EARTH DAY turns 50 this year.
I really should put my dystopian fiction novel down and celebrate.
This week we mark the 50th celebration of Earth Day, and I’m here to remind you that the EARTH will be fine. We don’t need to alter our consumption, plant a tree, or take a pesticide pledge in order to save our unique home planet. Those types of choices would only benefit you and me, possibly prolonging our enjoyment during the precious time we spend on this short ride known as life on Earth.
If you visit this Earth Day website, you can read up on the details that gave rise to first Earth Day in 1970. In short, a senator from Wisconsin harnessed the energy of university students already organized and demonstrating against the Vietnam War. The effort gained traction, spread quickly and mobilized nearly 20 million people in response to the rampant pollution of our air, water and natural resources caused by unchecked industrial growth and the rise of Big Oil. The Environmental Protection Agency was also born that year, and legislation was passed to protect water, air, and even people (under OSHA).
But Earth Day is mostly about giving people hope that we can save the planet, right? Well, Earth doesn’t need to be saved — we do. Earth will still be here after we are long gone.
The plastic industry (aka chemical or oil industry) created the brilliant recycling campaign using a very similar psychology: Americans need to take action and start recycling to reduce waste. The industry’s waste, that is.
When you don’t clean up waste generated by Big Oil, this Native American man will keep shedding tears and you will feel horrible. An ad campaign first aired on Earth Day in 1971, was funded by a non-profit called Keep America Beautiful (the organization was funded by industry interests), and is considered one of the top ads ever created. The campaign effectively redistributed responsibility for disposing waste generated by the producer straight to us, the consumers. We inherited an unsolvable problem created by packaging, beverage and plastic production.
As I think about Earth Day while living under our lockdown, I am happy that we happen to be lowering our carbon footprint by not traveling in our cars or planes or tuk-tuks (depending on where you live), and that makes our air much less polluted. Which is a small victory for us on this Earth Day.
Of course the dark side is that our current president and leader of the free world seems to have risen up straight from the pages of my favorite dystopian fiction novels. Let me off you some musings on why that is scaring me.
Part of the joy of reading is how we resonate with the material in hindsight. I marvel often at the power of prose, and how a memorable passage, or a favorite poem, or just a line from Shakespeare pops up to enhance my mood and crystallize my feelings.
A genre of literature called dystopian fiction has come to my aid recently. My mind drums up the pieces of narrative I have consumed, splicing various images together to clarify my feelings in the moment. I fit the various fictive orts into my current imaginings of a grim and frighteningly possible (but no longer comfortably distant) future.
I will tease out three solid sources of dystopian(ish) fiction to help illustrate my points, using chronological order of publication.
My first choice is The Stand by Stephen King. This story offers perfect conversation starters around the author’s eerie prediction of our lives after pandemic. For those who might not be familiar, King’s made-up and very deadly strain of flu virus lays waste to the human population on a scale far worse than COVID-19, leaving the few survivors struggling to organize into tribes. In once seen, they ride motorcycles through the Eisenhower Tunnel in Colorado and try to avoid corpses in the dark — let’s just say it easily darkens my day.
I first read it in my teens, and I remember struggling to define the qualities that permit a piece of literature into the literary cannon. I took this up with my AP English teacher in high school, trying to debate the merits of The Stand with her. King utilized allegory and symbolism, much like The Red Badge of Courage we had read in class.
While she allowed that The Stand was a favorite read of hers as well, she dismissed the book as popular fiction. That was ten years after publication, and I doubt attitudes today have shifted much around King and his place in the literary world. Still, here in the Spring of 2020, The Stand seems to wield more heft than the average forty three year old horror fiction novel.
At the end of the 1990s, I discovered and devoured stories by Octavia E. Butler while backpacking in Asia. I remember her awe-inspiring female protagonists of color, all exhibiting remarkable strength and resilience in the face of oppression and moral decay. The backstory details remain opaque in my memory, almost as if they were thrust into the aftermath of a bad outcome by the gods. Her devastated United States is ugly.
An article in the New Yorker reminded me that Butler set two of her most popular novels in the aftermath of climate change. Butler sets The Parable Of The Sower in 2025 (not long to wait!), and the US president slices all regulations. In the sequel, The Parable of the Talents, he runs for re-election and a super-religious opponent runs on a promise to “make America great again” through his narrow religious views. Stranger than fiction?
As the phenomenon of climate change gets more traction on the heels of our post COVID-19 reality, we may be referencing Butler’s prophetic stories as we navigate the fallout. Just as King’s novel alarms us to the horrors that would befall us if COVID-19 had been more lethal, so Butler’s predictions may yet unfold before our eyes, leading to totally new paradigms of controlling the masses as we witness the utter breakdown of civil liberties. That’s dark.
My most recent source for all of this fodder comes courtesy of Jeff Vandermeer. His Southern Reach Trilogy captured my attention with his wonderfully bizarre take on a future where worlds literally collide. Unlike Butler, where the world order shifted dramatically due to climate change — his tale is more akin to The Stand in that it has a very distinct backstory, a paranormal breach in the stability of the planet that allows for weird, disturbing occurrences in the ecosystem.
Vandermeer’s world never technically indicates dystopia per se (you can read up on this in a 2014 book review but there are spoilers), but the future isn’t rosy and bright either.
King, Butler and Vandermeer explore the fate of humanity with some overlapping themes. Changes in the virulence of the flu, man made climate change and abrupt fissures changing our ecology will gravely impact our way of living, and somehow we won’t see it coming.
Alternatively, I imagine those of us paying attention may already see it coming, but we watch miserably as those in power won’t agree on what to do about stopping it. Either way, we are decimated because we are unprepared, are unable to act, or wind up responding too late.
Going back to The Stand, the flu spread like it does during flu season, but it just happens to be deadly. Scary, because it is simple and plausible. In Butler’s books, dramatic changes in climate cause us to regress as a society. In The Southern Reach Trilogy, strange things occur and radically shift the environment, and we respond weakly and without influence.
These dystopian stories leave us to ponder:
Humans remain suspect in causing the demise of the planet, whether implicitly or explicitly — by negligence or by ignorance. Which is more frightening for you?
COVID-19 Virus has caused conspiracy theories to circulate, where the virus was released on us. These emerge to allow believers to cling to the notion that humans control their own fate. It is strangely comforting to believe somebody had a hand in starting this pandemic, because the notion that the contagion got loose, or was set loose, is more palatable than admitting humans simply have no agency, no say in what ultimately happens to humanity.
In storytelling, setting up humans as the helpless victims acted upon by nature (or the virus) is a way of creating an “us versus the unstoppable villain” narrative. This bothers us and scares us as readers, because so often in the dystopian novel, the “us” turns out not to be very cohesive or strong. Conspiracies shift this on its ear.
Humans responding to novel coronavirus simply illustrates an interplay of forces vying for position in the balance of nature, playing out on the scale that most of us prefer to push away.
It is a future episode on television, where nature unleashes power that proves incompatible with life (floods, tornadoes, tsunamis, avalanches, earthquakes, AND plagues) — we contend with forces we cannot control, rendering us vulnerable to dying an untimely death.
This year we are encountering perfect conditions for reflecting on the resilience of the Earth on Earth Day. We see the way we directly impact our living environment with our behavior. Look at online at satellite views of the cities where pollution has been cut by the shelter in place orders! Earth rebounds in short order when we are not actively polluting her (but the long game of climate change will not be affected).
Just like the politicians in Octavia Bulter’s books, the current Trump Administration hates regulations and continues to propose funding cuts to the EPA and other programs on top of the regulations they have already rolled back or cut out to date. This is a typical cycle of politics, and not the first time environmental programs have been cut way back. Under Trump, businesses have taken priority over environmental concerns. In turn, funding dries up for us. You know, “us people,” who drink water, breathe air, and might enjoy visiting a diverse ecosystem when we head outside and leave the concrete urban jungles so many of us live in.
That feels like darkness to me.
For perspective, please remember this: humans are just visitors during this blip on the screen of time. We will disappear off the Earth like fleas off the back (or belly) of your dog or cat once it has had a good flea bath. And we may be bathing ourselves off without knowing it. Or are we all suspecting the bath is coming while choosing to look the other way?
By setting the terms of measurement beyond the imaginations of these fiction writers and shifting more firmly to the realm of scientists, we clearly see that Mick Jagger got it wrong. Time is not on my side! It’s on the Earth’s side.
If we measure events in terms of geochronology (think Epochs and Eras) or, for even greater contrast, measure using time points along the Cosmic Scale (where relativity becomes really hard to get your head around), our perspective changes. Our small moment, right here as you read this, is consumed by a deadly virus. It has brought the economic machine to a halt, stunning us all by the inconvenience it causes for some, devastation for others, and makes us all weep for the unfinished lives it has taken.
As I’m writing this piece, the lyrics from the Australian musical act and activists Midnight Oil come to mind. At the end of the 1990 tune Blue Sky Mine, I always sing along to the refrain:
“Who’s gonna save me?
I pray that sense and reason brings us in.
Who’s gonna save me?”
Many of Peter Garrett’s lyrics for Midnight Oil songs create an “us versus them” mindset, which worked well for his political activism. And it works much like the storytelling trope I discussed above. We also see this in Trump’s political rhetoric of “Trumpers versus never Trumpers”. It is a very effective way to reach people and win them to your side.
Another important element of these dystopian novels is the protagonist savior, a hero who will represent “us” in that equation, and maybe even unite us against them. Here in the realm of the Real, I hope this 50th Earth Day will reinvigorate us to unite behind a movement to save us from ourselves. Who will be our hero of this dystopian story?
One man who may prove worthy is Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico. I learned about his efforts in an excellent article from the March edition of Rolling Stone, where Tim Dickson expertly reveals the origination of the myths of recycling, the massive scope of the plastic problem, and thankfully, some possible solutions: Senator Udall is drafting legislation that will curb plastic waste and reframe the responsibility for sustainable practices away from the consumers and back to the producers — oil and chemical companies.
Just as Earth Day was started by Senator Nelson of Wisconsin 50 years ago, we can hope that our representatives and legislators like Senator Tom Udall and his sponsor in the House, Senator Alan Lowenthal, will keep up the good fight on our behalf. Yet anyone paying attention for more than one news cycle can easily see that legislation is fragile, and lobbyists are mighty foes.
So outside of voting, we can all be active heroes and advocate for the future of humanity, not by sitting idly and allowing the seeds of dystopian fiction to become our reality. We have to seize our moment.
Stay informed. Look around and understand your impact as you return to work in the coming weeks and months.
I realize that keeping track of the president and his rollbacks on protecting us might leave you feeling helpless. I don’t enjoy being an informed citizen. It can be such soul crushing work for a guy born the same year as recycling.
Like you, I feel so gullible knowing that my genuine efforts to recycle turn out to have nearly no tangible impact. And I was known as Captain Recycle by my college housemate, where I was almost draconian when I caught plastic in the trash. Separating our recyclables was not optional!
I feel angry, and blue, and dark. My hope for myself is that I can convince my internal voice to start keying on those brighter, more hopeful messages as I move out of my dark mood and swing back to the light.
I will set down these novels and find a way to celebrate the Earth.
A dystopian fiction novel serves as a warning, not a self-fulfilling prophecy. The messages in literature are always open to interpretation, so readers have the power to find the positive passages that will inspire us to rally out into our communities and create meaningful change. I know we can do it!
Happy Earth Day everyone.
