Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction

A Poetics of Earth

A. Curry

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349444243, 9781137270108
• eBook ISBN: 9781137270115
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This pioneering study is the first full-length treatment of feminism and the environment in children's literature. Drawing on the history, philosophy and ethics of ecofeminism, it examines the ways in which post-apocalyptic landscapes in young adult fiction reflect contemporary attitudes towards environmental crisis and human responsibility.

1

A ‘Poetics of Planet’: Apocalypse and Our Post-Natural Future

‘Apocalypse’, writes Lawrence Buell (1995: 285), ‘is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.’ In post-apocalyptic fiction, the ecocatastrophe of tomorrow is graphically invoked to reflect upon the worsening crisis of today. Climate change is envisaged not as a general process of environmental decay and social degeneration but as an immediate and devastating shattering of cultural norms. Such a dramatic erasure of previous knowledges serves to interrogate the current epistemological frameworks held responsible for crisis whilst laying the groundwork for new and different modes of human–earth interaction. The new world orders put forward in the old world’s stead are predicated on a variety of ethical standpoints that are rendered more, or less, able to engender sustainable human relationships with the earth. These standpoints pivot around the alienation and dislocation engendered by crisis: of humans from the earth and of planetary exigencies from anthropocentric systems of value. In focusing on environmental apocalypse as a representational determinant of a more integrated and agential attitude towards earthly belonging I work from the ecofeminist premise that crisis calls for interrogating established ethical and epistemological frameworks to bring about a radical change in environmental thinking. Yet, as Betty Greenway (1994: 146) warns, when ecology experts themselves cannot agree on a solution to the world’s problems, should children’s literature be any more likely to? In their attempts to establish an ecoconscious framework for environmental reappraisal it is unsurprising that the young adult novels discussed are more successful in constructing resistant subject positions that reject or refute existing ontologies, than on creating fully-fledged new ones.

It has been well documented that in the history of western thought human ‘culture’ has undergone a socio-spatial segregation from wild ‘nature’. Scott Hess (2010: 85) delineates the pejorative effects of this systemic distancing of nature from culture as an enforced ‘blindness’:

[The] tendency to locate ‘nature’ apart from ourselves skews our environmental awareness and priorities in ways that blind us to the devastating ecological impact of our own everyday lives and incapacitate us from pursuing realistic alternatives. If we seek nature apart from our lives, how can we restructure those lives – not just individually, but socially, politically, and economically – in order to change the current patterns of environmental destruction?

By advocating the integration of human and natural concerns, Hess adheres to a general trend in environmental thinking: a move from what Michael P. Cohen (2004: 23) terms the ‘praise song’ school of first wave ecocriticism in which nature writing was lauded for celebrating the beauty of such a segregated nature to a second wave concern with humanity’s intimate and integral place within nature. Hess’s words are designed to instigate change: to restructure environmental perceptions that currently ‘blind us’ to our ecological impact. The metaphor of blindness in western ecological thought can be instrumental in elucidating current modes of crisis representation in young adult fiction. Novels that envisage the natural world as removed from human dwelling effectively construct the environment as a blind space, contoured by anthropocentric ideologies.

The earth, contends Bonnie Mann (2005: 57), ‘seems, more than any other “notion,” to always exceed its discursive boundaries’. Like climate change, it exists in its own epistemic blind space, at once too tangible and too amorphous, too material and too immense. Always phenomenologically accessible – we can feel it under our feet, we can crumble it in our hands – the earth is nevertheless invisible as a planet. The transcendent image of a dematerialised planet has been used to overwhelming effect as a slogan or icon to unite peoples of all nationalities and political orientations in service of the earth. The image of the globe as a contained and distant sphere that humans may contemplate, remotely, in its entirety – a perspective labelled by Frank White (1998) as ‘the overview effect’ – can, however, also engender a sense of dislocation from humanity’s material context, or what I term a ‘planetary consciousness’. A planetary consciousness is one of disengagement from local community; it denotes an ontological failure to account for the incommensurability of human relationships and a dehistoricised engagement with place on a scale that delimits closer readings of human–earth interaction. From an ecofeminist perspective, the dislocated view of the earth from space seems largely incommensurate with the caring values that underpin responsible place-based engagement with the earth.

Julien Knebusch (2004: 20) interprets our tendency to dematerialise the planet as product of our ‘relationship with the idea of the “planetary”’. Such an idea is born out though narrative formulations of environmental crisis that situate climate change and the deterioration of planetary health within a blind space in the contemporary western imagination. Sarah Amsler (2010: 139) notes that ‘instead of the threat of conceivable suffering, we encounter…the unfathomable possibility of collective non-existence, wrought by a confluence of human and non-human factors, unfolding somewhere out of our control, and happening in an unspecified future’. Kearns and Keller (2007: 1) similarly point to the intangibility of crisis rhetoric by suggesting that climate change ‘seems at once too flat in its realism and too dramatic in its rhetoric, too factual and too speculative, too complex and too immense to bear in mind’. If the globe as a material entity defies human comprehension then we might question how climate change, as a phenomenon occurring at the planetary level, can be drawn out of the blind space to engender activism and enable socio-political change. By interrogating the scaling of planetary symbolisation in contemporary climate rhetoric, ecofeminists contemplate the potential for a sense-based relationship between humans and an earth that is not iconic, detached or associative, but material and embodied and known intimately through localised engagement with place.

The young adult novels under consideration engage in scientific-phenomenal debate over the ontological properties of the earth by exhibiting tension over what Mann (2005: 57) terms the ‘discursive turn’ in postmodern engagement with place that dematerialises the planet and leaves no access to the earth except via language. Post-apocalyptic rhetoric is particularly well poised to interrogate postmodern discourses of dislocation in place of human–earth symbiosis since it envisages a world in which the potential for human embeddedness within nature is already seriously if not irreparably compromised. In apocalyptic narratives that envisage radically ruptured cultural normativities, the discursive evocation of planetary blind space signals the existential threshold on which humanity teeters and from which it must pull back if a sustainable life on earth is to be achieved. In each of these novels, authorial preoccupation with the workings of history on the local landscape turns the abused body of the earth into a discursive site of otherness rather than belonging: a post-natural landscape viewed through an ecophobic lens. These novels are caught in tension between discourses of control that advocate dominance over an increasingly unruly planet and counter-hegemonic narratives, influenced by ecofeminism, of a phenomenal earth that must be known intimately and nurtured back to health.

In what follows I situate my analysis of the young adult novels’ apocalyptic renderings of a degraded earth within the context of contemporary narratives of crisis and explore the degraded post-natural landscapes of the apocalyptic sensibility. I take individualist neoliberal ideologies to epitomise the self-advancing rhetoric of the war on climate change that offers technological progress as a fail-safe solution to crisis. I signify the planetary consciousness that signals an ‘overview’ of planetary exigencies as a controlling ideology predicated on surveillance and visual containment (White, 1998). In response to Greta Gaard’s (2010: 658) assertion that ‘[t]he resonant detachment of both ecoglobalism and the whole earth image offers fruitful ground for feminist ecocritical explorations’, I denote phenomenal belonging a discursive strategy to interrogate this planetary consciousness and to foster place-based attitudinal change. I suggest that phenomenal belonging inheres in the surprising possibilities for growth and renewal offered by the post-apocalyptic landscape, suggestive of a comparable restoration of human community after apocalypse. The novels discussed caution their readers to take responsibility ‘for what we learn not to see, what our knowledge-generating practices shield us from knowing’ (Gatens-Robinson 1994: 218). With their manipulated post-natural landscapes, these novels invoke such shielded knowing to dramatise a western tendency to turn a blind eye to encroaching crisis.

Beyond the tipping point: crisis narratives and blind space

In post-apocalyptic texts, an acute moment of crisis frequently provides the tipping point, or global rupture, that leads to the novels’ given state of social and environmental degradation. According to Kearns and Keller (2007: xi), the phrase ‘tipping point’ indicates ‘the transitional moment when small changes make huge differences, when predictable processes give way to nonlinear and irreversible amplification’. Moments of sudden amplification function to provide the apocalyptic conditions that lead to the erasure of cultural normativities. These moments are positioned to have occurred either within the reader’s own historical period or in his or her immediate future, in a narrative formulation that John Stephens (1992: 126) argues is typical of its genre:

[P]ost-disaster fiction evokes a deep past which usually approximates to the reader’s present, and hence its moral and political lessons are cast back to the moment at which the text is being read. … [B]ecause the message of such a book applies at the moment of reading, then the possibility of a new beginning is also displaced into the moment of reading, so that history always begins now rather than before.

Opportunities for narrative didacticism as warning, intimation or moral lesson are overt, albeit usually treated with a relative amount of subtlety; as Clare Bradford (2003: 112) argues, the implied child readers of books with environmental themes ‘carry significances over and above those involved in the narrative processes, because they represent various versions of our environmental future’. In novels in which a single moment of crisis is held responsible for planetary decline, the crisis, as tipping point, is discursively formulated to dramatise the linear inevitability of environmental crisis, and is couched in a discourse of ethical responsibility directed towards the reflexive reader.

The popular apocalyptic motif of a material brink, edge or threshold underscores the urgency of the novels’ call for climate action. In the various tipping points responsible for the novels’ new social orders, a few key words arise as powerful referents for current societal ills – oil, coal, petroleum, nuclear, atomics, war, viruses, governments, economies; in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy [2005–2006], Tally questions her forebears’ use of ‘“oil for everything”’ whilst Katniss in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy [2008–2010] muses that ‘[s]omehow it all comes back to coal’ (Westerfeld 2005a: 346; Collins 2009: 50). It is clear blame lies not only with western neoliberal ideologies built around unsustainable discourses of capitalism, consumerism and self-advancement, but also with the governments’ failures to respond to humanitarian crises when economic ‘progress’ pushes the environment beyond the brink of collapse. With an ecological stimulus as trigger for social upheaval, the disasters around which societies rally are both environmentally and culturally imbricated. For young readers positioned on the brink of adulthood and soon to be called upon to maintain, or reconstitute, existing ontological frameworks, such a brink positions them on a further threshold – or tipping point – preceding entry into adult systems of political and social responsibility. Unlike child readers, whose potential for effective social responses to climate change is limited, young adults await the imminent transgression that will see them affirm, or refute, the social systems that regulate them. The delineation of climate crisis as tipping point, edge or brink, thus forces the young readers into affirmation of, or resistance towards, current standpoints for ethical engagement with the earth. If the novels are similar in rendering planetary transgression a favoured motif, they differ in the level of redemptive agency they finally allocate to the average human in his or her critical response to disaster.

Climate crisis is commonly portrayed not simply as a warning for the future but as a graphic element of present existence, enacted on the world’s most vulnerable people and landscapes. Julie Bertagna’s Exodus [2002], a novel set in 2099 in a world drowned after the melting of the polar icecaps, employs a discourse of immediacy to foreground human complicity in environmental disaster. Its prologue ends: ‘Now retrack to the dawn of the world’s drowning. Stand at the fragile moment before the devastation begins, and wonder. Is this where we stand now, right here on the brink?’ (Bertagna 2003: prologue). Jenny Robson’s Savannah 2116 AD [2004] similarly recounts a past in which ‘[h]alf of Africa teetered on the brink of famine’ (Robson 2004: 63). An existential brink is tacitly envisaged in the far-future world of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines quartet [2001–2006], whose tipping point is engendered by the ‘Sixty Minute War’ – several millennia before the events portrayed – in which ‘the Ancients destroyed themselves in that terrible flurry of orbit-to-earth atomics and tailored-virus bombs’ (Reeve 2002: 7). A nuclear catastrophe of planetary proportions, the Sixty Minute War recalls the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 in which the world was similarly poised for imminent destruction. The rhetoric used in media coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis has been shown to resemble that of current media speculations about climate change; political, media and social discourses engendered by the crisis envisaged an edge or brink as the final standpoint against planetary disaster.¹ Like the brink on which Savannah 2116 AD imagines the developing world to teeter and the brink on which Exodus imagines its readers to now stand, this historical edge is deemed a fragile one: a threshold in danger of being transgressed.

In Exodus’s sequel, Zenith [2007], a single voice transmitted forever across the internet-like ‘Weave’ discursively dramatises, and constantly enacts, ‘the edge’ on which humanity is poised (Bertagna 2007: 206):

‘…ice caps melting twice as fast as feared…’ A disembodied voice crackles in the ether then fades. …

‘…we may be on the edge…not much time left…’

The voice seems to be coming from one of the satellites marked NASA. This one hangs above the northern hemisphere.

‘…all countries must stabilise emissions of carbon dioxide…can’t wait, must act…flooded Earth would be an alien planet…armadas of icebergs, rising oceans…the end of civilisation…how long have we got?’

The speed and immediacy of the earth’s decline is couched in the language of linear crisis; with the world moving towards a projected end, the non-linear moments of sudden amplification provoke a panicked delineation of temporal markers: ‘twice as fast’, ‘not much time left’, ‘can’t wait’, ‘how long have we got?’. With scientific projections failing to delineate the extent of climate crisis, this final question – ‘how long have we got?’ – might well be directed towards the earth itself. The ‘alien planet’, defamiliarised and made hostile – alienating its human inhabitants – is discursively formulated as a weapon of war (‘armadas of icebergs’). From an embattled subject position metonymic of wider planetary dislocation, the ‘disembodied voice’ of the lone reporter prefigures the humanitarian catastrophe to which such planetary alienation leads. Mara’s response – ‘“They could’ve done something but they didn’t. They knew. They didn’t think about the future, did they? They never thought about us”’ – foregrounds the failure of those who ‘knew’ to take epistemic responsibility for the world’s escalating crisis (206). That the voice of the reporter eventually ‘fades’ to remain forever on loop in the virtual reality of the Weave suggests that the apocalyptic rhetoric of linear crisis is an ineffectual stimulus for societal change.

In Bertagna’s novels, the post-disaster earth instantiates a divide between the pre-modern isolated island on which the protagonist Mara has grown up and the hypertechnological society of the sky city of New Mungo in which her lover, Fox, resides. This latter society cocoons the elite few in self-enclosed sky cities built to tower above the rising oceans. The devastating sea surge that wiped out the whole of Europe engenders the radical manoeuvring of humanity as far away from nature – in both a physical and ideological sense – as humanly possible, whilst engendering a socially stratified society based on the segregation of the ‘best’ human beings from the subordinate remainder (2003: 196). Such a society actively expels the socially ‘useless’ from its utopian dreams of a future human race dislocated from, and untainted by, the degraded natural world. Segregated living spaces here invoke the imbalanced geographic systems of privilege that currently see non-western societies bear the brunt of climate crisis. Whilst the past has invariably become lost to the villagers of Mara’s island through the inexorable infraction of the rising tides, the past in New Mungo has purposefully been forgotten. Deletion of the past constitutes a purposeful strategy for delimiting any lingering guilt, anguish or longing for the drowned world of the previous social order or hope for an embodied and embedded return to the earth. Environmental crisis here renders societal collapse in the language of apocalypse: the ‘end of civilisation’. The world has been pushed beyond the brink and entered a state of existential uncertainty. The question of whether – and how – to refute the epistemic validity of the masculinist ethos that has led to societal upheaval in favour of the embodied knowledges of ecofeminist engagement underpins the crisis rhetoric of the novel.

In much young adult fiction, apocalypse as tipping point is shown to result in environmental change, but more radically, perhaps, it is shown to target the very values, relationships and social structures on which human life as we know it is based. Dramatised moments of crisis are shown to result in radical ruptures to civilisation and technological losses of staggering proportions, correlative with Lovelock’s (2006: 10) famous argument that ‘it would t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ecofeminism and Environmental Crisis
• 1 A ‘Poetics of Planet’: Apocalypse and Our Post- Natural Future
• 2 Ideologies of Advancement: Writing on the Body
• 3 Regimes of Gender Difference: An Ecofeminist Ethic of Care
• 4 Situated Knowledges: Competing Epistemological Frameworks
• 5 A Poetics of Earth: Ecofeminist Spiritualities
• 6 Deep Ecology or Ecofeminism: The Embodied, Embedded Hybrid
• Conclusion: Apocalypse as EcopoiesisNotes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Works Cited
• Index