Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  The onset of the ice age, however, coincides with the rise of an alternative, female political power. Wicca, the women’s collective that Sarah joins during one of her many separations from Saul, is, in Saul’s words, founded on “a wacky female nature worship, centring on ‘the Hidden Goddess,’ who apparently ‘gave suck’ to us all” (117). Wicca successfully wins the national elections on the promise of a “caring revolution” (137), with the tagline “Vote for Wicca. Wicca Cares” (138). This ecomaternalist appropriation of care—effectively rejecting the burden of caring for men but purporting to care for everything else—is expressed in Wicca’s promises of “‘revaluing nature,’ ‘nurturing the future’; ‘the future is green.’ We would ‘bloom again’ with the ‘cooling earth.’ We would ‘give thanks to the Goddess’ for water” (137). When the effects of glaciation become impossible to ignore, however, Wicca’s technophobic stance means that it refuses to take seriously the “techfixes” (147) suggested by scientists, and neglects to meet the challenge of securing the necessary international cooperation and funding. In short, Wicca’s ecomaternalist revolution, established as an alternative to the anti-nature, pro-technology, globally warmed generation, fails in its attempts to cope with the second environmental crisis. It gets caught up in arguments with its rivals, a men’s collective that emerges as a kind of backlash to the backlash. The two sides become bogged down in a macro-version of Saul and Sarah’s lifelong argument. Gender relations are exposed as a depressingly insoluble conundrum—where there is difference there is inequity—in both the “old-fashioned” world of domestic squabbles and the “segged” world of political point-scoring. The biosphere suffers collateral damage in the process.

  The risks of an ethic of care are here laid bare. Wicca’s political campaigning is a reminder of the extent to which ecomaternalist care is an ideological tool rather than an inherent aspect of female identity. To note this, recalling Sandilands, is not to undermine an ethic of care but to subject it to a different kind of assessment: ecomaternalism can be useful as a platform on which to initiate sociopolitical good. In the case of Wicca, however, it becomes not just means but an end, a way of asserting control in order to retain control, particularly over men. Care in this instance becomes a weapon in a gendered power play, with women claiming a monopoly on care and men counterclaiming it as something they can do just as well. This is evident in the controversy that escalates over the domestic robots called “Doves” (87). It is Saul’s brand of nanotechnology that is responsible for the Doves; thus, “as a techie, [he] is full of admiration for the basic Dove design” (94). Moreover, the cute, anthropomorphic Doves prove wildly popular with men like Saul, who rely on them not just for domestic chores but for affection and company. Meanwhile, the Wicca government exploits primarily female fears over incidents in which malfunctioning Doves have attacked animals and children, and the robots are banned. To men, the Doves symbolize the successful masculinist appropriation of the traditionally female functions of care; to women, they represent a flawed counterfeit of an authentically feminine trait. In all, the Doves underline the fraught gender politics of care.

  The Doves’ destructive side also points to the dark side of care itself. The Ice People is a sustained reflection on the efficacy of care as a human response. As Tronto reminds us, a relationship of care is actually definable by selfishness, as the decision to care is necessarily about caring for one (or some) over others. Competing priorities of care are not always compatible. Neither Sarah nor Saul could be easily described as uncaring, but their arguments about care have a destructive effect on the person they would seem to care most about—their son. Correspondingly, the wider gender conflict about who cares more proves detrimental to the nonhuman environment, one of the supposed beneficiaries of that debate. (In this implicit link between child and environment, that common slippage between caring for the “environment” and caring for the “future” cannot escape notice.) Of course, this critique is refracted ironically through Saul’s first-person narrative, meaning that an understanding of the limitations of care must be gained alongside a compassionate response to this portrayal of fatherly love, for, because Saul cares about his son, the reader cannot help caring about him. As the world enters the ice age in earnest and European society begins to come apart, Saul abducts his son Luke from the Wicca commune. They head for the relative warmth and political stability of Africa (in another ironic comment, this time on the racial politics of environmental justice).33 However, if Wicca’s brand of caring could not save the day and the planet, neither can Saul’s. He stops at nothing to save his son, but this means caring for no one else. Not only do they rob fellow refugees; they leave for dead the sympathetic Wicca member Briony who travels with them when they flee attackers in Spain.34 Here, parental care has become Darwinian survivalism: “I told myself it was all for him. I had even sacrificed Briony” (272). Saul’s regrets that Sarah would never acknowledge his love for their son—“She never knew how much I’d loved him…. She didn’t know how much I’d cared for him” (301)—must coexist with his realization at the end of his life that “I wasn’t a hero, or a villain, or any of the things they say in stories—but merely one tiny unit of biology, stopping at nothing to save his genes” (273). Luke, as it turns out, rejects this kind of care; he and many others of his generation run away from their fragile, fighting families and become the Wild Children of the Ice Age.

  Yet this novel must not be misunderstood as a preference for one kind of care against another, for it is, if anything, a careful weighing up of care per se. The novel exhibits a deeply ironic interest in care—it cares about care and draws us in on this basis. Still, it reminds us that the dangers of care reside both in its metaphorical and its metonymic slips: it is too easily used as an alibi (that is, a symbol that conceals its status as symbol) for power, and it is also proximal to much less altruistic tendencies such as jealousy, possessiveness, and exceptionalism. Against Saul’s selfish, old-fashioned care sits Wicca’s failed and vindictive ideology of care, and, against these again, sits the nonsensical affection of the Doves. Then, there is the version of human relations with which the novel ends: the Wild Children and their animalistic pursuit of only the most basic needs. Looking back on his life, which he now spends with an entirely new generation of the ice age, the aging Saul asks: “How can I explain it to these crazy kids, who live for food, and fire, and sex? How love was so important to us. How tiny shades of wants and wishes made us fight, and sob, and part” (63). Saul, in other words, recognizes both the apparent necessity and the shortcomings of love and care in his climate-changed world.

  The Ice People is, in common with other climate change dystopias, about an inadequacy in the contemporary human response to the environment. However, unlike these, Maggie Gee’s thoughtful vision of the future is no simple account of the inadequacy of the contemporary response in terms of a failure to recognize the necessity of care. What makes this climate change dystopia so poignant is that, first, it is about the inevitability of care in shaping our responsibilities to each other and to the environment, and then it is about the terrible cost of taking care for granted as a way of fulfilling these responsibilities.

  Notes

  The research leading to this paper was carried out while a Visiting Fellow with the Humanities Research Centre, RSHA, Australian National University.

  1. Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (San Francisco: Night Shade, 2010); Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain (2004; London: HarperCollins, 2005), Fifty Degrees Below (2005; London: HarperCollins, 2006), and Sixty Days and Counting (London: HarperCollins, 2007). For a comprehensive review of fictional treatments of climate change, see Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra, “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2, no. 2 (2011): 185–200.

  2. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003; London: Virago, 2004), and The Year of the Flood (2009; London: Virago, 2010); T. Coraghessan Boyle, A Friend of the Ear
th (2000; London: Bloomsbury, 2001); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006, London: Picador, 2007); Will Self, The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and Distant Future (2006; London: Penguin, 2007); Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (London: Penguin, 2008).

  3. Doris Lessing, Mara and Dann (London: Flamingo, 1999), and The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2006; London: Harper Perennial, 2007).

  4. Maggie Gee, The Ice People (1998; London: Telegram, 2008). Future references to this novel will be presented in parentheses in the main text.

  5. Sheila Jasanoff, “A New Climate for Society,” Theory Culture Society 27 (2010): 237.

  6. Winterson, Stone Gods, 83.

  7. One could say that Atwood exposes the ethical fine line between environmentalism and misanthropy that characterizes deep green sabotage movements: a similar dilemma on a smaller scale faces eco-warrior Ty Tierwater in Boyle, Friend of the Earth.

  8. Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (London: Routledge, 1995), xix.

  9. Ibid., 216.

  10. For a brief but effective discussion of the “subjectivation” of nature in environmentalist discourse, see Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 77–78.

  11. John Barry, “Sustainability, Political Judgement and Citizenship: Connecting Green Politics and Democracy,” in Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustainability, Rights and Citizenship, ed. Brian Doherty and Marius de Geus (London: Routledge, 1996), 122.

  12. Chris J. Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing (London: Routledge, 1998), 129.

  13. Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), 170–71. For a more recent critique of the promotion of personal care as a political ideal, see Sherilyn MacGregor, Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 57–80.

  14. The phrase comes from MacGregor, Beyond Mothering Earth, 20.

  15. However, McCarthy’s The Road remains an important exception. The novel, which some have read as a climate change narrative even though the catalyst for the destruction of the biosphere is never named, is a sparse but poignant description of the love between a father and son as they make their way through the devastated landscape. Yet love is carefully sifted here, for it is not clear if the father’s steadfast, protective love for his son is really the best way to make sense of one’s place in a dying world, compared with the boy’s more trusting compassion for others.

  16. For the invention of the term ecoféminisme, see Françoise d’Eaubonne, Féminisme ou la mort (Paris: Femme et Mouvement, 1974); see also Barbara T. Gates, “A Root of Ecofeminism: Ecoféminisme,” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 15–22.

  17. For Andrée Collard, for example, the apparent tendency in matriarchal religions toward respect for nature means that motherhood can be invoked as the essential link between women and the environment. Collard writes of early goddess societies, “Women’s skills developed beyond her famed endurance and purveyance of care and wellbeing. She learned the ways of plants. She learned the ways of other creatures of the land, air and sea. She learned them in a spirit of recognition and respect. And with a similar spirit, she partook of them” (11). This allows Collard to state unequivocally, “Pregnancies and child-bearing … are a woman’s link to the natural world and the hunted animals that are part of that world” (14–15); See Andrée Collard with Joyce Contrucci, Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence against Animals and the Earth (London: Women’s Press, 1988).

  18. See, for example, Mary Mellor’s version of ecofeminist political economy: “Feminism is concerned with the way in which women in general have been subordinated to men in general. Ecologists are concerned that human activity is destroying the viability of ecosystems. Ecofeminist political economy argues that the two are linked. This linkage is not seen as stemming from some essentialist female identification with nature, for which some early ecofeminists were criticised, but from women’s position in society, particularly in relation to masculine-dominated economic systems.” See Mary Mellor, “Ecofeminist Political Economy and the Politics of Money,” in Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology, ed. Ariel Salleh (London: Pluto Books, 2009), 251.

  19. Deborah Slicer, “Toward an Ecofeminist Standpoint Theory: Bodies as Grounds,” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 49–73.

  20. Mellor, Feminism and Ecology (London: Polity, 1997), 105–6.

  21. The “ethic of care” was first put forward by Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), and further disseminated by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

  22. This is despite the careful historicist work by some ecofeminists in discovering and interrogating a dualistic system of thinking about women and nature at the heart of patriarchal thought. See, for example, Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 67–87; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980; San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990); and Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993).

  23. Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities, 117.

  24. Indeed, as Sandilands reminds us, “social construction and essentialism are not necessarily opposed concepts”; Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, 71.

  25. Ibid., xiii, 209.

  26. Ibid., 121.

  27. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 149–81. Material feminist Karen Barad has recently updated such ecofeminist critiques by showing how our relationship with the nonhuman is better understood in terms of agency rather than (gendered) identity, specifically, as what she calls “agential intra-action”; “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–31.

  28. John Sears, “‘Making Sorrow Speak’: Maggie Gee’s Novels,” in Contemporary British Women Writers, ed. Emma Parker (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 55.

  29. Maggie Gee, The Burning Book (1983; London: Faber, 1985), and The Flood (London: Saqi, 2005).

  30. Margaret McKay, “An Interview with Maggie Gee,” Studia Neophilogica 69, no. 2 (1997): 216.

  31. Both The Flood (2004) and Where Are the Snows (2006) come closest to this, being near-future treatments of environmental crisis; Gee, Where Are the Snows (London: Telegram, 2006).

  32. According to Gee, the novel was written as a distraction from the disappointment of her publisher’s rejection of The White Family for, among other things, its controversial race issues: “So I wrote another book, The Ice People, which saved me from despair. It dealt with a bi-racial child, but in a very different, light way”; Maya Jaggi, “Maya Jaggi in Conversation with Maggie Gee: The White Family,” Wasafiri 17, no. 39 (2002): 6.

  33. That Saul is of mixed race is another aspect of Gee’s interrogation of the race politics of environmental crisis and justice, which is, unfortunately, outside the scope of this essay.

  34. Saul’s survivalist tactics and Luke’s compassionate protests against these are echoed by McCarthy’s father and son in The Road, which, in a comparable way, questions the seemingly unquestionable “good” of parental care as a way of surviving environmenta
l destruction.

  8

  Future Ecologies, Current Crisis

  Ecological Concern in South African Speculative Fiction

  ELZETTE STEENKAMP

  In a 2004 essay titled “Science Fiction in South Africa,” Deirdre Byrne laments “the regrettable dearth … of published science fiction and science fiction readers” in South Africa. Byrne argues that “one cannot expect an advanced awareness of technological or scientific developments” or “even a basic acquaintance with published literature” in a country where the majority of the population live well below the breadline, the spread of HIV/AIDS is rampant, and levels of technological literacy are extremely low.1 Fast-forward a decade, and the prospects of the South African SF scene seem far less dismal. In 2009, South African–born Neill Blomkamp’s Oscar-nominated film District 9 captured the imagination of audiences worldwide, resulting in an unprecedented boom in local science fiction and fantasy. Add to this the success of Lauren Beukes’s Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning SF noir, Zoo City (2010), and South African speculative fiction appears to be blipping happily on the international radar.

  Aside from comparisons between the sudden international popularity of South African speculative fiction and the meteoric rise of the Scandinavian crime novel,2 very little has been written in the way of scholarly articles examining the role of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction in South Africa literature. This is partially due to science fiction’s association with “pulp” fiction and lowbrow escapism, but can also be attributed to the widely held perception that SF has more to do with shiny machines and spaceships than with actual people. Because of the country’s complex history of colonial and apartheid oppression, much attention is paid to the narrative representation of human conflict, and particularly the issues of race and gender, in South African literature; the neglect of SF as an area of critical inquiry in South Africa is based on the mistaken belief that the genre does not address these sorts of “real world” issues. In “Subversive, Undisciplined and Ideologically Unsound or Why Don’t South Africans Like Fantasy?” Felicity Wood asks: “Why is there so little fantasy in English South African literature?” Wood attributes this “resistance to fantasy” to the fact that “it’s sometimes perceived as being distinct from reality, an escape from it, and thus the way in which fantasy serves as a means of exploring reality has often not been adequately acknowledged.”3 This chapter argues that South African speculative fiction is in fact deeply concerned with the very issue that “serious” South African authors have been examining for many years—alterity.