using stories to inspire you to improve the world that you find yourself in, which I think is super appropriate for what we’re talking about on this podcast actually, because that’s kind of what I think the entire purpose of stories is.

And I think Octavia Butler herself would probably agree with that. Being a novelist who wrote these very prescient novels that seemed to give us instructions on how to make our own world a better place. So in this regard, I think Asha is actually one of the more interesting characters in the novel and who has a very unique perspective that’s maybe the most relevant to our immediate lives. So these last two themes I’m not going to spend as much time on. They’re still important, but we are kind of running short on time here and I want to make sure that we get to them.

Religion, community, and belief

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The first of them is religion or community or belief, I guess. It’s this idea that we all need a purpose. We will create purpose out of nothing and we kind of come up with these crazy belief systems to some of us these are totally normal and rational while others seem completely foreign to us and just totally outlandish.

But we create these belief systems to give ourselves purpose because if we don’t have purpose, we totally self-destruct. There’s this quote from in my copy of the book, page 216 this is Lauren as she’s in one of her arguments with Bankhole. She says, in reference to the destiny of humanity taking root among the stars, she says:

“We need the stars, Bankhole. We need purpose! We need the image the Destiny gives us of ourselves as a growing, purposeful species. We need to become the adult species that the Destiny can help us become! If we’re to be anything other than smooth dinosaurs who evolve, specialize, and die, we need the stars. That’s why the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. I know you don’t want to hear verses right now, but that one is…a major key to us, to human beings, I mean. When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.”

Then she stops for a moment and goes on. She says, “People seem to be willing to believe all kinds of stupid things—magic, the supernatural, witchcraft…But I couldn’t get them to believe in something real, something that they could make real with their own hands. Now…now most of the people here accept the Destiny. They believe me and follow me…and damned if I don’t worry even more.”

So while Lauren does believe wholeheartedly in the Destiny or the purpose that she’s sort of constructed for herself, she’s also kind of worried because people will sort of believe anything as long as it gives them a purpose. This obviously doesn’t detract from the importance of purpose, but it just means that we need to be really careful about what we allow ourselves to create for our own purpose.

Ideas can be dangerous

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That leads into the last thing I want to talk about, which is that ideas are dangerous things. This is best exemplified through when Lauren and the other members of Acorn are turned into slaves at Camp Christian. In fact, at the beginning of the chapter that introduces Camp Christian when Acorn is destroyed and turned into this re-education camp, Lauren writes some verses of Earthseed that are kind of very telling about this theme. She writes “When vision fails / Direction is lost./ When direction is lost / Purpose may be forgotten. / When purpose is forgotten / Emotion rules alone. / When emotion rules alone, / Destruction…destruction.”

It seems like she’s kind of writing this about the state of the country at the time. Like there’s this sort of loss of ideals with the the changing climate and all the destruction that that entails. But when this happens, people become desperate and they’re willing to believe anything really. And this is why it’s so easy for a sort of strong man politician like Jarret to take over, President Donner. He appeals directly to people’s emotions and that’s what they want. Like they’re just looking for some kind of purpose and he’s giving them that. It’s not a good purpose, but it’s still a purpose. At the end of the book, very close to the end of the book, Lauren is having a conversation with Len. She’s not really a major character. We don’t really even meet Len until the very end of the book.

But she is the, just as a reminder, she is the person that Lauren travels to Portland, Oregon with. But as Lauren’s talking to Len, she says:

“We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things have always been.”

She goes on to say, “We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them. And some of the new people who emerge from all this will develop new ways to cope. They’ll have to. That will break the old cycle, even if it’s only to begin a new one, a different one.

“Earthseed is about preparing to fulfill the Destiny. It’s about learning to live in partnership with one another in small communities, and at the same time, working out a sustainable partnership with our environment. It’s about treating education and adaptability is the absolute essentials that they are…It’s about a lot more than that, but those are the bones.”

So in response to dangerous ideas like the ones that President Donner is propagating or endorsing, Lauren thinks the only solution to this is the Destiny. This is the only thing that’s going to break this cycle. She admits that it may just create new cycles but at least we won’t be in this same ones of learning more about the physical universe but then building empires that just kill large amounts of people and lead to war. As the final note to all of this discussion about purpose, I think it’s good to leave on this one final thought. This is one of the very first quotes from the opening of the book. Lauren writes, “Consider— / We are born / Not with purpose, / But with potential.”

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This book tells the story of a young girl named Lauren Olamina who grows up in a town near Los Angeles in the mid-2020s. Climate change wrecked Lauren’s world, and it will take every bit of shrewdness and kindness for her to survive. Taking a closer look at Lauren’s story can help us as we brace for a world that may look very different in the coming decades.

What hyperempathy can teach us about the way we treat others

Early on in the book, we learn that Lauren suffers from a birth defect called hyperempathy. Hyperempathy forces a person with the condition to share in the pain and pleasures of others, and those born with it are called sharers.

At first, Lauren sees her condition as a curse, but as she encounters more and more human-caused suffering, she forms an appreciation for it. The ability to feel what others feel makes Lauren compassionate and leads her to help and protect those in need.

Also read: Parable of the Talents And Climate Change

In fact, Lauren eventually wishes more people were born with hyperempathy. She writes in her journal, “A biological conscience is better than no conscience at all.” If so many people seemed incapable of learning empathy, maybe the world would be better off if they were forced to feel it.

As natural disasters and various other humanitarian crises worsen in the years ahead, practicing empathy and compassion towards others will be crucial to our survival. While Lauren’s experience shows that empathizing with and being compassionate towards others is hard work, it may be one of the only actions we can take to preserve our humanity.

What Earthseed can teach us about resilience

In addition to having hyperempathy, Lauren also has many ideas about a religion she claims to have discovered. She calls this religion Earthseed and says its main tenet is “God is change.”

The God of Earthseed isn’t an actual entity or person like the Judeo-Christian God. Rather, Earthseed uses the term “God” to describe a fundamental and undeniable truth—in this case, change.

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According to the verses of Earthseed Lauren writes in her journal, change isn’t something to fear or fight. Instead, it’s to humanity’s best advantage to adapt with change and to learn resilience. This makes sense in a world like Lauren’s that undergoes so much rapid change, but it doesn’t mean people should be totally passive, either.

Lauren also writes that just as changes in the universe affect humans, humans also affect changes in the universe. This seems paradoxical, but through this philosophy, we can empower ourselves to adapt to a changing climate while simultaneously working to mitigate its destructive effects.

What Acorn can teach us about community (spoilers ahead)

At the end of the book, Lauren and her husband found a community in Northern California called Acorn. This is supposed to be an incubator for Lauren’s religion, but Acorn residents don’t have to subscribe to Earthseed to live there.

As long as newcomers treat others with respect and work for the good of the community, they can stay. This builds upon Lauren’s belief in compassion and creates an opportunity for Acorn residents to form order out of the chaos that surrounds them.

This is one small step towards restoring balance to Lauren’s world. As she writes in her journal, “Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals.” It’s often said that climate change intensifies the toughest challenges we already face. Remaining civilized by treating others with respect and resolving conflicts peacefully will help us work through these hardships without deteriorating into hysteria. It also teaches us how to be resilient.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), the biggest element contributing to resilience is loving and supportive relationships. In “The Road to Resilience,” the APA writes, “Relationships that create love and trust, provide role models and offer encouragement and reassurance help bolster a person’s resilience.”

Like Lauren, most of the people who come to live in Acorn have lost family members, sometimes their entire families. By joining a community of people that care for each other and work towards a common goal, Lauren and the other Earthseed residents begin to heal from their trauma.

Octavia Butler has much more to teach us

Parable of the Sower is a powerful book about what could happen if we don’t address climate change in time, but it doesn’t end there. Octavia Butler published a sequel to this book in 1998 called Parable of the Talents. It, too, contains many valuable lessons for helping us resist forces that try to oppress us and threaten our existence.

Stay tuned for our analysis of Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler, and be sure to subscribe to our podcast to stay up to date on new episodes.

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Regarded by many as the definitive cli-fi novel, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler imagines what our future could look like if we don’t take swift and appropriate action to mitigate climate change.

Overview

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (buy on Bookshop from $15.63) is a groundbreaking speculative fiction novel that tells the story of young Lauren Olamina as she journeys to Northern California to escape ecological and societal collapse in Southern California. Today, the book is heralded as one of the first major works of climate fiction or cli-fi. After Lauren’s town is destroyed by an outlaw group of drug addicts, she must learn to survive in a world reeling from the devastating effects of climate change. Along the way, Lauren starts a religion called Earthseed, forms a ragtag band of followers, and makes plans to found her own sustainable community in Northern California.

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Table of contents

1. Transcript
2. Who was Octavia Butler?
3. Plot summary of Parable of the Sower
4. Themes in Parable of the Sower
5. Recommendations

Transcript

I’m Forrest Brown, a writer and lover of stories, and you’re listening to Stories for Earth.

Welcome to Stories for Earth, a podcast about stories that can give us strength and resiliency in fighting the climate crisis. This is our first ever episode. I’m so glad that you’re out there listening, whoever and wherever you are.

Today, we’re already experiencing the effects of our climate’s destruction. And now that we are past the point of completely averting the climate crisis, I think we should be turning our attention to how we can emotionally prepare ourselves for the challenges and hardships that are coming our way.

We should, of course, also work on reversing the damage we’re doing to our environment, but we can’t ignore the emotional and psychological aspect of this work, either.

I personally have been depressed, anxious, and hopeless about our situation, and I know others, perhaps even you, feel or have felt this way too. This is something called “climate grief,” and it’s a very real thing.

I’ve been doing some research on this, and I think we aren’t talking about it enough. In the book Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change by psychologist Leslie Davenport, the author notes that suicide and depression rates skyrocket after natural disasters, disasters that will become more intense and common as the climate crisis worsens.

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I’ve heard the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg talk about getting extremely depressed when learning about the climate crisis. In fact, a lot of activists and scientists who work in this field often suffer from a sort of “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” a condition in which a moderate level of stress and dread about the future gradually wears them down.

As more and more everyday people such as myself become more aware of this crisis, they, too, will suffer from such conditions.

So what does all this have to do with stories? I think quite a lot, actually. Stories are the lens through which we see the world. We use stories to translate chaos into sense and meaning. I am a reader and a writer, not a psychologist or any other kind of licensed health professional, but think stories can help us here, like they do in so many other parts of life, and many academics and doctors agree.

A German environmental and cultural sociologist named Annika Arnold wrote a book called Climate Change and Storytelling that focuses on how stories and various narratives can help us fight the climate crisis.

In the introduction, Annika says, “As story-telling animals, we perceive facts, numbers, and urgent appeals that surround climate change inherently as a story.” She goes on to say, “…in order to make the fight against climate change a priority, climate advocates need to tell stories, to mobilize people and guide their actions.”

So, that’s exactly what I hope this podcast will be—a place where we can talk about stories that can help to mobilize us and guide our actions and thinking. We’ll focus a little less on the specific actions part and more on the thinking, emotional part.

We’ll talk about stories from authors who also grappled with issues like the climate crisis, natural disaster, persecution and hardship, rapid change, and more. These won’t just come from books—I think any kind of story told through any kind of medium can be powerful, so we’ll also look at movies, TV shows, video games, and who knows what else.

So, now that you hopefully have a firmer understanding of what this podcast is all about and we’ve finished our sort of “first day of school” syllabus reading and personal introductions, let’s get on to the story for our first episode: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler.

Who was Octavia Butler?

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I was first introduced to Octavia E. Butler as a freshman in college when her book, Kindred, was assigned as reading for an introductory class I took. I didn’t appreciate her at the time, but since then I’ve become a big fan of hers, especially after reading her near-future dystopian novel Parable of the Sower.

Octavia Butler was born Octavia Estelle Butler in Pasadena, California on June 22, 1947. She was an only child, and she grew up poor. Despite this, she went on to earn an associate of arts degree from Pasadena Community College and then she studied at Cal State in Los Angeles before going on to UCLA.

After college, she attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop, which is a prestigious training ground for many aspiring science fiction and fantasy writers. Butler started writing as a young child, around the age of eight or 10 years old, and she went on to win the Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, which, on the Charlie Rose Show, she refused to call a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” saying that if they really did hand those awards out to geniuses, she surely would not have won the award.

After her death, she was also awarded the PEN American Center Lifetime Achievement Award in writing. Today, we remember her as the first black female science fiction writer to rise to prominence. Octavia said of herself—this was a quote that she wrote, I found it inside of the front cover of Parable of the Sower—she said, “Who am I? I am a 37-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer, and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I’m comfortably asocial, a hermit, a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”

Unfortunately, Octavia Butler died a few years ago outside of her home near Seattle, Washington of a stroke at the age of 58.

Plot summary of “Parable of the Sower”

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WARNING: spoilers ahead

 So on the surface, Parable of the Sower is a book about the collapse of the United States. But really, it’s a book about climate change. And while that is a huge part of the story, it’s almost just kind of lurking in the background. I would say more than anything, the book is really about what humans are able to accomplish when they set their sights on something greater than themselves.

The book is set in the near future—the near future at the time of the book’s publishing. To us, not so far away now. It’s set in the mid-2020s in a dystopian world that’s been wrecked by climate change.

In this world, the US Federal Government has lost much of its control, state borders are closed off the same way national borders are today, and gangs of dangerous drug dealers rape and pillage towns and communities across the countryside, the hunger, desperate, and homeless steal and kill to survive, and a gang of people addicted to a drug called Pyro—which is a hallucinogen that drastically enhances a user’s high when looking at fire—attack communities to steal money for drugs before burning everything to the ground.

Our heroine is Lauren Olamina, a black girl growing up in Robledo, California, which is a walled community outside of Los Angeles. Though, walled for necessity, not because they were wealthy. Lauren is the daughter of a Baptist preacher and a college professor, and she keeps a journal which constitutes the book. In this journal, she describes her life experience and also a religion she says she discovered which she called Earthseed.

Another really interesting thing about Lauren is that she was born with a birth defect called hyperempathy. This was caused by an intelligence-enhancing drug her mom was taking during pregnancy. Hyperempathy forces her to share in the feelings of others, the good and the bad, though as you might imagine in the world Lauren is growing up in, it’s mostly just a lot of bad feelings.

We’ll talk more about Earthseed, Lauren’s religion, in just a moment, but for now, there are two main takeaways you need to know about the religion. These are the two main tenets of Earthseed:

1. God is change
2. The destiny of humanity is to take root among the stars

The story of Parable of the Sower is really the story as recorded by Lauren Olamina. Every entry begins with a verse of Earthseed before jumping into accounts of Lauren’s experience of living in a world that’s reeling from the devastating effects of climate change. These effects include:

• Massive wealth inequality
• Homelessness
• Lack of water
• Decreased access to education
• Epidemics of drug addiction
• Refugee crises
• A rise of far-right nationalist politics and Christian fundamentalist extremism

We’ll talk more about that in our second episode on the sequel to this book, which is called Parable of the Talents.

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

So Lauren grows up in a walled community in Robledo, California, when one day her community is destroyed by Pyro addicts. They manage to break down the gate and basically just attack her community and burn it to the ground.

Lauren manages to escape, along with two other survivors from her community, and together they start walking north. Lauren has it in her mind that she wants to go to either Washington State or Canada, where she’s heard that things are supposed to be better.

Along the way, the three of them run into other travelers who join their party, including a former physician from San Diego named Bankhole, who winds up taking them to a large plot of land he owns in a safer part of Northern California. Lauren’s journal chronicles their perilous journey to Bankhole’s land, where they settle and establish the first community of Earthseed.

Themes in “Parable of the Sower”

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There’s a lot going on in this book, and reading it at the time of this recording seems kind of surreal, to be honest. It’s incredibly eery how prophetic this book is in so many different ways.

A good example—the book talks about rampant crony capitalism with giant tech firms who bring back slavery via indentured servitude pretty much. There’s also a rise of racism, hate crimes, and nationalism.

There are massive refugee crises of people being driven not only from Central America and Mexico to the United States, but also of people being driven from the United States up to Canada and to Alaska, which, spoiler alert, as we’ll see in the next book, actually becomes its own sovereign state. Alaska secedes from the Union for the first time since the Civil War.

Last but not least, there’s obviously unmitigated climate change, which Butler does an incredible job of portraying as an intersectional issue, especially considering this book was published in 1993—26 years ago at the time of this recording in 2019.

There’s a really great quote from the book that sums this all up. Lauren writes, “People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.”

So climate breakdown is a central issue in the book that basically sends the world back to the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages. And I think that the way Butler chose to grapple with this issue as an intersectional one is brilliant. There are four main ways in which I think she does this.

1. Lauren’s hyperempathy

At first when I was reading through this book, I thought hyperempathy would be a purely net-positive. Surely, in such a violent time, when there’s so much uncertainty and massive social upheaval, being able to empathize on a crazy level with other people would surely be a good thing, it would really instill some kind of kindness or maybe help the world try to put itself back together.

But I hadn’t considered how it could also be a crippling thing and even dangerous at times. Especially when Lauren is having to defend herself and her party from Pyro addicts or thieves or what have you. For example, if she shoots someone and she sees it happen, she feels the gunshot wound. As you can imagine, that’s debilitating.

But overall, Octavia Butler uses hyperempathy to save Lauren and her party for the very reason that I first described: it forces Lauren to see other people as human beings with feelings that are just as important as her own. This causes her to be compassionate towards other people, and in a world that’s devolved even further into every man for himself, this helps Lauren to find strength in numbers to grow her party by basically taking in people from the road.

So, hyperempathy may be fictional, but it does force us to consider how we would treat other people if we always felt everything they’re feeling. So as more people become victims of natural disaster and the emotional-psychological effects of climate change, I think we can benefit a good deal from thinking about Lauren’s hyperempathy and applying that to our own lives of how we can empathize more with others and then turn that empathy into compassion.

2. Resiliency and embracing change

Earthseed, which is the set of essential truths Lauren believes she’s discovered, repeatedly emphasizes one thing: God is change. Change is the only constant, it’s an unstoppable force, as far as Lauren is concerned.

You really only have two responses to this. You can either choose to be terrified and paralyzed or you can be nostalgic and long for “the good old days” and try to fight against change, go back to the way things were before. But, as Lauren notes, this is only going to see you barreled over by change.

So instead of resisting change, people should learn to accept it and bend with it to sort of go with the flow. And in this way, the best human response to change is resiliency. This is something we see in nature all the time—there’s greater strength in pliability than in rigidity. I think this applies really well to what we’re talking about here.

We hear the word “change” in “climate change” all the time, but I’m not convinced we always stop to consider all the ways in which a changing climate forces us to change as well. We may have to change the way we vote, the way we consume products, we that we get around—our transportation—and also how we transport and store goods.

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy to make these changes. For the characters in the book, the changes they have to make certainly aren’t easy. I don’t think it’s going to be easy for us, either. But we’re much better off for adapting to our changing world than digging in our heels and fighting a battle that we’re sure to lose.

3. Taking action as opposed to staying complacent

Here’s a quote from a verse of Earthseed:

All that you touch, you change
All that you change, changes you
The only lasting truth is change
God is change.

So what Lauren is saying here is, as we’re changed, we also affect change. I think this is illustrated best through an example, a thought experiment.

So if you think about water that’s coming from a melting glacier, it runs down the rocks over the centuries, it’s going to dig rivers and streams. But the way that the land gives to that water determines the path that the water will eventually take. Which in turn influences a lot of things. It forges the climate, geography, and leads way to entire ecosystems.

So the best response to a change as colossal as climate change, then, is taking action. Climate change is going to make huge changes to the way we live, just like I mentioned, but we’re not powerless to this. Every action we take also creates change, all of which adds up.

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

I think I struggled with this a little bit because when reading about the book, Octavia Butler said that Earthseed was a kind of culmination of a lot of religions she studied to write the book, some of which include Buddhism, Taoism, and other Eastern religions. And I think a lot of Western readers, when they’re first introduced to these religions, mistake resiliency for complacency or for just being passive or like a pushover or something like that.

But really, that’s not what it’s saying. I think the way that Octavia Butler addresses this is really good. She takes special care to emphasize these traditions that are often lost of us Western readers, especially parts about action, or lack thereof. She sums this up in a verse from Earthseed:

Why is the universe?
To shape God.
Why is God?
To shape the universe.

So, this isn’t necessarily saying to dig in your heels and resist change like we were saying, but in going with change, we can also make a different set of decisions in that situation that will, in turn, impact the change we’re going through.

The verse I just read is acknowledged as the central paradox of Earthseed, and it’s the opposite of being complacent, weak, submissive, and demure. Instead, it centers on being strong-willed, on taking action, on riding the wave of change but also directing it as you’re able to in order to suit your desires.

For Lauren, this meant seeking a better life and always being prepared, but for us today it could be any number of things. Just like we talked about: voting for elected officials with plans for fighting climate change, making responsible consumer choices, planting trees, and protesting inaction from our governments and corporations peacefully.

4. Strength in numbers

Climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity today, and it’s going to take as many people as possible to stop it and reverse it. This means people in every sector, every industry—we all have an invaluable role to play in reversing climate change.

This includes people who work in energy production, the arts, people who work in business, agriculture, and construction. If this book does nothing else, I think it demonstrates that everything is delicately and inextricably intertwined, and that even the most seemingly insignificant changes have palpable effects that extend across the entire world.

I remember I was listening to a really good podcast about climate change recently called Climate One, and a guy who was a climate writer for Vox was on the show. And I remember, he said something I thought was really good. He said people will often come to him and say, “Climate change is this massive, huge issue, and I am only one person. What can I possibly do to fight climate change that will make any meaningful difference?”

And he had a really good response. He said something along the lines of, “Think about how big climate change is then think about how many of us there are.” That just means that whatever you do is going to make a difference because everyone is needed.

You don’t have to be a scientist to do something about this. We need people in the arts, we need people who work in agriculture, and various other sectors of our society for us to be able to stop this thing, for us to be able to pull it off. I think that’s really what Octavia Butler was trying to get at in Parable of the Sower.

Recommendations

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Book: Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

→ Buy NEW on Better World Books from $15.27 (affiliate)
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $15.63 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

Book: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

→ Buy NEW hardcover on Better World Books from $23.00 (affiliate)
→ Buy NEW on Bookshop from $14.72 (affiliate)
→ Find at your local library

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The post “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler: Summary & Analysis appeared first on Stories for Earth.

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Transcript

Today, humanity faces the greatest threat to our existence, ironically a threat of our own making: the climate crisis and ecological destruction.

This is a global emergency, and as people all around the world begin waking up to it and answering the call of duty, we will need inspiration, strength, and resilience for the many battles we will surely fight.

These virtues come from many places, but for me personally and for millions—perhaps even billions of others—they come from stories.

For thousands of years, humans have been storytellers. We are the only species on this planet to evolve a language complex enough that lets us communicate abstract thoughts, and we use this gift of language to teach each other about the world outside our present, immediate experience.

Nowadays we have books, television shows, films, social media, video games, recorded music, podcasts, and other ways to relate this information, but it all started with oral traditions, with people telling stories out loud to each other, over and over again for generations.

We still tell stories all the time—stories about ourselves, about others, about nature, the universe, religion, and philosophy. The stories we choose to tell and the ones we cherish help us piece together our collective consciousness.

In turn, stories become tools that inform every bit of culture, from identity to values to fears. Stories tell us who we are and who we want to be. Which is exactly why I think we need stories now more than ever.

Perhaps you, too, love a good story that makes you feel better equipped to grapple with the world and the human experience. If so, then this podcast is for you.

Perhaps you’ve never considered yourself a lover of stories but you need to find courage to persevere through what is already here and through what might get much worse. If this is you, I’m making this podcast for you, too.

Or perhaps you’ve stumbled across this podcast not realizing there is an emergency until right now. I hate to be the one to tell you, but we are in an emergency. This podcast, especially, is for you.

No matter why you find yourself listening in today, I’m glad we found each other, and I hope what we’ll cover together will help.

It’s going to take a lot to defeat the climate crisis, and I truly believe that stories—some of our oldest companions in facing numerous challenges and threats throughout our species’ history—can give us bravery in the face of death, resiliency through the midst of change, and compassion for each other as we do this together.

I hope you’ll follow along each month as we look at some of the best-suited stories for helping us fight the climate crisis. We will of course talk about books and short stories and poems, but we’ll also talk about movies, TV shows, video games, firsthand experiences, and any other kind of story told through any kind of medium that gives us strength.

My name Forrest Brown, and this is Stories for Earth, a podcast devoted to sharing the stories we’ll need to overcome the climate crisis.

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