Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is a form of speculative fiction that features a changed or changing climate as a major plot device. People have been unwittingly writing cli-fi stories and novels for decades, though the term came into heavy usage in the past 10 or so years. A 2013 article from Scientific American credits journalist Dan Bloom with coining the term cli-fi, and authors like Margaret Atwood and publications like NPR, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, and the New Yorker have since endorsed it.

In recent years, climate fiction has been gaining a lot of steam, probably thanks in part to increased public awareness of the climate crisis. Goodreads now lists cli-fi as a fiction genre, Amazon Original Stories published a short story collection of cli-fi in 2018, and the prestigious literary journal Guernica published a special issue on climate fiction in March 2019. I think it’s safe to say that climate fiction is now an established literary genre, and, if done well, I believe it can help us adapt to a rapidly changing world by teaching us skills to build emotional resilience.

The climate crisis will force us to adapt in ways we’ve never done before and on an unprecedented scale

I cannot stress this enough: it is absolutely imperative that the world takes collective action to stop greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But we will also have to adapt, and rapidly. Even if we could halt all GHG emissions today, significant temperature rise in the Arctic is locked-in. This means many adverse impacts are unavoidable at this point, and we need to prepare for them.

Some efforts are already being made here. Coastal cities like Miami Beach, Florida and Delfzijl, Netherlands are installing sea rise pumps and raising sea dikes, respectively, to protect themselves against rising ocean levels. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developed a public health-focused resilience framework called BRACE to help communities prepare for the negative health effects of the climate crisis.

Efforts like these all aim to increase a community’s physical resilience, or capacity to rebound from setbacks, but there are painfully few initiatives for helping people build emotional resilience. Building more resilient communities starts with building more resilient people, and to do this, we need a shift in mindset. I believe stories are some of our best tools for doing so.

How climate fiction can help us develop emotional resilience

Climate change is scary. And whether or not you already knew how high the stakes are, it won’t help anyone to only focus on the negative effects. It’s good to be aware of the severity and urgency of the climate crisis, but only seeing climate change as a threat can make us feel afraid and hopeless.

Instead, we need to reframe the climate crisis as an opportunity to create a better future, accept that change is a fundamental part of being alive, and process the complicated feelings we have surrounding climate change. These are all ways to develop emotional resilience, according to the American Psychological Association, and climate fiction can help us take these steps.

Climate fiction can help us reframe the situation

Dystopian novels like The Hunger Games and Divergent line the shelves at many bookstores today. Fear sells; authors grab us by the collar and compel us to keep reading when they speak to our worst fears. But fear is not always a good motivator, and in the case of using emotional appeals to fear in climate change communication, it can actually be a better demotivator. When we focus too much on a threat’s potential for harm, we feel disempowered and become paralyzed.

Not every cli-fi story is dystopian, and the ones that are don’t have to end in catastrophe. Take Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, for instance. This book is a classic work of dystopian fiction, but the characters build a better future for themselves in the end, learning to take care of others and live sustainably. The book’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is the archetype of emotional resilience: she builds a strong support network of people around her, focuses on action steps she can take, and envisions what she wants for the future instead of dwelling on the misery of her circumstances.

Also read: S1 E1: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

We may not live in the harsh world of Parable of the Sower, but we can learn from how Lauren reframed her reality to see it as an opportunity to make things better. By reading about her experience as a work of fiction, we can start thinking of ways to reframe our own situation before it’s too late to do anything about it.

Climate fiction can help us accept change

Benjamin Franklin may have been right about death and taxes, but he forgot to include change as a certainty of life. Change is a fundamental constant of the universe, underpinning every single event down to the particle level. Octavia Butler went so far as to have Lauren Olamina invent a religion centered around the belief that “God is change” in Parable of the Sower. Change is unstoppable, so instead of conspiring to thwart it, we should bend with it.

Climate change is unnatural, yes, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also adapt to it as we’re working to stop it. In Ursula K. LeGuin’s groundbreaking novel The Left Hand of Darkness, a representative from Earth visits an alien planet called Gethen. The people of Gethen have adapted to live in a changed climate—albeit an ice age—that renders large parts of the planet uninhabitable and other parts extremely dangerous. But instead of becoming hopeless as a result of the climate and the hostile living conditions it imposes, the Gethenians accept their situation for what it is and live appropriately in response.

Also read: Interview With Isaac Yuen of Ekostories

Gethenians don’t inhabit sprawled out metros like Atlanta or Los Angeles—they live in densely compacted cities. They take what they need from the natural world and nothing more since natural resources are scant. As Isaac Yuen puts it in Ekostories, “With little room for experimentation living on an unforgiving world, Gethenians have adopted a worldview that focuses less on progress, and more on presence.” By accepting their changing climate, Gethenians adapted over centuries to live in harmony with their world. We can learn from their example and from other stories like theirs.

Writing original climate fiction can help us process climate grief

Writing about traumatic experiences can be therapeutic, and writing about the climate crisis is no different. We can, of course, learn from the climate fiction that’s been written, but writing some ourselves is different. As the American Psychological Association notes, writing about the hardships we’ve faced is another way to build emotional resilience.

I once worked with a non-profit organization in Nashville that paired veterans with songwriters to write songs about wartime experiences that left many people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Doing this helped people heal. I watched veterans of Vietnam and Afghanistan break down into tears singing songs they’d written about the horrors they experienced. Later, I got to hear these people talk about how cathartic it was to tell their stories through song.

The American writer Kurt Vonnegut knew this too. It took him years to finally do it, but his famous novel Slaughterhouse-Five was his attempt to make sense of surviving the Bombing of Dresden during World War II. Vonnegut’s feelings about the bombing and war in general were complicated and came to be summarized by a motif from the book, “So it goes.” Earlier this year, I stopped by the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library on the way back from Chicago and bought a copy of the literary journal the Museum publishes, So It Goes. The first volume features an excerpt from The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s book about the Vietnam War. A particular quote jumped out at me:

Writing a story is empowering, and I believe that just as storytelling can help war veterans, it can also help those of us suffering from climate grief and pre-traumatic stress disorder feel a greater sense of agency. Stories don’t have to be painstakingly written literary novels or movies or TV shows. They can be as simple as imagining the future you want.

Climate fiction won’t fix everything

When it comes to a problem as enormous and complicated as the climate crisis, there isn’t a silver bullet solution. But to fight for a better future and adapt to our changing world, we’ll need all the help we can get. Climate fiction can be a great source of help.

Also read: Where To Get Started With Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi)

I can give you some recommendations on where to start, but know that there are dozens, if not scores, of excellent cli-fi books out there. If you start reading one and realize it’s only making you feel more anxious or scared, set it down. Remember that good cli-fi should help you put the problem into perspective, accept that the world is changing, and feel empowered to do something about it.

If nothing you can find does this for you, try writing your own climate fiction. Write the book you want to read. Tell the story you want to hear. Envision the future you want to live in. As long as we can still do this, we have reason to be hopeful.

Cover photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

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The post What is Climate Fiction? Cli-Fi and How It Can Help Us Respond to the Climate Crisis 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

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→ 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.