Being thoughtful about environmentalist care means attending not just to what is said but to what is not said about it. What is often effaced is any distinction between what it means to care for humans and what it means to care for the nonhuman environment, even as it would seem that an admirable ethos of reciprocity and empathy is being celebrated. Such an elision occurs, for example, when Merchant defines earthcare as a “partnership ethic” that “means that both women and men can enter into mutual relationships with each other and the planet independently of gender.”9 When examined closely, the human other and the (nonhuman?) planet sit uneasily together on this list of potential partners. To what extent can one’s relationship with another human be compared to, aligned with, perhaps mapped onto, one’s relationship with the planet, homogeneously invoked? While generally positive, environmentalist relationship ethics such as Merchant’s are more than a little presumptuous about speaking for “the planet” and all it betokens. The moment the planet (or the environment, or nature) is construed as a subject, it is subjectified, whether we like it or not.10 Further, such discursive constructions as the planet or the environment conjure up suitably vague subjects, connoting a vast nonhuman and human collective. While appealingly inclusive on the one hand, the lack of specificity in these constructions render them all the more appropriable by the (human) initiator of that construction on the other. Needless to say, nature cannot speak for itself. The same may be said for rhetorical moves to equate care for the planet with care for tomorrow: what is concealed is the unevenness of the power dynamic between present and future, in addition to that between human and nonhuman. Worth considering here is political scientist John Barry’s suggestion that constitutional democracies establish an ecological contract between citizens and state to safeguard the welfare of “both non-humans and future human descendants.” In a parenthetical but utterly pivotal remark, Barry qualifies his conceptualization of these “moral subjects”; they are, he notes, “worthy of moral consideration but not morally responsible agents.”11 The imbalance that allocates responsibility, voice, initiative, and, of course, care to one side and not the other is all-important: it is an imbalance of power.
Perhaps care always conceals power imbalance. Care must always be contextualized, the circumstances of both agent and object of care always attended to. For relationships of care risk exploiting either or both carer and cared-for; the role of carer is often maintained within the norms of self-sacrifice, and, equally, that of cared-for easily defined by powerlessness. As Chris J. Cuomo reminds us, “Caring can be damaging to the carer if she neglects other responsibilities, including those she has to herself, by caring for another,” while “caring for someone can be damaging to the object of care, who might be better off, or a better person, if she cares for herself.”12 Further, the narrow focus that care places on the dynamic of carer and cared-for has a distorting effect not only within this relationship but between this relationship and others. For Joan C. Tronto, parochialism ranks alongside paternalism as the “two primary dangers of care as a political ideal”: “Those who are enmeshed in ongoing, continuing, relationships of care are likely to see the caring relationships that they are engaged in, and which they know best, as the most important.”13 What is often forgotten, then, is the way in which relations of care are imbricated within complex power plays, which need to be interrogated before promoting these as a model for political action.
These problems intensify when, as so often happens in environmentalist discourse, the caring relationship is intentionally aligned with gender roles. The deliberate gendering of the environmentalist ethic of care is best expressed as “ecomaternalism,” that is, the biologically deterministic construction of women as mothers and the subsequent alignment of them with the nonhuman environment under the signs of fertility and nurture.14 In the wide-ranging discourse of ecomaternalism, “nature” and “woman” share everything from caring responsibilities for all species, to the status of victimhood at the hands of apparently masculinist technologies, to an exclusive relationship akin to a mother-daughter bond.15 The climate change dystopias I have briefly considered all invoke this commonplace of public and environmentalist discourse: motherhood confers a sense of environmentalist wisdom (for Lessing’s Mara), becomes a nostalgic sign of what the world has lost (for Winterson’s Billie), or is denied by mankind’s exploitative impulse (for Atwood’s Toby).
Ecomaternalism’s assumption that core characteristics of womanhood parallel the core characteristics of “nature” is really a long-standing tenet of ecofeminism.16 In the earliest “spiritual” manifestos of the ecofeminist movement, women are exhorted to celebrate a special relationship with nature, usually based on descriptions of early matriarchal religions. This relationship is underpinned by a shared capacity for connectedness—ecological interrelatedness and women’s apparently natural and ancient empathy for others are somehow the same thing.17 Meanwhile, later ecofeminist writing, which tends to couch the discussion not in spiritual terms but in political or cultural contexts, insists on a structural link between women and nature, the product of patriarchal degradation.18 The focus is thus on “standpoints.”19 As Mary Mellor explains, “Women, because of their structural disadvantage, can see the dynamics of the relationship between humanity and nature more clearly than can (relatively) privileged men.”20 Despite differences across the ecofeminist spectrum, then, the movement has tended to be united in its emphasis on a woman-nature affinity. This affinity is grounded in the notion of care, whether as a “natural” compassion or a sociopolitical effect of exploitation. Thus heavily invested in the enduring cultural-feminist notion of an “ethic of care,” the critical wisdom of ecofeminism and ecomaternalism is that women are continually psychologically conditioned to care, as girls, as wives, and, most of all, as mothers; this is what makes them more environmentally conscientious.21
The idea of a woman-nature affinity is deeply problematic, and its problems must be considered in any evaluation of ecomaternalist care as both the ground and the manifestation of this affinity. For one thing, the idea reiterates a centuries-old version of the link between women and nature as a stereotype of the female as less-than-human.22 In a not entirely straightforward tactic of reappropriation, ecofeminism attempts to combat what it sees as the blanket domination of women and nature with the very logic of that domination. For another thing, the insistence on an unmediated woman-nature link has opened ecofeminism up to the dreaded charge of essentialism, or—to use Cuomo’s more accurate phrase—“false universalization,” that is, a simplistically unified construction of femaleness and female experience.23 Certainly, it is easy to poke holes in the spiritual ecofeminist version of the woman-nature affinity, given that this relationship is never rigorously analyzed. Yet even the more stringent “standpoint” arguments of ecofeminism display a relatively unnuanced identity politics. Where an informed or learned understanding of the environment is seen as a fundamental part of the female standpoint, this can in turn be troped as an empathetic trait automatically shared by all women. Ariel Salleh, for example, posits that “the actuality of caring for the concrete needs of others gives rise to a morality of relatedness among ordinary women, and this sense of kinship seems to extend to the natural world.” Although Salleh insists that her brand of ecofeminism “does not set up a static ontological prioritization of ‘woman,’” she presents a vision of “women’s exploitation,” “women’s oppression,” and “women’s lives,” all monolithically conceptualized. In other words, political ecofeminism does not always evade the risk of falsely universalizing female experience as environmental care. One might say that sociological, rather than biological, essentialism is essentialism nonetheless.24
Sweeping remarks about immanent states of being or universal standpoints tend to distract from a more useful understanding of the ecofeminist construction of the woman-nature affinity as a set of political choices. Indeed, not just the logical inconsistencies of the ecofeminist position but the fact that t
hese are often concealed or brushed aside in ecofeminist writing should alert us to the extent to which this has been a tactical move (and, it must be said, a reasonably successful one at that). Rather than an ontological fait accompli brought about by women’s natural or material conditions, the ecomaternalist ethic of care is worth considering as an ideological decision made in response to global society’s prevailing narrative of technological progress. Such an idea informs the critique of ecomaternalist care mounted by Catriona Sandilands. Attacking what she sees as the identity politics of care at the heart of “motherhood environmentalism,” Sandilands proposes as an alternative “a recognition of the impossibility of identity.”25 That is, identity, particularly in a political sense, is only ever forged in the ironic gap between the idea of identity and the knowledge of the contingency of that idea. Sandilands goes as far as to advocate a “strategic essentialism” for ecofeminism, based on the knowledge that neither “woman” nor “nature” possesses any stability as a concept.26 In suggesting that identity is partial and provisional, and that much is to be gained from an ironic assumption of identity (or identities), Sandilands builds on Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism and its celebration of technology for enabling an identity-less world.27 Sandilands, however, is concerned with ironic play not just as liberating but as politically productive of action and change. An ironic ecofeminism enables the assumption of ecomaternalist identity in order to elicit sympathy from others, say, or to inspire them to action, but always with the awareness that such a performance is equivalent to—not expressive of—identity.
A critical—or, one should say, thoughtful—perspective on ecomaternalism, described here in the terms provided by Sandilands, resituates care from being a fundamental element of female “identity” to a portable and contestable component of an ideological stance. Such a perspective enhances a reading of Maggie Gee’s The Ice People and, particularly, its departure from the ecomaternalist ethos that underpins so many other eco-dystopian novels. In her fictional account of gender politics in a climate-changing, technologically driven world, Gee destabilizes the ethic of care, not just as a female prerogative in the face of masculinist scientism but as an ideal environmentalist response in and of itself.
MAGGIE GEE’S THE ICE PEOPLE
Gee’s first novel, Dying, in Other Words, appeared in 1981, and was followed by eleven more novels and, most recently, an autobiography. Critically acclaimed from the outset, Gee nevertheless remained relatively underrated until the 2002 publication of The White Family, a searching narrative about racial prejudice in contemporary England. Described by one scholar as a “compassionate humanist feminist,” Gee displays in her work an interest in the tenuousness of middle-class life, investigating the impact on individuals—usually networks of family and friends—when what is taken for granted in political, social, or environmental terms is somehow lost.28 Disaster is often enacted stylistically and structurally too: catastrophes occur as interruptions to Gee’s normally realist style, for example, in the black pages and bird-shaped visual poetry that represent nuclear holocaust in The Burning Book (1983) and in the montage of disconnected paragraphs after London is deluged in The Flood (2005).29 Gee’s oeuvre is also characterized by its interrogations of gender inequity beyond simple equations of masculinist oppression and female triumph. In 1995, around the time of writing The Ice People, Gee remarked on the “black and white” tendency of “women’s fiction”: “I think it’s too obvious to be a woman, and a feminist woman, writing about nice women and horrid men, which is a lot of what’s going on, isn’t it?”30 The Ice People, then, is characteristic of Gee’s fiction in its exploration of “average” family life devastated by environmental, social, and political change. In other ways, however, it is a one-off. It is so far the only one of Gee’s books definable as SF, set in a future world whose technologies are described in detail.31 Moreover, it departs, quite intentionally, from her regular cast of characters, the intricate network of people that radiates outward from the White family and that tends to recur in her novels.32 The Ice People thus focuses tightly on a single nuclear family unit, its psychological dramas serving as cause, effect, and even microcosm of national and global crisis.
The novel is set in the middle of the twenty-first century, when global warming suddenly experiences a rapid reversal: the world enters an ice age, and anthropogenic climate change is countered by an even more destructive “natural” climate phenomenon. Much of the novel, however, is told in flashback, as Saul, the first-person narrator, looks back on a life that spans the onset and development of one environmental crisis and then another.
Saul is born in London in 2005, at the start of what will become known as “the Tropical Time” (16). By his teens and twenties, global warming has reached its height, but this is a time during which young men and women—feeling all the invincibility of youth—revel in, rather than worry about, climatic conditions. Along with climate change, the world has also experienced dramatic social breakdown—epidemics of diseases such as Ebola and mutant HIVS have just about shut down entire governments, including Britain’s. However, the younger generation’s response to all this is a kind of apathy. The twentieth-century battle of the sexes has given way to mutual antagonism and a trend for gender segregation, or “segging” (23)—it has become fashionable for young men and women simply to avoid each other. Such a society is recognizable as the logical outcome of the kind of masculinist-scientist-capitalist complex in extremis detailed in other climate change dystopias; this is a world very like the worlds described by Atwood and Winterson. The biosphere has been irretrievably damaged, medical tinkering in the form of antibiotics has produced resistant strains of killer diseases, and an unrestrained profit motive only further encourages social, political, and environmental dysfunction.
Granting the similarities to other climate change dystopias, however, there is a crucial difference with Gee’s novel. This lies, in part, in Saul’s status as a narrator; specifically, it lies in authorial manipulation of narrator unreliability, producing an interpretive—and gendered—irony. Intelligent, likable Saul is made all the more sympathetic by his first-person perspective. The reader is initially drawn into the novel as one is drawn into the typical science fiction dystopia, through empathy with the protagonist as outsider: he or she is “like us,” and together we negotiate the brave new world of the text. It is difficult not to identify with Saul as he falls in love and settles down in an “old-fashioned,” “twentieth-century” kind of way (28). However, Saul’s seemingly commonsense description of his society is strikingly unreflective of the gender dynamics at play. He describes segging but cannot understand it. He cannot see, for example, that it is motivated by women, as a backlash against what they perceive to be the gender inequalities that still predominate in twenty-first-century life. Thus, it is Saul’s wife, Sarah, who provides us with an alternative insight into segging. Employed as part of a state initiative to combat segging and to improve falling fertility rates, she teaches teenagers how to fall in love and finds that, while boys are receptive enough to the idea of “having women to love and support them,” girls are “not all that excited about developing their nurturing sides” (36). The girls’ concerns center on care as power imbalance: “I want to look after kids…. But why should I want to look after a man? They’re not babies” (36). Sarah’s attempts to explain the girls’ perspective to Saul actually provokes an example of such imbalance:
“They’re quite thoughtful, when you listen to them. I think they have a point about housework, too.”
“But you enjoy it,” I said. “Partly because you’re so good at it. Your food always looks so beautiful. I mean, you turn that side of things into pure pleasure. I wish those girls could see what you do.”
She didn’t smile, but nodded slowly. “It takes a lot of time, though, Saul, you know.”
“Time well spent,” I said, kissing her. (37)
Sarah’s concerns and Saul’s response only clarify the inequities of ca
re in traditional male-female relations so familiar to twentieth-century feminism: it is not just that the woman’s conventional role is to provide care, but care is too often neither returned nor adequately rewarded.
The novel’s analysis of gender relations occurs alongside its depiction of increasing environmental chaos. First, the breakdown of Saul and Sarah’s marriage is reflective of a global gender conflict: as Sarah and many women like her turn militant in their separatism, men like Saul become more resentful of women, more insistent on cultivating what they see as masculine traits, and, yet, more desiring of conventionally feminine care and attention. Then, the world descends into an ice age, and the trajectory of anthropogenic climate change is abruptly reversed. It is not just that Saul and Sarah’s battle of the sexes is part of an all-out war; it is significant that it takes place within the novel’s trajectory of two global climatic events—anthropogenic climate change and the onset of glaciation. In other words, the novel’s interrogation of shifts in gender dynamics is, when read alongside its two environmental crises, also an interrogation of two very different—and differently gendered—solutions to these crises. That is, the novel first critiques a very masculinist response to man-made global warming and then studies an ecomaternalist response to the ice age crisis.
The initial crisis of global warming is readable as a component of a larger whole, as one of the outcomes of a thoughtless, even arrogant, indulgence in a technologically enhanced lifestyle. Once the reader becomes attentive to Saul’s unreliability as a narrator, it is possible to read his careless description of these early days as part of a broader ideological context for runaway climate change: his casual jetting around the world for easy, exotic holidays; his soaking up the heat with no anxiety about the rate of temperature increase; his embracing a career in nano-engineering, with no consideration that technology might offer a solution to environmental crisis rather than a path to more affluence. Through it all, Saul’s experience—“I felt on the brink of owning the world. I was a man, and human beings ran the planet…. I was tall, and strong, and a techie, which qualified me for a lifetime’s good money” (24)—is perceptibly gendered.
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