Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  “The People of Sand and Slag,” “Pop Squad,” and “Pump Six” make readers aware of the present and its connection to ecodystopian futures, but in these stories Bacigalupi employs an additional strategy to instigate critical reflection on better ways of being in the world. This strategy is in line with that of hopeful ecotopian fiction, as it encourages three key questions, addressing (1) protagonists’ new ways of thinking about the world after their experiences of something that gets them to reflect on the dominant worldview, (2) their abilities to act on this thinking, and, importantly, (3) our abilities as readers to institute similar transformations. In literary ecotopias—ecological utopias—such as Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), protagonists who visit ecotopian societies initially reject the changes they see. William Weston of Callenbach’s book expresses many prejudices against the culture and society he experiences in Ecotopia. Connie Ramos of Piercy’s book finds the future ecotopian world she visits—Mattapoisett—to be too backward, too pastoral, for her liking. In both books, ecotopia has the immediate effect of making the main characters uncomfortable, of radically destabilizing their conceptions about how the world operates. After spending time in ecotopia, however, the main characters of these narratives embrace it. Weston stays in Ecotopia, and Ramos wishes her daughter could grow up in Mattapoisett. A fundamental strategy of ecotopia is thus to prompt this question: What led the protagonist to reject their previous worldview and embrace a different one? In Ecotopia and Mattapoisett, Weston and Ramos, respectively, experience a quality of life and life-in-environment that far exceeds what they experience outside these ecotopian places. Among many reasons, they embrace ecotopian thinking because it has generated societies that are physically and psychologically healthier for them, and while in these societies they feel a deep sense of connection to community—human and nonhuman.

  Literary ecotopia explores alternatives that its protagonists embrace, and it confirms the structural possibility of its protagonists’ transformations. But ecotopian fiction must be measured by its ability to affect us. As utopian scholar Lucy Sargisson writes, “The exploration of alternatives is a necessary part of the process of transformation. It creates changes in the ways we think about the world and is an integral part of sustainably changing the way that we behave.”20 A final question in ecotopia’s political strategy is about whether the protagonists’ new ways of ecotopian thinking and being are inside the realm of possibility for us. This is not a question about representing progress, about imagining the future, which Fredric Jameson has pointed out our inability to do as a consequence of “the systemic, cultural and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners.”21 Rather, this is a question about living the present in a different way, not with an unimaginable utopian blueprint as our guide, but instead with a commitment to ecological sustainability and environmental and social justice. In a way, then, ecotopian fiction is not really about ecological utopia; it is about drawing our attention to the possibility of different ways of being now. To co-opt Jameson’s language on the future orientation of SF in general, literary ecotopia’s represented futures serve the function of “transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come.”22 That “something yet to come” is indeed an unknowable something, but its becoming at least a better something (that is, ecologically responsive, socially just) is contingent upon the existence or creation of supportive structures in the present moment.

  Weston’s and Ramos’s new ways of ecotopian thinking and being are inside the realm of possibility for us, who have a certain degree of agency over how we live our personal and community lives. While there are many existing challenges to sustainability and justice (for example, the fossil fuel economy, agribusiness, the capitalist subsumption of “all natural and social relationships to the drive to accumulate capital”), these challenges are not beyond being contested by individual behavior and collective action.23 This is not to imply, simply, that us is consumer society and that agency equals purchasing decisions. Such an equation fits the dominant narrative of neoliberal capital, which subjects the world’s peoples and ecosystems to market whim and (against ethics and science) deems this subjection rational. Ecosocialists John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark speak against the consumer sovereignty thesis, “or the notion that all economic decisions are driven by the demands of consumers, who then become responsible for the entire direction of the economy.”24 Environmental sustainability and social justice are not merely votes we can cast with our wallets. They require, as Foster and Clark argue, “finding new ways of building an economy and interacting with nature, based on socialist and indigenous principles, in which we ‘accumulate no more,’ while at the same time improving the human condition.”25 Living ecotopia, as Ecotopia and Woman on the Edge of Time make clear, is about being differently, and this different being is both an individual and community possibility that—while it often seems unlikely to get a foothold in production-driven, consumer society—has yet to be shut out completely by the existing hegemony.

  If we apply the strategic questions reviewed above to Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag,” “Pop Squad,” and “Pump Six,” we see main characters who are firmly of the culture and society that “the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived.”26 Then, as with the ecotopias, we see these characters reconsidering this culture and society in response to a lived experience, demonstrating the malleability of mind-set even within determining contexts. The first ecotopian question applies here: What led the protagonists to think against the grain of the dominant culture?

  In “The People of Sand and Slag” the entire globe seems to be a zone of hyper-industrial activity, as implied by the razed Montana landscape and the oil-black, flammable waves of Hawaii. Amid this degradation the only way humans can survive is by using a biotechnology called “weeviltech” that allows them to metabolize inorganic material such as sand and mine waste. The world imagined in the story emerges from a value system that, as Christy Tidwell observes, sees the land and nonhuman animals as “nothing more than resources to be profited from or destroyed,” as “objects or tools.”27 Chen, the protagonist and narrator of “The People of Sand and Slag,” is a guard for a mining company and a complicit participant in the objectification of the world. When Chen and his fellow guards find an “unmodified organism”—a real dog—wandering in the mining fields, and then take it in because it is “cool” and “Old-timey,” they are inconvenienced by its defecation, its slow-healing injuries, and the cost of its food.28 But then Chen shakes hands with the dog, its eyes staring up at him and watching him walk away. After this moment—and against his peers, who want to eat the dog—Chen begins to reflect deeply on the nonhuman animal and on what humans have become. Prompted to consider making an animal from “building blocks” if he really wants to have one around, Chen responds, “That dog’s different from a bio-job. It looks at us, and there’s something there, and it’s not us. I mean, take any bio-job out there, and it’s basically us, poured into another shape, but not that dog.”29

  Tidwell notes that the objectification of the dog “is undercut as Chen begins to see the dog as a creature in its own right, a consciousness separate from his own, a material presence that has not been biologically modified or constructed to serve his needs.”30 The handshake, the dog’s amber eyes, the morning face lick, the warmth, the “something” that is friendly about the dog—these experiences of the nonhuman, which are novel for Chen and anyone living in this future (a biologist in the story is only interested in a sample of the dog’s DNA)—lead Chen to question whether humans are even human anymore.31 Chen lives in a world where “we have transcended the animal kingdom”; when he asks “If someone came from the past, to meet us here and now, what do you think they’d say about us? Would they even call us human?” he inherently questions this transcendence and, for a littl
e while at least, challenges the dominant worldview of his society.32

  By the end of Bacigalupi’s “Pop Squad” the story’s protagonist and narrator is also thinking against his society, which condemns motherhood and reproduction while it exalts immortality and economic and cultural production. As the story begins, the narrator is executing children and imprisoning their mothers, and throughout the piece he questions women who choose to defy the law and reproduce: “It amazes me that women can end up like this, seduced so far down into gutter life that they arrive here, fugitives from everyone who would have kept them and held them and loved them and let them see the world outside.”33 Mothers have given up their lives, according to the narrator, and judging by what is socially valued in the story, we can assume that the accepted life in this future is one in which the person first maintains regular immortality, or “rejoo,” treatments, and is also actively engaged in producing economic and cultural artifacts, not in reproducing life. In one scene, the narrator follows a suspected, law-breaking mother into an antique shop—a toy shop, really—and speculates on the career she might have had before quitting rejoo because it has a contraceptive in it, and then becoming a mother. She might have been an actress, a financial adviser, a code engineer, a biologist, or a waitress.34 Earlier, moments after killing three sibling children and arresting their mother, the narrator of “Pop Squad” attends his girlfriend Alice’s viola performance, where she is later grandly celebrated for her unmatched virtuosity. As these scenes demonstrate, this future society values economically and culturally productive activity while at the same time grossly devaluing human biological reproduction.

  The narrator’s attitude toward human reproduction changes when, face to face with a breast-feeding mother whose baby he is professionally obligated to execute, he becomes “curious about what you breeders are thinking.” The woman’s response: “I’m thinking we need something new. I’ve been alive for one hundred and eighteen years and I’m thinking that it’s not just about me. I’m thinking I want a baby and I want to see what she does today when she wakes up and what she’ll find and see that I’ve never seen before because that’s new. Finally, something new. I love seeing things through her little eyes and not through dead eyes like yours.”35 Together with feeling his own suppressed reproductive urges at the sight of the woman’s exemplified fertility, as well as his playful experience with the cute child—once an “it” to him, but to whom he eventually and significantly attaches the correct pronoun, “she”—the woman’s reasoning and accusation work on the narrator to get him to walk away without fulfilling the mission that his society requires of him. He does not kill the girl, and as he walks out into the rainy jungle, “for the first time in a long time, the rain feels new.”36

  Finally, in “Pump Six,” Bacigalupi imagines the intellectual and biological devolution of the human species as a consequence of environmental pollutants and the infrastructural efficiencies of modern society. Polychlorinated biphenyls, heptachlor, and other harmful compounds contaminate New York City’s drinking water, contributing to reproductive disorders and mental deficiencies in the story’s twenty-second-century humans, as well as the birth of hermaphroditic troglodytes, or in the narrator’s words, “mash-faced monkey people shambling around with bright yellow eyes and big pink tongues and not nearly enough fur to survive in the wild.”37 The plot of “Pump Six” centers on a malfunctioning sewage pump that previously operated for over one hundred years without needing service, its existence therefore “forgotten by everyone in the city above.”38 The story thus stages the collision of toxicity-induced human intellectual defects with an efficiently mechanized infrastructure that likewise has contributed to a sense of unknowing among the human species, unknowing about where drinking water comes from and unknowing about what happens to human waste once it is flushed. When the pump goes silent, no one can fix it, and no one but the story’s protagonist, Alvarez, seems to care.

  Prior to the pump breaking down, however, Alvarez never wondered about the trogs, the crumbling buildings of the city, or the reproductive disorders, so he was a complicit participant in this decaying society. But as the one responsible for keeping the pumps working, Alvarez must figure out how to fix them. This leads him to seek advice at Columbia University’s engineering department, which turns out to be over twenty years defunct. The library at the university is empty but for an “old faculty wife” who initially waves Alvarez away with a pistol but then, upon learning that the broken pump serves Columbia, invites Alvarez to browse the stacks and learn whatever he needs to learn to fix the pump.39 She leaves him not only with the key to the library, but also with a new awareness of his society’s decay. As he leaves the library, he narrates,

  A crash of concrete rain echoed from a couple blocks away. I couldn’t help shivering. Everything had turned creepy. It felt like the old lady was leaning over my shoulder and pointing out broken things everywhere. Empty autovendors. Cars that hadn’t moved in years. Cracks in the sidewalk. Piss in the gutters.

  What was normal supposed to look like?40

  In asking “What was normal supposed to look like?” while at the same time making an effort to learn how to fix the pump, Alvarez steps outside his society’s constraints to try to become a different person.

  We must question whether the protagonists of these stories are able to make real or carry out their new ways of thinking and being within their societies’ determining contexts. In “The People of Sand and Slag,” “Pop Squad,” and “Pump Six,” as in many dystopias, it is indeed the protagonists’ “desires and hope for a better present or future that distinguish [them] from the rest of the population and additionally bring [them] into conflict with the dystopian establishment.”41 But as Ruth Levitas argues, “The transformation of ways of thinking and of being … depends on an alternative structure within which another logic of action and understanding makes sense.”42 Unfortunately for the main characters of Bacigalupi’s stories, such alternative structures do not exist. In “The People of Sand and Slag,” Chen does not “ultimately change his value system and become willing to pay for [the dog’s] upkeep at the cost of his other pleasures,” because there is no support for the care of nonhuman life.43 It is expensive to feed the dog, it is inconvenient to tend to the wounds that it will inevitably receive in the ubiquitously polluted and toxic world, and commercial society has triumphed so much that Chen would rather use his money for a new pair of virtual reality goggles. In the end, he and his friends eat the dog. “Pop Squad” concludes with its protagonist newly aware of the value of human reproduction against the desire among most in his society to live forever as productive citizens. The rain feels new to him, but as Levitas notes about the energies of utopian transformation, “the personal is not political enough.”44 The ending of “Pop Squad” is indeed left open, but the protagonist’s “micro-changes” seem unlikely to find enough, if any, support to become “macro-changes” in the thinking and being of his culture.45 Open-ended, too, is “Pump Six,” with Alvarez reading a book at random as the story closes. But Alvarez’s society is one in which pollutants saturate the bodies of everyone, buildings are beyond repair, and, perhaps most notably, the normally engaged and activist students of an Ivy League university have become apathetic and indolent. Within these contexts, Alvarez’s personal change seems unlikely to become anything more than short-lived.

  The end of a structure that supports utopian action does not mar our contemporary reality as it does the reality for the characters in Bacigalupi’s stories. The new ways of thinking and being that Bacigalupi’s characters adopt are inside the realm of possibility for us. Ecotopian fiction such as Callenbach’s and Piercy’s works on us by placing its characters within the social contexts that structure the possibility of better ways of being, and then leading us to see that such structuring remains imaginable and attainable for us. In contrast, Bacigalupi’s ecodystopian stories work—that is, instigate ecotopian transformation—by staging a productive tension betw
een what is (im)possible for their protagonists and what is still possible for us. There are social, political, economic, and cultural forces that work against the realization of ecologically and socially better ways of being today. But these forces have not fully interrupted our ability to care for nonhuman species (“The People of Sand and Slag”), to balance economic and cultural production with reproduction rather than subordinate the latter to the former (“Pop Squad”), and to disseminate the understanding that the human body, like all other species’ bodies, is always in ecosystems and will therefore always absorb industrial pollutants (“Pump Six”). Bacigalupi’s fiction reminds us that, “we have not yet crossed the threshold of the unthinkable.”46 If we wake up tomorrow, and the rain feels new, this profound personal change can still become political.

  Notes

  1. Lucy Sargisson, “The Curious Relationship between Politics and Utopia,” in Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 26. For Bacigalupi’s perspective on his role as an environmentalist writer, see Michelle Nijhuis, “A Sci-Fi Writer and an Environmental Journalist Explore Their Overlapping Worlds” (2008), http://grist.org/article/bacigalupi/.

  2. Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), 82.

  3. Kim Stanley Robinson, introduction to Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, ed. Kim Stanley Robinson (New York: Tor, 1994), 11.

  4. Christy Tidwell, “The Problem of Materiality in Paolo Bacigalupi’s ‘The People of Sand and Slag,’” Extrapolation 52, no. 1 (2011): 94–109 (95).

  5. For more on socialist ecofeminism see Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 2005), 208–12.