Earth & Fire

Earth and Fire: Environmentalism and the Fall of Man

A class project, by Lala St. Fleur

Summary

In arguments over the technical terminology of referring to climate change, and its associated social and environmental crises, as anthropogenic (the fault of all mankind) or capitalogenic (the fault of modern industrial-capitalist institutions), my reflexive 21st century instinct is to blame capitalism for all of the problems of modern-day society, including environmental degradation. However, it also cannot be denied that there have been grave mistakes of the distant past that peoples of the immediate present and potential future are still paying for. I stand with paleoclimatologist William F. Ruddiman’s understanding of the Anthropocene as having started over 10,000 years ago, during the Agricultural Revolution, when mankind moved from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to sedentary agrarianism (Ruddiman, 2003: 261). I disagree with the notion that the Anthropocene having started during the Industrial Revolution, as Paul J. Crutzen more popularly defined it.

Agricultural Revolution

Around the world, there are longstanding religious beliefs that the natural forces — or rather, nature spirits — of the earth itself are acting out in warning, protest or punishment against the decay of societies that have lost faith and not kept to the old ways of their forebearers. My research paper analyzes etiological and eschatological stories from ancient Greek and Abrahamic religions, that see certain elemental forces (Fire and Earth) and geological events (natural disasters) as manifestations of divine punishment against the wrongdoings of mankind. These stories are directly tied to the Agricultural Revolution.

Earth: The Agricultural Revolution

In the Book of Genesis’ story of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman were expelled from the Garden of Eden after eating the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As punishment, God exiled Adam and Eve from Paradise, and so, stuck on earth, they had to work the land as farmers, toiling by the sweat of their brow for everything they ate. But the earth was now cursed, and by extension, so were the fruits of all their labor. This story can be seen as reflecting mankind’s transition from hunter-gatherers to agrarian societies.

Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.

Genesis 3:17

The story of Adam and Eve’s sons, Cain and Abel, are also interpreted in my paper as allegorical, with Cain representing agrarianism and Abel representing pastoralism. In both Genesis stories, agriculture is directly tied to the sin of hubris. Adam and Eve sought forbidden knowledge. Cain thought his sacrifice of grain was better than Abel’s blood sacrifice of his first flock. In both stories, humans act against the will of God, and both mankind and the land itself suffer for it.

Cain and Abel, by Robert T. Barrett.

My paper connects these biblical stories with archaeological scholarship on Neolithic societies in the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia. Scholars either support or reject the notion that the Agricultural Revolution directly led to not only the formation of sedentary societies and the first cities, but also socio-economic inequality, and anthropogenic environmental degradation (Marcus and Sabloff 2008; Watkins 2006).

Fire: The Industrial Revolution

Rather than examining the Anthropocene through the modern Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, as Crutzen does, instead, my paper looks to ancient stories that describe the Fall of Man, related to technology, industry, and modernity.

In the apocryphal Book of Enoch, heavenly angels described as the Watchers descend to earth to breed giants with humans. They also taught humanity various corruptible knowledge, including, but not limited to warfare. Chief amongst them is Azazel, the Scapegoat.

Heal the earth which the angels have corrupted, and proclaim the healing of the earth, that they may heal the plague, and that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things that the Watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons. And the whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azâzêl: to him ascribe all sin.

Book of Enoch, 10:7-9

This apocryphal Abrahamic story serves as the segue into my segment on Greek mythology, which features another major etiological figure connected to human progress and punishment, the Titan Prometheus.

Prometheus’ punishment for stealing fire for mankind. 6th century BC, Vatican Museum.

My paper uses myths from the poets Hesiod and Aeschylus to highlight the ways that the mastery of fire, technological advancement and human innovation were considered the very foundations of civilized society, as early as the 8th-5th centuries B.C.

Hearken to the miseries that beset mankind how that they were witless before and I [Prometheus] made them to have sense and be endowed with reason.… Knowledge had they neither of houses built of bricks and turned to face the sun, nor yet of work in wood; but dwelt beneath the ground like swarming ants, in sunless caves.

Hesiod, Works and Days, 42-50.

Prometheus bestowed fire to cavemen, teaching them how to master it, and thereby inspiring the development of everything from architecture to art and science. However, Zeus, king of the gods, was angered at humanity gaining access to heavenly fire. As punishment, Prometheus was imprisoned, to be tortured for all eternity, and mankind was given the all-gifted woman, Pandora, of “Pandora’s Box” infamy. Upon opening her jar or box, Pandora unleashed all evils upon the world, including disease, poverty, and warfare.

Up to the present day, Prometheus has been perceived as either a savior god of industrial creativity, or as the corrupting demiurge of industrial destruction (Beller 1984).

Prometheus sculpture at Rockefeller Center, NYC. Behind him is an inscription paraphrased from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: “”Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends.”

By synthesizing the lessons to be gleaned from the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Azazel, and Prometheus, and analyzing their parallels with archaeological research, my class project attempts to stimulate an alternate way of thinking about certain things we take for granted: What does it mean for humanity to have evolved, developed, and progressed–even at the expense of the natural environment, and our own societal well-being?

World religions have long held people’s moral decay accountable for environmental decay. Regardless of whether or not climate change is the result of man’s faults in the anthropogenic past or capitalogenic present, the record still shows that it is essentially, fundamentally and ultimately humanity’s fault. The only arguments should be grounded in what we are going to do about it now, to save both the planet, and ourselves.

Resources

  • Aeschylus. Aeschylus, with an English translation by Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph. D. in two volumes. 1. Prometheus Bound. Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph. D. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. 1926.
  • Anonymous. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Homeric Hymns. Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.
  • Beller, Manfred. “The Fire of Prometheus and the Theme of Progress in Goethe, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Canetti.” Colloquia Germanica 17, no. 1/2 (1984): 1-13.
  • Charles, Robert Henry. Book of Enoch: Spck Classic. SPCK, 2013.
  • Crutzen, Paul J. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” In Earth System Science in the Anthropocene, pp. 13-18. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006.
  • Demos, Thomas J. “Against the Anthropocene.” Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017): 132.
  • Marcus, Joyce, and Jeremy A. Sabloff, eds. The Ancient City: New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and New World. School for Advanced Research, 2008.
  • Ruddiman, William F. “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago.” Climatic Change 61, no. 3 (2003): 261-293.
  • Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature.” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 36, no. 8 (2007): 614-621.
  • Stoekl, Allan. “Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy.” In Materialism and the Critique of Energy,” edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti, 1-29. MCM, 2018.
  • Watkins, Trevor. “Neolithisation in Southwest Asia—The Path to Modernity.” Documenta Praehistorica 33 (2006): 71-88.

Discussion Questions

  • Why is it that more often than not, popular culture props Prometheus the Titan up, while castigating Azazel the Scapegoat, Eve (moreso than Adam), and Cain?
  • What is “progress”? Has humanity evolved, or devolved?
  • Is hunter-gathering or agriculture better for the environment? To what extent could modern man ever return to either model?
  • Is technology/industry worth moral & environmental decay?
  • What are we willing to sacrifice to make things right?

“Geology, Race, and Matter” by Kathryn Yusoff

Core Text:

Yussoff, Kathryn. “Geology, Race, and Matter,” A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2018. 

https://manifold.umn.edu/read/untitled-5f0c83c1-5748-4091-8d8e-72bebca5b94b/section/6243cd2f-68f4-40dc-97a1-a5c84460c09b#ch01

Summary:

The discourses of the Anthropocene and of geology have embedded within them language and histories of racism that complicate legitimate understandings of climate justice. In her chapter “Geology, Race, and Matter,” Kathryn Yussoff describes the issues with using these words in the movement against climate change. Yussoff presents an archeological reveal of the relationship between mineralogy and racism (corporealism), showing how colonial deterritorialization, dehumanization and slave labor all extended from the interest in property. Based in the root preoccupation with property, cultivation and destruction of the world go hand-in-hand with racial injustice.  

Yussoff’s main objective is to expose this relationship, so that there can be a narrative that refuses to overlook the embedded injustices in climate change discourse and to assist in the establishment of a clear praxis of climate justice. Essential to this project is the determination of “the human” and “the inhuman” social legacies that fuse the historical anthropos of the Anthropocene. Failure to recognize the legacies of dehumanization based on racial social categorization and injustice is an automatic failure to see how climate change became an issue in the first place, as well as to recognize the issues preventing climate change solutions. Failure to recognize these issues maintains racial and social injustice by erasing the subjectivity and the struggle for recognition by Black people. 

While unveiling Blackness from the historical categorizations of inhuman-ness, Yussoff asks readers to understand Blackness as a presence, as a counteraesthetic to white supremacy, and, as such, as an insurgence to erasure, which, altogether, break through the embedded injustices of history and language. 

Questions: 

1) Does recognizing the human/ inhuman dichotomy of history help keep a reminder for social justice or does it maintain an aspect of otherness? Is a postracial “we” ever possible? 

2) If geology and subjectivity are relational, as Yussof demonstrates, does climate change justice entail a push for a reformation of “selfhood”? Does this ultimately change our economic and political organizations? 

3) What does solidarity look like for Yussof in the face of climate change? How does language affect the chances of solidarity? 

Additional Sources:  

McKibben, Bill. “Racism, Police Violence, and the Climate Are Not Separate Issues,” The  

New Yorker. June 4, 2020. 

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/racism-police-violence-and-the-climate-are-not-separate-issues

Climate change specialist Bill McKibben compares climate change with police brutality and determines that they lead to similar effects on black bodies. As black bodies are more susceptible to stress brought on by social injustices, such as financial inequality and police surveillance, increased allostatic loads for black bodies often leave them more susceptible to biological disorders. McKibben analogizes having a violent police force in your neighborhood to having a coal-fired power plant in your neighborhood: they destroy the body and toxify everything. McKibben continues to say that organized crime, partisan profit-oriented politics, support for oil companies, and climate denial, all still fueling during the COVID-19 pandemic, are all conditions that uphold the structures of social and racial injustice. Through these details and comparisons, McKibben allows readers to understand the biopolitics of black bodies in the U.S. that leaves them more prone to the troubles of climate change and less protected by governments.  

Godfrey, Phoebe C.. “Introduction: Race, Gender & Class and Climate Change,” Race, Gender & Class, Vol. 19, No. 1/2 (2012), pp. 3-11 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43496857?seq=1

Pheobe Godfrey encourages analytical frameworks that help in understanding the interrelations between social inequalities and environmental problems. Modeling analysis on frameworks that are bigger than the limited scope of traditional individualist subjectivities, Godfrey’s work incorporates a true interdisciplinary approach that includes critical social theory, Buddhist spirituality, and ancient cosmology, to name a few, to address social injustices embedded within climate change discourse. The big issue for Godfrey is determining the “we” in climate change solutions. For Godrey, the “we” cannot be achieved for climate change solutions, until social inequalities of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, religion, ability, and other differences are sorted out first. 

Nieves, Evelyn and Ilana Cohen, et al. “There Is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice,” 12 June 2020; 

There Is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice

Given the current convergence of COVID-19 and the BLM protests, there has been a significant rise in the concerns of climate justice and racial justice and how they are related. This article brings together the interrelated structures of racial injustice and climate injustice. Gathering the individual and collective support of climate change organizations, such as the Sierra Club, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunset Movement, this article highlights that climate change activism cannot begin without correcting racial injustice first. 

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet by Ursula K. Heise

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Summary:

Introducing “eco-cosmopolitanism” and its connection to different forms of artistic, philosophical and practical expressions, the Introduction and Part 1 of Ursula K. Heise’s A Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global provides an approach to environmentalism that transcends place and is interconnected to different locales and regions, mirroring the interconnectedness of a globalized world. 

In her meaty introduction which provides a broad overview of the conflicting opinions and thoughts on the subject of localism as place as an environmentalist strategy, Heise writes, “With this wave of countercritiques, the theoretical debate has arrived at a conceptual impasse: while some theorists criticize nationally based forms of identity and hold out cosmopolitan identifications as a plausible and politically preferable alternative, other scholars emphasize the importance of holding on to national and local modes of belonging as a way of resisting the imperialism of some forms of globalization” (12). Heise then presents one of the central ideas of this text, “eco-cosmopolitanism” which she defines as an “environmental world citizenship,” arguing that “ecologically oriented thinking has yet to come to terms with one of the central insights of current theorists of globalization: namely, that the increasing connectedness of societies around the globe entails the emergence of new forms of culture that are no longer anchored in place…”(13). 

Exploring the ways in which the Earth’s inhabitants, regardless of cultural differences, can be tied by a borderless ecosystem, Heise strongly argues against a sense of place tied exclusively to the local writing “…what is crucial for ecological awareness and environmental ethics is arguably not so much a sense of place as a sense of planet – a sense of how political, economics, technological, social, cultural and ecological networks shape daily routines” (55). Heise projects this “sense of planet” on her conceptualization of “eco-cosmopolitanism,” which acknowledges “varieties of environmentalism,” “preservation of natural ecosystems and their sustainable human use” and the awareness of an interconnected world where the “‘more-than-human world’” is connected to the human world through “animate and inanimate networks of influence and exchange” (59-61).  

By recontextualizing the greater environmental project in this globalized sense, Heise believes it being a more viable strategy for handling all things environmental in a world already marked and situated around the forces of globalization. 

Recommended Reading:

Le Guin, Ursula K. Vaster than Empires and More Slow: A Story (A Wind’s Twelve Quarters Story). Harper Perennial , 2017.

In Guin’s short story, a group of human space travelers find a Earth-like planet, with one of the explorers sacrificing himself to the humanless nature of the planet. Heise decorates Part 1 of her book with an excellent climate analysis of Guin’s short story, writing “The idea that all the planet’s life forms are linked in such a way that they come to form one world encompassing, sentient superorganism echoes James Lovelock’s well-known Gaia hypothesis, according to which Planet Earth constitutes a single overarching feedback system that sustains itself” (19). Heise then writes on the importance of “allegory,” specifically the challenge of artists to create “a vision of the global that integrates allegory – still a mode that is hard to avoid in representations of the whole planet – into a more complex formal framework able to accommodate social and cultural multiplicity.” In this work and her overall art, Guin demonstrates Heise’s conceptualizations of eco-cosmopolitanism and allegory through metaphorical and symbolic representations of a world that is interconnected to a world both familiar and foreign to us, a manifestation of the network that connects the “animate to the inanimate.” 

Rahman, S. “Karachi, Turtles, and the Materiality of Place: Pakistani Eco Cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 18, no. 2, 2011, pp. 261–282., doi:10.1093/isle/isr040.

Rahman, Shazia. Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism: Pakistani Women’s Literary and Cinematic Fictions. University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

In Shazia Rahman’s paper on eco-cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel Trespassing, “Karachi, Turtles, and the Materiality of Place: Pakistani Eco-cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing,” Rahman identifies Ursula K. Heise’s idea of eco-cosmopolitanism as an “attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of a planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both humans nonhuman kinds” (Heise 61). For Rahman, Heise’s eco-cosmopolitanism is a “way of extending nationalism to include the planet and nonhumans” (261). The writer then offers an alternative conception of eco-cosmopolitanism, using Khan’s novel as the site through which her definition is presented, for “Khan posits an eco-cosmopolitanism that is rooted in the local in such a way that it implicates the planet globally. This local rootedness is not nationalism but a materiality of place, and the global thinking not necessarily imperialist cosmopolitanism but rather a kind of planetarity” (262). In reading this essay, along with her book on eco-feminism which has chapters in eco-cosmopolitanism in Pakistan Punjab, the reader receives two differing perspectives on an idea that seems to connect the world through an awareness of modern environmentalism. “eco-cosmopolitanism.” 

“The Dreaming.” The Dreaming and Other Essays, by W. E. H. Stanner, Black Inc. Agenda, 2009, pp. 57–72.

At the center of this essay from 1953 is anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner’s expression, “Everywhen” which borrows from approaches to temporality from Aboriginal Australians, highlighting how interconnected the past, present and future is for Australia’s indigenous population. Though Heise doesn’t make an explicit connection to Stanner in this portion of her book, Stanner’s methodology of bridging the gaps of understanding nature and the environment between different cultures and locales (The Modern West against the Aboriginals) as well as the Aboriginals’ sense of temporal interconnectivity exemplifies Heise’s structure of a “sense of planetarity” and make Stanner’s essay a prescient, important work in climate literature. 

Discussion Questions:

  1. Given Heise’s insistence that her mode of “eco-cosmopolitanism” is influenced by the work of postcolonial scholars’ work on cosmopolitan (I.e. Homi Bhaba) and how separated it is from imperialism, to what degree are Rahman’s arguments justified? Are these arguments reactionary or is there perhaps something substantial in Rahman’s writing when it comes to developing a unique perspective to Heise’s “eco-cosmopolitanism”? 
  2. Given Heise’s consistency in holding globalization as a harbinger of contemporary life, is she too much of an idealist who may not fully appreciate and recognize the detrimental effects of the current capitalist framework and how tied it is to globalization and instead, see globalization’s potential for environmental thought? 
  3. One of the most provocative elements in Stanner’s essay is the research itself; considering that Stanner is a white, Westernized man performing research on indigenous tribes, when may Stanner become too problematic in his research and could that expose flaws in Heise’s eco-cosmopolitanism? Meaning, if an outsider is to connect himself or herself to another locale in the name of eco-cosmopolitanism, how can we “check” the West to ensure cultures of other locales do not become further  eliminated and acclimated to a globalized, less localized world? 

Note: The American book cover pictured here irks me a bit since both female main characters are described as having dark hair.

Core Text:

Itaranta, Emmi. Memory of Water. Harper Voyager, 2014.

Summary:

In Emmi Itaranta’s futuristic dystopian world, global warming has significantly melted the polar ice caps, drastically changing the Earth’s geography. Large coastal cities were drowned when the rising oceans vastly altered shorelines. Salt water has intruded into freshwater resources thus drinking water is scarce and the most coveted commodity.

Seventeen-year-old Noria Kaito lives with her parents in a small village on the outskirts of the city Xinjing within the Scandinavian Union, now occupied by the power state of New Qian. Noria is training to become a tea master like her father, a profession which is controversial and challenging for a female to earn. When Noria’s mother moves to the city to take a position at the University of Xinjing, her father completes her tea master instruction which includes finally revealing to her a hidden natural freshwater spring in the fells just near their home which they must protect. Shortly after her tea master graduation ceremony, Noria’s father becomes ill, leaving her to tend to their home, the tea house, and the secret spring all on her own.

Noria’s life-long best friend, Sanja, is her only trusted companion. Together they navigate the wartime oppression as they line up at a single pump with fellow villagers to fill jugs with their weekly water allowance. They get pleas to spare a cup of water from scared mothers holding their sick babies while waiting in line to receive medical care from the severely understaffed and ill-equipped hospital.

As an escape from the horrors of everyday life, Noria and Sanja frequent the plastic grave on the outskirts of their village to hunt for unlikely treasures from the past-world era. Sanja is a tech wiz and spends her time in her workshop immersed in restoring the items that the pair recover. After finding buried hidden discs at the secret spring and a busted player in the plastic grave which Sanja repairs, the two learn that the recordings contain documentation of an unfinished expedition to the Lost Lands which leads them to plot their own journey in hopes of completing the mission that the team of scientific researchers could not.

Emmi Itaranta tells Memory of Water at an unhurried and cool pace like the gradual trickle of water through earth and rock. Yet there is something ethereal and enchanting about her prose that keeps the reader engaged in this deep story and the characters whose secrets shape their purpose and path as intricately as water carves stone.

Teaching Resources:

Atwood, Margaret. “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet.” The Guardian, 25 September 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/26/margaret-atwood-mini-science-fiction

In this short text, Margaret Atwood conveys a somber mythical tale illuminating the ages of Humankind. Humanity has risen and fallen and what is left of our great civilization is the writing on a brass cylinder. Atwood invokes the personal and emotional by transfixing the perspective of the reader to that of an outsider, presumably the one finding this profound remnant of history during an archaeological quest. This mirror-like effect parallels the situation in Memory of Water, of Noria and Sanja discovering remnants from the past-world era and trying to piece together their meaning and significance from history. The theme of tracing origins in both works highlights present action and future imaginaries in addressing climate change.

Dawson, Ashley. “Cape Town’s water has a new apartheid” The Washington Post, 10 July 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/07/10/cape-town/

This poignant article describes the water crisis in Cape Town, South Africa during late 2017 into early 2018 that was successfully staved off, at least for the time being. Although water was guaranteed as a human right in South Africa’s new constitution, access to water is unequal. Municipalities have yet to provide sufficient infrastructure to many low-income areas where residents must trek a long distance to wait in line at scare communal taps and lug their water home while wealthy neighborhoods consume water freely and in excess. Memory of Water is an allegory of this real-life circumstance that will become more urgent as impacts from climate change are experienced. The novel highlights the social injustice associated with water scarcity experienced by the disadvantaged village residents on the outskirts of the large city and well as the government’s role in affording access to a basic necessity.  

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard, 2013.

Nixon’s innovative concept of “slow violence” focuses on the gradual and often out of sight violence on vulnerable communities wrought by climate change. Precarious ecosystems and poor, disempowered populations suffer the brunt of the climate crisis which they had little influence on causing. In Memory of Water the village where Noria lives is kept isolated and uninformed as to the larger happenings in the world but the ever-looming military presence restricts what they are allowed to do and where they are permitted to go. Not having access to plentiful water supplies or adequate health care causes much suffering in the village and some residents even resort to filling up jugs of water from a contaminated stream near the plastic grave just to have enough to drink or bathe with.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Margaret Atwood alludes to what has transpired in the history of Humankind in “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” similar to how Emmi Itaranta largely infers the events of the past-world era in Memory of Water. Noria and Sanja find bits and pieces of history that they must make sense from to gain knowledge of the past, present, and future. Interestingly, they also make a game out of creating and hiding time capsules of their own containing random personal objects and inscribing them with date indicating when they may be opened again. What are the effects of this practice of encapsulating history on those that create these memorials of the past and on those that discover them? Why is this such a powerful tool in telling stories and what does this say about human nature and our relationship to time and space?
  2. Though Noria and Sanja are best friends, their backgrounds are very different. Noria’s father is a respected tea master, her mother is college professor, and they live in a nice and spacious and home at the edge of the village that has been in their family for generations. Sanja’s family life and living conditions, on the other hand, are described as much less affluent. How do the socio-economic disparities between the friends come into play throughout the novel? In what ways are they treated differently by the other characters in the story especially the military enforcement? How do their backgrounds affect the decisions each of them make and ultimately their fate?
  3. Noria is more privileged than most in her village largely because she has access to the hidden natural freshwater spring that her father and past ancestors have been protecting. She must still make her presence a few times a week at the communal pump and try not to appear as though she has bathed so frequently in order to keep her secret. But when the situation in her village gradually worsens she decides that she will help others in need and as a result she marked as a water criminal with a painted blue circle on her door and is imprisoned in her own home to await her final judgement. Why did the military look the other way when Noria’s father was alive though they had suspicions that the Kaito’s had been harboring a secret water source? How does sharing her water with others in her community threaten the authority of the military and jeopardize their attrition warfare strategies?

Core Text:  Powers, Richard. The Overstory. W. W. Norton, 2018.

Summary:

The Overstory, by Richard Powers, will change the way you think about trees, and by extension, humanity’s place in the natural world.  Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, it is a novel about a small group of exquisitely drawn characters who, through the course of the novel’s development—Roots, Trunks, Overstory, Seeds—come together over their deep personal connections to trees.  Somehow, incredibly, the trees themselves emerge as memorable, sentient beings.  The Overstory is a rare novel that transports the reader from a modern-day, urban existence to contemplate the natural world in an authentic way.  Readers will notice at a greater depth the ways in which destructive policies for consumption of natural resources—forests—deplete and devalue what is essential to delicate and interconnected ecosystems. 

It begins with a breathtaking description of the American chestnut tree, chestnuts pocketed at the turn of the last century in a romantic immigrant gesture and carried West to be planted in a new home.  American chestnuts were a prime food and wood source and one of the most populous trees in eastern North America less than a hundred years ago, before chestnut blight all but caused their extinction.  Chestnuts are male and female; only one survives the journey, a sentinel.

The characters have varied backstories, but inexorably come together to fight the clear cutting of ancient trees.  There are high stakes involved for the characters’ eco-bravery as they face the brutality arrayed against protesters.  There is suspense, treachery, love and loss, told through a style of writing perfectly adapted to the language of trees:  “Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.”  The meditative, deliberate tone of tree-in-translation seems to compel the reader to simplify, to declutter, eschew materialism to focus on visceral life forces.

The drama of the Timber Wars and the loss of forest to short-sighted profit-driven exploitation is the backdrop to an extraordinary imagining of the life of trees and the interdependence of life on the planet.  Powers seems to be saying that we need to keep ‘branching’ in our search for solutions to the climate crisis brought about by carbon emissions and the obliteration of forests, whose noble trees perform the miraculous task of sequestering carbon.  Sun, water, air, soil:  seeds.

Teaching Resources:

Suzanne Simard: How Do Trees Collaborate?  NPR-WNYC TED Radio Hour, June 26, 2020

“Suzanne Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. Her work demonstrated that these complex, symbiotic networks in our forests mimic our own neural and social networks. She has over thirty years of experience studying the forests of Canada.”

One of the characters in The Overstory is a female scientist who theorizes that trees communicate with one another.  She is humiliated and hounded from the profession for what’s seen as lunacy before finding redemption many years later with the discovery of micorrhyzal networks, through which trees care for one another, cooperate across species.  They transfer information and nutrients through a language heretofore unknown to humans, using fungal networks.  Micorrhyza literally means fungus root, Simard tells us in her TED talk; the mushrooms we see are ‘just the tip of the iceberg’; their fungal roots, mycellium, literally cover the soil in the forest floor and make possible the exchange of carbon for nutrients.  Symbiotic, cooperative relationships are, well, unearthed.  Chemical warnings of beetles, for example, help trees gather defenses.  Bonus:  the site has family-friendly activities to engage all learners.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/26/882828756/suzanne-simard-how-do-trees-collaborate

The American Chestnut Foundation provides fascinating information on the history and efforts to revive the species.  Prized for its straight, light, and rot-resistant wood; valued as a food source for animals; nuts were a cash crop for farmers—they were (and are?) sweeter than other types of chestnuts.  A lone American chestnut plays an indelible part in the life of generations of a family who document its growth through photography, capturing its long-term movement while illustrating the way that art amplifies our world.

Importantly, reviewing the site raises the question:  if a natural disaster extinguishes a species, should we try to reverse the destruction?  The chestnut blight was brought to the US from Asia, arguably the result of human travel and migration.  While Asian chestnuts had developed a resistance, American chestnuts were wiped out. 

The American Chestnut Foundation’s site bridges the not-too-distant local past and the tree’s predominance in the northeast with conservation and preservation efforts that we can witness.

https://www.acf.org/the-american-chestnut/history-american-chestnut/

Why does this famous protector of trees now want to cut some down?

By Warren Cornwall Oct. 5, 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science

Jerry Franklin is a scientist, now in his 80s, who is reconsidering his early, important work in the Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s and ‘90s.  He is a seminal figure in producing the scientific research in the Forest Service report that resulted in the 1994 federal law banning clear cutting of thousands of acres of old-growth forest on federal land, the Northwest Forest Plan.  It pitted him squarely against the lumber industry (whose media efforts, focused in this case on the saving of the eco mascot native to old-growth forests, the threatened Spotted Owl, included “Save a logger, eat an owl.”).  

A hero of conservationists, his thinking has evolved, from witnessing the devastation of the Mt. Saint Helens eruption in the 1980s.  The subsequent regrowth—“it was like a supermarket” of food to support biodiversity in the forest ecosystem—led him to begin to rethink his research.  The article opens with his surveying ‘the scene of the crime’ of the targeted logging that he now supports.  “Franklin is drawing the ire of conservationists for promoting forest management techniques—including targeted logging—designed to create more of the scraggly patches of protoforest that ecologists call ‘early seral’ communities.”

The environmentalism of the characters in The Overstory can be seen as heroic–or misguided, depending on whether “scientific theory” is interpreted in the common way that “theory” is understood.  But scientific theory, including climate theory, is infinitely more weighty:  it is the overwhelming evidence of proof of theory, not a mere proposal. 

The article illustrates how science is done:  it is an evolving process that is anathema to dogmatic thinking.  Scientific theory is not immutable; reality, observed and studied, is the guide to inquiry.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/why-does-famous-protector-trees-now-want-cut-some-down

Writing Prompts:

Is Powers trying to change readers with The Overstory?   Does fiction have the power to turn readers into eco warriors? 

The sentinel nature of trees harkens to the power of bearing witness.  What are effective ways that we can bear witness to the changes in our environment caused by climate crisis? 

Are there ways in which trying to rescue species of trees, animals, and other life forms is counterproductive?

Reviewing the Science Magazine article on Jerry Franklin, who revised his thinking after a lifetime of protecting old-growth forests to theorize that targeted logging promotes biodiversity:  What is the nature of scientific inquiry and how can its processes be explained in a way that encourages further study?

Sowing Seeds of a New World in Climate Dystopia

Butler, Octavia.  Parable of the Sower.  Grand Central Publishing Edition: New York, 1993.

Summary:

Parable of the Sower is a story of a destroyed world and a young black woman who believes that it requires a new philosophy to navigate it and tries to carve out a space.  The world is 21st century California, and some of socio-ecological crises of water, fire, violence, and racism are terrifying lessons of a potential future.  The story is told by Lauren through her journal entries and starts out in her childhood home of Robeldo, a gated/walled predominately colored community.  Her father is a reverend at the only church, and is somewhat of a town leader, fostering community and activism to preserve the ‘town’ through the church.  The outside world, is filled with violence, and scavengers and thieves constantly threaten the not so safe walls of the community.  As events unfold, Lauren is forced to leave and head north, in search of better land, water and safety meeting some new companions along the way that she builds a community herself with.  As an alternative to her father’s Christian church, Lauren becomes a preacher of a new religion ‘Earthseed,’ which believes God is change, and accepts the agency and responsibility that we all have in a socio-ecologically collapsed world. The world died of growth and now she will grow a new one.

Recommended Reading:

Kat, Anderson.  Tending the wild Native American Knowledge and the management of California’s natural resources.  Berkley: University of California Press, 2005.

            Lauren loves to read and write, which are abilities that most people do not even have in the Parable world.  In her childhood community she was teaching people how to read and write and along the journey to Acorn she was also teaching.  One of the first books though not mentioned by title was a book on native plant species and the ways they were used by the indigenous communities in Southern California.  This knowledge ended up getting her in trouble in her community for trying to think of alternative ways of living, and also ended up giving her some knowledge to help her survive throughout her journey to Acorn.  One major theme of Parable of the Sower is stewardship, and a book on indigenous management of natural resources could be a great selection that ties into the themes of this novel. 

Tweedy, Clarence W, III.  “The Anointed: Countering Dystopia with Faith in Octavia’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 1900 – Present, vol 13 iss 1.  Spring 2014.

            This article frames Earthseed as a representation of black identity within the church.  Earthseed is an attempt to free one’s identity from the subservient position of the Christian God with one that is both empowering and also a responsibility.  In some way it is a critique against institutions like the church that have pledged to help African-Americans but have also perpetuated systems of racism.  Earthseed is a way to free blacks from this paradigm and help them forge their own paths.   

Melzer, Patricia.  ‘”All that you touch you change’: Utopian Desire and the Concept of Change in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” San Francisco Vol 3, Iss 2, (Jun 2002): 31. 

            This article talks about how Butler both constructs and challenges the classic utopian narrative.  She sets up that there is a destroyed world and a chance to make a new one.  But with part of her focus with characters who are BIPOC, her emphasis on change in earthseed, she doesn’t replicated classic utopian narratives.  Rather, at the end of the story there is a question of whether or not Acorn will succeed, will they survive at all.  Butler uses this example to illustrate challenges that marginalized people face in society, and a notion of a utopia that is in flux, that is something to constantly work for rather than a privileged entitlement.   

Discussion Questions:

  1. How does Lauren compare to her father?  What are the similarities and differences between Earthseed and Acorn and Robledo and her father’s church?  On a side note:  Where did her father disappear too?  And is it somewhat strange that Lauren enlopes with Bankrole, a very similar character to her father?  Does Lauren possess a father complex?
  2. What is the significance of race in the novel?  What was the affect that Lauren being black and the majority of the characters being BIPOC have on the novel?
  3. What do you think of Earthseed?  Do you think Acorn will survive?  Do you think that they will reach their destiny and land among the stars?  If a central tenant of Earthseed is change, do you think that a sedentary lifestyle, and the eventually institutions that come with expansion will counter the philosophy of Earthseed? 

#socio-ecologicallycollapse #climate_dystopia #earthseed #new_world #violence #newworld #father_complexes #theworlddiedofgrowthsowemustgrowanewone

Against the Anthropocene

Against the Anthropocene, by Thomas.J. Demos

An annotated bibliography, by Lala St. Fleur.

Core Text

Demos, Thomas J. “Against the Anthropocene.” Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017): 132.

Summary

Demos’ 2017 book is firmly against using the term “Anthropocene” in reference to the ongoing concerns around climate change. In Demos’ view, it only foists the blame of the military-state-corporate interests off onto universal accountability held by all of humanity, rather than to those truly at fault or most responsible for the world’s mounting eco-catastrophes (Demos, 2017: 19). He also challenges the emphasis put on geoengineering projects as solutions to environmental problems. Because the authority to conduct such experiments inevitably favors an imbalance of power between individuals, governments and corporations, Demos is skeptical of anthropocenologists (i.e.: military-state-corporate agents) having the final say as to what measures should be taken to see positive change and real environmental improvement.

Because the “Anthropocene” holds all humans accountable for global climate change, Demos argues that it disavows the unequal distribution of resources, aid, and responsibility between parties who either suffer or benefit the most from its causes and effects. It is the “underlying heteropatriarchal and white supremacist structures” whose fossil fuel industries are the worst perpetrators of environmental abuse, (Demos, 2017: 53). Meanwhile, disenfranchized and poor minorities are most severely affected by the slow violence of government policy, corporate interests, and climate impact. But the consolidated efforts of grassroots activism inside those very communities are also in a position to resist such pressures and hold corporations accountable for their harmful operations. In place of “Anthropocene,” Demos proposes the adoption of the term “Capitalocene” instead. Demos sees this as a “more accurate and politically enabling geological descriptor” for more precisely putting the blame on corporate globalization and industrialization as the main culprits of unchecked climate change (Demos, 2017: 54).

Demos’s methodology involves looking at the utilization of photo imagery circulated by the media and academia, as visualizations that either help shed light on climate crises that corporations would otherwise see silenced (local activism against fracking or development in communities; the victims of marine pollution and oil spills); or help divert attention away from environmental concerns by glorifying mankind’s dominion over nature (incredible mines seen from space; the downplay of the effect of said oil spills; etc.).

Teaching Resources

  • Crutzen, Paul J. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” In Earth system science in the anthropocene, pp. 13-18. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006. Atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen is the scholar who popularized the use of the term “Anthropocene,” in 2000. In this 2006 article, he doubles down on his notions that the current Anthropocene age (starting with the Industrial Revolution) is distinct from the Holocene’s epoch of pre-industrial human activity. Despite Earth’s cycles and systems of global change, Crutzen argues that anthropogenic activity has gone far beyond the bounds of natural atmospheric, chemical, and geological fluctuations.  
  • Stengers, Isabelle. In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. Open Humanities Press, 2015. In this rapidly changing epoch, Stengers’ book acknowledges the sense of impotency that the climate crisis can often put in the mindset of people today, who can be informed and educated about the causes of and effects of climate change (and capitalism) yet still participate in overbearing systems that perpetuate it. Stengers challenges the notions of progress and barbarism in the context of modern capitalist structures.
  • Stoekl, Allan. “Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy.” In Materialism and the Critique of Energy,” edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti, 1-29. MCM, 2018. Though Stoekl’s article focuses on Marxist concerns of capitalist fetishism that turns both people and nature alike into commodities, he ultimately argues that “merely changing the name of the Anthropocene (to Capitolocene or whatever) would not solve the underlying social and material contradictions” of today’s climate crises (Stoekl, 2018: 55). Market-based approaches to environmental issues only serve to abstract, invert, obscure, and detract from the root problems inherent within fossil duel industries and corporate interests. Geoengineering solutions, therefore will only be protracted over millennia, “effectively implicating dozens of future generations” in an ongoing climate crisis that might never be resolved (Stoekl, 2018: 59).

Discussion Questions

  1. Beyond Crutzen’s interpretation, there are various other understandings of when the Anthropocene began, and what its catalysts were. Is the Anthropocene indeed the product of the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, or is it instead a far older culture we inherited from the Agricultural Revolution and the rise of the first major civilizations, over 10,000 years ago?
  2. Stengers’ book focuses a light on the issue of capitalism not being all that is was cracked up to be. In the face of the various problems of modernity (climate change being only one crisis of many), what is progress, and what is barbarism? Is it progressive or barbaric to keep pushing forward with technological advancement, even at the cost of environmental decay? Or, is it progress or barbarous to actively try to dismantle institutional systems that have proved ineffective, and even dangerous to humanity and Gaia’s (the very world’s) well-being?
  3. What does a world without capitalism look like, and is it at all possible as long as people continue to be reliant on carbon-based technology? To what ends would any geoengineering models benefit the environment, so long as the earth’s natural resources are commodified and exploited for fuel?

“Communicating Climate Change: Closing the Science Action Gap”

Core Text

Moser, Susanne C., and Lisa Dilling. “Communicating Climate Change: Closing the Science Action Gap.” The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, Jan. 2012, pp. 1–18., doi:oxfordhandbooks.com.

Summary

Susanne C. Moser and Lisa Dilling’s article published in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society discusses different manners of communications and their effectiveness in society. Moser or Dilling do not promote and particular response to climate change throughout their article, however their goal is to present research on how communication on climate change can be carried out more effectively. They offer four main reasons that climate change communication has been less effective: lack of information, motivation by fear, lack of diversity in framing issues to diverse audiences, and utilization of mass media. Moser and Dilling believe more efforts should be implemented in diversifying strategies for communication on climate change to get more people engaged.

Teaching Resources

Norgaard, Kari Marie. “Climate Denial: Emotion Psychology, Culture, and Political

Economy.”The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, Aug.2011, pp.1-17.,

doi:oxfordhandbooks.com.

Kari Mari Norgaards article, “Climate Denial: Emotion Psychology, culture and Political Economy” published in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society discusses the very real problem of climate denial. Norgaard highlights the roles of emotional, culture, social structure and inequality that plays into individual’s response towards Climate Change. She also uses psychological and sociological explanations for climate denial. The denial is often cultural and can be attributed to positions of privilege. This article is relevant in discussing communication on Climate change as there are often other barriers to receiving information in addition the the manners in which the message is conveyed and disseminated.

Daggett, Cara. “Petro-Masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, 2018, pp. 25–44., doi:10.1177/0305829818775817.

Cara Dagget writes a compelling article in the Millennium: a Journal of International Studies, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire”. It is a unique article looking at climate change denial through a feminist lens that argues that the proliferation of fossil fuel extraction and consumption can be held up by the white male patriarchy. Dagget notes that extensive networks of privilege are sustained by the fossil fuel industry and are threatened by climate change initiatives. Dagget further discusses how climate denial obviously serves fossil-fueled capitalist interests, however it can responsible for the catalyst of authoritarianism as the profits from fossil fuels secure cultural meaning, identities, and political opinions. This article is relevant in discussing climate change communication as in addition to reasons of denial there may be larger systemic patriarchal hindrance to making real change towards sustainability.

Bina, Olivia, and Francesco La Camera. “Promise and Shortcomings of a Green Turn in Recent Policy Responses to the ‘Double Crisis.’” Ecological Economics, vol. 70, no. 12, 2011, pp. 2308–2316., doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2011.06.021.

Bina and Camera’s paper analyzes six international-scale responses to the financial and climate change ‘double crisis.’ The paper predominantly focuses on the role of economics as the dominant model and belief system that controls responses to climate change. They discuss a global Green New Deal which would not only combat sustainability on a global and cooperative scale but would address issues of vulnerable people, job loss and a disrupted financial system. Bina and Camera also discuss how responses to the double crisis need to be addressed with better regulated markets.  Overall Bina and Camera argue that without an economic approach to climate change, solutions will not be achieved regarding the double crisis. They also suggest the response to the crisis has been poor and development without the promotion of justice and environmental sustainability as a sustained goal will continue to fall short. This article is important to discussing climate change communication because in addition to sociological, psychological, and patriarchal that pose obstacles to progress on climate change initiatives, economics is predominant force that will be necessary to address in addition to addressing climate change communication effectiveness.

Discussion Questions

  1.  In what ways can communication on climate change be geared towards diverse audiences so that a ‘one size fits all’ approach can be avoided in order to facilitate understanding of issues and inspire real initiatives?
  2. What are some examples of ways that we can combat cultural climate change denial?
  3. If economics are interrelated with climate change, what types of incentives can be given at the corporate level to achieve real climate change goals?
Laudato Si: On the Care for Our Common Home

Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home

Core text

Pope Francis. Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home. The Holy See: Vatican Press, 2015. The Holy See.

Summary

The urgent need to preserve our planet has emerged as an issue of science, politics, economics, justice — and morality, as evidenced by Pope Francis’ 2015 publication of Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. The title of the encyclical comes from the pope’s namesake, St. Francis of Assisi. “Laudato Si’” means “Praise be to you Lord,” from the beginning of a prayer of St. Francis that continues, “through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.”

While Francis joins leaders of many other faiths — including his own predecessors — in defining environmental concerns as moral concerns, publishing an encyclical addressed to the world elevates and develops these concerns in an unprecedented way. In doing so, he defines environmental degradation and social degradation are inextricable.

Laudato Si‘ is more than a call to lower carbon emissions. In fact, Francis calls the buying and selling of carbon credits “a quick and easy solution” (if only it were quick and easy in the United States) that does not allow for the radical change these circumstances require. Instead, Laudato Si’ is a call to change the way we live: to decrease consumption, to be in solidarity with future generations, and to value every creature. The current pace of consumption and waste, of extreme consumerism, is not sustainable.

So, too, is unrestrained capitalism. As if writing directly to the United States, Pope Francis says that our current economic model is too rooted in individual success and self-reliance. He links the mindset of those who lack concern for the most vulnerable of society with the mindset of those who have no concern for the environment. He devotes an entire section to global inequality, reminding us that the environmental deterioration will affect the world’s most vulnerable people.

The message of Laudato Si’ will be familiar to those on the frontlines of the environmental movement: Extreme consumerism has led to a grave environmental crisis, and human beings need to change their lives radically to solve this crisis.

Teaching resources

  • Klein, Naomi. “A Radical Vatican?” The New Yorker, 10 July 2015.

    This essay in The New Yorker — also a chapter in Klein’s On Fire: The Burning Case for the Green New Deal — tells the story of her trip to the Vatican to participate in the announcement of the publication of Laudato Si’. A self-described “secular Jewish feminist” Klein describes the juxtaposition of her presence against the male hierarchy, though she describes many of the Catholics present as either from the Global South — with a different perspective from that which has dominated Christianity for centuries — or those who have felt like exiles under previous popes. When asked in a press conference to address the juxtaposition, Klein responds that she is not present to negotiate a peace deal, but that if she and Pope Francis are correct that responding to climate change requires fundamental change to our economic model, then it will take an extraordinarily broad-based movement to demand those changes. Klein questions how Francis can on one hand understand the gravity of our current crisis and, on the other hand, be hopeful for the future — then realizing that if the Vatican itself, one of the most tradition-bound institutions in the world, could change as rapidly as it has under Francis, then perhaps that gives hope to the world.
  • McDermott, Jim. “At the Front Lines: An Interview with California Governor Jerry Brown on ‘Laudato Si”.” America Magazine, 8 July 2015.

    Former California Governor Jerry Brown has spent more than four decades in public service and has accomplished the feat of serving as California’s youngest governor (1975 to 1983) and oldest governor (2010 to 2018). A former Jesuit seminarian, he was interviewed in 2015 by the Jesuit weekly America regarding the intersection of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ and public policy. He speaks from the front lines of the fight against climate change — both with dealing with the effects of climate change (longer fire seasons) and combatting it (with policies that have succeeded in reducing carbon output despite an increase in population). The now-former governor acknowledges the tension between our reliance on amassing consumer goods and the pope’s words on the need to consume less.

  • Okpodu, Camellia Moses. “What It Will Take to Do the Work of Laudato Si’: Stewardship for All, by All.” National Catholic Reporter, 26 June 2020.

    Part of a series in the National Catholic Reporter on the fifth anniversary of the publication of Laudato Si’, this piece reflects on Laudato Si’ from three unique perspectives: The author, Camellia Moses Okpodu, is an environmental scientist, she is African Methodist Episcopal, and she serves as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Xavier University of Louisiana, one of the nation’s 107 Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Okpodu explores the need to ensure that environmental programs in academia reach students of color, noting that environmental programs are lacking at HBCUs across the country. She has proposed a Centers for the Environment at colleges and universities serving minority students that would include students trained in the humanities and social and/or behavioral sciences, as well as the sciences. If people of color are to share the stewardship of caring for creation, Okpodu writes, we must make available the training it takes to do that work.
  • Weber, Kerry. “Why ‘Laudato Si” Is the Perfect Encyclical for Millennials.” America Magazine, 18 June 2015.

    This article — by a millennial who bought her copy of 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth at age 8 — notes that Laudato Si’ addresses all of the primary concerns of the millennial generation, as reported by a Deloitte survey: unemployment, resource scarcity, climate change/protecting the environment and inequality. The encyclical recognizes the power of human connection, values ethnic and cultural diversity, appreciates innovation, offers a call to humility and urges greater efforts for equality and solidarity — all accessible to the generation that grew up with the 50 Simple Things series, Weber writes. Laudato Si’ was a needed reminder to this young writer that “our use of technology, love of the poor, and care for our environment are integrally connected, and that cultivating love and respect for all God’s creation is, in fact, a timely and timeless concern.”

Discussion Questions

  1. Quoting his predecessors, Pope Francis writes, “The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.” How has American individualism and the sacredness of private property rights contributed to environmental degradation? Is it even possible in this country to view private property rights as anything less than inviolable?
  2. Pope Francis also writes “Christian spirituality proposes a growth marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little. It is a return to that simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack.” Could spirituality — of any faith or background — be a tool toward turning away from consumerism?
  3. More often than not in this country, many faith communities have been publically allied with politicians who do not support greater environmental protections. Is that changing? Is there a unique role that faith communities can play in combating environmental degradation?

The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard

Core Text

Ballard, J.G. The Crystal World. Jonathan Cape, 1966

Summary

The Crystal World was J.G. Ballard’s fourth novel in what has come to known among his devotees as the “disaster series.” Written in 1966 before “global warming” and “climate change” became common parlance and a genre dedicated to such phenomena was born, the ensuing years and ominous climatic discoveries have elevated Ballard as the godfather of “cli-fi.” The book begins with Dr. Sanders on the bow of a steamer that has delayed disembarkation for unknown reasons at Port Mattare, and, already, Ballard alerts the reader to pay attention to the environment: “…surface of the water was still gray and sluggish, leaching away the somber tinctures of the collapsing vegetation along the banks”; “…the dark green arbors towering into the dull air like immense cypresses, somber and motionless, touched only by faint gleams of light.” The location of the port is somewhere in the Republic of Cameroon, which “was still recovering from an abortive coup ten years earlier, when a handful of rebels had seized the emerald and diamond mines at Mont Royal…” Along with ecological details that signal unease, signifiers crowd the first few paragraphs: Sanders, a doctor who treats leprosy; Father Balthus, a priest in dark soutane; Ventress, a Belgian architect dressed in a white suit who tells Sanders, “This is a landscape without time.”; and the letter from Suzanne, the wife of Sanders’ colleague and his lover, which ends with at once luminous and ominous line, “The light touches everything with diamonds and sapphires.” 

Suzanne is the reason for Sanders’ journey. She and her husband had disappeared into the forest in Mont Royal to found a leprosy clinic. Balthus, Ventress, Suzanne, along with Thorensen, the director of the diamond mine, are all characters Sanders would encounter again as he ventures deeper into the jungle and realizes the “faint gleams of light” are in fact emanating from the mysterious crystallization of the forest and its living creatures, and each of them functions as a moral catalyst for Sanders. The scientific reasoning behind the efflorescence of crystal Ballarad gives is lacking but useful: an infinite atomic duplication of itself, capable of filling the entire universe and whose behavior is closest to cancer. As crystallization spreads and consumes every organism in its path, Sanders’ interior journey reverses course and the objective becomes running away from the forest in order to escape the fate of turning into a crystalline form. Along the way, Sanders finds out that crystallization is not an isolated phenomenon but is occurring in Florida and Russia also. In Ballard’s fossilized world, the crystal is a stand-in for time: Crystallization process requires “leaking time” and fossilization evinces time frozen. It’s also human’s race against time in the face of nature’s transgression – to run from being fossilized within the crystal or to embrace it. Sanders and company, in the end, come to a revelation that running is futile, so they remain or return to the forest to live in timelessness, to exist between death and life, which for them is some kind of utopia. 

Teaching Resources

  • Heller, Jason. “These Cli-Fi Classics Are Cautionary Tales For Today.” NPR, July 26, 2019. Heller starts this “beach reads” recommendation by injecting an ominous climate anecdote – “As yet another record-breaking summer heats up…” – and goes on to offer summaries of five cli-fi titles. He praises The Crystal World as a work that surpasses Ballard’s previous books – The Burning World, The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere – in his “disaster series.” Heller also draws a parallel with Heart of Darkness, an influence Ballard dismissed based on the fact that he hadn’t read it at the time of writing The Crystal World. Still, it is unmistakable that in both fictions, post-colonial malaise is manifested as geological transgressions which in turn engenders extreme human reaction to them.   
  • O’Connell, Mark, “Why We Are Living in JG Ballard’s World.” New Statesman, April 1 2020. With the pandemic very much in the foreground, this essay makes a convincing case that our current mysophobic existence owes more to Ballard’s dystopian vision than to any realms prognosticated by other postmodern authors. Indeed, Ballardian world is the one we occupy now – uneasy and distanced: “The rapid transition, under the new viral order, into further extremes of technological alienation has only made it more so.” Ballard’s short stories like “Having a Wonderful Time” (1982) and “The Intensive Care Unit” (1977) speak more directly to quarantine, human-weariness, and invisible captor. His “World” series encapsulates another set of mental stressors, anxiety and psychological displacement induced by environmental entropy. O’Connell is well aware of Ballard’s complicated early life – a White British settler family in Shanghai forced into internment camp under Japanese occupation during WWII – and draws a connection between Ballard’s experience with imperialism with upended-ness that often undergirds his characters’ psyche and the environment that occupies them. 
  • Clark, Jim, “Reading Climate Change in J.G. Ballard.” Critical Survey, Vol. 25, No. 2, Berghahn Books, 2013, pp. 7-21. Clark, in his prismatic analysis, does a great job linking climate change post hoc to The Drowned World (1962) and The Crystal World (1966), and critiquing the post-cli-fi hermeneutics of climate dystopias in these texts. Clark’s thesis is most persuasive when drawing out the inner world, the psyche, of Ballard’s characters when faced with environmental upheaval, as the locus of transformation: “The outer environment is subordinated to inner space, and what action or response it requires is primarily internal and transformative.” Time is another essential thematic component. Clark asserts that “Ballard conflates environment and time” and equates climatic disruption to temporal disruption. Timelessness of the crystal is a metaphor for the end of time, or surrender to time, which then is rendered as the end of environment. Expounding on the ways in which Ballardian climatic transgressions have been prescient of the environmental malaise to come, Clark also draws an analogy between the efflorescence of crystal and a viral infection prefiguring a pandemic narrative that became familiar in later cli-fi genre and eerily apropos of the current viral pandemic. 

Discussion Questions

  1. In planting a white doctor who presumably treats African leper patients amidst diamond and emerald mines then setting him off into a forest that turns him into the very element of seduction and exploitation, does Ballard’s post-colonial duality subvert the “resource curse”?
  2. Ballard has said that his central characters in his “climate” novels see the “system of imaginative possibilities represented by the disaster,” which Clark infers as follow, that “if Ballard conflates climate with time, he also conflates it with psyche.” Both insinuate that by confronting the disaster on an existential level, one can then harness the inner capacity for transcendence. This seems like a bit of channeling an utopian outcome in a dystopian situation, which is essentially what many of the climate accords are. In reality, when so many seem to have gone back to life as “normal” even after facing an existential threat of climate catastrophe, can individual psychical transformation be a real catalyst for “profound personal change” as Clark argues?
  3. In climate discourse and science, human anxiety is intrinsically tied to time, which acts as a simultaneously passive and aggressive omnipresent element. The race to keep the rise of global temperature below 1.5°C  to avoid the irreversible chain of events is itself a race against time’s irreversibility. Ballard seems to suggest that surrendering to time, therefore reaching a form of utopian timelessness, is a noble, even a moral thing to do. How does this square with the psyche being the catalyst for profound change?