The obvious question to ask is why, when faced with the incontrovertible evidence of impending catastrophe, not only the Swill, but also the Sweet, the Fringers, and the state, should have failed to plan adequately. The novel is clear that science had indeed sounded warnings. “As I understand it,” Andra observes to Lenna, “they knew what was coming…. Yet they did nothing about it.” “They fell into destruction,” she replies, “because they could do nothing about it; they had started a sequence which had to run its course in unbalancing the climate” (13). What neither she nor Turner adequately explain, however, is why they were unable to do anything about it, why they had started this sequence, and why it had to run its course. Logically, the answer can only be that some social power prevented them from acting on the scientific advice.
Yet Turner is at pains to insist that his fictional Australian elites were essentially well motivated. As Marin tells Andra, “The idea was not oppression but preservation. The Sweet, educated and by and large the most competent sector of the population … were necessary to administer the State. With the collapse of trade and … industry the Swill became a burden on the economy, easier and cheaper to support if … concentrated into small areas” (91). When Derrick, the most senior representative of Turner’s Australian state, defends the cull to Nola, he does so in similarly benevolent terms: “If there has to be a cull—and you know damned well that sooner or later there has to be—let’s at least learn to do it with a minimum of suffering for the culled” (297). How could an elite so well educated, so competent, so concerned to minimize suffering—in short, so much like the one Macfarlane Burnet had hoped for—have failed to prevent such preventable catastrophe? The answer must be that it, in turn, had been confronted by social powers more powerful and also less rational than itself. No doubt, there are a range of possible candidates available in the real world, but none within the novel. The competition between global capitalist corporations fits the bill rather nicely, however, as explanation for this peculiar combination of historically unprecedented power with historically unprecedented irrationality.
Which leads me, finally, to the linked questions of Turner’s representations of the state and of Australian insularity. The novel is clear that, when the world financial system collapses, the nation state takes over the administration of the economy. So Francis Conway recalls that “I was fifteen when the money system collapsed worldwide. That, in a single sentence, records the passing of … private-sector capitalism…. The commercial Sweet had spent months preparing for the changeover…. With forgetful speed it became convenient to present an allocation card at a State Distribution Store” (71). This is also the moment at which Mrs. Parkes’s import-export company becomes a government sub-department. At one level, Turner is very astute here, recognizing the way conventional Left-versus-Right disputes over public-versus-private ownership actually obscure the more fundamental continuities in management and structure that persisted, in both Western and Eastern Europe, through both the socializations of the 1940s and ’50s and the privatizations of the 1980s and ’90s. But at another level, he ignores the likelihood that truly global corporations might not be as readily devolved into state subsidiaries as are national firms. No matter how convenient the fictional device of insularity might be to utopian writers, one is left wondering what had happened to the international parent companies, to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the United States Federal Reserve Bank, the European Central Bank, the People’s Bank of China, and so on. Did the economy simply wither away, much as Engels had imagined the state might?29 It seems unlikely.
Turner’s The Sea and Summer is clearly not the game-changing climate change dystopia for which Christoff might have hoped. It has been out of print for over a decade, and unlike On the Beach it has never been adapted for film, television, or radio. As Verity Burgmann and Hans Baer recently observed: “The Sea and Summer is an extraordinarily well-crafted and gripping novel that received international awards and critical acclaim but has not received the popular attention it deserves.”30 Its reissue early in 2013, as the first Australian title to be included in Gollancz’s list of “SF Masterworks,” is thus especially to be welcomed. It has its flaws, no doubt, not least an underlying failure to acknowledge the deep contradictions between the emancipatory potential of scientific research and the political economy of late capitalism. Nonetheless, Turner’s novel is long overdue positive critical reevaluation, and hopefully this essay will make some small contribution to that effect. I for one have very selfish reasons to hope so, for I live in Elwood, only a few minutes’ walk from the beach where Alison Conway used to play as a little girl.
Notes
1. Nevil Shute, On the Beach (London: Heinemann, 1957).
2. Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 56.
3. Ibid., 56–57, 85–86.
4. Lyman Tower Sargent, “Australian Utopian Literature: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography, 1667–1999,” Utopian Studies 10, no. 2 (1999): 138–73.
5. Denis Veiras, L’histoire des Sévarambes, ed. A. Rosenberg (1679; Paris: Champion, 2001); Denis Veiras, The History of the Sevarambians: A Utopian Novel, ed. J. C. Laursen and C. Masroori (1679; New York: SUNY Press, 2006).
6. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (1867; London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), 768.
7. This is not true for North America or South America, Europe or Asia or Africa. Of the six commonly recognized inhabited continents, only Australia is truly an island.
8. Robyn Walton, “Utopian and Dystopian Impulses in Australia,” Overland 173 (2003): 7.
9. Joseph Fraser, Melbourne and Mars: My Mysterious Life on Two Planets; Extracts from the Diary of a Melbourne Merchant (Melbourne: E. W. Cole, 1889).
10. George Turner, “Envoi,” in A Pursuit of Miracles: Eight Stories (Adelaide: Aphelion Publications, 1990), 209.
11. George Turner, The Sea and Summer (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 318.
12. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 199.
13. Peter Christoff, “The End of the World as We Know It,” The Age, January 15, 2008, 13.
14. George Turner, Beloved Son (London: Faber and Faber, 1978); George Turner, Vaneglory (London: Faber and Faber, 1981); George Turner, Yesterday’s Men (London: Faber and Faber, 1983).
15. Turner, Sea and Summer; George Turner, Brainchild (New York: William Morrow, 1991); George Turner, The Destiny Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1993); George Turner, Genetic Soldier (New York: William Morrow, 1994); Turner, Pursuit of Miracles; George Turner, “And Now Time Doth Waste Me,” in Dreaming Down-Under, ed. Jack Dann and Janeen Webb (Sydney: Voyager, 1998); George Turner, Down There in Darkness (New York: Tor Books, 1999).
16. George Turner, “The Fittest,” in Urban Fantasies, ed. David King and Russell Blackford (Melbourne: Ebony Books, 1985).
17. George Turner, Drowning Towers (New York: Arbor House, 1987).
18. Turner, Sea and Summer, 3–16, 87–100, 315–16.
19. Ibid., 3–6. All subsequent references will be given in the text.
20. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects, the 2010 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2010), http://esa.un.org/wpp/Other-Information/faq.htm#q3.
21. Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, More People Than Ever Are Victims of Hunger, press release (Rome: FAO Media Centre, 2008), 1.
22. Turner would almost certainly have been surprised by how easily Australia withstood the global financial crisis that began in late 2007 (to date, it is the only OECD country to have escaped recession), as also by the probable cause: the long-term restructuring of Australian trade relationships away from America and Europe and toward China and India.
23. “List of Countries
by Unemployment Rate,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemployment_rate (last accessed May 22, 2013).
24. European Commission, Unemployment Statistics (Luxembourg: Eurostat, 2012), http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Unemployment_statistics (last accessed May 22, 2013).
25. Stockholm Institute for Peace Research, SIPRI Yearbook 2011: Armaments, Disarmaments and International Security (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 319–20.
26. “Summary for Policymakers,” Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis; Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. S. Solomon, D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K. B. Averyt, M. Tignor, and H. L. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 13.
27. Gabriele C. Hegerl, Francis W. Zwiers, Pascale Braconnot, Nathan P. Gillett, Yong Luo, Jose A. Marengo Orsini, Neville Nicholls, Joyce E. Penner, and Peter A. Stott, “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change” in Soloman et al., Climate Change 2007, 727; Stephen H. Schneider, Serguei Semenov, Anand Patwardhan, Ian Burton, Chris H. Magadza, Michael Oppenheimer, A. Barrie Pittock, Atiq Rahman, Joel B. Smith, Avelino Suarez, and Farhana Yamin, “Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risk from Climate Change,” in Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; Contribution of Working Group 11 to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Martin Parry, Osvaldo Canziani, Jean Palutikof, Paul van der Linden, and Clair Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 796.
28. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (1848; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 80–90; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 612–48; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, ed. Frederick Engels (1894; London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972), 211–31.
29. Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1878; Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), 387.
30. Verity Burgmann and Hans A. Baer, Climate Politics and the Climate Movement in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2012), 37.
7
Care, Gender, and the Climate-Changed Future
Maggie Gee’s The Ice People
ADELINE JOHNS-PUTRA
Anthropogenic climate change, global warming, the sixth mass extinction event—whatever we want to call it—is now fixed in the science fiction imaginary: witness the recent success of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2010) and consider Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-future depiction of abrupt climate change in the Science and the Capital trilogy (2004, 2005, 2007).1 Perhaps just as noteworthy is the recent spate of novels about future climate-changed worlds by authors who are not usually identified with SF. This includes writers of so-called “literary” fiction on both sides of the Atlantic: Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Cormac McCarthy, Will Self, and Jeanette Winterson.2 Doris Lessing’s return to futuristic world-building in her “Ifrik” novels is worth considering in this vein.3 So too is British novelist Maggie Gee, and the environmental catastrophe she depicts in her novel The Ice People (1998).4
I will take as a critical given the idea that novels constitute spaces in which to explore inner life as it relates to the outer world of social appearance and action. The specific case of the climate change dystopian novel is no different. These dystopian visions consider the lived experience of climate change, and attempt to refract through the personal the almost incomprehensible scale of this global ecological crisis. They attempt, too, to adapt the conventions of the novel form—the insistently concrete questions of setting, character, and plot—to the notoriously abstract nature of climate change. Climate change, remarks philosopher of science Sheila Jasanoff, is “everywhere and nowhere”—everywhere because it is a global problem that has become a mainstay of our collective cultural life, but nowhere because it is knowable and solvable only at a remove, through the mediation of science and the machinery of politics.5 In response to these representational contradictions, the climate change dystopia constructs a vision of the future in which ecological crisis can be denied no longer and a consideration of its causes and possible solutions delayed no further. More often than not, in such novels, humankind’s culpability in a climate-changed world, as well as our potential for change, become part of the psychological texture of the narrative.
In their assessment of humanity’s collective hubris, such novels imply that we simply have not cared enough, and that the way forward lies in caring more. Many climate change dystopias offer object lessons in environmentalist empathy, suggesting that—quite simply—love will let us save, survive, or escape an ecologically degraded planet. Where SF has conventionally reveled in technological world-building, these novels push the dark, dystopian side of science to the extreme, and insist on care and love as its only viable alternative. In Lessing’s Mara and Dann (1999) and its sequel The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2006), the eponymous sister and brother are a study in affective contrast: compassionate, motherly Mara is able to overcome the traumas of climate refugeeism, while emotionally blunted Dann finds only psychological dead ends. In Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2008), we find three interlocked time-shifting stories; each pits an environmentally and emotionally attuned protagonist called Billie (or Billy) against a world of technological brutality. The novel’s refrain that “Love is an intervention” is confirmed when the last Billie finds happiness in death, a moment that facilitates a return to her long-sought-for mother.6 Both Lessing and Winterson offer up eco-fables of a sort, but even in more considered assessments of environmental disaster, loving care provides the moral. In Atwood’s dystopia-turned-apocalypse, Oryx and Crake (2003), life on Earth has been genetically engineered and ecologically exploited beyond recognition. Crake, a gifted scientist who decides to destroy humankind to save the planet, is therefore both villain and savior. His ultra-rational, anti-emotional solution effectively places the notion of environmental care under watch, even while science is taken to task.7 Atwood returns, however, to the notion of care as optimal response in her characterization of Toby in the companion novel The Year of the Flood (2009), which narrates the experiences of a group of female survivors of Crake’s apocalypse. Life for the women in both pre-apocalyptic dystopia and post-apocalyptic devastation is a matter of surviving a violent male-dominated techno-capitalistic society, and only Toby’s successful application of the teachings of a fringe eco-cult secures the women’s survival.
Obviously, that “care” is the answer to rampant scientism and ecological crisis is not a new idea and is certainly not restricted to the contemporary novel. Indeed, it seems so apparently plain that a concept such as “earthcare,” put forward by Carolyn Merchant in the 1990s, seems hardly to need explanation. Merchant states her position unequivocally: “Humans, who have the power to destroy nonhuman nature and potentially themselves through science and technology, must exercise care and restraint by allowing nature’s beings the freedom to continue to exist.”8 Yet Merchant’s seemingly commonsense assumptions about how we should care more and destroy less skim over some difficult territory, and the same could be said for countless other environmentalist calls to care. Questions need to be asked—questions about who does the caring and who or what is cared for; about who gets to make these decisions; about what models of human-to-human care might be invoked in the process (friendship, kinship, marriage, parenthood, and so on); about the gender dynamics of our models of care; and, finally, about the efficacy of care in and of itself as an ethical, psychological, and political position. Such questions need to be asked, then, of the contemporary climate change dystopian novel.
The context for this chapter is the emergence of care in the climate change dystopia as an appropriate response to technologically driven ecological crisis. I first interrogate the notion that care per se represents a useful environmentalist ethic and then investigate the vexed gender dynamics of care. This dis
cussion provides a basis for reading Gee’s novel as a rare example of a climate change dystopia that actively evaluates the environmentalist ethic of care and its use as a counterpoint to a debased notion of techno-scientism. Ultimately, my contention is that the now ubiquitous celebration of care is deceptively simple, and that—in a time of ecological crisis—it warrants a close reading.
WHY CARE? WHO CARES?
By “care” I mean a feeling—translated into an ethos—of concern for and consideration of the needs of others, whether human or nonhuman. I certainly do not intend to suggest that an attitude of care is an inherently immoral or unethical stance to take, but I do wish to encourage a cautious approach to care, particularly when it is taken for granted as an ideal environmentalist outlook and its relationship to prior models of care insufficiently attended to. Perhaps another way to put this is that there is a need to complement care with thoughtfulness in both senses of the word, as a considerate and a considered response. This complicates any simple idea of care as pure or “natural” feeling versus science and technology as the product of ratiocinative reasoning.
Green Planets Page 18