0% found this document useful (0 votes)

19 views180 pages

( (Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture) ) Adeline Johns-Putra - Climate Change and The Contemporary Novel-Cambridge University Press (2019)

The document discusses the significance of a cardboard bookmark owned by the author's ecologist husband, which features the saying, 'We have not inherited the Earth from our fathers; we are borrowing it from our children.' This phrase, originally attributed to Wendell Berry, has been widely misattributed and reflects a powerful sentiment about environmental stewardship and intergenerational responsibility. The author explores how this rhetoric shapes contemporary environmental discourse, emphasizing parental obligations to future generations amidst the challenges posed by climate change.

Uploaded by

Zahra N.

We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

0% found this document useful (0 votes)

19 views180 pages

( (Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture) ) Adeline Johns-Putra - Climate Change and The Contemporary Novel-Cambridge University Press (2019)

Uploaded by

Zahra N.

We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

You are on page 1/ 180

Introduction

Ever since I have known him, my ecologist husband has owned a well-worn
cardboard bookmark; I first came across it tucked, appropriately enough,
into his copy of the Brundtland Commission’s report, Our Common Future
(1987).1 The bookmark was a gift from his parents and its pencilled
inscription is still just visible on its reverse: this is also appropriate, not
only because of the familial sentiments it expresses, but because my in-laws’
commitment to self-sufficient life helped to lay the foundations for my
husband’s professional, academic, and personal commitment to the envir-
onment, which have, in turn, encouraged mine. I noticed the bookmark,
a now somewhat tattered strip of cardboard, for its faded epigram:
‘We have not inherited the Earth from our fathers; we are borrowing it
from our children.’ Described as a ‘Native American saying’, these words
are accompanied by a banner featuring a pastiche of indigenous American
art (now torn off from my husband’s well-used bookmark) and an illustra-
tion of three people in a canoe (Fig. 1). Of course, clad in the fly-
fisherman’s uniform of khaki fishing vest and bucket hat, the paddlers
are not themselves characterised as indigenous; indeed, their apparent
whiteness identifies them as ‘mainstream’ Americans enjoying their coun-
try’s wilderness while managing, in their bark canoe, to exemplify
a romantic, ‘noble savage’ wisdom. That said, the bookmark’s folksy
sense of Americana is intended to be decontextualised as far as geography
goes (my in-laws no doubt purchased it in a bookshop in Wales, where they
live) and its three illustrated figures (a grandfather, father, and child)
signify the three generations of ‘fathers’, ‘children’, and the text’s inclusive
‘we’ who inhabit the middle ground. The main point of the keepsake is to
locate its modern reader, wherever she may be, in intergenerational terms,
reminding her of her part in a bargain of posterity.

1
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford University
Press: 1987).

Figure 1: Mary Engelbreit, ‘We Have Not Inherited the Earth from Our Fathers’
© Mary Engelbreit Enterprises, Inc.

It is not the bookmark’s quaint and cutesy appeal but its self-consciously
wise aphorism that is so striking. The cynic who suspects that it is not
a Native American saying would be right. The special attraction of these

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:11:20, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.001
Introduction 3
words has meant that they have been quoted and requoted in various forms
over the past three decades, and their provenance has proven surprisingly
portable. Meticulous research by the writer who blogs as Garson O’Toole
shows that the sentiments were first expressed by activist-author Wendell
Berry; writing in 1971 about protecting the Red River Gorge in his beloved
Kentucky, Berry declared: ‘I speak of the life of a man who knows that the
world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has
undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-
bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children.’2
The publication of Berry’s words in Audubon magazine soon after led to
its misattribution to John James Audubon, and when Dennis Hall, an
official at Michigan’s Office of Land Use, adapted them without citation in
1973, he was erroneously credited also.3 Similarly, Australian Environment
Minister Moss Cass’s use of it in a speech to OPEC in 1974 – inserting the
grander phrase ‘inherited the Earth’ to replace the idea of being ‘given’ the
world – meant that the adage has sometimes been ascribed to him.4 From
the 1980s onwards, the phrase was quoted in speeches and reprinted on
book jackets and in report bylines – by, among others, representatives of
the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Wildlife
Fund.5 Paul and Anne Ehrlich attributed it to the International Union
for the Conservation of Nature and an article in the Christian Science
Monitor assigned it to environmentalist Lester Brown of the Worldwatch
Institute.6 The Los Angeles Times asserted that it was an Amish saying;
US Secretary of State James Baker named Ralph Waldo Emerson as its
author; and the US Council on Environmental Quality claimed the source
to be Chief Seattle.7 If Mary Engelbreit, the artist responsible for the
bookmark along with countless other epigrammatic adornments of greet-
ing cards and calendars, chose sometime in the 1990s to describe this as
2
Garson O’ Toole, ‘We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors; We Borrow It from Our
Children’, Quote Investigator: Exploring the Origins of Quotations, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/
01/22/borrow-earth/#note-5296–1; Wendell E. Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on
Kentucky’s Red River Gorge (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1971), p. 26.
3
Wendell E. Berry, ‘The One-Inch Journey’, Audubon (May 1971), 4–11; Dennis Hall, ‘The Land
Is Borrowed from Our Children’, Michigan Natural Resources, 44.4 (1975), 2–3.
4
O’Toole, ‘Inherit the Earth’.
5
United Nations Environment Programme, Annual Review 1978 (London: UNEP Earthprint, 1980);
Lee M. Talbot, ‘A World Conservation Strategy’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 128.5288
(July 1980).
6
Paul and Anne Ehrlich, ‘The Politics of Extinction’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 37.5 (1981), 26;
Ed Jones, ‘Saving the Soil – by Private Initiative’, Christian Science Monitor (5 January 1983), 23.
7
Frank Riley, ‘John Muir’s Legacy Still Strong in Glacier Country’, Los Angeles Times (14 Aug. 1988), 5;
Ralph Keyes, ‘Some of Our Favorite Quotations Never Quite Went that Way: Did They REALLY
Say It?’ Washington Post (16 May 1993), L10.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:11:20, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.001
4 Introduction
Native American, one can only assume that her decision was partly
a matter of canny merchandising and partly the same kind of genuine,
unchecked error made by many others.8
At first glance, the sentiment seems to strike a chord of environmental
concern, and it is easy to see why differing versions have proliferated even
as they have been attributed to sufficiently venerable and quotable sources.
The idea that our relationship with the biosphere is automatically a matter
of posterity is a powerful one, and this quotation in particular achieves
several important rhetorical tricks. It collapses a web of obligations –
primarily, between species – into a single intergenerational strand of
time. We are not construed as guardians of the environment for the
environment’s sake but are explicitly called on to steward it for a vastly
distant future, even as we are reminded of our debt to those in the past; we
are thus placed in a grand historical chain of obligations. More impor-
tantly, this version of environmentalist posterity brings future generations
into the immediate purview of parental love. Even as the call to steward-
ship seems to trail off into the reaches of time, its use of synecdoche – the
modelling of our attitude to future generations on our responsibilities to
our offspring – replaces the terror of sublime infinity with the sentimen-
tality of parental caring, sheltering, and nurturing. From Berry’s original
expression of it through its many incarnations, the primal, emotional
punchline is that (every)man loves his children.
Such rhetorical manoeuvres are discernible in a wide range of late
twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural texts and artefacts, from
media reportage to cinema, from popular science to poetry. Indeed, this
parental rhetoric of posterity is possibly one of the most prevalent tactics in
contemporary environmentalist discourse. Unsurprisingly, this rhetoric
has turned ubiquitous with the deepening sense of global environmentalist
crisis in this century in the face of anthropogenic climate change, part of an
age of unprecedented human impact on the biosphere increasingly referred
to as the Anthropocene. It is, therefore, simultaneously an expression of
and response to the worries called forth by climate change. It frames our
climate change concerns as a fear for future (human) generations and
particularly for the most immediate of those – our offspring. It seems,
too, that it allows us to convince ourselves that parental care is the obvious

8
Mary Engelbreit, www.maryengelbreit.com. But Engelbreit should not be readily dismissed as
racially insensitive: she gained attention for producing an anti-racist (and parentally themed)
image in response to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014; Diana
Reese, ‘Michael Brown’s Mother Inspires Controversial Artwork by Mary Engelbreit’, Washington
Post, 25 August 2014.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:11:20, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.001
Introduction 5
and most effective solution to climate change: if we just cared more about
our children, we would be motivated to save them and everything would be
all right.
The discourse of environmentalist crisis in the Anthropocene is pep-
pered with such references to parental obligations to posterity, creating
a sense of transcendence and timelessness on the one hand and conjuring
up elemental feelings of care and love on the other. It is what, for example,
gives especial power to British poet Ruth Padel’s haunting climate change
poem, ‘Slices of Toast’ (2007), an effective piece of environmentalist
poetry thanks to its evocation of the poet’s parents and child.
The poem’s lyrical description of environmental crisis is occasioned by
a warm winter’s day that is ‘almost too warm’; it begins with memories of
the colder winters of childhood and ends with worries about the future
world.9 Anxieties about disruptions in ocean flows, melting polar icecaps,
and deadly weather events segue into the poet’s memory of events at
a public lecture by environmentalist James Lovelock: ‘A woman in the
auditorium asks: If all you say / is true, what should we be teaching our
children?’, to which Lovelock’s deflated and defeated response is simply,
‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’10 All then turn out to be addressed, along
with a final, unanswerable plea, to the poet’s daughter. For if, indeed, all
Lovelock says is true, then, ‘the only answer is commando skills. / Fight to
the death for any high ground you’re standing on / my darling.’11
The poem ends, self-aware but helpless all the same: ‘I know the Thames
Barrier, small waters / of our particular rivers, and this terrible readiness / to
worry about your own family first, may be the least / of our problems but
I think my daughter, my daughter, / how is she going to deal with this?’12
The shift from planet to child may in rational terms be an abrupt one – it is
‘a question’ that Lovelock ‘hadn’t faced before’ – but it flows, affectively
speaking, with utter ease.13 The repetition of ‘my daughter’ strikes a note
with the reader because of what the poet realises is everyone’s ‘terrible
readiness’ to think of the environment in terms of posterity.
The question that haunts Padel’s Lovelock is evident in many other
popular calls to environmental action. It is transformed in such rhetoric
into a reason to act, a rationale for changing our ways in the present to
make a better life for those in the future. The film An Inconvenient Truth
(2006) ends with Al Gore’s affecting words to the audience: ‘Future

9
Ruth Padel, ‘Slices of Toast’, London Review of Books, 29.5 (8 March 2007), 31.
10 11 12
Ibid., 31; original emphasis. Ibid., 31; original emphasis. Ibid., 31; original emphasis.
13
Ibid., 31; original emphasis.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:11:20, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.001
6 Introduction
generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, “What were our
parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had a chance?”
We have to hear that question from them, now.’14 Meanwhile, climate
scientist James Hansen has titled his book on global warming Storms of
My Grandchildren (2009) and includes photographs of those grandchildren
at various points in the book. In his preface, beneath an image of his
granddaughter at two, he opines: ‘I did not want my grandchildren,
someday in the future, to look back and say “Opa understood what was
happening, but he did not make it clear”.’15 More recently, Hansen has
joined with a group of twenty-one young people in Eugene, Oregon, to
take legal action against the government of the United States; Juliana
v. United States is a suit against governmental inaction on climate change
on the grounds that this represents a violation of the constitutional rights
of future adults (and, indeed, future humans, as Hansen’s status as
a plaintiff is both on behalf of his granddaughter and as guardian for future
generations).16 For Gore, Hansen, and others, ‘we’ have a parental duty to
not just one generation but to countless many.
The affective appeal of parenthood gives a seeming common sense to
environmentalist attitudes to posterity; hence the rhetorical certitude of
Gore’s closing remarks, Hansen’s concerns, and Padel’s pathos. But, as
I hope to show in this book, the use of posterity as environmentalist
rationale is not without its logical inconsistencies and ethical conundrums.
The elision of non-human environment with human posterity is not
something to be done lightly. For one thing, there are conﬂicting needs
at stake: not just between the non-human biosphere at large (if such a thing
can indeed be imagined) and the human species in its entirety, but among
diverse non-human and human populations of the world. For another,
even if these differences were somehow magically accounted for, there
exists considerable difﬁculty in apprehending and measuring our obliga-
tions to fellow humans into the distant future, not to mention balancing
present needs against these. The framing of posterity as parenthood – not
just the expression of environmental obligations as a matter of posterity but
the alignment of these with the language and norms associated with
parenthood – is both an ethical response to these complexities and

14
An Inconvenient Truth, dir. David Guggenheim, perf. Al Gore (Lawrence Bender Productions,
2006).
15
James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and
Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. xii.
16
‘Landmark U.S. Federal Climate Lawsuit’, Our Children’s Trust. www.ourchildrenstrust.org/us/
federal-lawsuit

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:11:20, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.001
Introduction 7
a rhetorical overlay that glosses over their difficulty. That is, this rhetoric
and the ethics that underpin it place the seemingly irresolvable questions
around the environment and the future, and the anxieties that ensue from
these, within the comforting frame of affection, love, and responsibility,
distilling them down to the ostensibly universal concerns of parenthood.
They attempt to transform, in other words, the unknowable into the
knowable.
In spite – or perhaps because – of this, the parentally charged rhetoric
and ethics of posterity are vulnerable to critique for their shortcomings and
shortcuts. And, thus, even as it affords expressive space to parental accounts
of posterity, the creative and cultural discourse around climate change (art,
literature, film, and so on) is also the place where these might be open to
critique. Probably one of the most prominent strands of such discourse is
now being called climate change fiction, the novel being, even in an age of
visual and digital media, an enduringly popular art form. In novels that
deal with climate change, there are certainly instances in which representa-
tions of parental care are employed for their psychological purchase on the
reader. At the same time, however, rather than celebrating such a position,
many novels reveal this rhetorical manoeuvre to be based on a problematic
ideal, riddled with ethical inconsistencies and bearing the burden, unsuc-
cessfully, of collective climate change anxiety. That is, such fiction does not
simply use the child as a convenient signifier for the future; it just as often
actively interrogates this symbolic use of the child and the norms it calls
forth, particularly scrutinising the narrowness of these expectations and
showing them to be predicated on anthropocentric and politically con-
servative stereotypes to do with gender, sexual orientation, race, and
economic privilege.
Thus, while the rise of ‘posterity-as-parenthood’ rhetoric is the premise –
and, indeed, spur – for this book, its main argument is that contemporary
climate change fiction does not necessarily reproduce this rhetoric unques-
tioningly, nor does it utilise it merely to assuage climate change anxiety
(though, importantly, it does this to some extent). Rather, a striking
number of climate change novels take the opportunity to query the
adequacy of the parental response to a climate-changed world and, in
some instances, replace this with radical versions of posterity that might
be fitter for purpose in such a world. For climate change and other
manifestations of this epoch have engendered something like a loss of
innocence towards notions of selfhood, identity, care, and sympathy. But
the critical knowledge that climate change has disclosed – the disruption it
brings to humans’ place in the world – is knowledge that is not confined to

The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate

Change Novel

A study of the climate change novel and its response to environmen-

talist idealisations of posterity and parenthood – or, more accurately,
idealisations of posterity as parenthood – requires an initial analysis of
the intricate links that connect ethics, literature, and environmental
crisis. This involves, first, an overview of intergenerational issues in
environmental ethics, and, then, a comparison of these conventional
ethical accounts of posterity-as-parenthood with more radical concep-
tualisations of posterity, with an eye to whether conventional inter-
generational ethics and their vision of posterity are now adequate to
the demands of this epoch of anthropogenic, global, environmental
depredation we have taken to calling the Anthropocene. And, finally, it
necessitates a discussion of the ethical role of literature, framed also
within the terms of the Anthropocene.
I therefore begin with a section on how twentieth-century environmen-
tal ethics has treated of intergenerational obligations. The next section
sketches out directions for a more radical posterity than the parenthood
rhetoric on offer in contemporary discourse. Approaching the
Anthropocene as both the setting for a rhetorical upturn in parental
framings of posterity and the reason that they bear scrutiny, a third section
turns to the Anthropocene’s effects on our understandings of time and
posterity, as well as to the challenge this mounts to art, literary or other-
wise; this includes a brief delineation of the literary category of climate
change fiction. Because this book is chiefly concerned with the ways in
which climate change fiction reassesses parental care as an ethical position,
a fourth section explores the relationship between literature (here, specifi-
cally, the novel), ethics, and emotion. In this fourth and final section, I also
set out a mode of reading the climate change novel that allows us to
understand its potential both as an intervention into the rhetoric and
ethics of posterity-as-parenthood and as a resource for alternative under-
standings of posterity.
9

Intergenerational Ethics
The legacy of environmental damage is a key concern of environmentalist
activism from its beginnings in the mid-twentieth century; in the tradition
of American environmentalism, for example, it underpins such pioneering
works as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and The Limits to Growth
(1972) commissioned by the Club of Rome.1 Broadly speaking, mid-
twentieth-century environmental discourse introduced an alternative

1
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (ﬁrst published 1962; London: Penguin, 2000); Donella H. Meadows,
Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens, The Limits to Growth: A Report on the
Club of Rome’s Project for the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
Posterity-as-Parenthood: Environmental Ethics 11
view of posterity to the prevailing view of progress. The dominant idea of a
future of humans’ ever-increasing material comfort and wealth drawn from
unchecked economic growth and technological improvement was con-
fronted with two truisms: ﬁrst, that such so-called progress would end in
disaster for human and non-human species alike and, second, that chan-
ging course – ethically, culturally, and politically speaking – would secure
an alternative future for humans and non-humans. Such a reframing of
posterity is latent in Carson’s ironic reference to our ‘obligation to endure’,
which may seem to describe the conventional path to progress but turns
out to signal our moral duty to ensure the preservation of the biosphere.2
One could characterise environmentalist calls to action in the mid-twen-
tieth century as a rallying cry to revolutionise humans’ beliefs and
behaviours in the present in order to ensure the well-being of humans
and non-humans in the future.
Perhaps by little coincidence, the 1960s and 1970s also saw the
emergence in the West of the serious philosophical study of posterity
that is now called intergenerational justice or ethics.3 This is not to
say that references to posterity in Western philosophy did not exist
before this: among others, David Hume and Henry Sidgwick specu-
lated on the possibility of expanding considerations of rights and
utility – that is, usefulness, value, or even happiness – to those not
yet born; further, as I will show later in this chapter, there exists a
very different, but no less important, set of ideas concerning posterity
in the work of Hannah Arendt.4 Overall, however, the innovation of
intergenerational ethics in the mid-twentieth century was to grant to
the concerns of future generations their place in a branch of moral
philosophy. It subjected to formal scrutiny the implications of endow-
ing future humans with moral standing or, in Kenneth Goodpaster’s
phrase, ‘moral considerability’.5

2
Carson, Silent Spring, p. 30.
3
Although I use the words justice and ethics interchangeably here, I do note that ethical questions
specifically concerned with justice represent a subset of the larger field of ethics or moral philosophy;
ethics deals with right or wrong conduct, and justice with the rights of the agents and patients of such
conduct. As Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez point out, ‘Justice is not the same as moral or ethical
behaviour, though, of course, it is a central part of it’; see ‘Justice and Fairness’, Issues in Ethics 3.2
(1990), https://legacy.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3n2.
4
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Stephen Buckle (first published
1748; Cambridge University Press, 2007); Henry Sidgwick, Practical Ethics: A Collection of Addresses
and Essays (first published 1898; Oxford University Press, 1998); Hannah Arendt, Between Past and
Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (first published 1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
5
Kenneth E. Goodpaster, ‘On Being Morally Considerable’, Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978), 308–25.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
12 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
The first thoroughgoing theory of intergenerational ethics was set out by
John Rawls in his 1970 Theory of Justice.6 Rawls’s theory explicitly counters
the emphasis on meeting only the needs and wishes of the present that is
found, for example, in the narrative of progress. Specifically, Rawls –
drawing in part on Hume – revises the dominant philosophical and
economic view that is utilitarianism, whose primary measure in ethical
decision-making is how much utility an individual derives from a decision
or action and whose logic of the ‘social discount rate’ assumes that the more
immediate the consumption of goods or the effect of the decision, the
greater the utility.7 Rawls argues that no treatment of justice could be
complete without accounting for justice to future generations (although he
notes that ‘the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any
ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests’).8 Rawls proposes a set of
principles for just social and political decision-making: first, that all mem-
bers of society should have equal and basic liberties; second, that there
should be equality of opportunity, with the specific notation that any
inequalities of wealth should give greatest advantage to those who are
least advantaged. Importantly, Rawls insists that this last point – the
‘difference principle’ – applies across generations; it involves ‘the long-
term prospects of the least favored extending over future generations’.9
This leads to the ‘just savings principle’, whereby the present generation
saves enough for future generations to live within institutions that make
the fundamental principles of justice possible.10 That is, Rawls assumes a
contractualist rather than utilitarian position, in which ‘each generation
receives its due from its predecessors and does its fair share for those to
come’.11
Rawls’s framework is notable not only for what it includes (the con-
siderability of the future) but for what it leaves out (the question of what
would motivate this consideration and the significant action or change in
behaviour it requires). Rawls’s theory is not an ethical framework per se
since it refuses to offer any rationale for why we should provide for, or are
even obligated to, those in the future; in David Heyd’s critique, Rawls’s
theory is ‘not a principle of justice but only a statement about the value of

6
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
7
Robert Proctor, Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 184–90.
8 9
Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 251. Ibid., p. 252.
10
Ibid., p. 252; see also Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001), p. 189.
11
Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 254.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
Posterity-as-Parenthood: Environmental Ethics 13
justice and the duty to maintain or promote it’.12 Rawls’s principles emerge
from a hypothetical ‘original position’, a scenario in which ‘rational men’ –
the ‘parties’ – decide on these principles from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’,
unaware of the class, social status, and abilities of the others, using ‘fair
agreement or bargain’.13 Because this original position of anonymity can-
not adequately explain any future-oriented motivation (the parties are
ignorant of how much, if at all, past generations have saved for them,
and thus are not necessarily motivated to save at all for future generations),
Rawls posits a ‘motivational assumption’: he assumes that the parties are
also heads of ‘family lines’, who would therefore ‘care at least about their
more immediate descendants’.14 Notably, in later work, Rawls retracted
the motivational assumption and did not speculate further on it, identify-
ing such questions as belonging to the realm of ‘non-ideal theory’, which
deals with existing conditions, and clarifying that his ‘ideal’ theory of
justice was concerned with ideal states.15
It is worth briefly comparing Rawls’s position to that in Our Common
Future, the 1987 report of the United Nations World Commission on the
Environment and Development led by Gro Harlem Brundtland. While
not a formal theory of justice or ethics, the report offers an important
perspective on intergenerational ethics from the point of view of environ-
mental thinking. This is encapsulated in its now-famous definition of
sustainable development: ‘development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs’.16 To some extent, this statement resembles Rawls’s principle of just
savings for future generations (though Brundtland gives what some have
identified as a ‘sufficientarian’ – rather than Rawls’s egalitarian – account
of intergenerational justice).17 Like Rawls, however, Brundtland does not
provide a new moral rationale for behavioural change or action on behalf of
future generations. Despite their implicit critique of simple utilitarian
assumptions such as the social discount rate, the version of the future

12
David Heyd, ‘A Value or an Obligation? Rawls on Justice to Future Generations’, in Axel Gosseries
and Lukas H. Meyer (eds.), Intergenerational Justice (Oxford University Press, 2012), p.172.
13
Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 11. 14 Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 255.
15
Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 274.
16
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford University
Press, 1987), p. 43.
17
As Nicholas Vrousalis points out, the sufﬁcientarian position is that ‘justice is not equality. All that
matters is that every generation has enough’; Vrousalis, ‘Intergenerational Justice: A Primer’, in Iñigo
González-Ricoy and Axel Gosseries (eds.), Institutions for Future Generations (Oxford University
Press, 2016), p. 53, original emphasis; see also Gosseries, ‘The Egalitarian Case against Brundtland’s
Sustainability’, GAIA, 14.1 (2005), 40–6.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
14 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
envisioned by Rawls and Brundtland is akin to that captured by the myth
of progress. Rawls assumes that future beneﬁts are ensured through capital
accumulation and the preservation of culture and technology, while
Brundtland expresses the hope ‘that people can cooperate to build a future
that is more prosperous, more just, and more secure; that a new era of
economic growth can be attained, one based on policies that sustain and
expand the Earth’s resource base; and that the progress that some have
known over the last century can be experienced by all in the years ahead’.18
That is, both are invested in a relatively conservative account of the future
in terms of economic growth.
In a 1995 response to Rawls’s theory of intergenerational justice, Avner
de-Shalit explicitly sets out a different kind of motivation for the future,
one that begins with a shift in dominant ideologies and behaviours.19 De-
Shalit opens with the argument that ‘in our context the moral dilemmas
derive from the very fact that the harm caused to future persons is the by-
product of a genuine, albeit sometimes mistaken, desire to improve (in
terms of a certain ideology) the standard of living of contemporaries’.20
De-Shalit argues that we should, instead, consider ourselves part of ‘a
transgenerational community’.21 This concept rests on a notion of com-
munity as deﬁned by both ‘cultural interaction’ and ‘moral similarity’, that
is, by the sharing of customs, codes of communication, values, and experi-
ences.22 Importantly, the basis for such a community is a common outlook
that shapes and is shaped by debate: ‘In every genuine community some
values and some attitudes towards moral and political questions are com-
mon to most people and serve as a background or as a framework when the
members engage in discourse on their political and social life. These values
and attitudes are, in fact, spectacles through which a member looks at the
world around her. Each member of the community shares these values,
ideas, and norms with the other members.’23 When this sense of commu-
nity is expanded to include unborn generations, it seems that we are
motivated by something like ‘moral sympathy’ with those in the future
(a term that de-Shalit appears to use, with echoes of Adam Smith, to
suggest sympathy as an emotional response necessarily supplemented by
a rational response).24 Thus, moral sympathy and shared moral values

18
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, p. 28.
19
Avner de-Shalit, Why Posterity Matters: Environmental Policies and Future Generations (London:
Routledge, 1995).
20
Ibid., p. 6. 21 Ibid., p. 13. 22 Ibid., pp. 21–31. 23 Ibid., p. 28.
24
Ibid., p. 52; for more on Smith and moral sympathy, see Robert C. Solomon, In Defense of
Sentimentality (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 31.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
Posterity-as-Parenthood: Environmental Ethics 15
mutually reinforce each other: because we share values, we sympathise;
because we sympathise, we pass down values to be shared.
Promising as it is, de-Shalit’s theory falters when applied to humans
distant in time and thus in conditions virtually unknowable and unim-
aginable to those in the present. After all, de-Shalit confines his model to a
given community: his transgenerational community seems to refer to
generations of societies already defined in the present by shared cultural
and moral ties; hence, this is no all-encompassing vision of a single
assembly of humanity. Moreover, and related to this, the transgenerational
community is likely to diminish over time. De-Shalit is at pains to point
out that the communitarian motivations of moral sympathy and the
sharing of values do not extend to the remote future: as ‘communities
and traditional values fade away over time’, our ‘obligations to remote
future generations fade away, although not all our obligations to them
completely vanish’.25 Future generations remote in time are subject to
issues of ‘humanity’ rather than of ‘justice’, that is, to abstract questions
of why we should prevent the suffering of fellow humans rather than to
more definite motivations of sympathy; of such abstract questions de-
Shalit declines to partake.26
Why should we be prompted to act on behalf of those in the distant
future, whom we do not know? Rawls’s contractualism and Brundtland’s
sufficientarianism suggest that we owe future humans a just or ‘decent life’,
but only as part of an enlightened expansion of our current commitment to
economic progress; yet, this hardly seems a robust response when ways of
life in the present might need to be radically transformed to allow such an
obligation to be met.27 De-Shalit’s communitarian framework, mean-
while, is, in the context of the Anthropocene, a relatively short-term view
of intergenerational obligation. In the face of such a question, the framing
of posterity in terms of parenthood seems a promising alternative. It
answers the question by analogy: future humans resemble our children,
and we should be motivated by something like a parental duty of care to
them. Indeed, Rawls’s brief mention of ‘family’ and ‘care’ gestures at
kinship as a motivation and model for intergenerational obligation and
demonstrates its appeal as a possible rationale, though he does not develop

25
De-Shalit, Why Posterity Matters, p. 54.
26
Ibid., p. 63; for the distinction between humanity and justice, made in the context of contemporary
global society, see Brian Barry, ‘Humanity and Justice in Global Perspective’, in J. Roland Pennock
and John W. Chapman (eds.), Ethics, Economics, and the Law (New York University Press, 1982),
pp. 219–52.
27
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, p. 41.

Parental Care Ethics

A recent attempt to introduce parenthood models to intergenerational and
environmental ethics demonstrates, by way of case study, both how par-
enthood comes to be supplied as a moral solution to environmental crisis
and the risks that attend such an ethical intervention. In a 2014 study,
Christopher Groves sets out a normative ethical basis for fulfilling our
obligations to future generations, an ethics he explicitly relates to the far-
reaching effects of climate change.29
At the outset, Groves establishes his ethics as a way of dealing with the
future’s unknowability, a condition he labels ‘reflexive uncertainty’.30
Though Groves never properly defines this term, he makes clear that it is
indebted to Arendt’s insights into humans’ imperfect knowledge of the
future as a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Specifically,
Groves echoes Arendt’s observation that the world in which we act is
conditioned by us as much as it conditions us: ‘In addition to the condi-
tions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them,
men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which, their
human origin and variability notwithstanding, possess the same condition-
ing power as natural thing.’31 Groves paraphrases Arendt’s stance thus:
‘what human beings create through subjective effort takes on an objective
form that then conditions their own existence and that of contemporaries
and successors in unforeseen ways’.32 He therefore interprets Arendt’s
analysis to mean that our actions produce uncertainty, in that they have
unpredictable consequences, and this uncertainty cannot help but condi-
tion our existence; he argues that this is exacerbated in a technological
28
‘Landmark U.S. Federal Climate Lawsuit’, Our Children’s Trust. www.ourchildrenstrust.org/us/
federal-lawsuit
29
Christopher Groves, Care, Uncertainty, and Intergenerational Ethics (Basingstoke: Palgrave–
Macmillan, 2014).
30
Ibid., p. 15.
31
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn. (first published 1958; Chicago University Press,
1998), p. 9.
32
Groves, Care, Uncertainty, and Intergenerational Ethics, p. 16.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
Posterity-as-Parenthood: Environmental Ethics 17
society and it finds ironic expression in the environmental declension that
is the Anthropocene. His ethics aims to provide a rationale for our obliga-
tions to the future while accepting that we cannot know it – that, indeed,
our actions cause its unknowability. Thus, Groves critiques existing
accounts of intergenerational ethics for disregarding the condition of
reflexive uncertainty, challenging Rawls’s theory, for example, for viewing
future needs and wants through the prism of present needs and wants;
according to Groves, such approaches simply ignore the profound
unknowability attached to the future.33 In their stead, Groves offers an
intergenerational ethics of care. Groves argues that care provides a robust
ethical motivation for our obligations to unknown and unborn others,
where, in contrast, de-Shalit explicitly rules out emotional response as a
basis for ethical action towards future generations because he sees it as
relevant to intimate rather than intergenerational relationships.34
Of course, care ethics is not in itself an original proposition, having first
emerged in the 1980s and since become an increasingly accepted alternative
to utilitarian thinking, justice perspectives, and Kantian ethics; thus, it is
worth briefly outlining it here.35 Care was initially posited as the basis for
an alternative female perspective and principle of conduct by Carol
Gilligan in In a Different Voice (1982), a psychological study of cognitive
development that showed that women conceptualise morality as care
rather than fairness, and that women’s moral development is built on
‘responsibility and relationships’ rather than an ‘understanding of rights
and rules’.36 In 1984, Nel Noddings’s normative ethics of care developed
Gilligan’s identification of care and relationality into distinct components
of moral understanding that are ‘characteristically and essentially femi-
nine’.37 For Noddings, ‘an ethic of caring arises out of our experience as
women, just as the traditional logical approach to ethical problems arises
more obviously from masculine experience’.38 Noddings explicitly theo-
rises care as based on emotion rather than on reason, finding that it

33
For Groves, one ‘problem with these responses is the strains that are evident between their claims to
universal applicability, and the suspicion of historical and cultural particularity that attaches to the
list of needs and goods they provide’; Care, Uncertainty, and Intergenerational Ethics, p. 47.
34
De-Shalit, Why Posterity Matters, pp. 31–4.
35
Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford University Press, 2005),
p. 9.
36
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 19.
37
Nel Noddings, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, updated edn. (ﬁrst
published 1984; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 29; the updated edition includes a
revision of the original title, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education.
38
Ibid., p. 29.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
18 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
originates in the ‘initial, enabling, sentiment’ of ‘natural caring’, a senti-
ment that in its turn arises from the experience of caring and the memory
of being cared for.39 Noddings counters too the concern with reciprocity
that characterises justice perspectives such as Rawls’s contractualist posi-
tion. So disdainful is she of theories grounded in reciprocity and reason
that she rejects the notion of empathy in favour of the concept of ‘engross-
ment’, that is, a kind of holistic reception of the other’s needs and wants.40
Empathy signals a ‘peculiarly rational, western, masculine way of looking
at “feeling with”’, privileging ‘projection’ over ‘reception’; whereas, in the
act of engrossment or caring, ‘I do not project; I receive the other into
myself, and I see and feel with the other.’41
Though Groves invokes several care ethicists, his ethics of care is
identifiable primarily as an ungendered version of Noddings’s model,
inflected by phenomenological understandings of selfhood; Arendt’s
thinking on posterity provides a motivation for, but barely informs,
this ethical position. Groves’s argument is not that we should care
despite the future’s unknowability; it is that we care because of it – or,
more precisely – as a way of making sense of it. Focusing on the way
in which relationships with ‘objects of care’ impact on the ‘conative
self’, Groves argues that we are motivated to care because care is of
direct benefit to the self, possessing ‘constitutive value’ to the indivi-
dual.42 Here, one should note, Groves is indebted not just to the
attachment theories of object-relations psychoanalysts such as Donald
Winnicott but to environmental philosopher John O’Neill’s argument
that ‘the flourishing of many other living things ought to be promoted
because they are constitutive of our own flourishing’ (O’Neill’s pre-
mise is itself drawn from Aristotle’s locating of eudaimonia, or human
well-being, in the act of ‘living or faring well’).43 For Groves,
‘Relationships with constitutive values hold . . . the self together.’44
Care, it would seem, holds together both moral agent (or what
Noddings calls the ‘one-caring’) and moral patient (the ‘cared-for’)
in the face of reflexive uncertainty, for Groves finds both that care is ‘a
way of rendering an uncertain future liveable in the present . . . for the
subject’ and that it creates a ‘secure space’ for the cared-for to ‘clarify

39
Ibid., p. 95. 40 Ibid., p. 49. 41 Ibid., p. 49.
42
Groves, Care, Uncertainty, and Intergenerational Ethics, pp. 102, 139.
43
John O’Neill, Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-Being and the Natural World (London:
Routledge, 1993), p. 24; Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross, rev. J. L. Ackrill and J.
O. Urmson (Oxford University Press, 1980), I.8, 1098b5-28.
44
Groves, Care, Uncertainty, and Intergenerational Ethics, p. 143; original emphasis.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
Posterity-as-Parenthood: Environmental Ethics 19
what he or she can do in the world, and thus who s/he is, in the face of
an uncertain future’.45
In expanding the private and direct mode of care into a rationale for
political and indirect care for the future, Groves’s argument does not rely
on a simple alignment of prospective generations with children, but
emphasises nonetheless the importance of immediate attachments and
explicitly models these attachments on parental ones, pointing out that
care must ‘be directed towards a particular kind of object’ – most often in
his analysis, this is the child.46 According to Groves, because we are
motivated to care for immediate attachments, we care about the practices,
traditions, and material circumstances that support them. The secure
space, as it were, is thus expanded. Then, because our acts of caring for
this enlarged secure space become institutionalised and capable of extend-
ing through time, care is applied to unborn others. As Groves states,
somewhat gnomically, ‘we are enjoined, by the activity of caring, to expand
our concern towards the wider social and biophysical worlds, and to extend
it in time in the attempt to become more adequate to the timescapes of the
objects of our direct and indirect care’.47 In other words, this is not about
framing a moral obligation to those in the future whom we do not know; it
is about the achievement of a positive outcome for them, almost inciden-
tally. We care about those in the present whom we do know; those acts of
caring become part of an infrastructure of caring, which in turn is of beneﬁt
to those in the future. Groves’s account, then, is a vicarious version of the
posterity-as-parenthood analogy: though he does not place future genera-
tions in the guises of our children, Groves nevertheless aligns these with
each other indirectly when he aligns acts of immediate parental care with
institutionalised practices of care.
Groves’s model demonstrates the challenges that ethical models of care
face in dealing with our obligations to an uncertain future, challenges it
meets with varying success. A consideration of these helps to delineate the
shortcomings of parental care ethics more generally. First, such arguments
tend to ignore how parental care is not automatically a positive disposition
and act, and is not always productive of certainty, security, and good for
the cared-for. Private conduct does not translate so easily to the public
realm, and care relationships are imbricated with, even inseparable from,
less-than-ideal emotional and psychological states and acts. Indeed, par-
ental care is often also a relationship of power. Even Groves acknowledges

45
Noddings, Caring, p. 24; Groves, Care, Uncertainty, and Intergenerational Ethics, pp. 112–13, 125.
46
Groves, Care, Uncertainty, and Intergenerational Ethics, p. 128. 47 Ibid., p. 182.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
20 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
briefly in his analysis that ‘caring and being cared for can lead to power-
lessness and an erosion of agency in particular circumstances (and as part of
some attachment styles)’, though he does little with this particular pro-
blem.48 As Joan Tronto notes in her detailed consideration of the risks
attendant in any reckless scaling up of the private activities of care, the ‘two
primary dangers of care as a political ideal’, which ‘arise inherently out of
the nature of care itself’, are ‘paternalism or maternalism, and parochial-
ism’.49 Of paternalism or maternalism, Tronto notes that ‘care-givers may
well come to see themselves as more capable of assessing the needs of care-
receivers than are the care-receivers themselves’, and, of parochialism, she
warns that 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’.50 Neither position, states
Tronto, is productive of democratic political or ethical action: the first risks
developing ‘relationships of profound inequality’ and the second produces
the assumption ‘that everyone should cultivate one’s own garden, and let
others take care of themselves, too’.51 In other words, a private position that
depends on authority and familiarity is potentially undemocratic and even
unethical when it becomes a model for public, moral action.
Such paternalism and parochialism are connected to another shortcom-
ing of parental care ethics – its distillation of ethical agency to the
perspective of the parent or, in other words, its exclusionary identity
politics. As Catriona Sandilands notes, ‘an obvious result of identity
politics is an exclusionary logic – “you can’t speak about this because you
do not belong to the group”’.52 When (private) identity is placed at the crux
of public action, individuals are collectivised into a broader public identity
on the assumption that they share an essential set of experiences and
activities, which grant them insight into the material reality of human
relations. This, as Sandilands notes, is the power of the standpoint.53 Much
depends on the maintenance of the standpoint through the policing of
rhetorical boundaries, in, for example, claims to specialness and even
superiority: ‘The solidification of identity results in politics of exclusion.’54
In other words, the idealisation of care very easily becomes the

48
Ibid., p. 117.
49
Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge,
1993), p. 170.
50
Ibid., p. 170. 51 Ibid., pp. 170–1.
52
Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 5.
53
Ibid., pp. 38–41. 54 Ibid., p. 47.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
Posterity-as-Parenthood: Environmental Ethics 21
exceptionalism of care and of those who are seen to care, such as women,
mothers, or parents.
Moreover, the identities that inform parental care ethics tend to reify
certain cultural norms, and a politicisation of care is in danger of either
replicating or ignoring the damaging biases that attend care as a private
disposition. Early iterations of care ethics, such as Noddings’s, depend
on an association of women with motherhood as a prerequisite for
ethical action: this both relegates moral responsibility to women and
reduces women’s agency to a stereotypical image of domesticity and
maternity. Chris Cuomo reminds us that such values jeopardise the
political potential of care, for these norms carry with them the history
of women’s – and carers’ – disempowerment, one that is not to be so
simply set aside or transformed into a collective political power and
agency: ‘Individuals who have been socialized or constructed, to their
moral detriment, to behave or to be in certain ways, cannot easily,
individually transform the social meanings and roles propagated by
that being. The signiﬁcance of values such as caring, mothering, and
non-violence is embedded in their current meanings, as well as in the
genealogy of their meanings.’55 Many of the dispositional aspects of care
that are so celebrated for their ethical promise, such as ‘ego denial’, are
also idealised characteristics that have informed historical patterns of
women’s oppression.56 In Sandilands’s description of ‘motherhood
environmentalism’, such a construction of ethical agency emerges
from, and in turn shores up, conservative norms in the political and
cultural sphere.57 Writes Sandilands of motherhood environmentalism,
the ‘neoconservative aroma of this discourse should be quite noticeable:
a return to patriarchal and heterosexual “family values” will restore not
only a healthy (natural) family but a healthy (natural) planet. . . . It is a
naturalized morality tale of private women embodying particularistic,
nuclear-family-oriented, antifeminist, heterosexist, and ultimately apo-
litical interests.’58
Certainly, one should not be too comforted by the seemingly
‘gender-neutral’ parenthood of more recent expressions of parental
care ethics, such as Groves’s moral framework, whose apparent uni-
versality potentially elides not just the problematic legacy of gender
norms in care ethics but assumptions to do with sexuality, race, and
55
Chris J. Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethics of Flourishing (London:
Routledge, 1998), p. 130.
56
Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities, p. 129.
57
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. xiii. 58 Ibid., p. xiii.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
22 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
class. As Nicole Seymour notes of such ‘sentimentalized rhetoric’ as
parental ethics, it ‘suggests that concern for the future qua the planet
can only emerge, or emerges most effectively, from white, heterosexual,
familial reproductivity’.59 In this, Lee Edelman’s critique of what he
terms ‘reproductive futurism’ and its attendant phenomenon of ‘pro-
natalism’ – the equation of the future with posterity and the emphasis
on parenthood that accompanies it – is highly relevant.60 For
Edelman, the figure of the child is ‘the perpetual horizon of every
acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political
intervention’.61 As Edelman argues, the child is the tool of a hetero-
normative hegemony, which he reads in Lacanian terms as exploiting
our universal desire for Imaginary wholeness, an impulse towards
teleology that is easily fooled by invocations of a never-achievable
future. The child (and the political model it invokes) beguiles the
subject (here, Edelman focuses on the queer subject) into both assum-
ing a parental posture that is inherently heterosexist and investing in a
political hegemony that serves higher socioeconomic and political
interests. The secure space imagined by parental care ethics such as
Groves’s is a domestic interior based on far from universal expecta-
tions around nuclear family units, material comfort, and class
privilege.
Thus, parental care ethics as a moral outlook for the future, with
its idealisation of care as an ethical disposition and its problematic
identity biases, lays itself open to critique on several counts. Among
other things, the exclusionary tendencies of identity politics and the
parochialism and paternalism that undermine positions of care have
the potential to lead to a narrow concept of posterity as genetic
survivalism, that is, the privileging of one’s own legacy over others’.
Moreover, motherhood environmentalism results in a reductive and
nostalgic conceptualisation of ethical agency to the future as one of
procreation and parenting, one that comes into direct conflict with
some of that future’s starker realities, such as resource scarcity and
human overpopulation. Such a critique, as I shall show in chapter 2
and chapter 3, is mounted in a number of climate change novels.

59
Nicole Seymour, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2013), p. 7; original emphasis.
60
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004), pp. 2, 17.
61
Ibid., p. 3.

Non-Identitarian Possibilities
To begin with, the ethics of parental care is predicated on an identitarian
view of ethical agents and patients. Interestingly, what Groves misses in his
invocation of Arendt is the emphasis in much of her writings on the
instability of identity, and the arena of social and political interaction as
the space in which identity is made and remade. Yet, the construction of
moral agents and patients as ontologically stable, identifiable, and know-
able beings problematises rather than clarifies any ethical basis to our
responsibilities to the future (though the suggestive imagery of caring
and affectionate parenting attempts to reassure us otherwise).
Part of the problem lies in a fundamental misconception of the condi-
tion of the moral patients of a future-oriented ethics – that is, future
humans – and their identities. This Derek Parfit has labelled ‘the non-
identity problem’.62 First, according to Parfit, future individuals cannot be
treated in ethical terms as known individuals, since any actions made in the
present for future people would likely change the time and manner of their
conception and birth and thus their specific identities. To construe them as
knowable is to commit an ontological error as well as to be drawn into
making inconsistent or morally indefensible statements.63 Future others
are inherently unknowable, not only because we in the present cannot

62
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 351.
63
In Parfit’s ‘depletion’ scenario, for example, those in the present decide to deplete rather than
conserve resources, as a consequence of which quality of life in two centuries’ time will be much
diminished. ‘The great lowering of the quality of life must provide some moral reason not to choose
Depletion’, notes Parfit. At the same time, however, depletion does not necessarily make life worse
for anyone. The depletion decision causes those specific future people to suffer, but a different
decision would change the timing and manner of their conception and thus produce different
people. Because Parfit assumes that the existence of those future people is worth having, he is forced
to conclude that depletion cannot be said to be ‘bad for’ anyone at all. There is thus no coherent
moral reason not to choose depletion if we define future others in terms of their identity; Parfit,
Reasons and Persons, p. 363.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
24 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
travel into the future to know them, but because, as Parfit would have it, by
dint of their very futurity, their identities are fluid and are changeable by
the actions of those in the present. As Robin Attfield usefully puts Parfit’s
argument, ‘morality is in part impersonal’.64 Our obligations to the future
are to persons not in particular but in the abstract. In other words, the
contingency of personal identity necessitates a reframing of the future
recipients of ethical action as unknowable entities (both human and
non-human) in unknowable circumstances, though no less deserving of
attention than the immediate attachments and objects of care. Indeed, it is,
perhaps, that very unknowability that should motivate our vigilance,
concern, and responsibility.
Like the contingency of the identity of the future moral patient, the
ontological fluidity of the moral agent also has profound implications for
conceptualising ethical behaviour. Here, again, Parfit is relevant. Parfit
argues that identity is something of a chimera: what we think of as personal
identity consists of ‘nothing more than the occurrence of an interrelated
series of mental and physical events’.65 He defines identity as the connect-
edness and continuity of a person’s experience, united by causality; the
existence of a person comprises merely these causal experiences, along with
his or her brain and body.66 If identity is simply this, then a single person’s
identity can become less connected over time (an argument that leads
Parfit to some important conclusions about autonomy, responsibility, and
justice, including the view that an individual is less responsible for a crime
he commits the further away in the past it was committed, as well as the
condoning of some paternalistic attitudes to certain individuals, not out of
anything so identity-dependent as care but in circumstances where it might
lead to the prevention of moral wrongs committed against others).67
If one acknowledges, with Parfit, that identity is contingent and
unstable, then one must attend to the process by which so-called identity
is made and remade if one is to take full account of the nuances of ethical
agency. In her analysis of ecofeminism’s potential as a democratic project,
Sandilands sharply critiques the reliance on essentialist notions of selfhood
found in certain versions of ecofeminist theory and politics. The context of
her critique is a concern with the fallacy of essentialism that underlies
identity politics in general: ‘most ecofeminist writing is imbricated in a
cultural feminist logic of identity politics in which ontological claims to an

64
Robin Attﬁeld, ‘Non-Reciprocal Responsibilities and the Banquet of the Kingdom’, Journal of
Global Ethics 5.1 (2009), 34.
65
Parﬁt, Reasons and Persons, p. 341. 66 Ibid., p. 261. 67 Ibid., pp. 321, 326.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
Radical Posterity 25
essence . . . are understood necessarily to precede political claims’.68 Thus,
Sandilands argues for what she terms a ‘radical democratic politics’, which
would challenge the very case for identity.69 Her analysis is grounded in a
Lacanian understanding of subjectivity and, strikingly, adopts language
that recalls Parfit’s description of personal identity. Sandilands describes
the process of identity-making, contingent as it is, as ‘the intervention of a
nodal point that collects a certain set of interpreted experiences and
produces from them a sense of coherence as if the identity in question
emerged from somewhere else’, that is, from some wished-for originary
point.70 ‘It is not’, writes Sandilands, ‘that identity doesn’t exist, it is that it
is an intra-social process that actually masks the impossibility of its com-
pletion.’71 What is crucial about Sandilands’s analysis of both political and
personal identity is her recognition of the occurrence of a ‘nodal point’, a
nub in a network of memories, experiences, and so on (that is, identity as
Parfit would have it) where some of these meet and are interpreted as a
coherent sense of self (that is, what we mistake as identity).
One could say that, for Sandilands, because it is fluid, identity is always
partial; because it is partial, identity finds its potential in affinity with
others. Sandilands’s position echoes the cyborg feminism of Donna
Haraway (which posits that identity is always hybrid) and aligns with the
new materialism of Karen Barad (according to which agency is formed in
interaction with others). Haraway’s ‘cyborg myth is about transgressed
boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive
people might explore as one part of needed political work’.72 While the
‘recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a
response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new
essential unity’, ‘there has also been a growing recognition of another
response through coalition – affinity, not identity’.73 Meanwhile, Barad
has argued that agency is established in what she names ‘intra-action’, the
process by which objects encounter each other, and which depends on both
separability and apprehension of the other.74 Most importantly for a
consideration of ethical conduct, Sandilands’s analysis is invested in
Arendtian theories of the human condition, particularly Arendt’s
68
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. xix. 69 Ibid., p. xx. 70
Ibid., p. 84.
71
Ibid., p. 84.
72
Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century’, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free
Association Books, 1991), p. 154.
73
Ibid., p. 155.
74
Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to
Matter’, Signs 28.2 (2003), 813.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
26 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
description of this as the vita activa, divided into three components: work,
labour, and action.75 It is in the sphere of action, through dialogue with
others, that the self is formed, Arendt argues.76 That is, identity is pro-
duced in public and political action and the spaces between political actors.
The ethical implications of such an approach are usefully drawn out in
recent climate change fiction, as I show in chapter 4.
The implications of a specifically Arendtian conceptualisation of iden-
tity and time for a future-oriented ethics are also worth sketching out here.
Arendt theorises the modern condition as a time in which the true meaning
and moral weight of traditional concepts, such as freedom and authority,
have been lost. Unable to understand the lessons of the past but desiring a
better future, the modern individual finds himself trapped in a clash
between these two forces.77 Specifically, the present becomes a ‘gap
between the past and future’; at this point, the ‘two antagonistic forces
are both unlimited as to their origins, the one coming from an infinite past
and the other from an infinite future; but though they have no known
beginning, they have a terminal ending, the point at which they clash’.78 At
this meeting point, or ‘parallelogram’, of conflicting forces labours the
human subject.79 But, of course, a third force exists, for, in Arendt’s
philosophy, the human in the present has his own capacity for thought
and action (a fluid and changeable capacity not to be mistaken for identity
per se). This produces another force, coming diagonally at the two antag-
onistic forces of past and present: ‘This diagonal force, whose origin is
known, whose direction is determined by past and future, but whose
eventual end lies in infinity, is the perfect metaphor for the activity of
thought.’80 Without the activity of thought, the individual risks clashing
fruitlessly with the powers of past and future, that is, an incompletely
understood history on the one hand and an unknowable posterity on the
other. What Arendt proposes is a critical awareness of the provisionality of
this position, so that the individual is able to achieve a ‘settling down into
the gap between the past and future’ rather than becoming ‘worn out under
the pressure of constant fighting’.81 Some climate change fiction, as I shall
suggest in Chapter 4, enables just such a critical acceptance of the imper-
fectly remembered past along with what one could call the imperfectability
of the future; in the process, it asks how such a critical awareness of the

75 76
Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 7–8. Ibid., pp. 175–81.
77 78
Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 3–15. Ibid., p. 12. 79 Ibid., p. 12. 80
Ibid., p. 13.
81
Ibid., p. 13.

Ecocentric Possibilities
At the same time, parental care ethics, along with most models of inter-
generational ethics, possesses deeply anthropocentric tendencies, constru-
ing the future of the biosphere as relevant primarily in relation to human
survival and well-being. Even de-Shalit, who locates his proposal in the
context of environmental ethics, dismisses ‘biocentric’ approaches and
prefers to place environmental issues ‘within the framework of moral
relations among human beings . . . as a matter of distribution of access to
goods (natural resources, forests, clean air, as well as capital and informa-
tion)’.82 The logic of parental care ethics, with its interest in the welfare of
future humans, is predicated on a similarly dismissive approach to the non-
human environment. This is unsurprising, given the anthropocentric focus
of care ethics more generally: so much does Noddings focus on the kind of
relationality and responsiveness found between humans that she contends
that it is difficult to imagine the ‘cared-for’ as a non-human animal, apart
from, perhaps, as a household pet.83 Groves, building on Noddings’s
model, finds that the non-human is relevant only when it is a direct object
of care (‘from pet cats and domesticated horses to the common or rare
species the attentive botanist or zoologist studies’) or when it is considered
as part of the support system of the cared-for (since the ‘practices, narra-
tives, traditions, institutions and infrastructures’ he discusses may be
‘either human or natural in origin’).84 Groves’s ethics is an example of
how, even in an environmentally conscious framework, the temptation
remains to view the non-human as a service to humans’ moral
considerability.
The apparent solution is an ecocentric ethics of posterity, that is, the
application of moral considerability to the future of ecosystems and their
species. Yet, even so, one must beware the trap of identitarianism. Many
influential ecocentric ethical attempts have tended to enforce a holistic
view that subsumes ecological diversity within the rubric of ‘nature’. So
Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, laid out in his Sand County Almanac (1949),
proposes that, if ethics depends on the premise that ‘the individual is a
member of a community of interdependent parts’, an environmental ethics

82
De-Shalit, Why Posterity Matters, p. 8. 83 Noddings, Caring, pp. 159–69.
84
Groves, Care, Uncertainty, and Intergenerational Ethics, pp. 170–1.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
28 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
simply expands ‘the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters,
plants, and animals, or collectively: the land’, which deserve to have
recognised ‘their right to continued existence’.85 Going further, deep
ecology, particularly as defined by Arne Næss, argues not only for a
‘relational, total-field image’ of all organisms, but also for their ‘equal right
to live and blossom’; paramount to the deep ecology movement is the idea
that the ‘flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth has intrinsic
value’.86 As laudable as this widening of ethical concern is, Næss and
Leopold commit what Attfield identifies as the error of holism common
to ecocentric, as opposed to biocentric, approaches (where ecocentric
approaches view whole ecosystems as moral objects and biocentric
approaches are concerned with the individuals that inhabit those ecosys-
tems).87 The ecocentric emphasis on ecosystems risks eliding the very
different conditions and needs of organisms and species under a conveni-
ent marker of identity. These differences represent both important ecolo-
gical dynamics (relationships of competition, predation, and so on) and
potential ethical complexity (the question, for example, of what indivi-
duals, populations, or species take priority when not all can be equally
benefitted); these differences necessarily pertain to any concern for poster-
ity for all.
The very construction of nature as nature points to a further identitarian
error in environmentalist ethics: that of insisting on the existence of the
non-human voice. This leads to the ‘dilemma’, as Sandilands puts it, of
discerning ‘the authentic “voice” of nature’, the problem of providing,
assuming, or assigning ‘authentic speech for nonspeaking nature’.88 While
both ecocentric and biocentric ethics, and the rhetoric that surrounds
them, tend to extol the act of ‘hearing’ or attending to the ‘voice’ of nature
or of its creatures, they do not always acknowledge that that voice is
radically distinct from human language or that it is a mediated composite
of many signs at many levels. For Sandilands, this is not just about the
problem of human ventriloquising of the non-human, though this is
certainly something that is too often ignored: ‘Rendering nature knowable
involves a process of subjectivation; constructing nature as a subject . . . is
85
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation, illustrated edn. (first published
1949; Oxford University Press, 2001) p. 171.
86
Arne Næss, ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary’, Inquiry
16.1–4 (1973), 95–6, original emphasis; Arne Næss and David Rothenberg, Ecology, Community, and
Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 29.
87
Robin Attfield, Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century, 2nd edn. (London:
Polity, 2014), pp. 39–40.
88
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 79.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
Radical Posterity 29
the task of environmentalism.’89 This is, more importantly, also about how
such ventriloquism usually involves translation, a sleight of hand that
transforms the inaudible into the (humanly) audible, the unknowable
into the (readily) knowable. As Sandilands warns: ‘The “I” that speaks in
environmentalist discourse . . . is always already something else, subject to a
process of translation through other identities, through myriad relation-
ships and interactions, through other forms of language.’90 The problem,
Sandilands suggests, is the fetishisation of authenticity, as though the
human medium of voice is the only way in which ‘nature’ might commu-
nicate and count as an ethical other.
This realisation calls for a coming to terms with the difference between
human and non-human species, inasmuch as non-human beings possess a
radical unknowability that is different from humans’ unknowability to
each other. Acknowledging this has two crucial effects: it avoids the trap of
attempting to speak for and thus, in Sandilands’s terms, subjectivating
nature, and it does not shirk the responsibility of moral agency possessed
by humans rather than non-humans. What this suggests, then, is a poster-
ity ethics that attends not simply to non-human and human species, but to
difference in at least two senses – not just ecological diversity (differences
within) but the otherness of non-human beings from human beings
(difference from). While difference might sound pejorative and exclusion-
ary in an identitarian framework, where knowability and identity are
everything, a non-identitarian ecocentric ethics would acknowledge that
what we call nature is just as radically contingent as human identity, as well
as different from the human, while still locating non-human and human
beings within the same ethical universe.
Just such an ethical possibility – an ecocentric rather than anthropo-
centric account of non-human posterity – emerges in some climate change
fiction, as I shall suggest in chapter 5. As I shall also show in that chapter,
the ethical model of interspecies affinity and coalition put forward by
Cuomo is particularly helpful in analysing such radical ethical solutions
for posterity. Cuomo’s is an ethics of flourishing, inspired in part by
Aristotle’s terms of eudaemonia, but differing in crucial ways from it and
from other posterity ethics that draw from it, such as Groves’s.91 Cuomo’s
model keeps in mind the moral considerability of non-human others, while
preserving a sense of the important difference between humans and non-

89
Ibid., p. 79. 90 Ibid., p. 80.
91
Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities, pp. 62–80.

Time and Art in the Anthropocene

Although the ethical stance and the rhetorical strategies that foreground
our parental duties to posterity may seem a useful response to the
Anthropocene, they are, as I have begun to suggest, inadequate to this
epoch’s demands for radical new understandings of human ontology.
Central to interrogations of human ontology in the Anthropocene are
questions of scale: spatial and temporal scale. The very concept of the
Anthropocene as a geological time period is a reminder that human agency
has assumed non-human proportions. Climate change and other
Anthropocene events make clear that the effect of humans on their envir-
onment will far outlast anthropocentric dimensions of individual lifetimes,
civilisation expansions and declines, and even historical epochs. Some of
the impacts of human activity – for example, species depletion and polar
ice melt – are, if not irrevocable, then reversible only over more immense
durations of time. Indeed, some effects might take thousands of years just
to emerge, this being the case with so-called millennial timescale events
such as ocean anoxia, oxygen depletion, and disruptions to thermohaline
circulation.
Thus, the mid-twentieth-century environmentalist call for political
action and change has become, in the light of the twenty-first century’s
Anthropocene awareness, not just an ethical but an existential revolution.
The past decade or so has seen a tendency in ecocriticism to consider the
environmental upheavals of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries as
a moment of the deconstruction of the human condition generally. What
has sometimes been called ‘climate criticism’ or ‘critical climate change’ – a
term that was first employed by Tom Cohen in founding the Institute of
Critical Climate Change, or IC3, at Albany, was subsequently used in
Cohen’s Telemorphosis, and is now identified with Timothy Morton,
Timothy Clark, and Claire Colebrook, among others – construes the
contemporary environmental crisis as the transformation of once esoteric
notions about the contingency of human agency and ontology into some-
thing of a lived reality.92 Alongside this, other ecocritical investigations

92
Tom Cohen, ed., Telemorphosis: Essays in Critical Climate Change (Ann Arbor, MI: Open
Humanities Press, 2012); see also Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a
Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis

Time in the Anthropocene: Posterity

These enlarged matters of scale and corresponding shifts in concep-
tualisations of human ontology are, of course, of import to the issue
of posterity, for one of the Anthropocene’s challenges is its demand
that we readjust the dominant logic of the immediate, the individual,
and the intimate in order to account for humanity’s effect on a vastly
distant – and therefore vastly different – future. As I have already
suggested, one could say that the rhetoric of posterity-as-parenthood is
an attempt at such readjustment, but, equally, one must ask just how
adequate such a rhetorical move, with its insistence on relationality
and identity, is to the task of apprehending the radically unknowable
future conjured up by the Anthropocene. Here, two recent and
prominent critical considerations of the Anthropocene, both depicting

Miller, Theory and the Disappearing Future: On De Man, on Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 2012);
Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays in Extinction (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press,
2014); and Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). See also Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘A New
Critical Climate’, symplokē 21.1–2 (2013), 9–12.
93
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment
and the Embodied Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
94
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of
Chicago Press, 2016), p. 33.

95
Morton, Hyperobjects, pp. 1, 9; on correlationism, Morton is citing philosophers of speculative
realism, such as Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2010).
96
Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, p. 139. 97 Morton, Hyperobjects, pp. 129–30.
98
The basic version of the dilemma is a scenario in which two accomplices are arrested and
interrogated individually. Each of the prisoners, who cannot communicate with the other, is
given the option of defecting, that is, confessing and implicating the other. If the prisoner defects
and his accomplice remains silent, the prisoner goes free and the accomplice is sentenced to twenty
years; if they both defect, both receive sentences of ﬁve years each; and if both remain silent, they are
awarded reduced sentences of one year. Over time, if the game is played on both prisoners
simultaneously in mutual ignorance, defection results in a slightly higher payoff for the individual;
if it is played sequentially, where prisoners are aware of previous behaviour, defection proves also to
be the best strategy. However, on an overall basis, and if the number of games is completely
randomised, the best outcome for both prisoners is mutual cooperation.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
Time and Art in the Anthropocene 33
human and non-human beings may be ‘strange strangers’, a term
Morton uses to describe the ultimate unknowability or withdrawn-
ness possessed by all objects (and, most of all, by hyperobjects); yet,
Morton insists, present humans must adopt an attitude of sincerity
towards strange strangers, because no matter how strange or withdrawn,
all objects are sincere inasmuch as they ‘are what they are, in the sense
that, no matter what we are aware of, or how, there they are, impossible
to shake off’.99 The ethical leap that Morton makes from this is to insist
not only that the ideas of cooperation affirmed by the prisoners’
dilemma must reach across time, but that we must replace distance
with intimacy. According to Morton, the ‘future self is . . . unimagin-
ably distant in one sense, and yet hyperobjects have brought her into the
adjoining prison cell. She is strange yet intimate. The best course of
action is to act with regard to her. This radical letting go of what
constitutes self has become necessary because of hyperobjects.’100
Like Morton, Clark explicitly refers to spatial and temporal dis-
location: ‘the demand to think of human life at much broader scales
of space and time . . . alters significantly the way that many once
familiar issues appear’.101 Clark’s concept of Anthropocene disorder is
specifically what he terms a ‘scale effect’, emerging from the ‘scalar
derangement’ between everyday human activity and the enormity of
its future impact spatially (particularly on the species that inhabit the
biosphere) and temporally: ‘at a certain, indeterminate threshold,
numerous human actions, insignificant in themselves (heating a
house, clearing trees, flying between the continents, forest manage-
ment) come together to form a new, imponderable physical event,
altering the basic ecological cycles of the planet’.102 Also like Morton,
Clark has recourse to game-theoretical discussions to demonstrate how
the Anthropocene challenges conventional and, particularly, utilitarian
responses to the future. He invokes Garrett Hardin’s oft-cited parable
of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, which appears to show how acting
in one’s best interests can lead to conflict and resource depletion on
an expanded communal scale.103 Though Hardin has been criticised
for not acknowledging that, historically speaking, there have existed
successful commons models of resource use based on mutual respon-
sibility and risk, Clark is at pains to point out that Hardin’s concerns
99
Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 17;
Hyperobjects, pp. 6, 35.
100
Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 123. 101 Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, p. 13. 102 Ibid., p. 72.
103
Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162 (13 December 1968), 1243–8.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
34 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
hold if the scale is enlarged beyond the communal to the global, and
therefore to the impersonal.104 Moreover, citing Stephen Gardiner,
Clark shows how the effects of impersonality are further magnified
when they occur across not just space but time: ‘each human genera-
tion, living with the immediately surrounding effects of a cumulative
environmental degradation, will very probably find itself doing only
the minimum or less to reduce its own ecological impact’.105 Unlike
Morton, however, Clark offers no moral pointers, no calls to action.
The Anthropocene’s scale effects require a critical awareness of how
we attend to scale, what Clark calls ‘scale framing’; yet, Clark’s
analysis also suggests that it is impossible to perform this successfully:
there are ‘unresolved and perhaps unresolvable conflicts revealed by
thinking the world of the Anthropocene at different scales’.106 On the
one hand, to reframe the distant as the immediate, as Morton recom-
mends, is to trust that a ‘human’ response will resolve a problem
whose scale constantly outstrips, outwits, and outdoes the human; to
accept its enormity of space and time, on the other hand, is to
abandon the need for a (human) response altogether. For Clark,
‘neither frame of reference is adequate as a basis for a definitive ethics
or for dismissing the importance of the other’; there is, then, no
ethical solution to the unknowable future that would avoid either
naïveté or nihilism.107
Morton and Clark diverge in important and, I suggest, revealing ways.
Because of his underlying investment in sincerity, Morton’s critique of self-
interest leads him to what initially looks like its opposite: acting with
‘regard’, which one could restate as an ethical stance of concern or even
care. Indeed, in a passage in which he considers the legacy of nuclear waste,
another hyperobject, Morton explicitly invokes the language of care.
Writing approvingly of the Nuclear Guardianship movement, which
encourages ongoing vigilance of the containment of radioactive waste, he
states: ‘What must happen . . . is that we must care consciously for nuclear
materials’; he notes, too: ‘Guardianship, care – to curate is to care for.’108
Meanwhile, Clark similarly critiques the utilitarian self-concern that leads
to a tragedy of the commons, but he refuses to posit a concern for others as
a viable alternative. In an argument that recalls Sandilands’s radical, non-

104
Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, pp. 84–6.
105
Ibid., p. 86; see also Stephen Gardiner, The Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate
Change (Oxford University Press, 2011).
106
Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, pp. 73, 154. 107 Ibid., p. 154.
108
Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 121.

Art in the Anthropocene: Climate Change Fiction

An Anthropocene response that imagines a sincere and stable self reaching
out to others, with that action conceptualised as a gesture of care and those
others framed as familiar and cognisable fellow beings, is easily discernible
as the impulse behind the rhetoric of posterity-as-parenthood. But, as we
have seen, those assumptions of coherence of identity and agency are
destabilised by the very distance they attempt to bridge; hence, that
rhetoric is rendered suspect in the Anthropocene. Though, as I have
already suggested, parental responses to posterity continue to be stated
and restated in cultural discourse, it is nonetheless tempting to speculate on
the potential for art in the Anthropocene to question rather than reinstate
such rhetorical and ethical manoeuvres. Particularly, the potential exists for
such art to posit instead radical, alternative visions of the future, of the
kinds I have already provisionally outlined.
Again, the analyses of Morton and Clark offer paths into this
discussion. Both consider the Anthropocene’s challenge to notions of
human identity as, consequently, a challenge to human expression.
Clark, indeed, hints that art is impossible in the ontological impasse
109
Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, p. 164; see Wilfred Sellars, ‘Philosophy and the Scientiﬁc Image of
Man’, in Robert Colodny (ed.), Frontiers of Science and Philosophy (University of Pittsburgh Press,
1962), pp. 35–78.
110
Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, p. 188.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
36 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
in which we now find ourselves, for human agency constitutes both
art’s source and, in climate-changing times, its rightful target for sub-
version; for him, the Anthropocene might therefore ‘form a threshold at
which art and literature touch limits to the human psyche and imagi-
nation themselves’.111 Morton, in contrast, proposes that some art –
most often, the avant-garde – has the potential to shock humans out of
our subject-object orientations and into a properly ecological and
intergenerational worldview. Such art offers, Morton clarifies, an oppor-
tunity not to reason ourselves into action, but to immerse ourselves in
an aesthetic and affective space that somehow (and it is not clear how)
makes both ontological awareness and ethical motivation possible:
‘Reasoning on and on is a symptom of how people are still not ready
to go through an affective experience that would existentially and
politically bind them to hyperobjects, to care for them. We need art
that does not make people think . . . but rather that walks them
through an inner space that is hard to traverse.’112 Unsurprisingly,
Clark finds that Morton’s celebration of avant-garde art fails to con-
vince, first, on how such art manages ‘to intervene positively in prisoner
dilemma/tragedy-of-the-commons type situations by bringing others
nearer into a recognizably shared space’, and, second, on how ‘the
knowledge of interconnection must somehow lead to an ethic of
care’.113 Such an interpretation forces experimental art ‘too hastily into
ethical and cultural agendas one would have expected it to question’ –
identitarian agendas that Morton purports to eschew.114
Concerns about art’s ability to apprehend the unknowable and
distant future, and particularly to do so without simply and somewhat
futilely insisting on its knowability and intimacy, are especially rele-
vant when considering the climate change novel. Where experimental
forms of art might be considered likely sites of subversion or resis-
tance of expectations of subjectivity and identity, the novel, as Clark
points out, is a remarkably conventional art form, relying on and in
turn reproducing those very expectations. ‘Linguistic narrative in
particular’, writes Clark, ‘seems at issue solely as that mode which
. . . fits least well into the demands of the Anthropocene, seemingly
more allied with forms of anthropocentric thinking to be overcome,
or as an art of sequences of human action or attention geared to a
definite significant end in some fulfilled or unfulfilled intention.’115

111
Ibid., p. 176. 112 Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 184.
113
Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, pp. 188–9. 114 Ibid., p. 188. 115
Ibid., p. 187.

116
Ibid., p. 191; see Sellars, ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’, and Ray Brassier, Nihil
Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2007).
117
For surveys of climate change fiction, see Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘Climate Change
in Literature and Literary Criticism’, WIREs Climate Change 2.1 (2011), 185–200, and Johns-Putra,
‘Climate Change in Literature and Literary Studies: From Cli-Fi, Climate Change Theater and
Ecopoetry to Ecocriticism and Climate Change Criticism’, WIREs Climate Change 7 (2016),
266–82.
118
Sylvia Mayer, ‘Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the Climate Change Novel, and the
Narrative of Anticipation’, in Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner (eds.), The Anticipation of
Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014), pp. 21–37.
119
Particularly early examples of climate change fiction appear to have taken inspiration from
earlier science fiction representations, by authors such as J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Frank
Herbert, and H. G. Wells, of disastrous global climatic conditions, what Trexler has labelled a
‘considerable archive of climate change fiction’ and Jim Clarke ‘proto-climate-change’ fiction;
see Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2015), p. 8, and Clarke, ‘Reading Climate Change in J. G. Ballard’,
Critical Survey 25 (2013) 8.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
38 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
moves through a text like a traveler in a foreign culture or a detective
seeking clues to unravel the mystery at hand’.120 Many climate
change novels, especially early examples appearing from the 1970s
through to the first decade of the twenty-first century, are set in such
futuristic worlds – which one could characterise as apocalyptic, post-
apocalyptic, or dystopian, depending on just how much the future
setting is premised on sudden disaster, its aftermath, or a state of
decline – and into which the reader is apparently invited. The
second, realist strand of climate change fiction has become increas-
ingly more prevalent. It tends to invoke a recognisable present (or
very near future) in which the threat of climate change poses an
ethical, political, or economic dilemma – or, more often, a combina-
tion of these – for the individual. To some extent, this reflects a
move towards ‘respectability’ for the climate change novel, as rela-
tively highbrow, realist writers such as Ian McEwan and Barbara
Kingsolver have taken up the task of writing about climate change.121
At any rate, this realist impulse underlines climate change fiction’s
dependence on highly conventional and canonical novelistic techni-
ques grounded in identification and empathy with characters.
This is not to say, however, that the climate change novel is resolutely
devoid of innovation; indeed, some recent analyses of climate change
fiction have strenuously argued for a recognition of its tendency towards
the stylistically experimental and unexpected. Adam Trexler’s study of the
climate change novel is premised on the idea that anthropogenic climate
change constitutes a formal challenge to fiction: Trexler argues that ‘the
underlying causes of the Anthropocene have altered the horizon of human
activity, as well as the capacities of the novel’.122 According to Trexler, the
nature of climate change – its composite make-up, emergent properties,
and unpredictable agency – forces the novel to abandon some of its
conventional strategies, such as the reliance on dominant protagonists
and character-driven plot lines; instead, he suggests, climate change fiction

120
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979) p. 63; Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science
Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), p. 7.
121
Nonetheless, the examples of Jeanette Winterson’s and Margaret Atwood’s SF-inflected climate
change novels show that the association between realist fiction and ‘serious’ authorship is hardly a
firm one; see Winterson, The Stone Gods (first published 2007; London: Penguin, 2008) and
Atwood, Oryx and Crake (first published 2003; London, Virago, 2004), The Year of the Flood
(first published 2009; London: Virago, 2010), MaddAddam (New York: Nan A. Talese–Doubleday,
2013).
122
Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, p. 15.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
Time and Art in the Anthropocene 39
favours character ensembles and tends to introduce environmental or
scientific entities as key motivators in order to portray climate change as
a complex phenomenon. Echoing this, Astrid Bracke contends that ‘post-
millennial fictions . . . participate in a reshaping of existing narratives to
present new ways of imagining the natural environment in a time of
climate crisis’ and Antonia Mehnert foregrounds the ‘representational
and conceptual challenges that climate change poses’ in order to focus on
how ‘writers come up with innovative narrative means to overcome the
elusiveness of climate change’.123 So much is this so that, even though
Trexler discerns a resurgence of realism in recent climate change fiction, he
maintains that ‘there remain real limits to realist fiction. It cannot imagine
novel technological, organizational, and political approaches to climate
change. Its focus on a narrow locale and set of characters compresses
distributed, global events. It struggles to understand the devastating poten-
tial of climatic disaster.’124
Importantly, though, Clark reminds us that the effect of the
Anthropocene on the novel is not as radical as studies such as Trexler’s
contend. Clark’s considered response to Trexler suggests that analyses such
as this remain committed to notions of coherent subjectivity, to the
‘intelligible and coherent world at the personal scale, centred on individual
agency’ that is the illusion of the manifest image. Clark astutely argues that
such analyses propose that climate change fiction finds innovative ways to
represent climate change as a complex phenomenon and a destabilising
experience, but that, ultimately, the representation they invoke depends on
conventional and anthropocentric expectations of readers’ empathetic
identification with characters and imaginative projection of themselves
into settings.125
Nonetheless, rather than bemoan the apparent lack of an avant-garde
climate change fiction, I hope to show, contra both Trexler and Clark, that
it is worth considering the kinds of interventions that climate change
novels might achieve through their seemingly retrogressive and anthropo-
centric evocations of reader empathy and inhabitation. I suggest that the
use of familiar techniques does not automatically translate into an affirma-
tion of narrowly human accounts of space and time, including, in this case,
the conventional conceptualisation of posterity as a matter of humans’
obligation to future humans. Indeed, some climate change novels deploy
123
Astrid Bracke, Climate Crisis and the Twenty-First-Century British Novel (London: Bloomsbury,
2018), p. 6; Antonia Mehnert, Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in
American Literature (London: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2016), p. 16.
124
Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, p. 233. 125 Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, pp. 179–83.

What Can the Novel Do?

That the novel exerts a complex emotional appeal on the reader, one that
plays a role in the formation of an ethical position, might seem axiomatic;
such appeal, indeed, is what Clark construes as highly conventional. Yet, the
ties that link emotions, ethics, and literature have been too often vexed in the
history of literary criticism. In his reassessment of The Value of the Novel
(2015), Peter Boxall describes a critical shift over the course of the twentieth
century from a belief in the moral worthiness of literature to a preoccupation
with literature’s ability to interrogate the foundations of moral value (and,
indeed, to interrogate the idea of value itself). However, as Boxall argues, the
mid- to late-century ‘struggle between the Leavisites and the new wave of
critics committed to “theory”’ has, in the ﬁrst decades of the new century,
given way to a renewed interest in literature’s ethical purpose.126 This heralds
not a return to morality as much as a recalibration of it, emerging out of ‘the
growing desire for a new means of articulating a set of values of our own
generation’.127 Certainly, Boxall’s analysis is joined by other recent studies,
such as Kenneth Asher’s Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions (2017), that seek
to understand anew the place of the novel in our moral – and, by extension,
emotional – universe.128 Yet, as Boxall rightly warns, anyone advocating a
new ethical turn in literary scholarship must be wary of repeating the value
judgements of earlier ideologues, that is, of mistaking literature’s purchase
on our moral lives for a normative statement of rights and wrongs:
The challenge that faces those who would measure, now, the value of the
arts, is how to capture and articulate the ethical force of the literary, without
resurrecting a conservative, Leavisite language in which to express it; how to
produce an adequately rich account of the democratic power of the literary
imagination, its capacity to continually remake the world in which we live,
without returning to a prior model of the critic as ‘arbiter of public taste’.129

126
Peter Boxall, The Value of the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 2. 127 Ibid., p. 2.
128
Kenneth Asher, Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
129
Boxall, The Value of the Novel, p. 9.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
What Can the Novel Do? 41
In addition, as Boxall reminds us, such an account must apprehend
literature not just as representations of moral matter but as drawing on
the resources of stylistics and aesthetics, that is, it must be equally alert to
form as it is to content. Additionally, it must be ready to understand the
interplay between so-called form and content, for it is this interplay that
continually shapes and reshapes the reader’s sense of subjectivity, ontology,
and, with these, ethics.
Thus, one way in which to consider ‘the ethical force’ of the
climate change novel is to begin not from literary scholarship but
from discussions about literature and ethics in moral philosophy. This
has the advantage not only of avoiding some of the entrenched
literary critical positions that Boxall describes but also of allowing
me to undertake a stepped discussion of content and form. That is, I
begin with these philosophical assumptions that emphasise novelistic
content (that is, as transparent depictions of moral behaviour in plot,
character, and so on), before going on to complicate these with
considerations of style and form (including narrative points of view
and focalisation) and to show how these encourage a critical awareness
(for example, through the strategies of irony and destabilisation). Like
Asher, I consider the moral philosophy of Martha Nussbaum to be a
‘promising starting point’ – and an oft-neglected one – for an under-
standing of the triangular relations among emotions, ethics, and the
novel; I employ Nussbaum’s ideas in order to elaborate a model of
reading that takes account of these relations.130 However, far from a
Leavisite vision of the novel as an emotional tool that perpetuates or
engenders moral norms (an approach which Nussbaum sometimes
takes), I particularly want to argue for the climate change novel’s
potential to intervene in these norms and to establish a critical
awareness of their power. That is, despite the novel’s seemingly
anthropocentric and conservative formal techniques and psychological
concerns, I suggest that it also uses these to critique conventional
ideas about and idealisations of the moral power of human affect – in
this case, the power of parental care and love. I thus set out here a
mode of reading the climate change novel that is critically aware of
existing expectations and ideas about literature’s ethical and emotional
power, as well as showing how the novel itself formally participates in
this critical awareness.

130
Asher, Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions, p. 12.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
42 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
Ethics, Emotion, and Literature: A Eudaemonistic Framework
Although Western moral philosophy has traditionally relied on the coor-
dinates of reason, principle, and duty (as has already been suggested in my
discussion of the emergence of parental care ethics), the work of Nussbaum
and others represents an important strand of investigation into the rela-
tionship between ethics and emotion. In particular, Nussbaum has argued
over the course of her career for the cognitive value of emotions; in such
works as Cultivating Humanity (1997), Upheavals of Thought (2001), and
Political Emotions (2013), she has elaborated a theory of the relationship
between emotions and value judgements, a theory that offers a first
(though, at this point, necessarily identitarian and anthropocentric) step
towards a mode of reading climate change novels’ emotional appeal as a
potential ethical intervention.131
Nussbaum constructs a model of compassionate ethical decision-mak-
ing. As she summarises it, emotions ‘involve judgements about important
things’, judgements which comprise ‘appraising an external object as
salient for our own well-being’.132 In short, emotions are ‘eudaimonistic
evaluations’.133 This is, then, a neo-Stoic ethics, drawing on the Aristotelian
idea of eudaemonia (that is, as we have seen, human well-being or flourish-
ing). Nussbaum focuses on compassion as an emotion that functions in
positive ways to determine what is important to one’s flourishing (while
disgust and shame, among other emotions, work negatively to this end).
Unlike Groves’s conceptualisation of the act of caring as constitutive to the
flourishing of the one-caring, however, Nussbaum’s work extends emo-
tional concerns beyond direct relationships and attachments. The emotion
of compassion occurs when one witnesses or otherwise becomes aware of
another’s distress and, in Nussbaum’s account, has three cognitive require-
ments: ‘the judgment of size (a serious bad event has befallen someone); the
judgment of nondesert (this person did not bring the suffering on himself or
herself); and the eudaimonistic judgment (this person, or creature, is a
significant element in my scheme of goals and projects, an end whose
good is to be promoted)’.134 It is Nussbaum’s explication of this third belief
that sheds particular light on the role of compassion in ethical assessment
and on the widening of what she calls ‘the circle of concern’.135 According
131
Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of
Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013).
132
Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, p. 19. 133 Ibid., p. 300.
134 135
Ibid., p. 321; original emphasis. Ibid., p. 319.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
What Can the Novel Do? 43
to Nussbaum, eudaemonistic judgement replaces Aristotle’s standard
requirement for compassion – the ‘judgment of similar possibilities’ –
because, she argues, similarities and similar possibilities between the spec-
tator and the sufferer are not in and of themselves a vital component of
compassion.136 What is important is that they bring home to the witness of
suffering her shared vulnerability with the one suffering. Preventing that
distress or pain, therefore, is inextricably tied to her own well-being,
because it alleviates her sense of her potential for distress or pain. The
eudaemonistic judgement that another’s experiences, particularly painful
experiences, are part of a common vulnerability, along with the compas-
sion that results from this judgement, are at the crux of Nussbaum’s ethical
framework.
Before I introduce literature to this configuration of ethics and emo-
tions, I should explain the terms I will use in this book to describe these
emotions, as, over the course of the history of the philosophy of moral
sentiments, some terms and descriptions have tended to overlap. First,
when it comes to discussing emotions, I take ‘emotions’ as referring, in
fairly self-explanatory fashion, to affective states, and I use ‘emotion’ and
‘feeling’ interchangeably. Robert Solomon introduces the additional
terms ‘sentiments’ and ‘sentimentality’. Solomon, like Nussbaum, is
concerned with defending emotions as ‘an essential part of the substance
of ethics itself’; he sees sentiments as a term used in an unnecessarily
pejorative way for emotions, particularly suggesting ‘“excessive” emotion’,
‘emotional self-indulgence’ or ‘“false” or “fake” emotions’, although, as he
maintains, there is little that is inherently egregious about emotions.137
Using Solomon’s definition, I shall refer to sentiments and the sentimen-
tal when there is an accompanying suggestion of an ‘excessive manipula-
tion’ of emotions, such as in the sentimental novel.138 Second, in my
discussion of emotional sharing, I have so far employed Nussbaum’s
model as a point of departure and thus shared her use of ‘compassion’
to refer to ‘a painful emotion occasioned by the awareness of another
person’s undeserved misfortune’.139 Nussbaum distinguishes this from
‘empathy’, which is simply ‘an imaginative reconstruction of another’s
experience, without any particular evaluation of that experience’; that is,
unlike compassion, empathy does not include any suggestion of a negative
emotion, such as pain or distress, arising from the awareness of that
experience.140 As Nussbaum notes, however, her definition of compassion

136 137
Ibid., p. 321; original emphasis. Solomon, In Defense of Sentimentality, pp. 8–9.
138 139
Ibid., p. 8. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, p. 301. 140 Ibid., p. 302.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
44 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
coincides with definitions of sympathy in eighteenth-century moral phi-
losophy as well as with contemporary uses of the word. Solomon, for one,
tends to discuss sympathy in this way, and, indeed, to distinguish between
it and empathy on much the same grounds on which Nussbaum contrasts
compassion and empathy. Thus, according to Solomon, empathy refers to
‘the sharing of emotion (any emotion). Sympathy, by contrast, is an
emotion, a quite particular though rather suffuse and contextually defined
emotion. It is therefore sympathy that does the motivational work . . . but
that in turn requires empathy, the capacity to “read” and to some extent
share other people’s emotions’.141 From this point, then, I follow, for
convenience, the many commentators on narrative empathy and emotion
who use ‘sympathy’ to mean what Nussbaum means by ‘compassion’. In
all cases, I treat sympathy/compassion as an evaluative emotional response
to another’s emotion, usually painful, and view it as the result of empathy,
the ability to partake of the other’s emotion. Both sympathy/compassion
and empathy, in this model of emotion and ethics, are important com-
ponents of ethical judgement. Identification, meanwhile, is a term I shall
sometimes use to describe literature’s encouragement of the reader to
assume a similarity with a character, which invokes patterns of empathy
and sympathy. It is to literature that I now turn.
Literature enters this formulation of emotion and ethics because it
seems to allow the witnessing of the experiences of unknown others,
widening the circle of concern. As Nussbaum puts it, ‘If distant people
and abstract principles are to get a grip on our emotions’ and create ‘a
sense of “our” life in which these people and events matter as parts of our
“us”, our own flourishing’, then ‘symbols and poetry are crucial’.142
Novels, in particular, with their constructions of fictional situations and
experiences create cognitive opportunities for compassion: ‘Narrative art’,
writes Nussbaum, ‘has the power to make us see the lives of the different
with more than a casual tourist’s interest – with involvement and sympa-
thetic understanding, with anger at our society’s refusals of visibility.’143
Such an account of the effect of literature chimes, as Suzanne Keen
suggests, with popular perceptions of novel reading and, indeed, with
responses of actual readers, who ‘report feeling both empathy with and
sympathy for fictional characters. They believe that novel reading opens

141
Solomon, In Defense of Sentimentality, p. 69; original emphasis.
142
Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 11.
143
Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, p. 88; see also Nussbaum’s early work on Henry James in two
chapters of Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1990),
pp. 125–67.

Reading Climate Change Fiction: A Critical Eudaemonistic Framework

As persuasive and seemingly commonsensical as such a model of literature
might be, a eudaemonistic framework requires a number of important
qualiﬁcations if it is to be related to the experience and effect of reading the
climate change novel. For one thing, there is no easy translation of the
reader’s emotional response to ethical action. Keen cautions against being
too quick to assign ethical power to literature, without taking full account
of the differing contexts and conditions in which empathetic reading takes
place, and without allowing that readers’ ethical actions might arise from
other factors, including an existing predisposition to empathetic insight
and sympathetic conduct.147 She also warns that the very otherness of the
novelistic world from the ‘real’ world might even mitigate against the

144
Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. ix.
145
Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, p. 94.
146
Eudaemonistic reading chimes with very recent ecocritical studies that emphasise the immersive
and experiential aspect of narratives and that show how this engenders compassionate responses to
social and environmental injustice. See, for example, Erin James’s theory and praxis of econarra-
tology, which ‘studies the storyworlds that readers simulate and transport themselves to when
reading narratives, the correlations between such textual, imaginative worlds and the physical,
extratextual world, and the potential for the reading process to foster awareness and understanding
for different environmental imaginations and experiences’, The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology
and Postcolonial Narratives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), p. xv. See also Alexa Weik
von Mossner’s study of readers’ responses to environmental issues in literature and film as
‘embodied cognition’, that is, as a cognitive response that is both physical and emotional, since it
forces comparisons and conflations between the reader’s material, or ‘real’ world with fictional or
filmic worlds, as well as ethical since it promotes empathetic engagement, Affective Ecologies:
Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017),
pp. 1–13.
147
Keen, Empathy and the Novel, pp. xiv–xv.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
46 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
exercise of political or social conscience: ‘the contract of fictionality offers a
no-strings-attached opportunity for emotional transactions of great inten-
sity. A novel-reader may enjoy empathy freely without paying back society
with altruism.’148 Also relevant here is Wayne Booth’s reminder, in his still-
influential study of literature and ethics, The Company We Keep (1988), of
the two kinds of experience that readers seek with any work. Booth adopts
Louise Rosenblatt’s distinction between aesthetic and efferent readerly
transactions, readers focused in the former on ‘what happens during the
actual reading event’ and in the latter on ‘the concepts, solutions, to be
“carried away” from their reading’; Booth argues not that aesthetic reading
fails to produce ethical outcomes, but that very different ethical conse-
quences follow from each kind of reading.149 In other words, a critical eye
needs to be kept on the very complex nature of ethical reflection that
accompanies reader identification, empathy, and sympathy, a complexity
not reducible to simple altruistic attitudes and actions such as environ-
mental awareness and environmentally sensitive behaviour.
Along with a critical consideration of the causal relationship between
sympathy and action, attention needs to be paid to the political contours of
eudaemonistic reading. Nussbaum tends to press reading into the service of
a progressive and liberal democratic politics of tolerance: literature fulfils ‘a
vital role in educating citizens of the world’.150 Yet, as studies of novelistic
sympathy show, the emotional power wielded by the novel is not necessa-
rily ideologically benign. Elizabeth Barnes’s exploration of the American
novel in the wake of independence highlights its role in constructing a
coherent democratic identity for the new union. As Barnes shows, the
depictions of family in a range of post-Revolutionary and antebellum
novels function to invite readers not just to view but to participate in
sympathetic ties, which become on the one hand the ideal expression of
private conduct and on the other an ethical model for a fledgling demo-
cratic citizenry: ‘familial feeling proves the foundation for sympathy, and
sympathy the foundation of democracy.’151 Thus, the novels in Barnes’s
analysis exemplify the eudaemonistic dynamics that Nussbaum pro-
pounds, but, at the same time, Barnes shows how such dynamics are far

148
Ibid., p. 168.
149
Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work
(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978); Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep:
An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 13–14.
150
Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, p. 88.
151
Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 2.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
What Can the Novel Do? 47
from innocent. Eudaemonistic reading is readily available, I would there-
fore argue, to a range of uses, and any critical account of it must attend to
the political hues of the sympathy – or, perhaps more accurately here,
sympathies – called forth by the novel. These sympathies are not always,
after all, transparently or straightforwardly beneficial to the kinds of
reflections and behaviours demanded by the Anthropocene.
Specifically, and not wholly surprisingly, an uncritically eudaemonistic
account of reading risks reiterating the kind of identitarian position
critiqued by Sandilands and dismissed as woefully inadequate by Clark,
for whom it represents ‘our normal entrapment in the delusory and
potentially destructive projections of the personal scale’.152 It would appear
that Nussbaum’s eudaemonistic reader, who immerses herself in fictional
situations and identifies with, relates to, and feels sorry for the characters
therein, is understandable as an unproblematically stable subject, develop-
ing reliably consistent feelings of compassion and applying these system-
atically to the world around her. While it must be pointed out that
Nussbaum does not construct her ethical reader in entirely naïve identitar-
ian terms – her moral framework is alive to fluctuations in identity and
recognises that emotional, eudaemonistic evaluations are part of becoming,
to some extent, ‘a different person’ – her conceptualisation of emotions’
role in identity shifts and transformations does not provide the kind of
insight into the slipperiness of identity propounded by thinkers as different
as Parfit, Sandilands, and Clark.153 For example, as I have already sug-
gested, Sandilands’s Arendtian understanding of identity emphasises it as
an ‘intra-social’ event, formed in moments of social and political coalition
and action but existing in an ongoing state of incompleteness.154 Thus,
where, for Nussbaum, identity is something of a work-in-progress, I would
argue that identity is better comprehended as always already a collection of
parts (and that it will never be a sum of these parts is what causes the
Lacanian trauma of subjectivity, as Sandilands suggests). To understand
identity as contingent is to value moments of empathy and sympathy as
coalitional interactions that make political and ethical action practicable
and identity momentarily possible, rather than to view them as tools
employed by a singular, developing identity in the first place. To under-
stand identity as contingent is also to remain alert to the (mis)assumptions
of stability of identity that may be operative in a eudaemonistic reading.

152 153
Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, p. 191–2. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, p. 83.
154
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 84.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
48 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
In particular, the eudaemonistic account of reading as a process of
identification seems to reinforce the myth of a stable identity for the reader.
Nussbaum’s version of reading, imbricated with empathy and sympathy,
assumes that the reader’s sense of identity and, with it, morality will be
both activated by reading and enhanced by it: the reader encounters a
manifest image of the self (to invoke Clark’s use of Sellars) and employs
this as a basis for ethical action. It is no accident, after all, that, historically
speaking, novels have played a central role in establishing the modern
category of the individual, particularly doing so by purporting to demon-
strate the ethical coherence and power of the self; in some studies, the novel
has been shown, indeed, to be no less than the discursive consolidation of
the concept of individualism, that discourse dependent on the flow of
reader empathy and sympathy. For example, analyses by Nancy Armstrong
and Gillian Brown have explained how eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury British and American novels construct the middle-class woman as the
embodiment of moral agency, thanks to her supposed capacity for sym-
pathy, which her readers were invited to emulate.155 A non-identitarian
critic would do well to keep in mind the novel’s discursive power in
consolidating the myth of identity’s coherence and completeness, as well
as the novel’s potential to reveal the impossibility of that myth. This
requires, then, a critical awareness of the identitarian assumptions that
underpin novelistic techniques of empathy and sympathy, along with a
vigilance in demonstrating when and how novelistic irony might work to
undermine these assumptions.
Moreover, the identificatory processes of novel reading, in a eudaemo-
nistic account, are liable to replay the conservative identity politics at the
heart of parental care ethics (certainly, Armstrong’s and Brown’s historical
accounts of the discursive construction of morally superior domestic
womanhood by British and American sentimental novels bear this out).
The sympathy provoked in the eudaemonistic reader is that of concern for
those whose plight is shared not just with the reader but with those for
whom she cares – the reader’s children or children she might imagine
having. As Nussbaum notes in discussing Aristotle’s judgement of moral
similarity, ‘the similarity should be not to my own possibilities alone, but
to those of my loved ones as well’; Nussbaum’s eudaemonistic version of
this judgement extends shared vulnerability rather than simply moral

155
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987); Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-
Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
What Can the Novel Do? 49
similarity to loved ones, including children, and their futures.156 On this
view, the novel would set up what Keen calls ‘situational empathy’, inviting
the reader to step into a familial relationship (or circle of concern) within
the novel, and to care for, rather than with, child characters.157 Where that
circle of concern repeats traditional nuclear family dynamics and invites
the reader to inhabit idealised stereotypes built on heavily gendered norms,
the reader is, as it were, interpellated as parent into suspiciously hetero-
sexist or patriarchal ideological expectations.
All this echoes Edelman’s concerns with the disingenuous use of the
figure of the child and Seymour’s particular identification of this
pattern in environmentalist discourse. Of course, the novel has a long
history of utilising images of childhood to reflect adult desires and
quests for identity. Building on Philippe Ariès’s grand account of the
construction of childhood as a social category in the modern age, Susan
Honeyman has shown how the twentieth-century novel’s idea of the
child is more the projection of adult interests than any authentic notion
of children.158 Meanwhile, Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s exhaustive study of
nineteenth-century American writing about children shows how they
were discursively employed as – among other things – ‘social actors’,
capable of exerting power on the reader through ‘affective ties’.159
Sánchez-Eppler suggests that children’s vulnerability and victimhood
were exercised in the service of agendas as varied as temperance and
abolition, with readers called on to display the moral decency or active
concern expected of parents. As such examples show, where the eudae-
monistic reading relies on a sentimental use of the figure of the child, a
critical awareness is required to identify and interrogate the parental
care ethics that underpin it.
Here, it is worth noting, if briefly, the differences and similarities
between parental care ethics and philosophical treatments of emotion
and ethics such as Nussbaum’s. Whereas care ethics emerged as an alter-
native to the dominant emphasis on reason, justice, and rights in Western
moral philosophy and thus tended to promote care as a non-cognitive
ethical response, philosophers such as Nussbaum and Solomon have been
keen to describe both emotions and judgement as forming equal parts of a

156
Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, p. 316. 157 Keen, Empathy and the Novel, p. 13.
158
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New
York: Vintage, 1962); Susan Honeyman, Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations of Childhood
in Modern Fiction (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2006).
159
Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
(University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. xxii.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
50 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
cognitive ethical appraisal.160 Moreover, Solomon, in particular, is aware of
the shortcomings of an uncritical reliance on parental care as a political
model, approaching as it does the dangers of parochialism (and thus
echoing Tronto): ‘To care for is also to be prepared to fight for, and against
the sweet image of women caring for the world in the way mothers have
always cared for their children should be juxtaposed the not-so-sweet
image of a mother defending her children against the dangers of the outside
world.’161 Nussbaum voices similar concerns in relation to compassion
(though here, and elsewhere, she never explicitly compares her ethical
model to care ethics): ‘Compassion for our own children can so easily
slip into a desire to promote the well-being of our children at the expense of
other people’s children. Similarly, compassion for our fellow Americans
can all too easily slip over into a desire to make America come out on top
and to subordinate other nations.’162 Nonetheless, Nussbaum’s character-
isation of the eudaemonistic reader has important points of similarity with
the moral agent called forth by parental care ethics. I argue, therefore, that
a critical deployment of a model of eudaemonistic reading must acknowl-
edge any replication – however unwitting – of some of the key political
risks, such as parochialism and paternalism, raised by parental care ethics.
Finally, in reading the climate change novel, critical caution must be
taken to ensure that a eudaemonistic version of reading does not remain an
anthropocentric exercise. To be fair, Nussbaum’s circle of concern is
capable of crossing species boundaries. Rather like O’Neill, who contends
that non-human flourishing is constitutive of human flourishing,
Nussbaum considers that humans often recognise non-human animals as
possessing a ‘common vulnerability’ on the basis of ‘pain, hunger, and
other types of suffering’; indeed, it is possible, she notes, to feel sympathy
for ‘precisely those aspects of an animal’s suffering that are unlike our own
– for example, their lack of legal rights, their lack of power to shape the laws
that affect their lives, or (in some cases) their lack of understanding of what
is happening to them. . . . We think, how horrible it would be to suffer pain
in that way, and without hope of changing it.’163 As laudable as it might be,

160
For the position in care ethics, see Noddings, Caring, pp. 22–7, and Held, The Ethics of Care, pp.
12–13.
161
Solomon, In Defense of Sentimentality, p. 57.
162
Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Compassion and Terror’, Daedalus 132.1 (2003), 13; original emphasis.
Though Nussbaum does not compare her work with ethics of care, Tronto notes that Nussbaum’s
‘capabilities approach – which, building on the work of Amartya Sen, focuses on meeting others’
capabilities to achieve eudaemonia – is akin to an ethic of care; see Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 140.
163
O’Neill, Ecology, Policy and Politics; Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, p. 319.

The Critical Method and Structure of This Book

What all this calls for in dealing with the climate change novel is a critical
understanding of eudaemonistic reading. This is not simply about being
critically aware of identificatory practices that disclose the political limita-
tions of parental care ethics, display the arrogance of human exceptional-
ism, or conform to identitarian assumptions of human subjectivity and
agency. It requires, too, a consideration of how the processes of readerly
eudaemonistic sympathy play out in climate change novels, and an identi-
fication of where these novels interrupt these processes to point to more
radical possibilities.
Specifically, I redeploy a key concept of Nussbaum’s model of reading:
tragic spectatorship. A concept implicit in much of her writing, tragic
spectatorship is defined by Nussbaum in a 2003 essay, ‘Compassion and
Terror’, and elaborated on in Political Emotions. In its initial iteration,
tragic spectatorship clearly fits into Nussbaum’s eudaemonistic ethical
framework. Noting how Athenian tragedy concerns itself with the posses-
sion and subsequent loss of ‘attachments that seem essentially reasonable’,
such as children, health, and freedom, Nussbaum goes on to state: ‘the
tragic dramas encourage us to understand the depth of such loss and, with
the protagonists, to fear it. In exercising compassion, the audience is
learning its own possibilities and vulnerabilities – what Aristotle called

164 165
Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, p. 321. Ibid., pp. 321–2.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
52 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
“things such as might happen”.’166 In her later work, Nussbaum readily
resumes such a definition, but also refers to the progress of the tragic drama
as a factor in the effect of tragic spectatorship, namely that the spectator
proceeds from a position of unconcern and even disgust for the protagonist
to one of compassion; that is, sympathy is awakened. Thus, what
Nussbaum calls the expectation of ‘segmentation’ is breached: tragedy
reminds the relatively privileged just how much they are like the tragic
and deprived protagonist: ‘terrible plights are the common lot of all, even
the most privileged’.167 Tragic spectatorship involves, then, not just the
witnessing of tragic events but a process from unconcern to concern, as a
shared exposure to those events is gradually revealed.
What this means, first, is an ecocentric understanding of the potential in
tragic narrative for the undoing of species segmentation in particular.
Tragic spectatorship challenges ‘anthropodenial’, a term that Nussbaum
borrows from primatologist Frans de Waal to refer not just to our denial of
all things of the ‘body’ and our desire to transcend the ‘animality’ of our
existence, but to our idea of ourselves as ‘truly human’, as inhabiting a
highly individualised and invulnerable state of transcendence, unity, and
omnipotence.168 The spectator’s assumption of immunity from distress, so
rudely disrupted by tragic narrative, includes the notion that the human
spectator is exempt from the kind of deprivations that non-humans might
undergo. But what is also made possible is an ecocentric recognition that
the deprivation of non-human flourishing is of concern in and of itself.
Furthermore, to emphasise tragic spectatorship is to be mindful of the
progress undertaken by readers of fiction. This is particularly relevant to a
critical awareness of the political and ideological biases of reader sympathy,
for an attention to the stages by which reader sympathy is developed allows
some of the norms that underpin that sympathy to be questioned. What
this requires is critique that sheds light on the invitations issued to the
reader at key points in the novel. That is, while I do not conduct a blow-by-
blow account of reader response, I do attend to moments in which
identification and eudaemonistic sympathy, whether with characters or
situations or, more often, a combination of these, are called forth, and I am
mindful of how plot and character development (or, perhaps, lack thereof)
allows these moments to make or unmake eudaemonistic sense. I also pay
heed to endings, not just closing pages but points of plot resolution and
dénouement that might occur in earlier sections of the novel; I will take up,

166 167
Nussbaum, ‘Compassion and Terror’, pp. 25–6. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 265.
168
Ibid., p. 184.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
What Can the Novel Do? 53
for example, false endings, open endings, or tragic conclusions, and their
effects, where relevant.
The reading I propose here therefore involves a focus on the sympathetic
– one might say, sentimental – journey undertaken by the reader in
empathy with narrators or protagonists, as well as a readiness to read that
sympathy as destabilised by such elements as unreliable narrators or
focalisers. It also enables the questioning of the sympathetic (or, indeed,
caring) dispositions and actions of those protagonists or narrators in their
parental roles, and thus the active interrogation of care that they display.
Then, it highlights the importance of endings, particularly where those
endings involve the destabilisation of the emotional investments made by
the reader. I realise that some might ask why a novel would invite sympathy
from a reader only to undercut it. I contend that, in some cases, the novel
enacts emotions – and even asks for an enactment of emotional identifica-
tion on the part of the reader – so as to critique those emotions all the more
powerfully. That is, if the eudaemonistic rug is to be pulled out from under
the reader’s feet, the reader has to be standing on that rug in the first place.
Moreover, the potential for destabilisation applies not only to the
sympathetic investment made by the reader but to the larger framework
of identity from which such sympathy is supposed to originate. That is,
more radical possibilities exist for the reader to be invited to identify with
protagonists or narrators whose own identities come into question. The
process of identification becomes a means for self-reflexively querying that
process, recalling Sandilands’s strategy of ‘ironic’ essentialism, whereby
coherent identity is assumed in full knowledge of its impossibility, as well
as Clark’s almost offhand comment, via Sellars, that the manifest image is
an important coping mechanism for the human psyche.169
In the first half of this book, I read novels that encourage a relatively
uncritical eudaemonistic response, but do so in order to invite the reader to
inhabit a parental care ethics and subsequently to critique these ethical
stances. This critique tends to take the form of the positioning of readers as
critical tragic spectators, destabilising the emotions of care and identifica-
tions with parenthood that lead them to tragic compassion, and inviting
critical reflection on those parental emotions and perspectives. Thus, in
chapter 2, I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Maggie Gee’s
The Ice People (1998) for the ways in which they shed light on the power
dynamics of parental care ethics when it serves as a model for intergenera-
tional action, specifically, the merging of attitudes of parochialism and

169
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 114; Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, p. 164.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:13:25, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.002
54 The Ethics of Posterity and the Climate Change Novel
paternalism into a narrow genetic or biological survivalism, and the exclu-
sionary gender politics that underwrites this.170 Chapter 3 takes up the
thread of the gendered norms of parental care ethics, reading the risks of
expanding motherhood environmentalism into an intergenerational ethics
in Edan Lepucki’s California (2014) and Liz Jensen’s The Rapture (2009).171
These novels particularly juxtapose maternalised care ethics and their
emphasis on the moral power of procreation and parenting against the
threat of overpopulation in the Anthropocene.
As I show in the second half of this book, however, some novels do more
than critique; they enable radical ethical alternatives to emerge.
Specifically, they question the basic assumptions of human interest and
identification on which eudaemonistic readings rest. In chapter 4, I employ
reconceptualisations of political identity as contingent and coalitional to
read Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) for its insights into the
hybrid nature of identity and its critical awareness of how nostalgic desire
for the past informs our ethical relationship with the future, and Sarah
Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007) as a demonstration of the process by
which identity is made and unmade, and the opportunities and hazards
this creates for a future-oriented ethical agency.172 Finally, chapter 5
compares two heroic treatments of science’s ability to save the future. It
contrasts Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Science in the Future’ trilogy (2004,
2005, 2007), reliant as it is on an anthropocentric account of science, with
Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012), which enables an ecocentric
awareness by way of a surprising ending.173 In particular, I argue that
Kingsolver employs the kind of widening of the circle of concern that is
only hinted at by Nussbaum’s concept of wonder but more fully developed
in Cuomo’s ethics of flourishing.
Throughout, this book argues that climate change fiction builds
worlds in which readers might be immersed and creates characters
with whom we might identify in order not merely to evoke emotional
response but to provoke ethical reflection. This is the case across the
full range of climate change fiction’s generic inflections, from the
parental dilemmas brought on by the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic
170
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (first published 2006; London: Picador, 2007); Maggie Gee, The Ice
People (first published 1998; London: Telegram, 2008).
171
Edan Lepucki, California (first published 2014; London: Abacus, 2015); Liz Jensen, The Rapture
(London: Bloomsbury, 2009).
172
Winterson, The Stone Gods; Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army (London: Faber, 2007).
173
Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain (first published 2004; London: HarperCollins, 2005),
Fifty Degrees Below (first published 2005; London: HarperCollins, 2006), Sixty Days and Counting
(London: HarperCollins, 2007); Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour (London: Faber, 2012).

The Limits of Parental Care Ethics: Cormac

McCarthy’s The Road and Maggie Gee’s The Ice
People

Often, because people who care become enmeshed in the caring

process, the great moral task for them is not to become involved
with others (the problem of moral motivation, a fundamental pro-
blem in contemporary moral theory), but to be able to stand back
from ongoing processes of care and ask, ‘What is going on here?’
It requires honesty, and a non-idealized knowledge of selves and
others.
Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument
for an Ethic of Care

My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will

kill anyone who touches you.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

To scale up the many interpersonal attitudes and acts that mark the
parent–child relationship into a rationale for intergenerational justice is to
reveal the limits of parental care as an ethical position. For this scaling up
risks exacerbating such dangers as parochialism and paternalism, allowing,
for example, one generation’s obligation to future generations to be
simpliﬁed as one’s obligation to one’s own lineage, and thus allowing
intergenerational justice to be expressed as nothing more than biological
survivalism. It also risks eliding the gender dynamics that underpin
parental care as a private set of activities and dispositions under the
territorial and exceptionalist logic of identity politics.
Such are the concerns explored in this chapter. The limitations of
parental care as intergenerational ethics are revealed by two contem-
porary novels, The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy and The Ice
People (1998) by Maggie Gee, the one popularly read as a global
warming parable despite its apparent reticence on that matter and
the other an early novelistic engagement with climate change that
precedes the twenty-ﬁrst-century fanfare around climate change

Parochialism, Paternalism, and Genetic Survivalism

Embedded within care ethics is a set of political and ethical risks, closely
connected to care’s origins in private and immediate attachments, as I have
already suggested in chapter 1. Joan Tronto argues, in a detailed account of
the ethics of care and its potential as a political position, that care ethics is
too often concerned ‘with relationships of care that are now considered
personal or private’, when what is instead required is ‘an assessment of
needs in a social and political, as well as a personal, context’.3 Tronto
proposes a configuration of care not simply emanating from a private
disposition in a domestic space, as in Noddings’s pioneering account of
it, but as a broad worldview expressed in concrete practices.4 This is, for
Tronto, not just about the important difference between ‘caring about’ and
‘caring for’; it is also about recognising the need to widen the concept of
1
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (first published 2006; London: Picador, 2007); Maggie Gee, The Ice
People (first published 1998; London: Telegram, 2008). Subsequent page references to these texts are
in parentheses.
2
Nel Noddings, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, updated edn. (first
published 1984; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 24.
3
Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge,
1993), p. 137.
4
Noddings, Caring.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
58 The Limits of Parental Care Ethics
care beyond a narrow definition of identity and activity, so that it might be
applied to a range of issues, responsibilities, and potential conflicts, while
contextualising it sufficiently to account for diverse kinds of actions,
concerns, and demands. Drawing on a framework that she first developed
with Berenice Fisher, Tronto defines care as ‘a species activity that includes
everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we
can live in it as well as possible’.5 This definition has been criticised by care
ethicists such as Virginia Held and Christopher Groves for being too
broad, but it is intentionally so, in order that care might be turned into
a politically useful stance.6 Tronto goes on to show how care so defined
would inform different phases of caring: ‘caring about’ (that is, recognising
the need to care); ‘taking care of’ (assuming the responsibility of meeting
that need); ‘care-giving’ (directly meeting that need); and ‘care-receiving’
(perceiving and assessing whether the need has been met).7 These relate to
four components of an ethics of care: ‘attentiveness, responsibility, com-
petence, and responsiveness’.8 Tronto, then, is careful to understand caring
responsibilities and activities in terms applicable to public conduct, rather
than to model these on immediate attachments and particular standpoints.
In a related move, Tronto shows how the focus on intimate and dyadic
relationships of care gives rise to moral dilemmas, which an uncritical
celebration of care risks ignoring and therefore replicating. Most strikingly,
as Tronto suggests, ‘paternalism, or maternalism’ and ‘parochialism’
emerge as problems for a political model of care.9 The risks of inappropri-
ate types and amounts of care are enfolded, as it were, in its origins as
a sentiment arising out of relations and attachments. Care in its particular
and private expressions leads, for example, to problems in assessing ‘proper
levels of care, of anger and gratitude’, as well as the danger of giving
‘smothering care as opposed to care that leads to autonomy’.10 Tronto
warns of paternalism: ‘We can well imagine that those who are care-givers,
as well as those who have decided to take care of a particular need, will
come to accept their own account of what is necessary to meet the caring
need as definitive.’ That is, the one-caring may indulge in unintentionally
self-serving kinds of care, such as over-protectiveness and possessiveness.11
5
Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 103, original emphasis; Tronto and Berenice Fisher, ‘Towards
a Feminist Theory of Caring’, in Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson (eds.), Circles of Care:
Work and Identity in Women’s Lives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 40.
6
Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 104; Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global
(Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 31; Christopher Groves, Care, Uncertainty, and Intergenerational
Ethics (Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2014), p. 107.
7 8 9
Tronto, Moral Boundaries, pp. 106–8. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 170. 10 Ibid., p. 141.
11
Ibid., p. 145.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
Parochialism, Paternalism, and Genetic Survivalism 59
And of parochialism, Tronto asks: ‘How are we to guarantee that people,
who are enmeshed in their daily rounds of care-giving and care-receiving,
will be able to address broader needs and concerns for care? If mothers care
for their own children, why should they not take the needs of their own
children more seriously than the needs of distant children?’12 Robert
Solomon voices a related concern with the territorialising aspects of care:
‘caring about anyone or anything sets up a zone of dangers and threats that
promote aggressive defensiveness and hostility’.13 In other words, the
tightness of the emotional focus of the caring dyad or group has its limits,
for it easily translates into a lack of compassion for and even violence
towards others.
Parochialism and paternalism are united in the tendency towards self-
gratification and self-interest, a selfishness that becomes more apparent
when parental care is idealised as a disposition towards posterity. When the
intimate connections of care serve as a model for obligation and action
towards the future, they allow the kind of delusory self-importance that
Timothy Clark cautions against in assuming that the non-human dimen-
sions of the Anthropocene crisis require solutions at the human scale.14
They potentially limit the view of that unknowable future to a version of
the knowable present, at just the point at which an ethical position should
be expansive rather than restrictive. The absence and thus powerlessness of
future generations in moral decision-making risk a situation in which
decisions are based on the values and interests of the present. At the
same time, it is tempting to restrict moral considerability to present
interests too, for example, to lineage (as John Rawls suggests in his brief
reflection on the rationale of intergenerational justice, in which the deci-
sion-makers of his idealised ‘original position’ are imagined as heads of
‘family lines’) or community (as Avner de-Shalit proposes in his vision of
a ‘transgenerational community’).15
In other words, parental care ethics is translatable into a limited position
of concern that, interestingly, resembles the biological argument for pos-
terity – that is, the perpetuation of genes. When expressed as a paternalistic
attitude to the future as a version of the needs of the present and as
a parochial concern with the future as lineage, parental care ethics

12
Ibid., p. 142.
13
Robert C. Solomon, In Defense of Sentimentality (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 57.
14
Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London:
Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 164.
15
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 255; Avner de-Shalit, Why
Posterity Matters: Environmental Policies and Future Generations (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 13.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
60 The Limits of Parental Care Ethics
approximates genetic survivalism. Certainly, care construed in this way is
hardly a model for an altruistic attitude to the planet as a whole and the
continuation of its many species. Indeed, even in biological terms, simple,
lineal, genetic preservation constitutes the most basic of evolutionary
imperatives when compared with more advanced strategies such as kin
selection and group or reciprocal altruism. One could say that it reveals, to
borrow Richard Dawkins’s controversial description, the genes at their
most selfish.16
In the readings that follow, I argue that McCarthy’s The Road, the
reception of which, as a climate change novel, depends almost solely on
its searing depiction of parental care in a damaged world, concludes, on
close reading, with a critique of the narrow biological survivalism asso-
ciated with an ethics of care. I then show how Gee’s The Ice People holds
these problems up to scrutiny throughout, and, moreover, brings into
fuller view the gendered norms of care, which McCarthy’s novel only
hints at and never quite recognises. My analyses depend on a recognition
of the reader’s own journey of sympathy for characters; that is, I note the
processes involved in a eudaemonistic reading, which become the grounds
for a critical eudaemonistic interpretation. For one thing, each novel relies
on the reader’s identification with its protagonist and on the calling forth
of empathy, sympathy, and, indeed, care for those within the protagonist’s
circle of concern (that is, with the exercise of sympathy not just for the
protagonist but in tune with his own sympathetic and caring attitude and
actions to his child). Yet, the protagonists’ capacity for care is limited and,
thus, their apparently unswerving commitment to care is unreliable. In this
way, and in ultimately revealing the boundaries of care, or the limits of
what Martha Nussbaum calls ‘the circle of concern’, the novels bring the
reader to an acknowledgement of those boundaries and a reconsideration
of parental care.17 For another thing, each novel grants access, at key
points, to the perspectives of characters other than the focalising or
narrating protagonist; most importantly, these include the child who serves
as the object of care in each novel. These identificatory disruptions not
only represent critical interventions in the reader’s sympathetic develop-
ment; they also gift the reader with alternative points of view, which,
crucially, look beyond the survivalist dimensions of parental care ethics.

16
Richard Dawkins, The Selﬁsh Gene, new edn. (ﬁrst published 1976; Oxford University Press, 1989).
17
Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge University Press,
2001), p. 319.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
Parochialism, Paternalism, and Genetic Survivalism 61
The Road
A simple conceptualisation of parental care underpins the reception of
McCarthy’s The Road as a climate change novel, though the novel itself, as
my reading suggests, is careful to reveal the cracks in such a monolithic
ideal. McCarthy is known for works – such as Blood Meridian (1985), the
Border trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, 1992, The Crossing, 1994, and Cities of
the Plain, 1998), and No Country for Old Men (2005) – in which heroes,
usually male, undertake physical and psychological journeys and endure
violence and isolation; McCarthy usually presents these traits as unavoid-
able, if extreme, aspects of human experience. In this respect, The Road, an
account of an unnamed man and his son travelling south in an unim-
aginably devastated and dangerous landscape, takes up typical
McCarthyian concerns, focalising the reader’s empathy and sympathy on
the man and his experiences in protecting himself and his son. However, it
differs in other, crucial respects. For one thing, the setting’s geographical
uncertainty and the anonymity of the two characters lend the narrative
a deeper fabular tenor than McCarthy’s other novels. It casts a starker
spotlight on the man as a representative of humanity and conjures up the
possibility that the world in which he travels is a version of our – that is,
the reader’s – future, which in turn hints at the possibility of a moral to the
story. For another thing, the pair’s deep and abiding bond serves not only
to offset the brutality and barrenness of the journey but, by the novel’s end,
to introduce, in the child’s point of view, an alternative perspective to that
of the everyman who apparently dominates the novel and the reader’s
purview.
The novel’s mythical contours have played a pivotal role in its reception
as a climate change parable. The British paperback edition of The Road
carries one of the most oft-quoted endorsements of the novel, that it is the
‘ﬁrst great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation’, a statement
attributed to the author Andrew O’Hagan on BBC Radio 4.18
In a comparable statement, the British writer and activist, George
Monbiot, praised the novel for offering an object lesson in environmental
awareness in his regular column in the broadsheet The Guardian,
in October 2007:
A few weeks ago, I read what I believe is the most important environmental
book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small is Beautiful or even Walden.
It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, ﬁgures, warnings, predictions or

18
McCarthy, The Road, back cover.

19
George Monbiot, ‘Civilisation Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern: Are We There Already?’,
The Guardian (30 October 2007).
20
Lydia Cooper suggests that McCarthy identiﬁes the disaster as ‘a meteor strike’ in ‘Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative’, Studies in the Novel 43 (2011), 218;
Carl Grindley discusses a ‘supernatural cause’ in ‘The Setting of McCarthy’s The Road’,
Explicator 67 (2008), 12; and Francisco Collado-Rodríguez and Tim Blackmore suggest nuclear
disaster in Collado-Rodríguez, ‘Trauma and Storytelling in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old
Men and The Road’, Papers on Language and Literature 48 (2012), 45, and Blackmore, ‘Life of War,
Death of the Rest: The Shining Path of Cormac McCarthy’s Thermonuclear America’, Bulletin of
Science, Technology and Society 29 (2009), 18–36.
21
Ben De Bruyn, ‘Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes: Care, Ruin and Vision in
McCarthy’s The Road and Harrison’s Ecocriticism’, English Studies 91 (2010), 776–81; Susan Kollin,
‘“Barren, Silent, Godless”: Ecodisaster and the Post-Abundant Landscape in The Road’, in Sara
L. Spurgeon (ed.), Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road
(New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 157–71; Andrew Keller Estes, Cormac McCarthy and the Writing
of American Spaces (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 189–216.
22
Donovan Gwinner, ‘“Everything Uncoupled from Its Shoring”: Quandaries of Epistemology and
Ethics in The Road’, in Sara L. Spurgeon (ed.), Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country
for Old Men, The Road (New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 139.

The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.
I’m right here.
I know. (3)
In addition, and strikingly, this dialogue is an interpellative moment for
the reader as parent; in Philip Snyder’s Levinasian reading, it is an ethical
‘me voici’ or ‘here I am!’ moment, presenting the son as an ethical other and
giving to him a face to which not just father but reader might respond.23
Both the warmth of the short exchange and the father’s sense of respon-
sibility contrast with the assertion of the lines immediately preceding: ‘This
was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day’ (3).
The dangers of the world beyond give urgency to the father’s obligations to
protect his child on their journey, and to the reader’s apprehension of
these.
As the novel progresses, the world which the reader of The Road enters
seems, more and more, to be designed not just to contrast the devastation
in the landscape on the one hand with the care and love between man and
boy on the other, but also to establish the very special import of that care
and love. To begin with, the bare landscape through which the pair walk is
not merely bare, but haunted by loss; the novel’s tenor, in short, is elegiac.
Much has been made of the lyrical emptiness of the novel’s setting: the
‘cauterized terrain’ (13), the ‘ashen scabland’ (14), ‘a colorless world of wire
and crepe’ (123), and the ‘coastal plain rivers in leaden serpentine across the
wasted farmland’ (214); Rune Graulund asserts, for example, that it is ‘a
desert that never ends nor begins, a landscape as devoid of difference as it is

23
Phillip A. Snyder, ‘Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, Cormac McCarthy Journal 6
(2008), 74–5.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
64 The Limits of Parental Care Ethics
of life’.24 But, as Linda Gruber Godfrey notes, ‘the old geography of the
lost, greener world is revered and mourned in the novel’.25 The significance
of this emptiness is that it creates a vacuum which remnants of the past
rush to fill, whether such material vestiges as the last bottle of Coke or the
telephone on which the man ‘dialed the number of his father’s house in
that long ago’ (5), such verbalised reminders as the bits of information the
man gives his son of the world as it used to be, or such psychic spectres as
memory and dream. But these remnants can give no comfort to the man
and, by extension, the reader. What makes the loss so keenly felt is that
what is lost can only return incompletely, as traces. Because the past is
spoken of, thought of, remembered, only in order to know it is not there,
loss becomes an ongoing state of being in the novel. That is, the traces of
the pastoral past – dream, memories, remnants, stories, bits and pieces –
constantly establish and re-establish the incompleteness of the present. So,
for example, in a feverish dream, the man finds ‘the vanished world
returned’ (199); on other nights, he dreams of his long-dead wife and
other elements of the long-gone world that emphasise the deathliness of
the world to which he awakes: ‘Rich dreams now which he was loathe to
wake from. Things no longer known in the world’ (139). The last material
residue of this lost world has much the same effect: he remembers ‘Chile,
corn, stew, soup, spaghetti sauce. The richness of a vanished world’ (147).
Even the marvellous plenitude of the bunker upon which the man and boy
miraculously stumble underlines the emptiness of the world outside.
These traces of what is lost possess a double vulnerability, being not
merely impartial, but also at risk of disappearing altogether. Over and
over, the reader is exposed, through the man’s encounters, not just to the
old world’s extinction but the process of its extinguishing. Its objects are
rotting and useless: the telephone the man dials calls nowhere, and the
once vital contents of his billfold – ‘credit cards’, ‘driver’s license’ (52) –
are now of so little import that he decides to leave them on the road.
The man’s memories, the reader learns, are being forgotten: ‘Like the
dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from
memory’ (17). His memories of language, too, fade, so that language
itself ceases to exist: ‘The names of things slowly following those things
into oblivion’ (93). The man’s stories make little sense when they are of

24
Rune Graulund, ‘Fulcrums and Borderlands: A Desert Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’,
Orbis Litterarum 65 (2010), 61.
25
Laura Gruber Godfrey, ‘“The World He’d Lost”: Geography and “Green” Memory in Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road’, Critique 52 (2011), 171.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
Parochialism, Paternalism, and Genetic Survivalism 65
a world the boy cannot know, ‘that for him was not even a memory’
(55).26
The novel emphasises its elegy by embodying it in the man’s experi-
ences, and conveys it all the more powerfully by placing the reader in the
man’s shoes. More than once, memories explicitly situate the father and
son in the footsteps of others in the long-lost pastoral, the boy standing
beside the man ‘Where he’d stood once with his own father in a winter long
ago’ (33–34). The same may be said of the man’s countless memories of
different views from different times in the same place, of how, for example,
‘In the long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall
down the long blue wall of the mountain’ (19). The reader looks upon and
experiences, with the man, not just the world but the loss of that world.
As the journey proceeds, the novel clarifies exactly what has been lost, or,
more precisely, what kind of loss the man must constantly face. The man
and the boy are not humans in a dead world as such; they are humans in an
inhuman world. The man’s realisation that ‘On this road there are no
godspoke men’, that ‘They are gone and I am left and they have taken with
them the world’ (32), is a realisation that he constitutes a remnant of moral
worth. This worth is figured in the characteristically McCarthyian com-
pound of ‘godspoke’, the medieval quaintness of the word bringing an
element of the mythical and biblical to the text.27 That the world itself has
disappeared with the ‘godspoke men’ underscores how the quality of being
humane – rather than merely human – is what defined the now-extinct
world. If humanity, in both senses of the word, is the hallmark of the lost
pastoral past in The Road, then not simply a lack of life, but a lack of
humanity even where there is life, brings about the novel’s present
nightmare.
At the heart of such morality, it seems, is the father’s bond with the boy.
The novel’s early pages establish the father’s awareness that the boy is ‘his
warrant’ (3), suggesting that the man’s love for his son is his justification for
and guarantee of life, a warrant in both senses of the word. This idea is

26
For more on the tenuousness not just of objects but of memory and, with it, language, see De Bruyn,
‘Borrowed Time’, 781–5; Tim Edwards, ‘The End of the Road: Pastoralism and the Post-
Apocalyptic Waste Land of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (2008),
58; Godfrey, ‘“The World He’d Lost”’, 169–70; Louise Squire, ‘Death and the Anthropocene:
Cormac McCarthy’s World of Unliving’, Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012), 211–18; and
Linda Woodson, ‘Mapping The Road in Post-Postmodernism’, Cormac McCarthy Journal 8 (2010),
91–3.
27
Benjamin Mangrum discusses the prayer-like quality of the word ‘godspoke’ in ‘Accounting for
The Road: Tragedy, Courage, and Cavell’s Acknowledgement’, Philosophy and Literature 37
(2013), 277.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
66 The Limits of Parental Care Ethics
underlined later in the novel by a remembered statement of his wife’s,
a memory brought on by the boy’s fragility: ‘He held the boy close to him.
So thin. My heart, he said. My heart. But he knew that if he were a good
father still it might well be as she said. That the boy was all that stood
between him and death’ (29). The boy’s pitiful thinness is, at once, a source
of anxiety and a reminder of parental duty for both the man and the reader,
thanks to the vividness and tactility of the description of the boy. Here, the
phrase, ‘My heart’, offers itself as an expression not just of painful concern
(‘oh, my heart!’) but of identification (‘my son is my heart’), which
subliminally echoes the empathy and sympathy between reader and man
as caring parents, even as it demonstrates the centrality of parental love to
the man’s humanity, that is, his humanness and humaneness.
If such humanity has as its lodestone the love of the man for his child, it
is also because, in the inhuman world beyond, there exists the utter absence
of such love. In this world, children are raped (as the boy’s mother fears he
will be) and killed; worst of all, they are eaten. Paedophagy, the most
dramatic and visceral opposite of parental care, lies at the heart of the
nightmarish world of The Road. It is the unspeakable subtext of the man’s
instructions to the boy to kill himself with the revolver or his anxiety about
having to ‘crush that beloved skull with a rock’ (120) to save him from their
near encounter with cannibals. More explicit and more shocking are the
remains of a baby they chance upon in the forest – ‘a charred human infant
headless and gutted and blackening on the spit’ (212); yet, this is still,
within the novel, unspeakable, for the man wonders if the boy (or, perhaps,
he means himself) would ‘ever speak again’ (212) after this. Strikingly, the
horror is most fully expressed when the reader is explicitly invited to place
herself, alongside the man, in a ‘world . . . largely populated by men who
would eat your children in front of your eyes’ (192). As Arielle Zibrak notes
of the novel’s evocation of ‘these extreme poles’ of the treatment of
children, it means that ‘upholding the sacred role of parent is no less
than the preservation of one’s humanity’.28 Unsurprisingly, this grotesque
juxtaposition of cruelty and love informs the repeated expression of the
father-and-son bond, their shared refrains not just that they are ‘carrying
the fire’ (87) but that they are ‘the good guys’ (81). The dialogue that passes
between father and son after their escape from the cannibals’ house with its
cellar prison establishes explicitly that ‘We wouldnt ever eat anybody’
because ‘we’re the good guys’ and ‘we’re carrying the fire’ (136). In other

28
Arielle Zibrak, ‘Intolerance, A Survival Guide: Heteronormative Culture Formation in Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road’, Arizona Quarterly 68 (2012), 111.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
Parochialism, Paternalism, and Genetic Survivalism 67
words, their bond – ‘the fire’ – is one of the world’s last vestiges, according
to the novel, of unconditional parental love and the shelter it brings.
The reading I have put forward here depends, so far, on the reader’s
sympathetic identification with the man, an identification grounded on the
value of parenthood and particularly provoked by the emotional intensity
of the tests of his parental responsibilities – the preservation not just of the
well-being but the very survival of his son. Such sympathies underlie, for
example, Michael Chabon’s assessment of the novel. In an eloquent review
that first appeared in the New York Review of Books, Chabon describes it as
‘a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears’, and, in doing so, gives
voice to his sympathies for the man.29
The eudaemonistic reader might further extend this sympathy to
consider parental care as constituting a humane and ethical position,
and, indeed, to find that it is just this kind of ethical position that is
required in the face of environmental devastation. Such a conclusion is
made by Monbiot’s evaluation of the novel as ‘the most important
environmental book you will ever read’. It must be said that such
a ‘globally warmed’ reading of the novel attributes environmental
damage to carelessness or inhumanity and identifies environmental
rescue with care and humanity, even though the novel makes no such
connection. Aligning the death of the non-human world with the rise of
inhuman humans, the novel enables – but never actually performs – an
alignment of environmental disaster with the loss of (parental) care.
The novel’s stark contrast between the human and inhuman is not
a contrast, after all, between the human and non-human. It is odd,
then, that readers such as Graulund should concede that this is ‘a novel
that is squarely anthropocentric’, but also find that ‘the second and
contradictory desert lesson to be learned from The Road is that without
nature . . ., there can be no humanity either’.30 For The Road is not as
interested in the non-human environment as it seems, requiring instead
a relentless anthropocentrism for its logic; hence, a reading of the novel
in the context of climate change must proceed by a kind of thought
association, placing parental care in proximity with – and, from there, in
contrast to – virtually wholesale biospheric devastation (except for
humans, one or two dogs, and, surprisingly, a handful of mushrooms).
All this invites an easy correlation of uncaring with ecocide and an

29
Michael Chabon, ‘Dark Adventure: On Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, Maps and Legends: Reading
and Writing along the Borderlands (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008), p. 120.
30
Graulund, ‘Fulcrums and Borderlands’, 74–5.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
68 The Limits of Parental Care Ethics
equally easy identification of uncaring as one of the direst losses that
humans will suffer if we continue with ecocide.
However, a more informed reading of the novel’s eco-credentials must
take account of the boy’s role in this dynamic of parental care. Importantly,
the boy is the bearer of his own ethics (quite aside from his enigmatic
quality, inviting readings of him as a messianic figure).31 Crucially, this
ethics is very different from the parental position held by his father, and
thus very different from the sympathetic anxieties called forth in the reader.
The reader would do well to recall that the boy attempts to return the care
his father extends to him, insisting in one instance that they share a can of
Coca Cola and chiding his father on another occasion for foregoing cocoa
for his sake. The boy’s language, importantly, turns parental care back on
itself: ‘You promised not to do that . . . I have to watch you all the time’
(35).32 Later, when his father proclaims, paternalistically and self-
righteously, that he is ‘the one who has to worry about everything’, the
boy’s response is ‘I am the one’ (277). The curious absolutism of the phrase
‘the one’ construes the boy’s capacity to care not as equally valid as the
man’s but as valid in a way that the man’s paternalistic authority is not.
That is, it challenges the foundations of the man’s power to make caring
decisions for the boy.
The man’s brand of parental care belies what Donovan Gwinner
describes as ‘survivalist insularity’; that is, it exercises the parochial impulse,
identified by critics of parental care ethics, of saving one’s offspring at the
expense of others.33 Protecting the boy requires harming or killing others
who pose a threat to the boy. Here, of course, Lee Edelman’s forthright
condemnation of ‘reproductive futurism’ is worth considering.34
The figure of the child – which dominates the man’s and thus the reader’s
frame of reference – is associated by Edelman with adults’ false and
ultimately narcissistic attempts at realising their own desires for the future.
The child is, according to Edelman, ‘the site of a projective identification of

31
For remarks on the boy’s ‘messianic’ qualities, see Grindley, ‘The Setting of McCarthy’s The Road’,
11–13; Allen Josephs, ‘What’s at the End of The Road?’, South Atlantic Review 74 (2009), 23–9;
Ashley Kunsa, ‘“Maps of the World in Its Becoming”: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road’, Journal of Modern Literature 33 (2009), 65–7.
32
Gwinner, ‘Everything Uncoupled from Its Shoring’, p. 147; however, in an otherwise compelling
reading of the way in which this clash of ethical codes plays out in the novel, Gwinner glosses this
statement as an early example of the pair’s ‘shared precepts’ and misses the son’s appropriation of
moral authority here.
33
Ibid., p. 153.
34
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004), p. 2.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
Parochialism, Paternalism, and Genetic Survivalism 69
an always impossible future’.35 For Zibrak, the man’s survivalism ‘can be
precisely described within Edelman’s model’ and is, in her analysis,
‘unfounded in any real hope for the boy’s future’.36 It is possible to read,
in other words, the man’s blinkered, desperate care for his son as also
a brutal inability to care for anyone else, coming increasingly to resemble
a selfish and stubborn mission to save something of himself – to preserve his
“warrant” (3), his “heart” (29).
At the same time, an awareness of an alternative ethics casts attention
onto the actions of the boy’s mother. That is, the boy’s perspective reminds
the reader of other marginalised perspectives and, with them, other ethical
positions.37 Having committed suicide before the action of the novel, the
mother is focalised for the reader through the man. Thus framed by his
memory and his interactions with her, her suicidal thoughts are, strikingly,
recalled by him as her metaphorical description of death-wish as infidelity:
she expresses her desire to kill both herself and the boy not only as ‘the right
thing to do’ (58), but also as akin to ‘a faithless slut’ (58) with ‘a whorish
heart’ (59) taking on ‘a new lover’. Yet, while the mention of faithlessness
might initially suggest a betrayal of the man and even, perhaps, the boy, the
mother’s words do not simply disavow parental care; they also raise the
possibility of a version of parental love to rival the man’s. His survivalist
ethics holds onto a binary understanding of life versus death – he insists:
‘We’re survivors’ (57). Her response complicates this with an alternative
description of their life – ‘We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in
a horror film’ (57) – and a wistful invocation of death as ‘eternal nothing-
ness’ (58). The woman’s advice to anyone who might find himself alone in
such a world chillingly fits with the man’s treatment of the child in the
novel from the very first pages. She states: ‘A person who had no one would
be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into
being and coax it along with words of love’ (59); in contrast, her solution
presents, tantalisingly, as a release. Unfortunately, her death silences her
and the very different scenario she wishes for the boy.
Importantly, it is the child who talks back. From the first instance in the
narrative of the man’s survivalist inflection of parental care ethics, the boy
raises questions about its tenability. Having shot a potential assailant, the
father washes the boy free of blood and gore, musing: ‘This is my child . . . .
I wash a dead man’s brains out of his hair. This is my job’ (77). This job is
35
Ibid., p. 31. 36 Zibrak, ‘Intolerance, A Survival Guide’, 109.
37
Indeed, in Squire’s reading, the mother, father, and boy illustrate three different responses to the
existential challenge presented by death as an unavoidable aspect of the human condition,
a challenge brought into focus by the Anthropocene; Squire, ‘Death and the Anthropocene’, 211–28.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
70 The Limits of Parental Care Ethics
clarified to the boy: ‘My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do
that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you’ (80). Such a wrenching
example of parental care invites the unwary reader into sympathetic accord
with the man, and indeed, aided by divine invocation, gives any eudae-
monistic reading an additional sense of ethical uprightness. Yet, tellingly,
the child’s response – ‘Are we still the good guys?’ (80) – questions the code
of exclusionary survivalism that underwrites the father-and-son bond. For
the reader, the boy’s alternative approach is crystallised much later in the
narrative, in the incident with the old man who calls himself Ely.
The encounter is initiated by the boy’s desire to help, feed, and protect
others, which runs counter to the man’s assumptions. It is remarkable for,
first, showing explicitly that ethical agency can originate from that half of
the bond too easily constructed as the passive ‘cared-for’ and, second, for its
identification of a third-party recipient outside the confines of the dyadic,
parochial bond of care. In other words, it introduces an alternative,
democratically inclined ethical action.
The boy’s democratic ethos is further defined against the father’s in their
conversations about ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, a motif that, as I have
already noted, carries much of the import of the father’s love for the boy.
Often in the novel, the man acknowledges only in the abstract the presence
of ‘other good guys’ (196). But, in noting that a mutual fear of danger
conceals ‘good guys’ from each other, he renders their presence as good as
absence (or, to turn the man’s own query onto himself: ‘How does the
never to be differ from the never was?’ (32)). In contrast, the boy constantly
proffers the hope of the existence of other good guys: of tracks in the road,
he suggests, ‘They could be good guys. Couldnt they?’ (108), and, of
whomever constructed the bunker, he asks, ‘They were the good guys?’
(148). But another such question from the boy, ‘What if some good guys
came?’ is met by: ‘Well, I dont think we’re likely to meet any good guys on
the road’ (160). Similarly, when the boy thinks of writing in the sand ‘a
letter to the good guys’, this is countered by his father’s question, ‘What if
the bad guys saw it?’ (261). As Gwinner puts it, ‘there is no model for “good
guys” besides the protagonists themselves.’38 Other good guys do not exist
in the man’s ethical universe.
The bearded veteran who saves the boy puts the lie to this denial of other
good guys, revealing the man to be an unreliable and somewhat undeser-
ving focaliser of the reader’s sympathies. Crucially, the veteran’s attitude is
in keeping with the boy’s ethos of open compassion and in contrast with

38
Gwinner, ‘Everything Uncoupled from Its Shoring’, p. 148.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
Parochialism, Paternalism, and Genetic Survivalism 71
the father’s code of fiercely guarded, filial protection. The decision to come
after the pair, over which the veteran admits there was ‘some discussion’
(303), suggests an interest in the welfare of others beyond the immediate
attachments of care ethics. The father’s relentless care for his son at this
point seems emblematised by their single-minded focus on the road, for
the veteran’s advice to ‘keep out of the road’ (303) provocatively suggests an
alternative code of behaviour and, possibly, ethics. Importantly, this advice
suggests a mode of survivalism – indeed, a set of ethics – that is rather more
enlarged than the father’s. After all, the boy is not just a trace of the past
and the world as it was; he is also one of the rightful inheritors of this dead
past. On the ‘intestate earth’ (138), such inheritors are in danger of being
mere traces of the past, of themselves being made extinct, if they do not
procreate; thus, the survival of the boy and such other children as the boy
and girl of the family who save him is paramount to a wider survivalism –
the survival of the human species.
As I have suggested, a globally warmed reading of the novel would
equate a lack of humanity towards children with a lack of humanity
towards the non-human world. For some, this may appear to be consoli-
dated by the novel’s quixotic conclusion. The vivid description of brook
trout that ends the book, apparently a propos of nothing, is a paean to non-
human ecology that seems to offer relief and even eulogy after the devasta-
tion of the novel. Critics have pointed out how it echoes the man’s memory
of trout earlier in the novel.39 What has not been noted in their commen-
taries, however, is how the coda’s evocative reminiscence of the beauty of
the world – ‘A thing not to be put back. Not to be put right again’ (307) –
repeats a moment in the narrative when the man ‘bent to see into the boy’s
face under the blanket hood [and] very much feared that something was
gone that could not be put right again’ (143–4). This occurs after their
discovery of the prison cellar of human prey and the child’s awareness of
the existence of cannibalism. In echoing this moment in the enigmatic
conclusion, the novel seems to correlate the irrevocable violence done to
the child’s innocence with the irreversibility of environmental damage, and
hence to reaffirm a parental care ethics for the good of posterity.
Nonetheless, the boy’s covert presence in this ending should also alert
the reader to the significance of his ethical conduct and to the value of his
perspective. It is one thing to associate the inhuman traumas visited on the
39
See, for example, De Bruyn, ‘Borrowed Time’, 785; Edwards, ‘The End of the Road’, 58; Godfrey,
‘“The World He’d Lost”’, 172; Josephs, ‘What’s at the End of The Road?’, 29; and Hannah Stark,
‘“All These Things He Saw and Did Not See”: Witnessing the End of the World in Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road’, Critical Survey 25.2 (2013), 81.

Re-Gendering Care
As much as it might problematise the blinkered and exceptionalist view of
parental care ethics, The Road disregards – and, indeed, reinforces – the
glaring issue of its gender politics and power games. The brief appearances
of the mother in the narrative marginalise her: she serves in the man’s
memories and the reader’s identification with these to point to the lost
world of (male) fulfilment and pastoral, and becomes, in short, another
vestige of the past. Because, in Zibrak’s words, the mother’s character
‘comes in and out of narrative focus in brief flickers’, the novel effectively
screens female presence out of ‘a tale of abounding natalism in an almost
exclusively male environment’.40 What is noteworthy is not that the novel
neglects the conventional feminisation of parental care ethics – itself, notes
Zibrak, a problematic ‘construction of motherhood as the ultimate source
of female fulfillment’ – but that it passes up the opportunity to interrogate
and scrutinise these gender norms.41 Moreover, the novel re-inscribes such
norms by situating parental obligation within behaviours heavily coded as
masculine – gunmanship, threats, physical violence; it would seem the man
is not so different from other McCarthyian heroes, after all. Yet, in the
popular reception of the novel, this machismo surrounds an enactment of
parenthood for an ungendered reader (presumably, the reader of ‘the
globally warmed generation’ whose sympathies stem from ‘a parent’s
greatest fears’).

40 41
Zibrak, ‘Intolerance, A Survival Guide’, 111. Ibid., 111.

42
Deborah Lupton and Lesley Barclay, Constructing Fatherhood: Discourses and Experiences (London:
Sage, 1997); Janice Kelly and Laura Tropp, ‘Introduction: Changing Conceptions of the Good Dad
in Popular Culture’, in Tropp and Kelly (eds.), Deconstructing Dads: Changing Images of Fathers in
Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016), pp. xi–xx; Glenda Wall and Stephanie Arnold,
‘How Involved Is Involved Fathering?’ Gender and Society 21.4 (2007), 508–27.
43
Jane Sunderland, ‘“Parenting” or “Mothering”? The Case of Modern Childcare Magazines’,
Discourse and Society 17.4 (2006), 503–27.
44
Ralph LaRossa, The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History (University of
Chicago Press, 1997); LaRossa, ‘The Culture of Fatherhood and the Late-Twentieth-Century New
Fatherhood Movement: An Interpretive Perspective’, in Laura Tropp and Janice Kelly (eds.),
Deconstructing Dads: Changing Images of Fathers in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington,
2016), pp. 3–30.
45
For example, television and print advertisements overwhelmingly show fathers indulging children in
desserts, fast food outings, and breakfast, and mothers cooking meals, administering medicine, and
doing domestic chores; see Wall and Arnold, ‘How Involved Is Involved Fathering?’, and
Gayle Kaufman, ‘The Portrayal of Men’s Family Roles in Television Commercials’, Sex Roles 41
(1999), 439–58.
46
Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 244–6.

The Ice People

Gee’s The Ice People enables just such a critical excavation of the gendered
history of parental care ethics, while pointing to the vulnerability of
parental care to traditional gender power dynamics.49 By alternating
between reader identiﬁcation with its male narrator on the one hand and
moments of ironic distance and insight into its female protagonist on the
other, the novel allows two gendered worldviews – encompassing parental
care and environmental awareness – to unfold. Each is subject to critique,
and together these critiques lead to an understanding of the limitations that
gendered identity politics impose on parental care ethics.
Gee’s ﬁrst novel, Dying, in Other Words, appeared in 1981. 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’ and by another as a revivalist of the
mid-Victorian ‘condition-of-England novel’, 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 is somehow lost.50 Disaster is often enacted stylistically and

47
Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 47.
48
Ibid., p. xiii.
49
Rather than interpret the novel – as Susan Watkins does – as a celebration of the ‘maternal
imaginary’, my reading of Gee’s novel emphasises its trenchant critique of maternal care as
environmental solution; see Watkins, ‘Future Shock: Rewriting the Apocalypse in Contemporary
Women’s Fiction’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 23 (2012), 119.
50
John Sears, ‘“Making Sorrow Speak”: Maggie Gee’s Novels’, in Emma Parker (ed.), Contemporary
British Women Writers (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), p. 55; Mine Özyurt Kılıç, Maggie Gee:
Writing the Condition-of-England Novel (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 5.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
Re-Gendering Care 75
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
(2004).51
The Ice People is characteristic of Gee’s fiction in its exploration of
apparently average life devastated by environmental, social, or political
change, and its use of such upheavals to critique that appearance of
normality. Like her more recent novel, The Flood, The Ice People is set in
a recognisably futuristic world. Also like this novel, it treats of environ-
mental crisis by demonstrating its impact on a single family. In Gee’s own
words, she aims for her environmental novels to achieve their power not by
being ‘message-y’ but by enabling the reader ‘to live other lives and become
other people’ and, in so doing, to ‘feel fear while it is still useful’.52 Also in
keeping with Gee’s œuvre generally, the novel is characterised by its
interrogations of gender inequity, particularly in questioning conventional
equations of oppressor and oppressed. 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?’53 Gee’s novels, indeed, tend to expose gender biases by
scrutinising their impact on both men and women, and inviting reader
sympathy on all sides.
The Ice People effectively describes two climate change events. It 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 anthropo-
genic climate change is countered by an apparently ‘natural’ climate
phenomenon. While the novel’s present-day setting shows the effects of
rapid glaciation, its past, conveyed in flashback by the male narrator Saul,
details first a warmed world and then the drastic process of cooling. In the
first few pages of the novel, Saul despatches a description of the globally
warming world in which he grew up. Born in London in 2005, at the start
of what would become known as ‘the Tropical Time’ (16), climate change

51
For commentary on these novels’ stylistic devices, see Magdalena Maczynska, ‘This Monstrous City:
Urban Visionary Satire in the Fiction of Martin Amis, Will Self, China Miéville, and Maggie Gee’,
Contemporary Literature 51 (2010), 48–9; and Sarah Dillon, ‘Imagining Apocalypse: Maggie Gee’s
The Flood’, Contemporary Literature 48 (2007), 374–97.
52
Diana McCaulay, Michael Mendis, and Maggie Gee, ‘The Untold Story: The Environment in
Fiction’, Hay Festival, 29 May 2014.
53
Margaret McKay, ‘An Interview with Maggie Gee’, Studia Neophilogica 69.2 (1997), 216.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
76 The Limits of Parental Care Ethics
has reached its height by his teens and twenties. 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. The biosphere has been irretrievably
damaged, medical tinkering in the form of antibiotics has produced
resistant strains of killer diseases, and unrestrained proﬁt motive only
further encourages social, political, and environmental dysfunction. But
this is a time during which young men and women – feeling all the
invincibility of youth – revel in, rather than worry about, climatic condi-
tions. Saul’s response, like that of others in the developed West, is to use
the hot weather and many technological advances to his advantage and
enjoyment.
Initially, the reader is invited to empathise and sympathise with Saul,
who seems intelligent and likeable. This sympathy is further encouraged by
Saul’s position as a dystopian outsider, which sees him negotiating and
attempting to retain his perspective in something of a brave new world.
The twentieth-century battle of the sexes has given way to mutual antag-
onism and a trend for gender segregation, or ‘segging’ (23), in which young
men and women simply avoid each other; yet, Saul describes himself as ‘a
man who wanted women. . . . It seemed so natural, like having children’
(24). He further rebels when he falls in love with the apparently like-
minded Sarah, and settles down in what he describes as an ‘old-fashioned’,
‘twentieth century’ kind of way (28). If the reader still empathises with Saul
at this point, it is by inhabiting an insistently heteronormative parental
attitude, framed as a desire for pastoral bliss: ‘We imagined raising a family
by the sea, with forests, ﬁelds, clean bright water. The children were
running, shouting, towards us’ (35). All this, crucially, is described by
Saul as overwhelmingly normal, Sarah’s ‘womanly’ characteristics comple-
menting his wish to be ‘manly’ and resulting in an ‘absolute feeling of
rightness together’ (32; original emphasis). That is, as Sarah Dillon’s
perceptive analysis suggests, Saul is the ideological mouthpiece for the
kind of ‘reproductive futurism’ that Edelman describes: Saul’s desire for
conventional family life is expressed as a love for the child, even while that
desire betrays, in Lacanian terms, a self-directed wish for wholeness.54
For the attentive and sympathetic reader, discomfort with Saul’s self-
serving heterosexist outlook sets in early. In particular, Saul’s response to
segging is telling; his inability to understand it and offer a coherent

54
Sarah Dillon, ‘Literary Equivocation: Reproductive Futurism and The Ice People’, in Sarah Dillon
and Caroline Edwards (eds.), Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015), p. 113.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
Re-Gendering Care 77
rationale for it allows Sarah’s perspective – half-expressed and focalised
through Saul – to come into play. Saul fails to see that segging 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, Sarah
provides an alternative insight. 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
centre on the inequality that informs caring expectations, with the burden
of care assigned to women rather than to men: ‘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 produce
an example of such imbalance: her suggestion that ‘they have a point about
housework, too’ provokes Saul’s response that ‘you enjoy it . . . . I mean,
you turn that side of things into pure pleasure. I wish those girls could see
what you do’ (37). In this context, Sarah’s growing indecision over whether
to marry and have children with Saul, reflecting her increasing detachment
from their attempt to revive traditional gender norms, is unsurprising. Her
experience points to segging as the outcome of women’s dissatisfaction
with the conventional gendering and marginalisation of the role of the one-
caring. What follows for the reader is an empathetic split, initially between
Saul and Sarah. Saul’s narrative point of view continues to dominate, but
his angry outbursts over Sarah’s actions, framing her as irrational and cruel,
tend not to strengthen reader sympathy for him. Instead, Saul’s irration-
ality creates an ironic distance between him and the reader, creating space
for a competing sympathy with Sarah.
The birth of their son, Luke, heralds the first of many separations for
Saul and Sarah, as well as coinciding with the start of the world’s
descent into an Ice Age. The parental conflicts over Luke are mirrored by
humanity’s inability to safeguard the planet, thus aligning parental care –
inadequate as it is shown to be – with environmental stewardship. Luke
becomes, not unproblematically, a symbol for the future of the planet.
Moreover, as the narrative turns into a chronicle of arguments, separations,
and reunions between Saul and Sarah, the reader is invited to consider their
argument in the context of a gendered conflict between two different
approaches to both parental and planetary care.
The first approach is discernible in a catalogue of environmental failings
construable as masculine. Certainly, Saul’s initial description not just of
the crisis of global warming but of his disregard for it betrays a casual

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
78 The Limits of Parental Care Ethics
arrogance: ‘I felt on the brink of owning the world. I was a man, and
human beings ran the planet. There were eight billion of us, though
numbers were shrinking, but few other animals were left to compete. . . .
I was tall, and strong, and a techie, which qualified me for a lifetime’s good
money’ (24). Once the reader becomes attentive to Saul’s unreliability as
a narrator, it is possible to read this as a mutually reinforcing mix of
masculinist, technological, and anthropocentric power, and to recognise
the novel’s context for runaway climate change as unmistakably gendered.
In this respect, the domestic robots called Doves represent an extreme
masculinist appropriation of apparently organic or ‘natural’ processes, for
they replicate the physical actions of human and non-human animals not
just in thinking, talking, and moving but in reproducing and evolving,
abilities made possible, crucially, by nanotechnologists like Saul. Indeed,
he decides that ‘as a techie, I was full of admiration for the basic Dove
design’ (95). It is no surprise that Saul’s companions at the all-male club
called The Gay Scientists – not just a pun on Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche
Wissenschaft but an indicator of the rise of masculinist scientism – vote to
purchase ‘a fleet of halfadozen [Doves] for us to play with’ (95).
The second – and opposing – attitude is expressed by the collective that
Sarah joins; it represents, like segging, women’s backlash against andro-
centric power. Yet, the novel’s account of the group is no straightforward
celebration of feminism’s environmentalist potential against male oppres-
sion. Indeed, the rise of the women’s collective replays for the reader some
of the vexed history of ecofeminism, particularly its investment in mother-
hood environmentalism. First, it particularly queries the motivations
behind the feminist appropriation of a maternal ethics of care, given that
such an appropriation replays the associations of women and care that are
often criticised as reductive and problematic in the first place (as, for
example, in the rise of segging described in the novel). Second, it highlights
the problems that arise when applying care ethics to a political mode.
In other words, the feminist celebration of parental care ethics is shown to
be founded on the need to gain and maintain control, a need that is
unhelpful to the putative ‘cared-for’, whether that designates children or
the future of the planet. The women’s collective, begun as a Children’s
Commune, evolves into a political movement called Wicca. The original
commune is one of many such communities that develop as segging
progresses, with women ‘drawing up the battlelines around the scarce,
precious children’ and in which ‘the childless ones found a kind of fulfil-
ment’ (68). While this description – Saul’s – couches such groups in
threatening terms, it nonetheless reveals them to be just as much about

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
Re-Gendering Care 79
meeting adults’ needs as it is about caring about and for children.
Unsurprisingly, Wicca is overtly formulated along lines reminiscent of
motherhood environmentalism. In Saul’s sarcastic description, it is
founded on ‘a wacky female nature worship, centring on “the Hidden
Goddess”, who apparently “gave suck” to us all’ (117), and he and his male
friends respond with derision to Wicca’s promotional film, whose ‘voice-
over spoke of “revaluing nature”, “nurturing the future”; “the future is
green”’ (137). More importantly, Wicca represents an attempt to politicise
a maternal ethics of care, winning the national election on the promise of
a ‘caring revolution’ (137), with the tagline ‘Vote for Wicca. Wicca Cares’
(138). Most importantly of all, Wicca fails because its care ethics stems from
a maternalistic belief in the superiority of its brand of care over others.
When the effects of glaciation become impossible to ignore, Wicca’s anti-
male stance means that it refuses to incorporate the ‘techfixes’ (147)
suggested by scientists and neglects to meet the challenge of securing
international cooperation and funding in order to launch a concerted
environmental effort.
In this way, the novel peels back the layers of the gender norms
and conflicts that underpin parental care ethics. It shows both posi-
tions to be about the assertion of identity and maintenance of con-
trol. Unsurprisingly, then, in the closing events of the plot, Saul’s
efforts at parental care are part of a masculine backlash against the
ecofeminist backlash. As the world enters the Ice Age in earnest and
European society begins to come apart, Saul, helped by a newly
formed men’s collective called Manguard, abducts Luke from the
Wicca commune to take him to the relative warmth and safety of
Africa. In doing so, he institutes a particularly violent, survivalist kind
of care, executed along masculinised codes of behaviour. He invokes
the Old Testament’s hyper-patriarchal mythology to describe his role:
‘I was a man, Esau, Moses, leading my tribe to the promised land’
(220; original emphasis). Saul and Luke travel with Briony, the
sympathetic Wicca weapons officer who befriends them, but Saul
disregards her munition skills and advice, a sexist arrogance which
eventually leads to her death. Yet, Saul sees this as a sacrifice for his
son: ‘I told myself it was all for him. I had even sacrificed Briony –
I held on to the thought it was somehow heroic’ (272). Here, as in
The Road, parental – specifically, paternal – care has become genetic
survivalism. However, the older, wiser Saul of the present comes to
understand this for what it is, and allows a critique of its efficacy as
an ethical stance: ‘I see I wasn’t a hero, or a villain, or any of the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:16:22, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.003
80 The Limits of Parental Care Ethics
things they say in stories – but merely one tiny unit of biology,
stopping at nothing to save his genes’ (273).
Towards the novel’s end, Luke makes an important intervention into
both parents’ attempts to assert care and control over him. Certainly,
Luke’s emergence as the moral recipient of a future-oriented care ethics
would be problematic if it remained unquestioned, for this would
simply re-establish, for the reader, a eudaemonistic position of caring
for the child as posterity. Crucially, however, Luke’s perspective is
a wholesale rejection of care, and, moreover, is correlated with the
experience of others of his generation. One should note that the novel
has already opened up a space in which the reader might identify and
sympathise with Luke; as the reader oscillates, via Saul’s and Sarah’s
constant negotiations throughout the narrative, between two conflicting
viewpoints, he is placed, uncomfortably, in the position of the child at
the centre of parental dispute. Thus, when Luke runs away to join
a band of ‘salvajes’ (283) in Spain, the reader glimpses an alternative
future for the child, away from the paternalistic and parochial con-
straints of care.
The novel ends in a distant future, with the dominance of such ‘wild
boys and girls’ (172) and with Luke becoming something of a ‘leader
among the wild children’ (309). At the novel’s conclusion, the reader is
able to piece together the moments from Saul’s present that punctuate
his narrative, and to realise that Saul and other survivors of the older
generation are eventually forced to live with just such wild children and
to adopt a life marked by primitive competition for food and sex, but
seemingly free from emotional conditions and demands. A question
asked by Saul earlier in the narrative now makes sense: ‘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). That is, implicated in love are
behaviours that result in the alienation of those who are loved; con-
tained in parental care are attitudes, such as paternalism and parochial-
ism, that work to the detriment of those cared for.
According to these novels, so proximal is parental care to positions of
control that, when expanded into an ethics of posterity, it slips easily
into the expression of power and self-interest: the preservation of line-
age, the shoring up of one’s own interests against others’, and the
rehearsal of gendered behaviours in order to retain control. This is the
futural ethics that McCarthy’s novel discloses and that Gee’s novel
actively critiques. Such insights are achieved through a process of reader

Overpopulation and Motherhood

Environmentalism: Edan Lepucki’s California
and Liz Jensen’s The Rapture

Pregnancies and child-bearing . . . are a woman’s link to the natural

world and the hunted animals that are part of that world.
Andrée Collard with Joyce Contrucci, Rape of the Wild

Clearly, an individual’s reproductive choices can have a dramatic

effect on the total carbon emissions ultimately attributable to his or
her genetic lineage . . . ignoring the consequences of reproduction can
lead to serious under-estimation of an individual’s long-term impact
on the global environment.
Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax, ‘Reproduction
and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals’

Parental care ethics is intertwined with a set of gender assumptions that,

following Catriona Sandilands, I shall term ‘motherhood environment-
alism’.1 Like Sandilands, I am referring here to a reductive construction
of women as mothers and the subsequent identiﬁcation of maternity
with the non-human environment under either the biologically deter-
ministic signs of fertility and nurture or the standpoints of oppression
and exploitation. In the wide-ranging discourse of motherhood envir-
onmentalism, ‘nature’ and ‘woman’ share everything from caring
responsibilities for all species now and in the future to the status of
victimhood at the hands of masculinist ideologies. Often, its shorthand
is the automatic equivalence of motherhood with an attitude of envir-
onmental concern.
In the previous chapter, I showed how Maggie Gee’s The Ice People
enables some of this discourse to be critiqued. In two more recent climate
change novels, this catchall designation of motherhood is further dis-
mantled. Both Edan Lepucki’s California (2014) and Liz Jensen’s The
Rapture (2009) invite, to differing extents, readers’ identiﬁcation with
1
Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 4.

Ecofeminism and Motherhood Environmentalism

The assumption at the heart of motherhood environmentalism is that core
characteristics of womanhood parallel the core characteristics of ‘nature’;
this assumption is itself a long-standing tenet of ecofeminism. In the logic
of ecofeminism, as Sandilands describes it, ‘the fact of being a woman is
understood to lie at the base of one’s experience of ecological degradation;
of one’s interests in ecological protection, preservation, and reconstruc-
tion; and of one’s “special” ecological consciousness’.3 The history of
ecofeminism, in Sandilands’s detailed account, is a chronicle of variations
on the theme of the affinity between ‘woman’ and ‘nature’, both construed
monolithically. From the invention of the term ecoféminisme by Françoise
d’Eaubonne in 1974 to Sherry Ortner’s provocative question in the title of a
paper published that same year, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to
Culture?’, ecofeminism has grappled with how to treat of the link between
woman and the non-human world.4 While d’Eaubonne affirms the affinity
between these, declaring that ‘the planet in the feminine gender would
become green again for all’, Ortner subjects that conventional link to heavy

2
Edan Lepucki, California (ﬁrst published 2014; London: Abacus, 2015); Liz Jensen, The Rapture
(London: Bloomsbury, 2009). Subsequent page references to these texts are in parentheses.
3
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 5
4
Françoise d’Eaubonne, Féminisme ou la Mort (Paris: Femme et Mouvement, 1974); Barbara T. Gates,
‘A Root of Ecofeminism: Ecoféminisme’, in Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (eds.), Ecofeminist
Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp.
15–22; Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo
and Louise Lamphere (eds.), Woman, Culture, and Society (Stanford University Press, 1974), pp.
67–87.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
84 Overpopulation and Motherhood Environmentalism
critique, answering her question by postulating that the ‘universal devalua-
tion’ of woman derives from the universal identiﬁcation of woman with
nature, and the consequent devaluation of both.5
This split between celebration and critique of the idea of an essential
connection between women and non-human nature has played out in
subsequent expressions of ecofeminism. In some of ecofeminism’s early
manifestos, women are exhorted to regale in a special relationship with
nature, a relationship framed as the stuff of early matriarchal religions, to
be revived and reinstated. So, for example, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology (1978)
argues that patriarchal power, which she describes in quasi-religious terms,
has polluted both the non-human world and women: ‘Phallic myth and
language generate, legitimate, and mask the material pollution that threa-
tens to terminate all sentient life on this planet.’6 Meanwhile, Susan
Grifﬁn’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her (1979) laments how
men have become deaf to the voice of nature, a voice inherent in women.
In some of these ‘spiritual’ ecofeminist statements, the common ground
between women and nature is distilled to an essential characteristic of care;
that is, women, it is implied, possess an innate connection with the non-
human based on their shared capacity for connectedness, whereby
women’s supposedly inherent empathy for others is construed as a version
of ecological interdependence.7 And, certainly, such care is explicitly
maternalised. Andrée Collard, for example, writes of early matriarchal
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’.8 For Collard, then: ‘Pregnancies and child-bearing . . .
are a woman’s link to the natural world and the hunted animals that are
part of that world.’9
At the same time, and in contrast, ecofeminism has also consisted
of careful historicist work, building on Ortner’s concerns, that has
characterised the alignment of women with nature as a symptom of
patriarchal oppression and been wary of making any immanent or

5
Eaubonne, Féminisme ou la Mort, p. 67; Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’, pp.
71–2.
6
Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (London: Women’s Press, 1978), p. 9.
7
Susan Grifﬁn, Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).
8
Andrée Collard with Joyce Contrucci, Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence against Animals and the Earth
(London: Women’s Press, 1988), p. 11.
9
Ibid., pp. 14–15.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
Ecofeminism and Motherhood Environmentalism 85
inherent link between them. Most famously, Carolyn Merchant’s The
Death of Nature (1980) traces the history of ‘the formation of a
worldview and a science that sanctioned the domination of both
nature and women’.10 Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of
Nature (1993) similarly critiques masculinist thought as based not just
on the equations ‘women = nature’ and ‘men = reason’, but on
assumptions about the inferiority of the first pair and the superiority
of the second.11 Building on these insights, much ecofeminist discus-
sion in the 1980s and 1990s tended to be couched not in spiritual
terms but in the language of standpoints, figuring women and the
non-human as structurally historical victims of patriarchal systems of
exploitation. As Mary Mellor argues, ‘the two are linked’ but the
‘linkage is not seen as stemming from some essentialist female iden-
tification with nature, for which some early ecofeminists were criti-
cised, but from women’s position in society, particularly in relation
to masculine-dominated economic systems’.12
Even so, standpoint ecofeminism is not immune to the problem of
essentialising the identities of both women and nature, and, in doing
so, it reifies care as defining female experience and as the grounds for
women’s connections with the non-human. For example, Merchant
argues that, as women meet social and cultural expectations that
place them in caring positions, they become qualified to practise
‘earthcare’; Merchant uses the word to unite a collection of her essays
from the 1980s and 1990s.13 Through these decades, ecofeminism
tended to theorise the sociological connection between women and
nature in the language of object-relations psychoanalysis, having
recourse to the care ethics initiated (as discussed in chapter 1) by
Carol Gilligan as an explanation for how women’s experiences con-
dition them to be both more caring and how such caring places them
in closer connection with nature.14 The position argued by Ariel
Salleh is representative; Salleh 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
10
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (first
published 1980; San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990), p. xxi.
11
Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993).
12
Mary Mellor, ‘Ecofeminist Political Economy and the Politics of Money’, in Ariel Salleh (ed.), Eco-
Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology (London: Pluto, 2009), p. 251.
13
Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (London: Routledge, 1995)
14
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 21; Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory
and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
86 Overpopulation and Motherhood Environmentalism
the natural world’.15 Mellor goes further, insisting that women,
socialised into undertaking caring responsibilities, are then unavoid-
ably brought into a biological connection with nature: ‘Ecological
impacts and consequences are experienced through human bodies, in
ill health, early death, congenital damage and impeded childhood
development. Women disproportionately bear the consequences of
those impacts within their own bodies (dioxin residues in breast milk,
failed pregnancies) and in their work as nurturers and carers.’16 Such
positions, seemingly concerned with sociological explanations of
structure, nonetheless reconnect women to a reductive maternal
identity. As Sandilands reminds us, ‘social construction and essenti-
alism are not necessarily opposed concepts’.17
In addition to being a particularly reductionist account of female
identity, this political discourse of ecofeminism, perversely, restricts the
range of political responses to patriarchal and environmental violence
available to both women and men. By following spiritual ecofeminism in
aligning violations against women’s maternalised bodies with degrading
practices against non-human species and ecosystems, this discourse turns
reclamations of either female empowerment or ecological protection into a
defence of maternal rights and activities. That is, motherhood is not just
the explanation for women’s closer connection with nature; it also provides
ongoing motivation and method for maintaining this connection for all
humans. Sherilyn MacGregor describes this conglomeration of ‘socio-
material and experiential’ arguments for connecting women and nature
as the ‘rhetoric of “ecomaternalism”’, and exposes its logic: ‘Because it is
women (as mothers) who do the nurturing work that sustains human life,
and that mediates the connection between humans and nature, women
care about (assume a sense of compassion, responsibility, and connection
towards) their environments, and this, in turn, leads them to take action to
preserve and repair them.’18 In short, ‘for these ecofeminists, women are
seen to hold the key to an ethical approach to socio-ecological as well as to
social relationships that can solve the ecological crisis’.19 That is, women’s
caring disposition as mothers enhances their awareness of the
15
Ariel Salleh, ‘Class, Race, and Gender Discourse in the Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate’, in Max
Oelschlaeger (ed.), Postmodern Environmental Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1995), p. 82.
16
Mary Mellor, Feminism and Ecology (London: Polity Press, 1997), p. 2.
17
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 71.
18
Sherilyn MacGregor, Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), pp. 4, 59.
19
Ibid., p. 59.

Procreation: Human Overpopulation and Reproductive Rights

To what extent is procreation compatible with the well-being of future
generations? Obviously, the simple generation of a species depends on the
continued reproduction of that species, but, in a world of limited
resources, uncontrolled procreation just as easily heralds extinction.
Certainly, the idea that humans will continue to survive – with adaptation
and natural selection taking care of any Malthusian worries about popula-
tion growth – is an overconﬁdent one. Even Darwinian principles allow
that, though individuals will strive for survival, they may do so at the
expense of their species, a phenomenon ﬁrst considered by the evolutionary
biologist J. B. S. Haldane, who wrote in 1932 of situations in which
members of a species ‘inevitably begin to compete with one another’, the
results of which ‘may be biologically advantageous for the individual, but
ultimately disastrous for the species’.21 A similar narrative of biological
survival instincts leading inexorably to unregulated competition and

20
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist; MacGregor, Beyond Mothering Earth; Chris J. Cuomo,
Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethics of Flourishing (London: Routledge, 1998).
21
J. B. S. Haldane, The Causes of Evolution (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1932), pp. 119–20.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
88 Overpopulation and Motherhood Environmentalism
thence to resource depletion is told by Garrett Hardin’s parable of the
tragedy of the commons.22 This is the parochial danger of biological
survivalism, discussed in the previous chapter, writ large. The ultimate
act of genetic survival that is reproduction is, perversely, also a threat to the
species.
The Anthropocene puts such a threat in the spotlight. As Timothy Clark
points out, if overpopulation refers to a ‘situation in which the population
of a species exceeds the long-term carrying capacity of its ecological con-
text’, then the current ecological crisis, in which that species is ‘humanity’
and the context is ‘the Earth as a whole’, places the problem of human
overpopulation on the environmentalist agenda.23 In some ways, this is not
new: concerns about overpopulation raged in the 1960s and 1970s,
expressed not just by Hardin but by Paul and Anne Ehrlich and the
Club of Rome.24 However, the apparent panic about overcrowding, star-
vation, and famine that marked this discourse made it vulnerable, some-
times justiﬁably, to accusations of global North antagonism towards the
global South, and particularly to what Diana Coole calls ‘population-
shaming’ rhetoric, which sometimes serves as ‘a subterfuge for pursuing
heinous ulterior motives’.25 But the question has returned with urgency in
the twenty-ﬁrst century amid additional concerns over resource sustain-
ability on the one hand and carbon emissions on the other. The most
recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which
Clark cites, states, for example, that ‘economic and population growth
continue to be the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions
from fossil fuel combustion’.26
Yet, the contemporary overpopulation debate is a particularly contro-
versial and, in Clark’s words, ‘politically and culturally toxic’ topic.27 For
Clark, the lack of political will to address overpopulation has to do with
scale effects, namely, the disparity between the vast intergenerational and
interspecies concerns demanded by environmental crisis and the

22
Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162 (13 December 1968): 1243–8.
23
Timothy Clark. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London:
Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 80.
24
Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (ﬁrst published 1968; London: Pan, 1971); Donella H.
Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens, The Limits to Growth:
A Report on the Club of Rome’s Project for the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books,
1972).
25
Diana Coole, ‘Too Many Bodies? The Return and Disavowal of the Population Question’,
Environmental Politics 22.2 (2013), 199; see also Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet:
The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 68–9.
26
Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, p. 80. 27 Ibid., p. 81.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
Procreation: Human Overpopulation and Reproductive Rights 89
individualistic frame through which much political and cultural discourse
flows. This is evident not just in the recourse to the language of equalising
global wealth distribution, which Clark describes as ‘evasive and anthro-
pocentric’ and which Coole traces to the desire to avoid population-
shaming.28 More to the point, concerns about overpopulation abut directly
onto cultural valorisations of parenthood, based on, among other things,
the association of parental care as ethical good. In its starkest terms, the
overpopulation debate asks whether parenthood itself is an act of wilful
environmental degradation. In an influential and much-debated paper that
appeared in 2009, a statistician and an atmospheric physicist from Oregon
State University presented their calculations of present humans’ ‘carbon
legacies’.29 In it, Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax suggest that the
average environmentally conscious American woman might save 486
tons of CO2 in a year but, if she had two children, she would eventually
contribute forty times that amount to Earth’s atmosphere. While they
concede that it is important to understand ‘the ways that an individual’s
daily activities influence emissions and explain the huge disparities in per
capita emissions among countries’, they argue that ‘ignoring the conse-
quences of reproduction can lead to serious under-estimation of an indi-
vidual’s long-term impact on the global environment’.30 Other scientists
have since concurred with their conclusions.31 A debate published in a 2014
issue of The New Internationalist that responds, in part, to Murtaugh and
Schlax’s study is representative of the framing of such concerns as a battle
of environmental ‘care’ against parental ‘care’, its central question being: ‘If
you care about climate change, should you have children?’32
The scalar schism between the intergenerational threat of overpopula-
tion and the immediate concerns of parenthood are a challenge not merely
to notions of the ethical good attached to parental care but to the idea that
parenthood is an essential aspect of identity. Arguments about overpopu-
lation strike at the heart of deep-seated cultural expectations that the right
to have children is a matter of an individual’s civil liberties, enshrined by no

28
Ibid., p. 81; Coole, ‘Too Many Bodies?’, 198.
29
Paul A. Murtaugh and Michael Schlax, ‘Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals’,
Global Environmental Change 19.1 (2009), 14–20; see also Sam Wong, ‘Baby Emissions Fuel Global
Warming’, The Guardian (5 August 2009).
30
Murtaugh and Schlax, ‘Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals’, 18.
31
Brian C. O’Neill, Michael Dalton, Regina Fuchs, et al., ‘Global Demographic Trends and Future
Carbon Emissions’, PNAS 107 (2012), 17521–6.
32
Anne Hendrixson and Erica Gies, ‘If You Care about Climate Change, Should You Have
Children?’, New Internationalist 480 (March 2015). http://newint.org/sections/argument/2015/03/
01/climate-change-children

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
90 Overpopulation and Motherhood Environmentalism
less than the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights (at
which Hardin took aim so many years ago, describing any criticism of it as
‘taboo’).33 The Declaration states that ‘men and women of full age, without
limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and
found a family’, a statement further clarified by then General Secretary U
Thant to mean that ‘any choice and decision with regard to the size of the
family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by
anyone else’.34 But, as Coole puts it, the distillation of the population
debate to private ‘matters of reproductive health and individual welfare
entitlements’, ‘eminently worthy’ as they are, has ‘had the effect of displa-
cing population growth as a global environmental issue’, and – one should
note – as a question of ethical obligation to future human and non-human
well-being.35
It therefore becomes evident how Anthropocene concerns over over-
population run counter to the assumptions of motherhood environment-
alism. As we have seen, by the logic of motherhood environmentalism,
maternity and, with it, the exercise of maternal care, are a matter of
autonomy and identity. This is not to say, of course, that the population
debate is to be always decoupled from questions of gender. There are
certainly instances in which it is important to keep the two within the
same frame. For example, the notion of reproductive rights underpins
worthy campaigns around the world that would defend the entitlement
of girls and women to decide for themselves whether to bear or not to bear
children, in contexts as diverse as abortion information and rights, the
prevention of child marriage, and access to fertility treatment, which are, as
Clark concedes, ‘obvious goods’.36 Indeed, one could elaborate on what
Coole calls population-shaming, with Rachel Stein’s identification of a
tendency towards ‘Negative associations of women of color with over-
population’, a tendency that has historically enabled a catalogue of crimes
and violations, such as ‘the coercive use of birth control, forced steriliza-
tion, and . . . possible eugenics misuses of genetic research or biogenetic
manipulation of environmentally stricken populations’.37 Yet, equally, one
must remain vigilant against removing specific – and admittedly grave –

33
Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, 1246.
34
United Nations General Assembly, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: United
Nations, 1967); U Thant, Statement at Presentation of Declaration on Population Growth (10
December 1967), www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/rights.
35 36
Coole, ‘Too Many Bodies?’, 209. Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, p. 82.
37
Rachel Stein, Introduction, in Stein (ed.), New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender,
Sexuality, and Activism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 6.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
Procreation: Human Overpopulation and Reproductive Rights 91
cases of gendered and raced exploitation from their particular contexts to
shore up, in more general terms, the argument that maternal identity is an
absolute good. Coole argues for the need for a franker discussion of
‘demographic policies’ and their relevance to environmental issues, based
on an awareness not just of how these are ‘susceptible to entanglement in
broader geopolitical struggles’, but also that the tendency to connect
population, race, and gender is ‘a contingent one embedded in particular
histories’.38 Or, as Noël Sturgeon reminds us in proposing ‘a global feminist
environmental justice analysis’, which she defines as ‘an intersectional
approach (seeing at all times an interactive relationship among inequalities
of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation)’, one must attend to historical
context and contingency, highlighting the intersections that might arise in
particular cases, and avoiding simple dualisms.39
In this respect, The New Internationalist’s debate is interesting for
demonstrating how contexts might be conveniently elided in the popula-
tion argument. The ‘no children’ stance of journalist Erica Gies is focused,
via the findings of Murtaugh and Schlax, on the carbon footprint of
‘children and their descendants’, while the argument for children, mounted
by population studies professor Anne Hendrixson, aligns ethical responsi-
bility to the planet initially with the ethical efficacy of parental care in and
of itself, and then with the need to preserve reproductive rights as a matter
of individual liberty.40 Hendrixson contends: first, that corporations and
the military are greater culprits for carbon emission and environmental
damage generally; second, that change can be brought about in part by the
ethical guidance of parents (Hendrixson advises, ‘If you want to address
climate change, you and your children should challenge the excesses of the
military-industrial complex’, and ‘Hold these powerful companies accoun-
table for their actions and teach your children to do likewise’); and, third
and most importantly, that parental rights in the domestic sphere are
sacrosanct against wider environmental concerns: ‘Ultimately, people
should be able to choose to have children or not.’41 Strikingly,
Hendrixson’s argument implies these parental rights to be maternal rights.
She cites the work of ARROW (the Asian-Pacific Resource and Research
Centre for Women, a not-for-profit group that campaigns for sexual and

38
Coole, ‘Too Many Bodies?’, 200, 202.
39
Noël Sturgeon, Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the
Natural (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2009), p. 6; original emphasis.
40
Anne Hendrixson and Erica Gies, ‘If You Care about Climate Change, Should You Have
Children?’.
41
Ibid.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
92 Overpopulation and Motherhood Environmentalism
reproductive rights for women in the developing world) in order to insist,
in general terms, on the need to ‘safeguard sexual and reproductive health
and rights – including having kids – even as we hold the worst carbon
emitters accountable’; she moves almost indiscernibly from a particular
context of securing reproductive rights for disempowered women to a
universal standpoint of parenthood. She thus ends her argument on the
issue of preserving women’s maternal rights as an absolute good and
returns to her earlier association of this with the ability to initiate environ-
mental action through parental activism. In other words, the possibility of
parenthood as an environmentally compromised act is countered by an
insistence on the inviolability of its rights and the power of its ethical,
educational potential.42
The tendency to invoke a universalised position of motherhood as
grounds, motive, and means by which the environment might be saved,
even in the face of the questions posed by overpopulation, is replayed in
two climate change novels (where such a universal standpoint is also,
conveniently, represented by white, heterosexual, socio-economically pri-
vileged subjects). Lepucki’s California and Jensen’s The Rapture contex-
tualise the need to fulfil individual reproductive rights within a scenario of
overpopulation threat. Where Lepucki’s narrative, with its unsympathetic
female protagonist, tends towards a simplification of this into a story of
motherhood as selfishness, Jensen’s use not just of overpopulation dis-
course but of reader identification with her female character prioritises
environmental and maternal concerns equally, bringing the two into
conflict. Jensen, I shall argue, ultimately demonstrates the contradictions
that inhere in motherhood environmentalism. However, rather than sta-
ging this, like Lepucki, as an exposé of motherhood environmentalism, she
enables an understanding of the complexity of female identity, an under-
standing worth reading through the lens of recent ecofeminist investiga-
tions into women and their bodily experiences.

California
Lepucki’s California imagines a resource-scarce environment in which
arguments rage over the environmental justice of having children, and
depicts, in the ﬁnal analysis, the extent to which any decision to have
children is a potentially self-interested choice. The novel, the ﬁrst by
Lepucki, a graduate of the distinguished Iowa Writers’ Workshop, came

42
Ibid.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
Procreation: Human Overpopulation and Reproductive Rights 93
to national attention in something of a lucky break. Published by Hachette
at the height of its controversial dispute with online bookseller Amazon
over e-book prices, Lepucki saw her work promoted, by chance, by televi-
sion personality and fellow Hachette author Stephen Colbert; seeking not
just to publicise an Amazon boycott but to make the case that Amazon’s
actions were most damaging to first-time authors, Colbert urged viewers to
buy books such as Lepucki’s.43 California subsequently entered the New
York Times bestseller list at number three.44 This unconventional and
unexpected publicity may account for the gap between the novel’s reputa-
tion and its lack of polish. While a promising first novel, its plot and
characters remain underdeveloped, a thinness in characterisation that
contributes to its simplistic critique of parental – particularly, maternal –
care ethics.
The novel is set in California in the mid-twenty-first century, when
environmental and political disasters – ‘Overpopulation, pollution,
drought, disease, oil, terrorism’ (57) – have virtually torn apart the coun-
try’s economic and social fabric. Extreme weather events have devastated
the national infrastructure: in addition to earthquakes in California, there
have been ‘wildfires in Colorado and Utah’, ‘snowstorms across the
Midwest and the East Coast, and ‘rainstorms north of here’ (46). While
the wealthy reside in gated enclaves known as Communities, those less
fortunate survive in rundown cities or outposts in the wild, vulnerable to
marauding bandits. The novel begins with two such survivors, young
husband and wife, Cal and Frida, who eke out an existence on their own
in a shack in woodland outside Los Angeles until they discover a myster-
ious settlement nearby, a place called the Land. The conjunction of the two
names – Cal and Frida – punningly identifies them with the name of the
state, and aligns their struggle for survival, along with the lessons they learn
about procreation and posterity, with the sacrifices to be made by a once-
affluent society in a climate-changed future. Moreover, Frida’s discovery at
the start of the novel that she is pregnant means that the narrative is focused
throughout on the couple’s concerns for their unborn child, since the plot’s
duration exactly covers that of Frida’s pregnancy.
The narrative splits the reader’s attention between the two protagonists.
It systematically switches between their points of view, proceeding as
tightly focalised passages that alternate between Frida’s and Cal’s free,

43
Brookes Barnes, ‘Winner in the Amazon War’, New York Times (3 July 2014).
44
Carolyn Kellogg, ‘Edan Lepucki Thanks Colbert Nation for Making California a Hit’, Los Angeles
Times (22 July 2014).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
94 Overpopulation and Motherhood Environmentalism
indirect discourses. This has several effects. First, flashbacks reveal their
very different backgrounds and outlooks. The reader learns, for example, of
Frida’s privileged Hollywood upbringing by a film-maker father and a
glamorous mother, which contrasts with Cal’s rural Midwestern child-
hood, particularly the influence of his farming father and his experience at
a nontraditional, all-male college called Plank (modelled on Deep Springs
College in northern California, where the education philosophy combines
small-group teaching with agricultural labour and student governance).
The urban and urbane Frida wants to live in a community, while Cal
wishes to live a primitive and isolated life on the land. Indeed, the couple’s
departure from a ravaged Los Angeles had been at Cal’s behest but delayed
by Frida’s desire to stay in the city. This creates a sense of distance between
the characters, and splits reader empathy and identification between
the two.
The alternating focalisations and interior monologues also function to
highlight the secretiveness that marks Cal and Frida’s relationship: each
repeatedly keeps information – important or trivial – from the other. This
includes Cal’s early discovery of the Land, which he tries to withhold from
Frida, and Frida’s hidden stash of ‘artefacts’ (2) from her previous life. The
reader is made privy to the secrets that the couple keep from each other –
for example, Frida’s announcement of her pregnancy, out loud and to
herself, means that the reader learns of it before Cal. These secrets empha-
sise the alignment of Frida with civilisation and Cal with wilderness: for
example, Frida’s cache of keepsakes – an abacus, a shower cap, a perfume
bottle, and a turkey baster that she particularly cherishes for being both
brand new and utterly useless – represent her tendency to cling to a past life
of trivial and now defunct material goods, along with the holidays and
rituals they represent. Meanwhile, Cal keeps his knowledge of the Land’s
existence a secret from Frida so that they can maintain their self-sufficiency
in the forest. The novel, then, is a series of alternating ironic insights into
Frida and Cal that underline their differences.
These differences are also emphasised by the apparent necessity of
traditional gender norms in a devastated environment of scarce resources.
The couple ‘rely on an antiquated division of labor’ (64), in which, for
example, Frida performs the chores of washing their clothes at a nearby
creek and preparing their meals while Cal digs animal traps. The connec-
tion between gender norms and a successful life in the wild is further
suggested by their neighbours, the Miller family, whose self-sufficiency is
managed by the adoption of a gendered hunter-gatherer lifestyle: the father
Bo hunts, while the mother Sandy forages and cooks. Not only do the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
Procreation: Human Overpopulation and Reproductive Rights 95
Millers pass on this gendered knowledge to Cal and Frida, the younger
couple find themselves surprisingly well-suited to their allotted tasks.
Already aligned with the domestic sphere through her love of and expertise
at baking, Frida becomes such ‘an expert at foraging’ that Cal concedes that
‘foraging was women’s work . . . maybe Bo was right’ (58). Frida, mean-
while, sees the Millers’ life as a lesson in working with the land: ‘with Bo
and Sandy, . . . the earth was to be respected. Only then would it collabo-
rate with you, tell you what it needed and what it was willing to give. And it
was willing to give you a lot, if you knew how to ask’ (24–25). This
correlates the Millers’ gendered knowledge with a kind of ‘natural’ under-
standing of the world, a yielding to the environment’s differing physical
demands on men and women that, in addition, masculinises predatory
activity and feminises nurture.
Connected to this is the existence of an embodied and feminised knowl-
edge around reproduction and maternity. While the men discuss ‘how to
handle larger predators’ (25), Sandy teaches Frida how to chart her men-
strual cycle by ‘the phases of the moon’ (26). That Frida is ignorant in this
respect is a result of her past reliance on the contraceptive pill. Sandy’s
teachings represent, it would seem, the handing down of an exclusively
‘natural’ female expertise, replacing Frida’s previous abnegation of that
responsibility to the ‘artificial’ apparatus of medical knowledge. Moreover,
Sandy explicitly connects this information to reproductive power, specifi-
cally advising Frida that she could, and should, use it to have children. At
this point, Frida’s prior reluctance to become a mother – for ‘Who wanted
to bring children into this world?’ (26) – undergoes a transformation:
‘Frida felt her perspective shifting, tilting the world, blurring the colors,
brightening them’ (28). It is immediately after this that Frida refuses to
practise the withdrawal method when having sex with Cal. What she
acquires, then, is a reproductive power explicitly tied to Sandy’s feminised
wisdom and her highly gendered relationship with the land: that is, Frida
engages in a version of motherhood environmentalism.
Yet, this is no simple delineation of Cal as protector and Frida as
nurturer. Cal’s focalised narrative details his dedication to a conventional
and masculinised responsibility of looking after his wife and child, but
Frida’s traces her gradual reluctance to assume the feminised role set out for
her by the Millers. While Cal finds that ‘they’d learned a lot’ from the
Millers and ‘were getting the hang of things’ (66), Frida comes to resist the
gender norms they have enforced – she laments how ‘No one cared about
voting rights and equal pay because everyone was too busy lighting fires to
stay warm and looking for food to stay alive’, and complains that ‘It’s like

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
96 Overpopulation and Motherhood Environmentalism
the only thing that matters anymore is upper-body strength’ (65). What she
eventually resists, it would seem, is the motherhood environmentalism that
the Millers represent.
As Cal and Frida enter the Land (which – in a complicated subplot – is
led by Frida’s supposedly long-dead brother, Micah), the narrative focuses
further on the couple’s differences, particularly in their attitudes towards
their unborn child. As the decision to allow Cal and Frida to stay in the
community is put to a general vote, the impending birth is kept secret.
Thus, a further layer of insulation is added to each character in the already
highly divided narrative; focalised thus far on each protagonist’s secretive
thoughts about the other, the narrative is now more intensely concerned
with their private concerns over the impending birth, which they cannot
share with others in the community and are loath to share with each other.
While Cal’s actions become focused on discovering the complex mechan-
isms by which the Land is run, including its striking lack of children,
Frida’s uncertain relationship with motherhood comes under scrutiny.
Motherhood, for Frida, is far from being an innate and inherent part of
her identity, and certainly very far from an expression of a connection with
‘nature’. Frida experiences maternity in somewhat second-hand terms,
basing her responses on received ideas; remembering her mother’s descrip-
tions of ‘a peculiar peace that descended upon her with each pregnancy’
(106), she tries to imagine feeling the same way. The child also becomes a
means to an end, an opportunity to be accepted onto the Land; feeling
optimistic that the birth of her child will be welcomed by the community
and will bring her acceptance into the Land, she finds herself ‘channeling
Sandy Miller, she realised, triumphant before her chart of menstrual cycles,
glory be to the gift of children . . . . Because that’s what moms did, right?
They chose to believe the future was good’ (343–4). However, when she
starts to worry that her pregnancy will lead to exile from the Land, she
contemplates terminating it, wondering, ‘if she could see it as something
inhuman, then she might be able to rid herself of it’ (217). Indeed, the
reader might consider the absurd motif of the turkey baster as a metaphor
for Frida’s superficial relationship to her child and her wish to use it to gain
access to the Land. Not only is the baster an object to which she is
sentimentally attached, she – secretly, of course, and inexplicably – intends
to proffer it as a gift to the community. Moreover, if the turkey baster is
indeed an objective correlative of Frida’s maternity, this hints at a sense of
artificiality: turkey basters are, after all, associated in the popular imagina-
tion with artificial methods of impregnation (as a synonym for do-it-
yourself insemination), and the baster functions in the narrative as a

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
Procreation: Human Overpopulation and Reproductive Rights 97
memento for Frida and a sign of her nostalgia for her consumerist,
materialist past. Frida, it would seem, is no earth mother, and her child
represents a way to secure material comforts for herself.
That Frida’s maternal desires are a projection of her desires for herself
becomes even more evident when these maternal wishes are pitted against
the wishes of the community. The Land is unable to sustain children. As
Micah explains of his arrival at and eventual leadership of the community:
The Land was a mess when we first got here. There were children, but they
were underweight. . . . Almost all of them were still too young to contribute
anything, and the adults spent a lot of time looking after them, and they
couldn’t get as much work done, couldn’t make preparations for their own
survival. That endangered the whole community. Plus, the older ones would
be teenagers in a few years, and who knows what would happen then? They
might not follow rules or do their jobs. (320)
The Land practises a policy of ‘containment’ (211), out of concern about
the energy demands of parenting, children’s use of resources without
contribution to labour in return, the health risks of parturition to both
mothers and babies, and the difficulty of both keeping older children safe
and ensuring that they adhere to its strict social order. The Land has settled
for a future life without children in order to ensure a life in the present:
‘Kids had been removed from the future’ (312). To be clear, this puts the lie
not just to Frida’s self-absorbed version of maternity but also to the
celebratory motherhood environmentalism expressed by Sandy. In the
resource-stricken future imagined by California, children represent a lux-
ury. The Millers’ dreams of a pastoral future ensured by children – ‘Their
children would mark the beginning of a new and better species, start the
world over’ (15) – appear just as irresponsible as Frida’s desire for a child in
order to secure a better life for herself. Motherhood, even motherhood
environmentalism, emerges here as a manifestation of self-interest.
The novel’s conclusion grants Frida a happy ending but ironically
underlines what it suggests is her self-centredness. Because Frida cannot
comprehend that the child is inimical to the sustainability of the Land, she
impulsively announces her pregnancy before the vote, which results in the
couple’s violent ejection. Micah, who is revealed to be secretly trading with
the wealthy Communities, saves Frida and Cal by transferring them to one
such enclave, where the novel ends. The artificiality of the Community –
its cheap, tailored clothes and synthetic foods – underlines the deception of
their new life, and its relative wealth, derived from the exploitation of
outposts such as the Land, highlights the luxury that is parenthood in the

Motherhood, Materiality, and Female Identity

What California misses is the opportunity to understand female identity as
a composite of several discourses. Such an approach would acknowledge
and accept, rather than expose and condemn, the ways in which, for many
women, maternal desire is one of a number of discursive forces (or, more
precisely, forces in which the discursive is combined with material phe-
nomena and bodily experiences) that participate in the ongoing and
slippery process of self-construction.
Two important trends in ecofeminism help to shed light on this idea.
The ﬁrst is the range of insights represented by Donna Haraway’s cyborg
feminism, in which the ﬁgure of the cyborg expresses the shifts in subject
positions that might offer a more productive political environmental
strategy for women. ‘A cyborg world’, suggests Haraway, ‘might be
about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of
their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently
partial identities and contradictory standpoints’.45 Haraway’s arguments
about the hybrid nature of identity have been further enhanced by
Sandilands’s work, drawing on the philosophies of Hannah Arendt, on

45
Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century’, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free
Association Books, 1991), p. 154.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
Motherhood, Materiality, and Female Identity 99
identity as an ‘intra-social’ event, formed in moments of social and political
coalition and action, and always an ongoing process.46 Second, some more
recent developments in ecofeminism, specifically, new materialism, have
begun to re-emphasise the importance of materiality in considering human
and non-human relations. Instead of returning the discussion of women
and nature to biological determinism or essentialism, however, new mate-
rialism emphasises the way in which the discursive and material are inter-
linked, ‘since various aspects of materiality contribute to the development
and transformation of discourses’.47
Together, these developments urge an awareness of how material-
discursive practices impact on women’s understandings of both female
identity and their relationship with the non-human world. Of especial
relevance is Karen Barad’s argument that identity and agency are
dynamic processes.48 Because the ‘primary epistemological unit’ is
not a stable object or entity but ‘phenomena’, that is, a constellation
of entities acting on, in, with, or through each other, it is not inter-
action between objects that matters in establishing identity and agency,
but ‘intra-action’, the process by which objects become – momentarily
and locally – separate and thereby knowable.49 What is especially
significant is the dynamic quality Barad imparts to ontology and
agency, reminding us that apprehension and identification of the
other occurs not in static opposition but in a coming together and
enactment of separability – what Barad calls the ‘agential cut’.50 What
is of further significance is that the phenomena comprise not simply
human and non-human others, but ‘material-discursive practices’.51
That is, identity is an encounter between things materially and dis-
cursively fabricated.
In The Rapture, the female protagonist’s idea of herself is dominated by
maternal desire, a domination made all the more obvious in her defence of
its ideals and ethics in opposition to the discourse of overpopulation. In the
final analysis, however, motherhood – its idealisation, physical manifesta-
tion, and psychological dimensions – is shown to be one of several
material-discursive intra-actions that inform female identity, that is, it is

46
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 84.
47
Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, ‘Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist
Theory’, in Alaimo and Hekman (eds.), Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008), p. 4.
48
Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to
Matter’, Signs 28.2 (2003), 801–31.
49 50
Ibid., 815; original emphasis. Ibid.; original emphasis. 51 Ibid., 818.

The Rapture
British novelist Jensen has attracted critical acclaim over her career with
innovative and intelligent novels that nonetheless have tended to be
‘ignored by scholars’.52 Though her novels range from the comic to the
dystopian, they are all classifiable as thrillers of a sort, each beginning with a
puzzling premise and then driving the plot towards an answer to this
puzzle. In addition, these mysteries tend towards paranormal phenomena
– or, at the very least, to ideas that are scientifically implausible – such as
animal-human hybridity and psychic powers. Significantly, most also dis-
play a preoccupation with parenthood, from Jensen’s first novel, Egg
Dancing (1995), about a woman who suspects her perfect baby is the result
of a eugenic experiment by her embryologist husband, to one of her best-
known works, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (2004), whose eponymous
protagonist is a problem child in a coma that, we learn, is the result of an
attempted murder by his long-suffering mother. A recent novel explicitly
locates parenthood within the context of longer-term obligations to future
generations: The Uninvited (2012) imagines a global phenomenon of
juvenile homicides, which is revealed in a supernatural twist to be the
revenge by future generations on the present for the environmental devas-
tation visited upon them.
The themes of posterity and parenthood are also combined with
environmental concerns in Jensen’s seventh novel, The Rapture, and
particularly framed through maternity. The Rapture is set in a near-future
Britain, in which the extreme weather events of climate change are
virtually an everyday occurrence. Its narrator and protagonist, Gabrielle
Fox, is a child psychologist recovering from a traumatic car accident.
Attempting to restart her life as a paraplegic, she takes on a challenging
posting at a secure hospital for criminally insane adolescents. There she
treats Bethany Krall, who has savagely killed her mother and seems,
moreover, to have the ability to predict the global disasters now taking
place. As Bethany’s predictions become ever more vivid and accurate,
Gabrielle – and the reader – must decide whether or not the teenager is
in possession of paranormal powers and, if so, whether these are part of

52
Barbara L. Estrin, ‘Mutating Literary Form and Literalizing Scientiﬁc Theory in Liz Jensen’s Ark
Baby’, Critique 47 (2005), 41.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
Motherhood, Materiality, and Female Identity 101
the onset of some kind of supernaturally ordained final event. When
Bethany foresees a cataclysmic event large enough to wipe out most of
Europe and North America, Gabrielle, along with the scientist with
whom she falls in love, strives to alert the world to the possibility of
impending doom.53 Shaped as what Eric Otto calls ‘an ecothriller’, the
engine of the novel is suspense, driving purposefully towards a cata-
strophic climax. Aiding the overwhelming sense of apocalypse is the
predominance of a religious end-times narrative. Bethany’s family is
part of an evangelical Christian community, the ‘Faith Wave’, that has
embraced climate change as ‘a sign we’re on the brink of doomsday’ (88),
believing that they are living through the end of days and that the ascent
to heaven – the Rapture – is nigh.
At the same time, the novel establishes a conflict to do with procreation
and parenthood; it raises the spectre of overpopulation as a contributing
factor to environmental crisis and pits this against individual desires for
parenthood. The other ‘cult’ that dominates this future Britain is the
Planetarians, an environmentalist, zero-population-growth movement,
who welcome the many climatic catastrophes as a form of ‘human cull’
(36). Their spiritual leader Harish Modak explicitly frames the argument as
a conflict between the immediate wish to have children and the long-term
view of overpopulation, writing in a newspaper article: ‘In times past,
children and grandchildren were seen as a blessing, a sign of faith in the
future of the gene-pool. Now, it would seem that the kindest thing to do
for our grandchildren is to refrain from generating them’ (37). Harish is ‘a
geologist and one-time colleague’ of the environmentalist James Lovelock,
who is described in the novel as having come up ‘with the notion of Gaia,
the planet as a self-regulating system with its own “geophysiology”’ (36).
The Planetarians are therefore associated with some of the real Lovelock’s
bleaker assertions that Earth’s self-regulation could and perhaps should
include human extinction.54 Their argument against overpopulation, then,
goes against the twin emphases of parental care ethics, that is, its interest in
immediate attachments and its concern with human lives.
The novel juxtaposes the Planetarians’ ecocentric position on posterity,
with its visions of a virtually childless and possibly non-human future, with

53
Eric C. Otto, ‘“From a Certain Angle”: Ecothriller Reading and Science Fiction Reading The Swarm
and The Rapture’, Ecozon@ 3 (2012), 106–21.
54
Lovelock states, for example, ‘like an old lady who has to share her house with a growing and
destructive group of teenagers, Gaia grows angry, and if they do not mend their ways she will evict
them’; James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back—and How We Can Still
Save Humanity (ﬁrst published 2006; London: Penguin, 2007), p. 60.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
102 Overpopulation and Motherhood Environmentalism
Gabrielle’s profound parental desires. Through a series of flashbacks and
reported conversations, the reader learns gradually of Gabrielle’s terrible
accident and is drawn into sympathy with its psychological and physical
repercussions. The reader discovers clues and hints that build towards a
picture of devastation: made aware at the outset of Gabrielle’s paraplegia,
the reader then learns of the death of her lover, Alex, and the fact that he
was married. Then comes knowledge of Gabrielle’s state of advanced
pregnancy at the time of the accident, and, finally, the discovery that the
accident caused the loss of her unborn child and her inability, with her
physical disability, to have any more children. The accident turns her, in
her words, into ‘a non-woman pretending to be a real one’ (65).
Specifically, she is ‘a woman with no man, no baby, no feeling below the
waist, no imaginable future’ (109), a self-description which collapses var-
ious conventional idealisations of female identity into one, all imbricated
in the physical (motherhood, (hetero)sexual desirability and desire) and all
deemed necessary to a life worth living (an ‘imaginable future’). The first-
person narrative, with its vivid handling of the practical aspects of para-
plegia (for example, Gabrielle’s experiences of managing a wheelchair,
negotiating able-bodied prejudices, and having sex), invites the reader to
inhabit Gabrielle’s body and sympathise with her physical state. But the
revelations of Gabrielle’s accident culminate in the story of the loss of her
child and what is, for her, a rare concession to tears: ‘If I allow myself to cry,
I will never stop’ (141); this works to reduce her disability to the question of
childlessness, and then to turn this into the most tragic aspect of the
erosion of her sense of self. It also focuses reader sympathy on the question
of Gabrielle’s unfulfilled maternity.
Gabrielle’s desire for motherhood hints at Bethany’s position as a
surrogate daughter. Bethany may seem an unlikely – and initially unlike-
able – candidate for the role of moral patient in a maternal care ethics,
given that her crime is matricide and her mental fragility manifests itself in
threatening and violent behaviour towards others, including Gabrielle.
Yet, it is precisely the void left by Bethany’s abusive parents that creates a
space for Gabrielle’s treatment of her to be constructed in affectionate and
even caring terms. Gabrielle – and the reader – find themselves inexplicably
drawn to Bethany. Initially, this concern is professional: after getting hurt
as a result of Bethany’s assault of another patient, Gabrielle muses that ‘a
part of me that’s still professional cares’ (103) about Bethany being pun-
ished with isolation, even while she feels anger at the extent of the injury.
But the professional extends to maternal when Bethany finally talks to
Gabrielle about the abuse that drove her to murder her mother. Gabrielle’s

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
Motherhood, Materiality, and Female Identity 103
response replaces that maternal neglect with a new source of parental –
even parochial – protection: she tells Gabrielle, ‘Your mother’s job was to
protect you. That’s what parents are supposed to do’, before realising that if
Bethany’s mother ‘were standing in front of me now, perhaps I’d want to
kill her myself’ (275) and promising to Bethany, ‘I won’t leave you’ (276).
Then, towards the novel’s climax, as Gabrielle and her new partner Frazer
seek safety with Bethany from the impending disaster, they pretend to be
Bethany’s parents in order to avoid suspicion (Bethany having been
removed from secure psychiatric confinement), and thus pose as a make-
shift nuclear family.
More strikingly, Gabrielle’s care towards Bethany is aligned with a
concern for the planet. It is not simply that Gabrielle strives to keep
Bethany safe even as she works with Frazer and his scientific colleagues
to warn the public of the upcoming disaster and to save as many human
lives as possible. It is also that Bethany is in tune with the extreme events
occurring around the globe. In Gabrielle’s assessment, Bethany’s pain is
‘planet-shaped and planet-sized’ (36) and she is a ‘raging electric Gaia’ (62).
This turns out to be more than a figurative description, for Frazer con-
cludes that Bethany’s predictive powers come from her hypersensitivity to
changes in meteorological and geological pressure, as evidenced by the way
electroconvulsive therapy refines her predictions and by the drawings in
her notebooks. Furthermore, Bethany, like the planet, is troped as violated.
Bethany accurately predicts the final, climactic catastrophe (which is not in
itself the outcome of climate change, but is, rather, a manmade trigger for
abrupt climate change – a colossal earthquake brought about by suboceanic
methane drilling in the North Sea, which will create a tsunami that will
submerge Northern Europe and the American East Coast and release
enough methane to bring about ‘runaway global warming on the scale
that’s beyond anyone’s worst nightmare’ (228)). Bethany’s predictive
drawings present this in sexualised terms, at least in Gabrielle’s estimation
– the vertical line into a devastated landscape is interpreted by Gabrielle as
‘a violent invasion’ and taken as evidence that Bethany has ‘been sexually
abused’ (133). When the reader realises what the drawings really represent,
Gabrielle’s misinterpretation in reading the representation of methane
drilling as an expression of sexual abuse only serves to bring the prospect
of the girl’s and the planet’s violation into the same frame.
As the narrative pushes to its catastrophic climax, Gabrielle, defined by
her maternal desire and care for Bethany, and positioned as a potential
saviour of the planet’s human beings, comes into direct conflict with the
anti-procreation – and, indeed, anti-children – discourse of the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
104 Overpopulation and Motherhood Environmentalism
Planetarians. When Gabrielle, Frazer, and his fellow scientists attempt to
recruit the Planetarians to their cause of warning the public, they must first
convince Harish Modak of the ethical good of doing so. Importantly, it is
Gabrielle who debates the issue with Harish and wins. She does so by
psychologising Harish’s responses and framing the debate in insistently
immediate and familial tones. Harish notes that the childless ‘are often
called selfish for making what is essentially an altruistic choice’ (249);
Gabrielle, it seems, calls him just that. On the one hand, she uses the
memory of his dead wife’s desire for children ‘for the sake of some kind of
future’ (256) to insist that parenthood is, indeed, an investment in poster-
ity; on the other hand, she argues that a lack of concern for the survival of
present humans is both selfish and murderous: ‘Whatever you feel about
the Great Cycle and Gaia and the futility of the species is irrelevant, Harish!
The issue is about the people who are alive now, who will die if you don’t
help us warn them! . . . If we fail to act now, none of us is any better than
any war criminal on trial in The Hague’ (256). Conveniently, Harish’s
argument simply melts away here, in line with the reader’s conditioning, by
identification and sympathy with Gabrielle, to believe in the ethical power
of parenthood.
All this sets the scene for a climax filled with apocalyptic spectacle,
as well as for a conclusion that underlines Gabrielle’s parental care
ethics and the reader’s eudaemonistic share in it. On the brink of
disaster, as the earthquake and tsunami threaten, Bethany, Gabrielle,
and Frazer head to the Olympic stadium in East London, where the
other scientists have arranged for a helicopter to fly them out of the
imminent flood. The three are saved just in time, being lifted out of
the stadium moments before the methane tsunami flows into it and
ignites:
The fire spreads greedily as though devouring pure oil, yellow flames
bursting from the crest of the liquid swell, triggering star-burst gas explo-
sions above. With a deep-throated bellow the wave gushes across the land-
scape, turning buildings and trees to matchwood in an upward rush of
spume. As the force catapults us upward, the scene shrinks to brutal
eloquence: a vast carpet of glass unrolling, incandescent, with powdery
plumes of rubble shooting from its edges, part solid, part liquid, and part
gas – a monstrous concoction of elements from the pit of the Earth’s
stomach. (339)
The apocalyptic ending also coincides with a final prediction by Bethany,
and the quasi-religious, cosmological description of this spectacular cata-
strophe helps to give the prediction a messianic quality. As the helicopter

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
Motherhood, Materiality, and Female Identity 105
lifts above the ruin, Bethany senses that Gabrielle is pregnant by Frazer,
something unknown to either of the couple, and informs Gabrielle before
hurling herself from the helicopter. The conjunction of Bethany’s see-
mingly superhuman powers, her martyr-like death, and the near-miracle of
a child for paralysed Gabrielle casts the new birth as redemptive. Indeed,
among the last words of the novel is the suggestion that this birth will
coincide with the rebirth of the world – ‘the birthday of a new world’ (341).
What is hinted at here, in purely figurative terms, is the power of maternal
desire and the fulfilment of that desire to regenerate the planet.
Nonetheless, there is yet room in the novel for a sense of scepticism
about the possibility of rebirth – that is, environmental salvation – through
parenthood. However, this requires a critical re-evaluation by both
Gabrielle and the reader of the ethical dimensions of the mother’s wish
for a child in a devastated world. Indeed, Gabrielle’s intense focus on
parenthood is ripe for reassessment by the end of the novel. At Bethany’s
news of the long-wished-for fulfilment of motherhood, Gabrielle’s
response is one of devastation, not celebration: she lets out ‘a great wail,
. . . a cry that will echo across the rest of my life’ (341). The newly born
world, Gabrielle realises, is not a world for her child:
I look out on to the birthday of a new world. A world a child must enter.
A world I want no part of.
A world not ours. (341)
The new world in which Gabrielle and Frazer will raise their child is a
testament to humanity’s failed legacy to future generations; crucially,
this is framed as a failure of parenthood, for, after the manmade disaster
of the tsunami, there will ‘be no safe place for a child to play’ (341). This
world is also a monument to humanity’s mistaken emphasis on immedi-
ate and artificial gratification at the expense of the future of the bio-
sphere; it is made of ‘the ruins of all we have created and invented, the
busted remains of the marvels and commonplaces we have dreamed and
built, strived for and held dear: food, shelter, myth, beauty, art, knowl-
edge, material comfort, stories, gods, music, ideas, ideals, shelter’ (341).55
What the novel’s end reveals, for both Gabrielle and the reader, is that
selfishness might equally lie on the side of parenthood and its emphasis
on the here and now, as on the refusal to have children for the sake of
posterity.

55
The repetition of ‘shelter’ in this list, though probably a purely typographical error, serves to
emphasise the need for basic care for a child.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:18:58, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.004
106 Overpopulation and Motherhood Environmentalism
Nonetheless, the sympathy that the reader might have extended to
Gabrielle over the course of the novel is not simply to be withdrawn. If
the novel has been successful up to this point, it will have brought the
reader along a journey of sympathy, and asked her to undertake and,
possibly, replicate Gabrielle’s emotional and eudaemonistic investments.
In the reading I have proposed here, it is possible also for the novel to effect
a critical awakening for both protagonist and reader, which requires that
the sympathy remains even as errors in sympathetic judgement are
acknowledged. What emerges, then, is the chance for the reader to under-
stand the cultural power of the norms of motherhood, combined as they
are with ideals to do with bodily vigour and sex appeal, in shaping female
identity; these ideas, of course, are not just discursive phenomena but occur
in interaction with different material and physical circumstances and
experiences. What might also emerge is a sympathetic and critical acknowl-
edgement, rather than condemnation, of the extent of that power and its
appeal in shaping identity.
Set in worlds marked by scarce resources, both novels explode assump-
tions of maternity as an automatic good by juxtaposing these against the
urgent fears wrought by population pressures. Yet, whereas Lepucki’s
underdeveloped and unsympathetic protagonists sketch motherhood
environmentalism as selfishness, Jensen’s use of reader empathy and sym-
pathy allows the reader both to engage in eudaemonistic identification and
to develop insights into the potency of the myths that underlie such
identification. Posterity-as-parenthood rhetoric wields considerable
power over our emotional and ethical lives, and both novels – Jensen’s
especially – help demonstrate the depth of its purchase. The Rapture does
not, however, go as far as it could in disclosing the contingency of
(parental) identity, nor does it question the anthropocentric assumptions
that underpin it. In the next chapter, I show how two climate change
novels unmask the process of identity-making, and how one of these in
particular – Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods – shows this to be, at the
same time, a process of human–non-human boundary-making.

Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical

Posterity: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods
and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army

With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and
this insertion is like a second birth, in which we conﬁrm and take
upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance.
This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is
not prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by the
presence of others whose company we may wish to join, but it is
never conditioned by them. . .
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

A quantum universe – neither random nor determined. A universe of

potentialities, waiting for an intervention to affect the outcome.
Love is an intervention.
Why do we not choose it?
Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

In parental care ethics frameworks, moral agency tends to be construed as

emanating from a reliable and coherent standpoint – parenthood (or, in
ecofeminist inflections, motherhood, as discussed in chapter 3). Placed on
the seemingly stable ground of parental obligation (for, it would seem,
what could be more fundamental?), the ethical agent responds to those in
the circle of concern with something like parental affection; even where
that circle is widened eudaemonistically, moral considerability hinges on
the resemblance of the moral patient to the child in need of protection and
of the moral agent to, first and foremost, a parental protector. The moral
compass of parental care ethics depends, then, on an ethical agent who
surveys all from the perspective of parenthood.
Identity, nonetheless, is a mobile and fluid phenomenon: to say parent-
hood is not a fixed identity is to acknowledge that, where parenthood
occurs as an aspect of identity, it is one of many aspects of experience, and
it is also necessarily itself (if it can indeed be isolated) fluid from moment to
moment. Thus, as has been noted in the introduction, Derek Parfit defines
107

1
Derek Parﬁt, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 341; Catriona Sandilands,
The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 84.
2
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 84; Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, Simians, Cyborgs and
Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), pp. 149–81;
Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to
Matter’, Signs 28.2 (2003), 801–31.
3
Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (ﬁrst published 2007; London: Penguin, 2008); Sarah Hall,
The Carhullan Army (London: Faber, 2007). Subsequent page references to texts are in parentheses.

Identity, Coalition, and the Real

As we have seen in chapter 1, Sandilands’s identitarian critique draws in
part on Hannah Arendt’s conceptualisation of the human condition as the
vita activa, that is, consisting of labour (the practices required to maintain
the biological or ‘natural’ processes of life), work (those practices that shape
and transform the ‘natural’ to create an artificial world of things), and
action (political and public practices).4 It is this third category of action, in
its demand for public collaboration and interaction, that defines the
human condition; it is ‘the only activity that goes on directly between
men’, and it ‘corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact
that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’.5 As Sandilands
paraphrases Arendt, the individual ‘reveals her unique personal identity in
relation to the common world. Moving away from what they are, indivi-
duals appearing in public reveal who they are, thus constituting themselves
as individuals in relation to the shared world of public life.’6 The key
component of Arendt’s philosophy of public life and Sandilands’s subse-
quent theorisation of it, then, is social interaction: Sandilands’s invocation
of the ‘common world’ and ‘shared world’ echoes Arendt’s emphasis on
how the ‘revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore’ in
moments of ‘sheer human togetherness’.7 If identity exists at all, it exists as
an outcome of action on these terms: it is in saying and doing in exchange
with others that we both form a sense of identity and are capable of
generating political or moral change. Ethical agency – the ability to affect
the lives of others for either good or ill – is thus enfolded into the Arendtian
notion of identity.
The contrast between an ethic of care and this radical ethics of action
and coalition thus becomes clear. Where an ethic of care such as that put
forward by Christopher Groves treats the uncertainty of identity-making
postulated by Arendt as something to be resolved by the individual exercise
of parental care and its putative ethical power, Sandilands proposes that
such uncertainty provides the context in which individuals come together
in an ongoing, never completely fulfilled desire for affinity – in doing so,
4
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn. (first published 1958; Chicago University Press,
1998), pp. 7–8.
5
Ibid., p. 7. 6 Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 159.
7
Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 180.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
110 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
they make and share statements, positions, and ideas, and practise an
openness and coalition that are politically or ethically productive.8
Whereas in an ethic of care concerns for the future are predicated on
standpoints such as the identity conferred by motherhood or parenthood,
in the kind of radical ethics of posterity sketched here, there occurs not
only an acknowledgement of the conditionality of identity but an insis-
tence, on this basis, on the importance of interaction and conversation to
create identity and the potential for moral agency.
More complexly, such an ethics is based on a reconceptualisation of
identity as contingent and coalitional not just in the present but in the
future; specifically, it necessitates an embrace of the future as fundamen-
tally unknowable. Turning to Lacanian theory, Sandilands posits an ‘ethics
of the Real’, an ethics that recognises the impossibility of wholeness and
acknowledges the trauma associated with this impossibility.9 The Real, in
this account, is ‘the gap between reality and representation’ and ‘the
unreachable horizon of universality’.10 In Sandilands’s analysis of ecofe-
minism and environmental activism, this refers to the fantasy of the
recovery of a lost affinity between woman and nature. In an ethics of
posterity, this could be construed – in more straightforwardly Lacanian
terms, one might suggest – as the constant and unfulfillable quest to know
the future; after all, we desire to know it in the same way we believe we
know the past. This is what lies behind the face of the child and prompts its
ubiquitous use as a marker of parental care and future desire, as identified
by Lee Edelman’s Lacanian critique of the figure of the child: we desire
a future over which (we think) we have control, the control of care.11 But, as
Sandilands would have it, ‘while the Real is always with us but never
apprehended, an ethical relation to it demands that we pay attention to
its leftovers, its traces, its scars’.12 What this implies, for this analysis, is the
need to attend to how the doomed desire for the future to be knowable is
also a desire for the future to resemble the past. An ethical relation towards
posterity involves not just accepting the unknowability of the future, but
accepting that our desire to know it derives from an attempt to recover the
irrecoverable past. If, in Sandilands’s analysis of an ecofeminist ethics of the
Real, the answer lies in the exercise of ironic gestures, such as the parodying

8
Christopher Groves, Care, Uncertainty, and Intergenerational Ethics (Basingstoke:
Palgrave–Macmillan, 2014); Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, pp. 99–104.
9
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 181. 10 Ibid., p. 180.
11
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004).
12
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 189.

The Stone Gods

Winterson’s The Stone Gods maps hybridised identities and queer desire
onto an ethical openness towards others, in a move that entails not just
a coalitional and contingent view of identity but a specifically cyborgian
one, after Haraway. This is offset, however, by the experience of maternal
love, and, by implication, the ethical efficacy of parental care. Yet, the
novel ultimately points to the reductive and recursive dimensions of
parental care ethics. Specifically, it reveals how parental care engenders
a nostalgic desire to recreate the future in the image of the past and it uses
this revelation to make even more evident the need for a radical, future-
oriented ethics of posterity.
The novel is Winterson’s tenth for adults – eleventh, if one considers her
early graphic novel, Boating for Beginners (1985) – and is part of
a considerable œuvre that began with the immediate critical and popular
success of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). Follow-up novels such as
The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry (1989) cemented Winterson’s
reputation as a writer of experimental, queer narrative. Despite her own
dislike of such labels, she has become something of an ‘institution of queer
postmodernism’ and her writing has long been placed in ‘the boxes
labelled “lesbian fiction” or “postmodern fiction”’.15 In Winterson’s
work, indeed, non-linear narration and non-heterosexual modes of desire

13
Ibid., p. 78, p. 186.
14
Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (ﬁrst published 1954;
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 13.
15
Jago Morrison, ‘“Who Cares about Gender at a Time like This?” Love, Sex and the Problem of
Jeanette Winterson’, Journal of Gender Studies 15 (2006), 171; Lyn Pykett, ‘A New Way with Words?

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
112 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
are often imbricated with each other; that is, her novels express alter-
native modes of desire both in and as avant-garde style, especially
experimental points of view and non-sequential temporality. At the
same time, Winterson’s more recent work has tended to frame its
multiple, shifting perspectives and untraditional modes of desire
within an ethos that might best be described as the search for a higher
truth. Jago Morrison charts an important shift in Winterson’s recent
work towards ‘a highly essentialising commitment to the discovery of
Love in the agapeic mould’.16 In later novels, from The Powerbook (2000)
and Lighthousekeeping (2004) onwards, queer desire is combined with
what Morrison calls a ‘Christian sensibility’ of love as metaphysical, an
emphasis on ‘an ideal, transcendent love – one that is not only distinct
from the problematic of sexuality, but that involves a sacrificial shedding
of the erotic body itself’.17
The Stone Gods, then, privileges a queer erotics of open-endedness, but
does so as a means to establishing an overriding ethos that makes sense of
love and life. The novel begins on a note of openness, troping spiritual and
sexual development as a journey in which new worlds and new ways are
discovered. In Nicole Merola’s reading, ‘Winterson utilizes repetition,
intertexuality [sic], and palimpsest as formal strategies and thematic ele-
ments’ and ‘seems to propose that love – for human and nonhuman others
and for the planet – offers a prescription for setting a new, nondestructive
path’.18 The novel thus consistently equates queer desire and discovery with
a greater ecological understanding. In other words, it aligns narrative,
erotic, romantic, and environmental receptivity at one stroke. At the
same time, however, this alternative futurity of openness comes into
conflict with the ethical effects of parental care, particularly maternal
care, on the child. The novel replays a set of conflicts in parallel modes:
unexpected sources of love and desire are offset by maternal care; a radical
ethics of openness is balanced against a relatively narrow ethics of human
posterity.
The Stone Gods may be described as a set of ‘novellas-in-a-novel’ rather
than as a single narrative.19 It is a collection in four chapters of three stories
that take place, respectively, in the distant future, the eighteenth century,

Jeanette Winterson’s Post-Modernism’, in Helena Grice and Tim Woods (eds.), ‘I’m Telling You
Stories’: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), p. 53.
16
Morrison, ‘“Who Cares about Gender at a Time like This?”’, 170. 17 Ibid., 177.
18
Nicole M. Merola, ‘Materializing a Geotraumatic and Melancholy Anthropocene: Jeanette
Winterson’s The Stone Gods’, Minnesota Review 83 (2014), 125.
19
Julie Ellam, Love in Jeanette Winterson’s Novels (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), p. 220.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
Identity, Coalition, and the Real 113
and the near future; these revolve around three protagonists, each named
Billie Crusoe (or Billy, where the protagonist is male in the second story).
In all three stories, Billie/Billy makes a strong connection with a character
called Spike (or Spikkers, in the second story) and witnesses unprecedented
environmental destruction. In the first chapter, Billie and Spike are part of
a reconnaissance crew that leaves the dying planet Orbus, which resembles
a version of a future Earth, to establish the habitability of the newly
discovered Planet Blue. The Billie of this first chapter is a scientist
who despises her civilisation’s Central Power for encouraging its citizens
to stay in thrall to cosmetic surgery, celebrity culture, and artificial,
climate-controlled environments, while it competes with the planet’s
other superpowers – the Sino-Mosco Pact and the Caliphate – to use up
the last of the planet’s resources; meanwhile, Spike is a type of advanced
humanoid robot – a Robo sapiens – with evolutionary capabilities. Billy in
the second chapter is a sailor on the second voyage of Captain Cook’s
Resolution, accidentally left behind on Easter Island, where he falls in love
with a Dutchman called Spikkers, and – evoking the cultural common-
place that the Easter Islanders sacrificed the viability of their ecosystem to
their religious beliefs – witnesses the destruction of the island’s last tree in
a power struggle. The Billie of the third and fourth chapters lives on Earth
in a near-future time known as ‘Post-3 War’ (158), the aftermath of
a devastating world war amidst the ruins of a climate-changed planet.
Her job involves educating Spike, this time a cyborg created to assist the
government in making objective, rational policy decisions. Britain is run
by a faceless corporation called MORE, which has rebuilt the war-torn
economy and now asserts complete control over it. But MORE is also the
name of the corporation behind the Central Power of the first chapter.
Thus, Earth is committing identical, not merely similar, mistakes to those
made by humans on Orbus, but – at the same time and in a piece of
temporal illogicality – it is also revealed that Earth was once the Planet Blue
of the first chapter. In this final story, too, hope and openness increasingly
give way to resignation and regression, figured most of all by the last Billie’s
desire for a return to childhood.
The novel makes explicit early on the similarities between loving planets
and loving people. Hearing of Planet White, destroyed when ‘humans, or
whatever they were, massively miscalculated and pumped so much CO2
into the air that they caused irreversible warming’ (68), Billie bemoans how
humans ‘keep making the same mistakes over and over again’, to which
Pink – a typically youth-obsessed, cosmetically enhanced citizen of
Orbus – responds that ‘Women are just planets that attract the wrong

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
114 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
species’ (69). Certainly, the unloved Orbus presents as the victim of an
abusive relationship. Asks Billie of the planet: ‘We didn’t do anything, did
we? Just fucked it to death and kicked it when it wouldn’t get up’ (8). Even
as it is on the receiving end of exploitation, Orbus is also the setting for it,
particularly of a shallow kind of masculinist exploitation – what Fiona
McCulloch describes as a ‘mutated form’ of ‘patriarchal gender
dichotomies’.20 On Orbus, men no longer need women for procreation,
women resort to identikit, artificial beauty to achieve desirability, and men
turn to young girls for ‘something different when everything has become
the same’ (21). Planet Blue seems to prove this maxim. Advertised on
Orbus with a line from John Donne’s poetry (‘She is all States, all Princes
I’, 6; original emphasis), it is construed as feminine and ripe for conquest.
Those lines, we learn, have come from Captain Handsome, the man who
discovers Planet Blue and later engineers what he calls ‘species-control’
(82), an asteroid collision to kill the planet’s dinosaurs and to create
conditions in which humans can live.
Planet Blue, however, turns out to evoke something other than
masculinist domination; it becomes – and then stands in for – the
object of queer desire. Billie’s journey to Planet Blue coincides with
the awakening of her desire for Spike. What is significant for Billie is
not that she is falling in love with a woman (indeed, Billie’s sexual
orientation prior to joining the reconnaissance mission is never
described) but that she is falling in love with a robot: ‘My lover is
made of a meta-material, a polymer tough as metal but pliable and
flexible and capable of heating and cooling, just like human skin’ (83).
Billie’s first sight of the unknown planet glosses the radically new
experience opened up by Spike: ‘I can’t wipe out the yes. One word
and a million million worlds close. One word, and for a while there’s
a planet in front of me, and I can live there’ (83–4). Billie’s lyrical
description of the planet – ‘But there she is, sun-warmed, rain-cooled,
moon-worshipped, flanked by the stars. There she is. Planet Blue’ (84) –
provides an alternative version to Donne’s verse adopted as advance
publicity for the planet. In pointed contrast, Spike is desired by
Handsome in precisely the masculinist terms of Donne’s poetry; indeed,
it is his discovery of those lines and use of them to describe Spike that
subsequently informs the marketing of Planet Blue to Orbus. Billie’s

20
Fiona McCulloch, Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction: Imagined Identities
(Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2012), p. 65.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
Identity, Coalition, and the Real 115
and Spike’s romance thus explicitly queers desire beyond the hetero-
normative and, indeed, into the post-human.21
Strikingly, the post-human, as a space beyond conventional forms of
human domination, also opens up a kind of ecological humility. That is, it
dislodges not just (hetero)sexist but anthropocentric power as well. Both
Orbus and its oversexed men and women are being destroyed by a selfish
anthropocentrism: ‘Humans always assumed that theirs was the only kind
that mattered. That’s how you destroyed your planet’ (79), says Spike.
‘But’, she continues, ‘you have a second chance. Maybe this time . . . ’ (80).
Spike and Planet Blue represent that second chance for Billie and for the
reader: ‘I looked at Spike, unknown, uncharted, different in every way
from me, another life-form, another planet, another chance’ (90). Such
renewability is exemplified by Spike’s ability to evolve into something that
unites the best of human and robot: ‘We are solar-powered and self-
repairing. We are intelligent and non-aggressive’ (79). Little wonder that
the vision she has for Planet Blue is ‘to develop a hi-tech, low-impact
society, making the best of our mistakes here, and beginning again differ-
ently’ (39). The embrace of others, of possibility, of difference is troped as
a radical new ecological ethics for the future. Spike explains their first kiss
in the context of a ‘quantum universe’ that ‘is potential at every second’
(75). And so Spike and Planet Blue function as sites of resistance not to
masculinism as such but, simultaneously, to heteronormativity, technolo-
gical aggression, and narrow visions of the future.
The correlation of masculinism and heterosexism with ecological irre-
sponsibility, and the countermove that is Spike and Billie’s post-human
and cyborgian ethics, echoes Haraway’s cyborgian feminist ethics.22 For
Haraway, after all, the cyborg privileges multiplicity of identity and rejects
essentialism, gesturing to ‘permanently partial identities and contradictory
standpoints’.23 Such a rejection of identity politics concurs with a queer
acknowledgement of the contingency of gender: ‘Cyborgs might consider
more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual

21
As Louise Squire suggests, Billie and Spike can be interpreted as representing, loosely, ‘the subject
categories of “human” and “nonhuman”’, and the consummation of their relationship can be read as
signalling the possibility of, simultaneously, a ‘love solution’ and a ‘posthuman solution’ to the
existential demands of the Anthropocene; Squire, ‘The Subject Reconsidered: Death-Facing and its
Challenges in Contemporary Environmental Crisis Fiction’, PhD dissertation, University of Surrey,
2014, pp. 116, 133–4.
22
For an extended reading of Spike as a Harawayan cyborg, see Sonia Villegas-López, ‘Body
Technologies: Posthuman Figurations in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Jeanette Winterson’s
The Stone Gods’, Critique 56.1 (2015), 26–41.
23
Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, p. 154.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
116 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has
profound historical breadth and depth’.24 Spike possesses a cyborgian
subjecthood (a fixture of cyberpunk science fiction, as Veronica
Hollinger points out) that is uniquely placed to figure both technological
promise and technological over-reaching, while, at the same time, disman-
tling the expectations of gender performance.25 In this case, Billie and
Spike’s ethics of receptivity towards human and non-human others and,
indeed, towards the biosphere at large is explicitly also a que(e)rying of the
ideas of both progress, that narrative of consumerist mastery over the
world’s finite resources, and posterity, the retelling of the future as
human procreation and lineage. The novel, according to Abigail Rine,
‘locates the hope of humankind – minimal though it may be – in forging
new kinds of love-relations that cultivate and thrive on difference, relations
characterized by mutuality’.26 That is, the queering impulse is
a transgression not just of heteronormativity but of norms per se; as Rine
states: ‘Queerness, for Winterson, is not simply non-heterosexuality, but
that which intentionally challenges and exceeds the constraints of the
normal.’27
In Winterson’s novel, the queer coincides with renewal – indeed, the
cyborgian discourse seems to appropriate the privilege of new life and new
beginnings from parenthood ethics and rhetorics. In the conclusion to the
first vignette, Billie and Spike die soon after arriving on Planet Blue,
victims of the asteroid impact facilitated by Handsome. As death
approaches, hybridity between humanity and technology is achieved, as
Billie and Spike make love. Billie experiences this as a journey of enlight-
enment: ‘She is the missing map. She is the place that I am’ (107).
Meanwhile, Spike develops a heartbeat. That is, death brings not only
love but rebirth. Love is, for Billie, ‘a journey on foot to another place’
(109) and, for Spike, ‘the chance to be human’ (110). The novel insists,
almost mantra-like, on birth instead of death, dream instead of sleep, and
beginnings instead of ends: Billie intones, ‘Things dying . . . things new-
born’ (112) and ‘Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This
is one story. There will be another’ (113).
24
Ibid., p. 180.
25
Veronica Hollinger, ‘“Something like a Fiction”: Speculative Intersections of Sexuality and
Technology’, in Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon (eds.), Queer
Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 2008), p. 150.
26
Abigail Rine, ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention: Rethinking the Future’, in Ben Davies and
Jana Funke (eds.), Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan,
2011), pp. 83–4.
27
Ibid., p. 77.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
Identity, Coalition, and the Real 117
This sense of rebirth is taken up in the next chapter (and indeed in the
very existence of ‘another’ chapter and ‘another’ story). The reader finds
another journey outward, another opportunity to witness and resist the
standard narrative of progress. Billy the sailor, the protagonist of the next
chapter, understands the self as a ship and the soul as ‘the seabird that
ploughs the wake of a Ship and then flies away no man knows where’
(131–2). This chapter juxtaposes once more the journey to and discovery of
love by an enlightened pair with the destruction of ecosystems by ignorant
others. This Billy also finds love with someone who is at once a hybrid
figure and a protector of the environment: the half-Dutch, half-native
Spikkers, a man intent on saving the ravaged island. The events on the
island microcosmically replay the failures on planet Orbus.
The devastation of Easter Island is explained as the result, in the first
instance, of the use of timber to transport and erect the giant moai in
a regime of ancestor worship.28 Environmental exploitation is then exacer-
bated by corruption and resource war, laying waste to the entire island.
Thus, both Billies’ journeys of queer discovery coincide with love for
another and love for the non-human environment. While the first Spike
opens up for Billie a ‘hi-tech, low-impact’ future of possibility, Spikkers
unfolds for Billy the island’s ‘ghastly history’ (132) and then reveals his plan
to usurp the current regime and to restore both civil and ecological
stability. Moreover, just as the first Billie discovers her love for Spike as
they approach a new world and a newly possible world view, Billy realises
he is in love with Spikkers in the midst of Spikkers’ attempt at overthrow.
At Spikkers’ death, however, we must give pause. The chapter has
continued the previous chapter’s short circuiting of linear narratives and
conventions of care with a queer, cyborgian openness, but at this point it
complicates this. Spikkers introduces to Billy the wish for home, a desire
that is both the openness of outer space and the closure of return to his
father’s homeland: in a gesture that combines both impulses and is overlaid
by a further desire for Billy, ‘Spikkers pointed up to a bright and steady star
close to the moon . . . “Holland,” he said, kissing my fingers, one by one by
one, and until my hand became a five-pointed star’ (129). This confuses
Billy’s ideas of home: he wonders if his home, Plymouth, is ‘nearer than
a Holland star – or easier to believe?’ (130). He comforts the dying Spikkers

28
The novel thus repeats the accepted (though now contested) version of Easter Island’s history;
however, that the people of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, devastated their forests to assist in building
the moai, or stone gods, has been recently challenged: see, for example, Christian M. Stevenson,
Cedric O. Puleston, Peter M. Vitousek, et al., ‘Variation in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) Land Use
Indicates Production and Population Peaks Prior to European Contact’, PNAS 112 (2015), 1025–30.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
118 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
with the thought of home, represented by the tall house on Spikkers’ Delft
tile but also signified by the night sky: ‘In the sky there is a star called
Holland and the tall wooden houses of Amsterdam are clear to be seen’
(139). And this is Billy’s journey too, for he looks forward, after Spikkers’
death, to being reunited with him in such a house – or, rather, to their souls
being reunited. The ‘white Bird [that] opens its wings’ (140) in the
chapter’s final line becomes a reference simultaneously to Spikkers’ soul
on its voyage of return to his fatherland and to Billy’s soul in anticipation of
his reunion with Spikker. The chapter ends, then, on a note of openness,
but this openness is now mingled with a nostalgic longing.
This is also what happens in the third and fourth chapters. In the novel’s
final tale, set in London, the third Billie is defined not as a journeyer but as
a castaway, and thus not as venturing into a queer future of potentiality and
openness but as stranded in the present; here, Billie’s surname of Crusoe
finally comes into its own, as she is ‘shipwrecked on the shore of human-
kind’ (148). This Billie is also figured not as a moral agent but as a moral
patient; indeed, she is positioned as the child. She is in search not of queer
love but of parental care, defined by the loss of her mother, who, young and
unmarried, was forced to abandon her as a baby. Obsessively seeking this
mother, Billie will ‘never stop looking’, and lives with the thought of her
mother as though ‘in an echo of another life’ (149). She thus calls to mind
less the impulse of queer love as signified by the previous incarnations of
Billie and Spike and more the nostalgic desire of Spikkers for his father’s
home. One must note, too, that in evoking the continued longing of the
child rather than the care of the parent, this Billie in particular constructs
care and love as trapped within the dyadic dimensions of parent–child
relationships.
In line with the intensity of Billie’s filial yearning, the Spike of this
vignette is hardly Billie’s soulmate. Indeed, she could be regarded as
inferior to the first Spike both physically and ethically. This Robo sapiens
is nothing more than a robotic head, developed to provide advice to the
MORE corporation: ‘She has no body because she won’t need one . . . to
take the planet-sized decisions that human beings are so bad at’ (158–9);
these are ‘neutral, objective decisions . . . for the global good’ (198).
Attuned to MORE’s corporate goals, this Spike believes in the possibility
of ‘the transition from the economics of greed to the economics of purpose’
and insists that the ‘economics of purpose is not about making money: it is
about realigning resources’ (164). The ‘economics of purpose’, part of
MORE’s ‘new world order’ of ‘modest and eco-conscious members’
(165), comes suspiciously to sound like an anthropocentric narrative of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
Identity, Coalition, and the Real 119
progress, in which ecological and social justice is translated into environ-
mental services and resource management. No surprise, then, that Billie is
aware that ‘Neither art nor love fits well into the economics of purpose, any
more than they fitted into the economics of greed. Any more than they fit
into economics at all’ (169). This Spike does not offer Billie the interven-
tion of queer love.
Alternative modes of desire and ethics do exist, but their potential is
frustrated in this narrative. Beyond Tech City, the MORE-controlled
zone where Billie and Spike live, is Wreck City, a ‘No Zone – no
insurance, no assistance, no welfare, no police’ (179); if Tech City
represents the economics of purpose, Wreck City promises something
like openness. Wreck City’s town centre – the Playa – is a carnivalesque
space that serves as meeting place, market square, performance ring,
‘fairground, bacchanal, dream’ (224), and is home to ‘twenty alternative
communities’ (207). Spike, having been taken to Wreck City by Billie
on an educational and experiential excursion, decides to join a group of
young lesbian vegans called Chic X (so-called because they regret the
damage done by the asteroid at Chicxulub, and therefore regret, unwit-
tingly and according to the novel’s twisted timeline, Captain
Handsome’s anthropocentric geoengineering). But any possibility for
queer transformation is half-hearted, to say the least. Spike’s sexual
encounter with one of the Chic Xs is a comic version of the cyborgian
epiphany experienced by the first Billie and is dismissed sarcastically by
the last Billie: ‘Great. The robot that was designed to become the world-
sage has had oral sex with a teenager called Nebraska and become
a drop-out free-love silicon guru’ (210).
This Billie’s rejection of cyborgian love emphasises her longing for
maternal love, and underlines this story’s contrast between the two.
Moreover, that this Billie wants a landing place rather than a journey
suggests, correspondingly, a recursive movement rather than a trajectory
of openness and possibility. Her default state, she recognises, is lone-
liness, and the ‘opposite of loneliness isn’t company, it’s return. A place
to return’ (175). Then, later, she realises that the landing place she seeks
‘isn’t a place at all: it’s a person, it’s you’ (200). In the first two stories,
the free-floating second-person pronoun seems to represent the ultimate
and unknown object of desire, before it is gradually revealed to be Spike
or Spikkers. In this story, ‘you’ is the first object of desire, the mother.
But, at the end of the story, when Billie is reunited with this original
love, this union happens in death: return collapses into finality. Shot by
MORE soldiers, Billie experiences a phantasmal out-of-body sensation

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
120 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
of walking to the stone farmhouse to which her mother used to walk
when pregnant with her and, at the gate to the farmhouse, she is met by
her dead mother. At this point, it is difficult to read in the third Billie’s
death anything like openness, for it speaks primarily of return and
regress.29
Nonetheless, Billie’s reunion with the mother repays a closer reading.
Just before she dies, Billie repeats the words of the first Billie and Spike:
A quantum universe – neither random nor determined. A universe of
potentialities, waiting for an intervention to affect the outcome.
Love is an intervention.
Why do we not choose it? (244)
Could it be that the discovery of the mother is as much an intervention as
the first Billie’s journey to openness and cyborgian love? Several critics have
remarked on the novel’s equivalence of maternal love and queer love, and
the orientation of both towards the future: McCulloch finds that Billie’s
reunion with her mother is yet another example of ‘the capacity of human
love that transcends divisions’ and Susana Onega proposes simply that the
reunion is ‘pregnant with possibilities’.30 As Susan Watkins notes, the
novel avoids ‘the cliché of maternal salvation’ by investing in ‘cyclism’.31
What these commentaries miss, however, is the complex way in which the
narrative transforms nostalgic desire for the mother into a radical and
future-oriented desire, and replaces the dyadic bond with a very different
dynamic. What they miss, indeed, is the way in which the mother herself
expresses a cyborgian rather than a closed and parochial form of care.
For this mother is the first Billie. The farm to which the third Billie
returns, the home her mother used wishfully to label ‘our house’ (156), is
29
Squire explicitly figures this as a retreat from the kind of posthuman solution proffered by the first
Spike: ‘The novel’s sense of irresolution, as Billie withdraws from all networks into her narcissistic
death, demonstrates a failure of the human to grasp the meanings of the posthuman’; Squire,
‘The Subject Reconsidered’, p. 149.
30
McCulloch, Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction, p. 72; Susana Onega, ‘The Trauma
Paradigm and the Ethics of Affect in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods’, in Susana Onega and
Jean-Michael Ganteau (eds.), Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2011), p. 297.
31
Susan Watkins, ‘Future Shock: Rewriting the Apocalypse in Contemporary Women’s Fiction’, LIT:
Literature Interpretation Theory 23 (2012), 127. That this section of the novel is fixated on the
abandoned child rather than on mature queer experience may be relatable to Winterson’s belated
search for her biological mother and her discovery in 2007, when she had just completed the novel,
that her mother had nursed her till Winterson’s adoption at the age of six months. Winterson herself
relates the erotic desire of which she writes to time spent with her birth mother and her unconscious
desire for her: ‘I realised that what I had written in The Powerbook was not about a lover but someone
else. I was effectively asking: “What have you done with my mother?”’; see Stuart Jeffries, ‘Jeanette
Winterson: I Thought of Suicide’, The Guardian (22 February 2010).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
Identity, Coalition, and the Real 121
identifiable – with its apple tree, water barrel, and gate – as the first Billie’s.
That farm was, for the original Billie, ‘the last of its line – like an ancient
ancestor everyone forgot . . . a message in a bottle from another time’ (13).
But, lest this return is read as a nostalgic embrace of an unfulfillable idyll of
the past, it is worth recalling the extent to which the first Billie was troped
by her ability to reach outward rather than back, defined by her inter-
planetary voyage and transgressive relationship with Spike. Moreover, the
first Billie had always looked forward, even in the guise of motherhood.
Facing her own death, she had remembered ‘Not the stories with
a beginning, a middle and an end, but the stories that began again, the
ones that twisted away, like a bend in the road’ (106), and had mused,
‘Much of what I have done lies unfinished . . . because it had a life of its
own that continues without me. Children, I suppose, are always unfinished
business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as
another continent’ (106). The first Billie’s construction of maternal care
points to the life of the child as a life that is inevitably independent of its
mother, as a new world and a new story.
Much has been made of the effect of the novel’s emphasis on repetition,
what Watkins calls ‘cyclism’, with its suggestion of a closed loop rather
than an opening up; however, I would contend that that repetition occurs
in the spirit of acknowledgement and critique, and thus with regard for
possibility and potential. The novel is, in Winterson’s own words, about
our ‘endlessly making the same mistakes’.32 Merola finds that, ‘by utilizing
the formal strategies of repetition and intertexuality [sic] and by construct-
ing a looping narrative that offers no closure and no escape, Winterson
positions the reader in a melancholy, dysphoric space’.33 Nonetheless, what
Merola characterises as melancholy need not be unproductive, and
Winterson’s demonstration of our tendency to repeat our mistakes is not
an uncritical one. In displaying the third Billie’s wish for the mother, the
novel enables an acknowledgement of the power of the nostalgic yearning
for return, while continuing to affirm the need for radical openness; most
importantly of all, it points to the revelation of trauma and a breaking of
the cycle. For the novel, it could be argued, points to an ethics of the Real
in Sandilands’s sense. As Rine suggests, the third Billie’s longing for the
mother situates her in the context of ‘a Lacanian reading of split-
subjectivity’.34 Rine reads Billie’s lack as productive of agency; yet, while

32
Sonya Andermahr, Jeanette Winterson (Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2009), p. 131.
33
Merola, ‘Materializing a Geotraumatic and Melancholy Anthropocene’, 130.
34
Rine, ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention’, p. 83.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
122 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
her interpretation depends on a straightforward connection of loss with
desire and hence with creativity – the ‘loss of the mother is what gives Billie
desire and what allows her to write as an expression of that desire’ – I would
suggest instead that it is the delineation of the contours of loss and desire
that is truly transformative.35 Through Billie, the novel enacts and
acknowledges the trauma that compels us to desire the future in very
particular and nostalgic ways, but it does so in order to caution against
the constant repetition that this engenders. It does so, in other words, to
break the cycle and to practise the love interventions that are celebrated
throughout the novel.
The novel’s display of hybrid identity not only queers expectations of
ethics of care; it also queers notions of reader identification and empathy.
For one thing, the reader, initially invited to identify and sympathise with
the first Billie, finds herself shifting identity as the novel shifts narrative,
moving in and out of narrators and their experiences, and being further
destabilised by the third Billie’s position as both a character in the novel
and as another reader of it – after all, this Billie discovers the manuscript
of ‘The Stone Gods’ on the London Underground. For another, the plot
proceeds not so much in terms of focalised or narrated experience but in
lyrical intonations of desire, exhibiting what Jean-Michel Ganteau has
perceptively labelled Winterson’s ‘baroque aesthetics’.36 In keeping with
her emphasis on transcendence, Winterson situates her stylistic experi-
ments within an idealised notion of the power of story (as Andermahr
notes, ‘she disparages realism with its focus on narrative storytelling, yet
extols storytelling as a human need and aesthetic principle’).37
The novel’s descriptions of love read as free-floating assertions, rather
than as plot- or character-driven expressions or opinions. Because they
are statements about the power of literature and love together, they offer
metatextual guidelines to the reader on how to experience the novel. So,
for example:
Every second the universe divides into possibilities and most of these
possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse – there is more than one
reading. The story won’t stop, can’t stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for
an intervention that changes what will happen next.
Love is an intervention. (83)

35
Ibid., p. 81.
36
Jean-Michel Ganteau, ‘“Rise from the Ground like Feathered Mercury”: Baroque Citations in the
Fiction of Peter Ackroyd and Jeanette Winterson’, Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical
Aesthetics 5 (2005), 193.
37
Andermahr, Jeanette Winterson, p. 27.

Identity and the Agonal Moment

This echoes the Arendtian view of identity and agency, which, as we
have seen, is of identity as formed in coalitional and dialogic action, and
of such action as a space of (unpredictable) ethical potential. Sandilands,
paraphrasing Arendt, suggests that ‘action is the capacity for speech and
deed’, where speech and deed are productive of identity.40 What is
revealed, then, is not an essential identity, lying passive or latent and
waiting to be expressed; identity is unknown prior to – and thus made
in – the expression of it. When Arendt states that in ‘acting and
speaking, men reveal who they are, reveal actively their unique personal
identities’, she is also at pains to clarify that such identity ‘remains
hidden from the person himself’ and is ‘visible only to those he
encounters’.41 This, then, is what allows her to declare: ‘With word or
deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is
like a second birth.’42 Identity is not just disclosed but discovered –
including by the individual herself – in reaching out to others.

38
Rine, ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention’, p. 78.
39
That is, care here is ontological (agential) rather than ontic (the grounds on which agency occurs).
As Squire puts it, the novel ‘may depict love as an intervention; nonetheless, this intervention
operates within an endless multiplicity of possible givens and outcomes, always contributing but
never occupying any single primacy’; Squire, ‘The Subject Reconsidered’, p. 142. For more on care
and love as ontological, see Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘Environmental Care Ethics: Notes toward a New
Materialist Critique’, symplokē 21.1–2 (2013), 125–35.
40
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 155. 41 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 179–80.
42
Ibid., p. 176.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
124 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
Nevertheless, Arendt’s insistence that identity is made in the public act
of disclosure and discovery should not be mistaken for a conception of
identity formation in a moral or ethical vacuum. One need recall that, for
Arendt, identity both emerges from and contributes to a public and
communal realm. Thus, action results in ‘power’, a word that for Arendt
has positive connotations and betokens the potential of social action for
social good. Indeed, power is distinct from ‘force’, which is the mono-
polistic exercise of an individual’s strength over others and thus involves
‘violence’.43 As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl explains, for Arendt, ‘power and
violence are opposites’.44 The combination of force and violence are the
markers of ‘tyranny’, a form of government that takes place in isolation
from its people and is, hence, ultimately impotent.45 That ‘Tyranny
prevents the development of power’ means that, even while it diminishes
or disables power among its citizens, it is also unable to accrue power to
itself.46
With such a conception of identity (as shaped in and by public action
and conversation), the relationship of ethical agency (as concomitant with
identity, since identity is always dialogic and coalitional) to the public and
the private requires some reformulation. Identity on these terms is no
private phenomenon awaiting its unveiling, but is equivalent to the agency
initiated, declared, and practised in public; as Sandilands states: ‘Action
does not cement the private self but disrupts it in the creation of something
entirely new, something that cannot be grounded or predicted in private
life.’47 As Sandilands explains the Arendtian view, ‘in private life, the self is
fragmented and conflicted. Only through performative appearance in
public, in the presence of others, does it attain identity, a sense of who it
is as distinct from the constraints of what one might call the identities of
private life.’48 One could, after Young-Bruehl, distinguish between public
action and private behaviour; Young-Bruehl clarifies, ‘action is quite
different from behavior, which is repetitive and habitual, showing what
people have become, not who they can become in the performance of
action, which forces them to rise to an occasion’.49 For this reason, Sherilyn
MacGregor’s analysis of ecofeminism and activism identifies the need for
a ‘feminist ecological citizenship’ that is a reimagining rather than ‘an

43
Ibid., pp. 199–202.
44
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 90;
original emphasis.
45
Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 202. 46 Ibid., p. 202.
47
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 160. 48 Ibid., p. 159.
49
Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters, p. 87.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
Identity and the Agonal Moment 125
extension of women’s private roles’.50 This suggests, among other things,
the need to dislodge ecomaternalist positions grounded in domestic and
familial care, positions that, as I have argued in chapters 2 and 3, are
proximal to parochial and paternalistic attitudes that, when practised
unreflectingly, might express themselves in resentment, self-interest, or
possessiveness.
The Arendtian concept of identity also invites a closer scrutiny of the
public and performative moments that are productive of identity – those
points of self-declaration and exchange in the realm of public and political
action. Sandilands posits an Arendtian-inflected model for ecofeminist
identity-making in which the political subject attains a sense of self in
performance, and clarifies: ‘Arendt herself uses the word performance to
describe the speech process by which the actor reveals her unique personal
identity in relation to the common world.’51 This revelatory instance,
Sandilands reminds us, is ‘the agonal moment of Arendt’s public’ (the
agonal here referring to the contestatory nature of self- or, more accurately,
identity-formation in relation to others).52 In Young-Bruehl’s words, the
revelation of identity through action ‘requires not skill or strength or
application of violent force for achieving a result, but courage in the face
of the unknown; action is risk’.53 It is a risky because entirely radical
undertaking – the bringing forth of an identity full of unpredictability
and promise. According to Sandilands, the appeal of such an agonal vision
is that it frees political and ethical agency from existing constraints, such as
norms to do with gender, sexuality, or race (it allows for
a ‘noncorrespondence between social location and political action’), or
business-as-usual, bureaucratised politics (‘it does not respect existing
boundaries’).54 It possesses, in other words, true democratic potential.
At the same time, however, what is risked in the agonal moment –
conceived as identity (re)birth, and with it, uncertainty – deserves some
comment. Following Seyla Benhabib, Sandilands identifies two tendencies
in Arendtian theorisations of public life – what Benhabib calls the

50
Sherilyn MacGregor, Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), p. 5.
51
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 159, citing Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 179; Sandilands
makes clear that this conception of performativity differs from Judith Butler’s: in Arendt, the
performance is ‘the only moment at which an individual can be said to exist (the rest of the time,
she or he is deﬁned by what, not who, she or he is), whereas, for Butler, parodic performance relies
on the careful and conscious repetition of precisely the categories through which an individual is
deﬁned (the what) in order to disrupt them’, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 160.
52
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 159. 53 Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters, p. 89.
54
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, p. 16.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
126 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
‘agonistic’ and the ‘associational’.55 Both seem compatible with Arendt’s
emphasis on the collaborative, dialogic, and coalitional nature of action,
but, at the same time, each exists in tension with the other, to the point
that, as Shmuel Lederman puts it, a ‘heated controversy’ exists in Arendtian
studies over this apparent ‘self-contradiction’.56 While the agonal model
privileges extraordinary, noteworthy, and, one might say, heroic entries
into the public realm, the associational ideal also evident in Arendt’s work
focuses on commonplace and egalitarian participation for all; as Sandilands
acknowledges, the agonal vision is vulnerable to charges of individualism
and elitism.57 Indeed, François Debrix and Alexander Barder have recently
argued that Arendt’s agonal politics, ‘taking place in a space allegedly freed
from sovereign decisionism and valued for its performative manifestation’,
lends itself to the logic of drastic and even brutal regime change and
governance (even while they acknowledge that Arendt’s chosen emphasis
is on ‘a public sphere that . . . needs to remain plural, free and, more
importantly, contingent’).58 For Debrix and Barder, the agonal model
unwittingly ‘reveals how tenuous the boundaries can be between main-
taining or, in fact, inventing a political domain and destroying it (as well as
others or enemies in the same process) by having recourse to the perfor-
mative acts of heroic public agents who are left in charge, without any
limitation or safeguard, of devising or realizing new political
possibilities’.59 What they call ‘agonal sovereignty’ names the latter,
destructive scenario.60 One could say that Arendt’s agonal actor, in
Debrix and Barder’s analysis, while initially committed to the ‘power’ of
public action, is not immune from a turn to ‘violence’, ‘force’, and,
consequently, ‘tyranny’.
To apply an Arendtian understanding of identity to ethical agency
oriented towards the human and non-human future – a future consisting
of moral patients that are necessarily public rather than private – is to
recognise that such obligations might call forth an agonal moment in
which a public identity is created that is distinct from the private self.
Yet, it is also to perceive that the agonal moment – which I take to refer not
just to the formulation of identity but the reformulation of private modes
55
Ibid., p. 162; Seyla Benhabib, ‘Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition and
Jürgen Habermas’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1992), pp. 77–8.
56
Shmuel Lederman, ‘Agonism and Deliberation in Arendt’, Constellations 21.3 (2014), 327–8.
57
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, pp. 161–2.
58
François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder, Beyond Biopolitics? Theory, Violence, and Horror in World
Politics (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 35, 38.
59
Ibid., p. 38. 60 Ibid., p. 38.

The Carhullan Army

Hall’s novel juxtaposes two utopian visions against each other, the first
implying the kind of motherhood environmentalism or ecomaternalism
described in detail in chapter 3 and the second requiring an ecological
citizenship of political action and public commitment to a cause. In the
shift from one to the other, the narrator not only experiences fluxes in
identity but makes and unmakes identity in response to a very public call to
act on behalf of an endangered future. In so doing, she risks surrendering
agency altogether to a violent and militant tyranny disguised as an ethical
call to arms.
Hall came to attention as a young British novelist of promise when
her second book, The Electric Michelangelo (2004) was shortlisted for the
Man Booker Prize; already, her first book, Haweswater (2003) had received
critical praise. The Carhullan Army (2007), published in North America as
Daughters of the North (2008), also won acclaim. Hall’s current body of
work is difficult to categorise, ranging as it does from the historical settings
of her first two novels to the immediate political present of The Wolf Border
(2015) and the temporal shifting of How to Paint a Dead Man (2009).
The Carhullan Army, meanwhile, takes place in a dystopian future Britain;
indeed, the prizes it has won – the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and
a nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke Award – suggest its ready accep-
tance as science fiction. In general terms, Hall may be regarded as a writer
of place and its effect on people, with all her novels – even The Electric
Michelangelo with its evocation of Coney Island and How to Paint a Dead
Man with its setting in mid-twentieth-century Italy – referencing the
remote landscapes of Cumbria in northwest England, where she was born.
The action of The Carhullan Army, like Haweswater, is set almost
entirely in Cumbria’s mountainous Lake District, with its descriptions
intended to be topographically accurate. It takes place in a future marked
by food scarcity and rising water levels brought about by climate change,
when, ‘of all the English traditions to have been compromised, the weather
was the saddest’ (6). Hall has indicated that the novel was inspired by her
experience of the 2005 Cumbrian floods centred on the town of Carlisle, an

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
128 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
environmental disaster that, as she has noted, is part of the larger picture of
global warming and rising temperatures: ‘There are reasons for [the flood-
ing]. The snow doesn’t hold in the uplands. It melts very quickly because
temperatures are slightly warmer, so we know that we’re not going to have
a gentle trickle down of snow into the rivers; we’re going to have flash
floods and overwhelming levels of thaw.’61 In Hall’s novel, the devastation
and its impact on infrastructure and agriculture have led to the rise of
a paranoid dictatorship known as the Authority. Citizens registered with
the Authority live in impoverished, urban communities, circumscribed in
all aspects of their private lives – housing, employment, mobility, and even
reproduction. Meanwhile, those who have remained in the increasingly
wild spaces without are disregarded as ‘Unofficials’ (15). The novel’s nar-
rator leaves her husband in the Authority settlement of Rith (based on the
town of Penrith) to join an all-female community living in self-sufficient
exile on a remote farm in the Cumbrian mountains called Carhullan.
Carhullan is led by Jackie Nixon, a tough, mercurial figure who eventually
inspires the women to launch a bold guerrilla attack on the Authority.
Carhullan’s appeal is crystallised through Jackie’s charisma, and both are
framed by the narrator’s infatuation with the woman and her land. From
the outset, the reader knows the narrator only as ‘Sister’, which is the name
she is given in Carhullan, and knows also that the attack has failed, since
the narrative is presented as Sister’s fragmented and partially recovered
confession to the Authority.
The novel posits two responses to the dystopian regime: both are, in
their way, utopian, inasmuch as they are grounded in the belief in a better,
alternative social order. Although they are premised on the same invest-
ment in living close to the land, eschewing technology and machinery,
and – most of all – privileging (feminist) community over (masculinist)
competition, their modes of execution differ, a difference that eventually
places the two in conflict. The one, embodied in the Carhullan farm, is
centred on withdrawal to an isolationalist retreat, on achieving a true
utopia in the sense of a distinct topos or place; the other, expressed in
Jackie’s martial offence against the Authority, is premised on a sense of
mission, the need to attack the dystopian state and replace it with a utopian
one. They reiterate, then, a crucial distinction in commentaries on literary
utopias (a difference I discuss further in chapter 5) between static and

61
‘Sarah Hall – The Carhullan Army’, Bookclub, BBC Radio 4, 9 December 2010; the floods were the
worst seen in Carlisle since 1822, see ‘Floods in Carlisle – January 2005', Met Office,
29 October 2012, www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/interesting/jan2005floods.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
Identity and the Agonal Moment 129
kinetic utopias, that is, between ‘the classical utopia of static perfection and
the “modern” utopia characterised by a continuous process of political and
social improvement’.62 In Iain Robinson’s insightful reading of the novel,
whereas the Carhullan community presents on the one hand as a ‘flawed or
failing utopia’, Jackie’s bellicose solution is ‘a militant attempt to provide
an alternative to the dystopian situation’.63 The novel considers the ideo-
logical and geographical limits of its separatist utopia, and depicts the final
dismantling of its borders as part of a wider strategic battle for not just
survival but supremacy. Finally, then, having committed to a utopian
ideology, Sister unwittingly participates in the tyrannical execution of
this ideology.
Initially, Carhullan presents as a tempting vision of an alternative green
utopia in the static, escapist sense, a stark contrast to the techno-dystopia
that Sister flees. The Authority has chosen to concentrate its people in
towns, all the better to control them and to use them as cheap industrial
labour. Sister associates her once like-minded but now apathetic husband,
Andrew, with the unremitting grind of living under the Authority and
working in its factories: he has been ‘reduced to the base mechanism of
getting by’ (30). When Sister finds her way to the open country of the Lake
District, her sense of emancipation is more than just about liberty from the
Authority; it is about the rediscovery of an emphatically ‘natural’ subjec-
tivity and agency. The reader takes in the transition from urban devasta-
tion to pastoral idyll through Sister’s eyes. Indeed, in their readings of the
novel, Deborah Lilley and Astrid Bracke emphasise how the pastoral
haunts and gives meaning to the dystopian landscape through which Sister
travels.64 The abandoned cars she passes while on the run have been
reclaimed by animals, plants, and weather, the ‘observances of airbags
and seatbelts, stereo systems’ and ‘bright paint’ defeated by rust, mildew,
and nests in their engines. These corroded symbols of
technological redundancy – ‘husks of a privileged era’ (20) of fuel and
highway maintenance – are implicitly compared to both the government
and her husband, and both are being left behind: ‘I knew that I had done

62
Patrick Parrinder, Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientiﬁc Revolution to Brave New World
and Beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2015), p. 4.
63
Iain Robinson, ‘“You Just Know When the World is About to Break Apart”: Utopia, Dystopia and
New Global Uncertainties in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army’, in Siân Adiseshiah and
Rupert Hildyard (eds.), Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (Basingstoke:
Palgrave–Macmillan, 2013), p. 202.
64
Deborah Lilley, ‘Unsettling Environments: New Pastoral in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and
Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army’, Green Letters 20.1 (2016), 60–71; Astrid Bracke, Climate Crisis and
the Twenty-First-Century British Novel (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
130 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
the right thing by leaving Andrew, leaving the harsh orchestration of the
town, the dismal salvaged thing that the administered country had
become’ (21).
Carhullan, according to this logic, is the locus of pastoral purity.
The transition from dystopia to utopia is boosted by Sister’s remembered
experiences of the women of Carhullan. Sister knows of the farm as ‘a truly
green initiative’ that ‘had never been built with the outside world in mind’
(54), an assessment founded on girlhood memories of the women of
Carhullan, who used to visit her town to sell their produce – homegrown,
wholesome vegetables, butter, and honey that are very different from the
‘cubes of meat and fruit, from the shipments of tins sent from America’ (31)
sold by the Authority and unthinkingly consumed by Andrew. Each time
Sister ‘opened a tin and transferred the gelatinous contents into a bowl’,
she would think ‘of the farm’s bright vegetables on the market stall a decade
before’ (52). When she does reach the farm, her first proper meal is a hearty
porridge and ‘the most delicious fruit I had tasted for years’ (83). Likewise,
her adolescent infatuation with Jackie Nixon is based on Jackie’s indigene-
ity: of old Cumbrian stock, ‘the Border Nixons’ (49), she appears in the
photographs in Sister’s saved newspaper cuttings as ‘hard-cast, like granite’
(49); upon their first meeting, her pale grey eyes seem to be ‘the colour of
slate riverbeds’ and enforce the impression that ‘that the territory had
somehow gone into the making of her’ (78). Most importantly of all,
Carhullan’s utopia is identified with both environmental sustainability
and female agency. Sister thinks of it, with its waterwheel, vegetable
gardens, orchard, and fishery, as ‘grandly holistic, a truly green initiative’
(54), while the news reports quote Jackie’s beliefs that, too often, women
‘endorse the manmade competition between ourselves that disunites us,
stripping us of our true ability’ and her declaration that ‘It’s time for a new
society’ (51). Sister’s anticipation of, journey towards, and first experience
of Carhullan establish a confluence of closeness to the land, authenticity of
self, and pure womanhood.
Carhullan, as land that is solely and truly female, stands in juxtaposition
with the masculinity of the Authority’s towns, implied not just through the
Authority’s male leadership – a figurehead king and a ‘dangerous’ and
‘power hungry’ (25) man named Powell – but through the complicity of
the unsympathetic and unquestioning Andrew. As Sister makes the ardu-
ous trek to Carhullan, she appears to travel from female objectification
under a masculinist agenda to female subjectivity in kinship with a female
landscape: the journey is troped as a rediscovery of the power of her body,
in which the reader partakes, thanks to a slowly paced, lyrical vocabulary.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
Identity and the Agonal Moment 131
Sister describes the environment as endowing her with a heightened and
corporeal experience of selfhood: first, ‘I felt the arrival of a new calmness,
an assurance of my own company . . . I was aware of my own warm
predominance in the environment, my inhabited skin, my being.
I suddenly felt myself again, a self I had not been for so long’ (41); then,
‘as I stood and looked in the direction of the summits, I felt dressed in my
own muscles, and ballasted by my sense of physicality’ (42).
The female body – in this case, Sister’s body – becomes the ground of
a transformation in identity, as it moves from being the site of male control
to female agency. The most damning motif of the Authority’s power and
Andrew’s collusion with it is the government-issue contraceptive coil that
is inserted in women, including Sister, in order to regulate reproduction
and population. That it signifies the ultimate violation of Sister is made
patently clear through a series of episodes: the painful fitting from a male
doctor although Sister had asked to be seen by a woman; Andrew’s arousal
by the device and the unwelcome sex that follows; his dismissal of it as
‘obsessing over [her] maternal rights’ (33); and the humiliating spot check
of Sister’s device by government monitors in the back of an Authority
cruiser, an incident whose lack of detail but considerable effect on Sister –
it is what first inspires her to go to Carhullan – only heighten the sense of
trauma and threat. When Andrew insists that she be ‘complicit in Britain’s
attempts to rebuild herself’, her angry rebuke presses home the point that
the brutalisation of her body functions metaphorically to suggest the
ecocidal degradation of the land: ‘She’s a female, is she, this country
that’s been fucked over’ (31). The regulator takes on added poignancy as
a contaminant to the apparently organic sense of self she develops at
Carhullan. There, the device ‘felt exactly as it was: an alien implant, an
invader in my body’ (90), and it is removed very soon after her arrival.
The device, then, is an important part of the novel’s presentation of Sister
in both literal and figurative terms. The reader is invited to share Sister’s
experiences as both site and symbol of alternative powers, and to anticipate
that her recuperation at Carhullan will present a utopian, (eco)feminist
challenge to a broader agenda of exploitation.
For the device also raises the questions of motherhood and its conjunc-
tion with female autonomy. At a casual glance, Carhullan is a site of female
control over reproduction, in keeping with the novel’s initial identification
of it as a utopian alternative. The Authority’s regulation of reproduction –
its infringement of Sister’s ‘maternal rights’ and its rendering of her as
a ‘sterile subject’ (41) – contrasts with Carhullan’s ability to create and
support new generations of its community. When Sister catches sight of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
132 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
a baby at the farm, the use of restricted point of view and gradual revelation
of this information establishes it as climactic and significant: ‘It took
a moment for me to comprehend what I had seen. My eyes were still
watery and smarting, but they were not mistaken. There was a newborn at
Carhullan’ (80–1). Sister then forms an immediate connection with
a young woman called Megan, the oldest of Carhullan’s second generation,
whose pregnant mother had come to the farm to escape an abusive
husband. Megan describes herself as ‘multi-mothered’ by the women,
raised as ‘an experiment . . . to see what they could do without the influence
of nem’ (107). The invented word ‘nem’ – ‘men turned round and made to
face the other way’ (107) – is intended to reflect back onto men their
exploitation of women. Both the description and the context of the
‘experiment’ confirm the marginalisation of men: the farm’s other children
are the offspring of Carhullan women and a small number of men, who are
allowed to live on a satellite settlement and obtain food and fuel in
exchange for doing odd jobs for Carhullan; any boys are sent to the
men’s crofts when they reach puberty. The community is, then, an
insistently homosocial space, and – while it is not necessarily homosexual –
it is a space in which rich, loving relationships develop between women,
whether romantic (as for Sister and her lover Shruti) or maternal (as with
Megan’s upbringing). This female-only space is correlative with women’s
care for the land. It is a version, that is, of an ecomaternalist utopia.
Ultimately, however, the novel suggests that this sanctuary of care
cannot provide a long-term future in practical or political terms.
An ecofeminist counter-ideology operates at Carhullan, one that requires
open resistance to the Authority and active engagement with other com-
munities. There occurs in the novel, as Robinson notes, ‘a shift in the
nature of the counter-narrative offered by Carhullan, from social experi-
ment to martial resistance’.65 This is already signalled in Jackie’s warning to
Sister on their first meeting that ‘we’re going to have to change’ (98), and in
Jackie’s sarcasm about the settlement’s utopian credentials: ‘She did not try
to describe Carhullan as any kind of Utopia’ and ‘when she had referred to
Shangri-la . . . it had been with a note of irony’, so that Sister wonders
whether she ‘might have failed in her original plan’ (100). Gradually, both
Sister and the reader realise that Jackie disparages the other women’s wish
to ‘just bolt the door. Hole the fuck up. And pray to be left alone’ (116); she
intends to ‘start again, but differently’ (156). Indeed, the history of
Carhullan, going back to its founding by Jackie and her lover Veronique,

65
Robinson, ‘“You Just Know When the World is About to Break Apart”’, p. 209.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
Identity and the Agonal Moment 133
suggests a split in its utopian personality – a contrast between Jackie’s
hardness and Veronique’s warm ‘optimism’ (156), a difference that is part
of an ‘oppositional gravity’ (115) in the community and that can be mapped
onto the novel’s two versions of utopia as private sanctuary and as political
project. Having had to shoot Veronique in a violent act of mercy killing,
Jackie has ‘killed her love with her lover, and cured herself of human
weakness’ (158), and plans to create utopia anew, this time through the
army of the novel’s title. The Authority’s decision to spread its jurisdiction
to the country’s unofficial zones only confirms Jackie’s conviction that, in
order truly to last, Carhullan’s ethos must be defended and disseminated.
This marks the narrative’s transition from a tale of utopian retreat to one of
utopian operation.
This militant brand of utopianism seems to promise an ethics for
and on behalf of the future of the country, an ethics of public action
rather than the insulated and interiorised care that would seem to be
promised by the farm. It is based, then, not on an idea of the women’s
innate caring ability or identity but on an identity forged in the
women’s communal debates and responses to Jackie’s fiery speeches
as leader. What this requires is both the unmaking and making of
identity, namely, Sister’s.
Thus, from the point of Sister’s arrival at the farm, Jackie works to
disassemble her sense of a stable self. Jackie’s confinement of her in the
tiny, windowless ‘dog box’ (70) seems a shocking contradiction to the idyll
that Sister had earlier imagined Carhullan to be, but it is also part of an
initiation that completes the self-renewal that began with Sister’s escape
from the Authority. Sister realises, in her confinement, that the experience
is ‘letting me break apart, so I could use the blunt edges of my reason to
stave in my mind, and the jagged ones to lance open the blisters of my
insanity’ (74); the result is ‘a kind of suicide’, the realisation that she is
‘nothing’, ‘void to the core’, and ‘an unmade person’ (94). All this is in
keeping with the stripping away of her old name and imposition of the
appellation of ‘Sister’. Here, the breaking down of self is a prerequisite for
the assumption of a new identity.
Sister’s identity-making occurs in what might be read as an agonal
moment. The farm holds regular ‘formal debates and discussion that ran
to order’ (109), at which Jackie makes the case for dissolving the farm and
initiating armed resistance to the Authority. She makes her argument,
strikingly, by singling out Sister to decide in public if she will join the
army’s action. Of this moment, Sister states:

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
134 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
I don’t remember what I said. The words were lost to me even as I spoke
them. I felt Jackie’s arm on my shoulder, acknowledging my allegiance,
binding me to her. I felt the flow of energy leaving her frame and filling
mine, circulating with my own blood through the vessels of my body. She
had always understood what my potential was, the apparatus she could work
with. (162)
Sister’s identity as a soldier for Carhullan’s ideals is enacted in this instance,
and emerges both as a performance before the others and in coalition with
Jackie, a coalition emphasised by the image of corporeal intermingling.
This is, importantly, seen by Sister as both a dissolution and a constitution
of identity. Sister’s initial feeling is that she is ‘a piece in a game [Jackie] was
playing’ (162) and her sense that she is ‘the apparatus [Jackie] could work
with’ (162) even echoes the Authority’s dehumanisation of her. Eventually,
however, where Sister had been objectified by the contraceptive device
planted in her, she comes to feel, after this moment of public declaration,
and through the performance that is her army training, that her body is
a ‘matchless device’ (170). Sister then claims of Jackie: ‘We knew she was
deconstructing the old disabled versions of our sex, and that her ruthless-
ness was adopted because those constructs were built to endure’ (187).
The identity that Sister makes, in word and action, is the ‘anima’ (204) she
sees in her mirror, suggesting an activator of Carhullan’s utopian ideals
rather than a passive consumer of them.
Here, the crucial apparatus in Sister’s performance of identity is her
father’s gun. It is taken by Sister to Carhullan as a sign of her willingness to
contribute to its cause and is returned to her when she is ready to play a role
in the army. The gun represents an adherence to Carhullan’s principles of
female solidarity; it signals Sister’s and the other women’s willingness to
stand their ground and refusal ‘to submit to survive’ (116). In another
performance of action – an exchange with Jackie – Sister is asked if holding
her father’s gun would have ‘ma[d]e any difference’ to her ability to prevent
the insertion of the contraceptive device. Sister’s answer – ‘Yes, it would’
(118) – underlines the gun’s potential in her assumption of agency. But, of
course, the gun can be no innocent symbol of female agency; like the all-
female constitution of the Carhullan army, it serves to remind the reader of
the contingency of gender identities. The gun is a marker of patriarchy and
patrilineage – it is her great-grandfather’s rifle – but, crucially, Sister
appropriates it. Similarly, she, Jackie, and the other Carhullan women
appropriate soldier identities to defeat the Authority.
All this, however, should alert the reader to another possibility, that
Sister’s agonal moment is really subsumed into Jackie’s supremely agonal

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
Identity and the Agonal Moment 135
invention of herself as leader or, as Debrix and Barder might put it, ‘agonal
warrior’.66 Jackie, more than Sister, shows how identity can be formed in
the agonal moment and put to use as political agency. After all, Sister and
her gun are really Jackie’s apparatuses in her reinvention – tellingly, Sister
cannot even remember the details of the speech and deed that constituted
her entry into public action. The reader is reminded at several points in the
novel that Jackie has ‘many faces’, that she ‘passed through arrangements of
humour and pragmatism, lightness and invective, as she presented herself,
as she covered those matters she wanted to discuss’ (86). With each
‘rotation of her personality’ (157), it is Jackie who shows how identity
might be made out of public action and, more strikingly, performance.
The ethical potential for posterity that Jackie’s identity offers wavers
between what Arendt distinguishes as the opposite poles of power and
tyranny. On the one hand, there are hints that the political vision of the
Carhullan army encompasses an enlarged view of futurity, specifically,
a desire to transmit and transfer its ecological feminist ideas to posterity.
Built into the narrative is an insistence that it is something to be passed
down. The text’s prefatory paraphernalia identify it as Sister’s incomplete
statement as a prisoner of the Authority, a status that is clarified at the end of
the narrative in Jackie’s dying instructions to Sister: ‘Tell them everything
about us, Sister. Make them understand what we did and who we were’
(207). The text is Sister’s oral testimony to Carhullan’s ethos, and thus
available to be read metatextually as a record of a political and ethical effort
to change the future for ecofeminist ends, a manifesto of Carhullan’s utopian
action. On the other hand, however, Jackie’s ethos is hardly life-affirming in
the present, as is demonstrated, for example, by her willingness to kill
deserters in order to safeguard the military operation. The novel’s conclusion
also seems to undermine any sense of future potential – after the army’s brave
occupation of Rith for fifty-three days, it is defeated and Jackie killed.
As Robinson notes: ‘The possibility of utopia, or hope, in the brutal near
future presented by Hall, gives way to fundamentalism and violence as an
ideology, a response to oppression that is ultimately self-defeating’.67
The agonal opportunity for ethical power becomes, instead, the exercise of
what Debrix and Barder call agonal sovereignty; agonal sovereignty as violent
tyranny is, as Arendt might argue, ultimately impotent.
This contrast between Jackie’s utopian vision as one of power on the
one hand and tyranny on the other pivots on whether Sister truly

66
Debrix and Barder, Beyond Biopolitics?, p. 41.
67
Robinson, ‘“You Just Know When the World is About to Break Apart”’, p. 206.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:22:23, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.005
136 Identity, Ethical Agency, and Radical Posterity
assumes identity and agency. The agonal birth turns, tragically, into
the destruction rather than constitution of identity – indeed, it recalls
what Arendt famously recognised as the atomisation of individuals and
the prevention of coalitional identity that precedes the totalitarian
establishment of ‘mass society’.68 One could go so far as to argue
that Jackie’s ideology, resting on the eradication rather than coalitional
creation of identity, comes to resemble not just the violence and force
of tyranny, but the evil of what Arendt identified as totalitarianism.
For Arendt, totalitarian movements depend on driving ‘their members
to the point of complete loss of individual claims and ambition . . . and
succeed in extinguishing individual identity permanently and not just
for the moment of collective heroic action’.69 Sister’s identity, and
with it the potential for ethical agency for now and for posterity,
flicker briefly as heroic endeavour but are subsumed into the instru-
ments of ideology.
The Stone Gods and The Carhullan Army reflect on the partial and
processual nature of identity as described by Sandilands: Winterson’s
novel focuses on hybridity and Hall’s on – ultimately compromised –
agonal processes. Winterson’s narrative shows how belief in stable identity
is driven by a quest to achieve wholeness and by a corresponding denial of
the traumatic ruptures in that wholeness. The acknowledgement of that
trauma, specifically, an awareness of the impossibility of achieving such
perfect future knowledge, is part of what, following Sandilands, I would
term a futural ethics of the Real. Meanwhile, Hall’s narrative sheds a harsh
spotlight on the ethical risks of identity-making, and is a cautionary tale of
futural ethics turned violently ideological. Both novels also undermine the
process of readerly identification in order to undermine the reader’s
investment in identity. In Winterson’s The Stone Gods, the reader’s slippery
and ultimately fruitless identification with the three Billies enables the
ironic awareness that there is no essential identity that performs the act of
identification in which the reader is engaged. In Hall’s Carhullan Army, in
contrast, the reader is brought on a journey of identification with Sister
only to be left, like Sister herself, bereft of identity as a result of the agonal
contest for it; at the same time, the collapse of identity is also the collapse of
utopian power into a tyrannical – even totalitarian – display of violence
and force. Winterson’s novel shows the possibilities for radical posterity
when trauma is acknowledged and the desire for wholeness exposed, while

68
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (ﬁrst published 1951; New York: Shocken, 2004), p. 422.
69
Ibid., p. 417.

Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity:

Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Science in the Capital’
and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour

Science and technology provided the methods, the content and the
ideology to make a certain kind of future thinkable. It is a future
deeply moulded by the belief in progress.
Helga Nowotny, ‘Science and Utopia: On the Social
Ordering of the Future’

I have an allegiance to community, which includes both my human

community and the biological community that surrounds me in this
habitat. And I have an allegiance to the possibility of their collective,
maybe even collaborative survival into the future.
Barbara Kingsolver, in Stephen L. Fisher, ‘Community and Hope:
A Conversation’

Since science provides us with information on the causes, impacts, and

extent of climate change, it is tempting to look to science too for informa-
tion on how to mitigate its effects on, and prevent further damage to, an
ecocentric posterity of humans and non-humans alike—to look to science,
that is, for tools and concepts with which to create and maintain an
ecologically sustainable future. The idea of the future within scientiﬁc
practice, however, is not a straightforward one: on the one hand, science
is a process-oriented—indeed, one could say, future-oriented – activity,
inasmuch as it is predicated on advancement and enlightenment; on the
other hand, science holds itself aloof from the ethical, psychological, and
emotional decisions that inform what that future should look like.
Certainly, a particular construction of the future, or at least the idea of
progress, is essential to the project of science. Progress in these terms signals
an idealised, intellectual march towards the future – a collaboration of
minds, aimed at ever greater knowledge about and discovery of the species,
systems, and processes that make up the non-human world that interacts
with, exists around, and even occurs within humans. Such progress, how-
ever, is essentially an ‘objective’ endeavour – it is value-free at the level of

138

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity 139
determining what that endeavour should achieve (though not at the level of
whether that endeavour might be immediately harmful to humans and non-
humans, as scientific ethics committees around the world would attest). This
can be seen in the relationship between scientific progress and economic
progress. On the one hand, science would seem to be opposed to the
standard economic narrative of progress – ongoing economic growth, tech-
nological advancement, industrial expansion, and material comfort for
humans. The scientific ideal of enhancing our understanding of the (non-
human and human) world seems inimical to the economic story of human
exceptionalism and the damage it is capable of inflicting on non-human
organisms, systems, and environments, not to mention the harm that
rebounds onto humans. On the other hand, scientific progress informs
and makes possible the increased technological sophistication that underpins
economic progress. Scientific knowledge is politically, morally, and ideolo-
gically appropriable, even to anthropocentric social practices and systems
that might be egregious to science’s objects of study.
In other words, the knowledge needed to meet present obligations to the
humans and non-humans of the future is, in large part, granted by science,
but for ethical guidance towards an explicitly better future one must look
elsewhere. An ethical, hopeful version of scientific endeavour – what I call
a utopian vision of science – requires a particular combination of science
with values and practices extrinsic to it.
In this chapter, I discuss two climate change narratives with utopian
views of science that are enabled by the practice of compassion or care.
I begin with Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Science in the Capital’ trilogy of
Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and
Counting (2007).1 Robinson’s narrative combines science with the teach-
ings of Buddhism to create a utopian project to mitigate against and even
reverse some of the worst effects of global warming. With his focus on
community, whether scientific or religious, Robinson usefully imagines
a commitment to posterity outside the bounds of parent–child relations
and ethics. Yet the scope of this posterity does not extend far, for it deals
with human concerns and human futures. Thus, despite its engagement
with science and notions of scientific progress, and, indeed, with
Buddhism, the novel’s eudaemonistic circle of concern is, broadly speak-
ing, a human one. I then turn to Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour

1
Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain (ﬁrst published 2004; London: HarperCollins, 2005); Fifty
Degrees Below (ﬁrst published 2005; London: HarperCollins, 2006); Sixty Days and Counting
(London: HarperCollins, 2007). Subsequent page references to these texts are in parentheses.

The Utopianism of Science

Many scientists would agree that the aim of science is to move towards an
understanding of the ‘truth about physical reality’, that is, rational and
objective (or testable) truths about the state of the world.4 Truth is the goal
of the scientific method, by which I mean not just the empiricist conven-
tions of observing, experimenting, and collecting data, but the practice of
hypothesising – putting forward a hypothesis and then conducting empiri-
cal research in order to support or refute, that is, refine, this hypothesis.5
As Karl Popper insisted, and Peter Medawar would go on to clarify, such
‘hypothetico-deductive’ refinement depends less on inductive reasoning
2
Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour (London: Faber, 2012). Subsequent page references to this text
are in parentheses.
3
Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 321; Chris J. Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethics of Flourishing
(London: Routledge, 1998), p. 71.
4
Hugh G. Gauch, Scientific Method in Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 409.
5
Ibid., pp. 406–9, citing G. E. P. Box, W. G. Hunter, and J. S. Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters:
An Introduction to Design, Data Analysis, and Model Building (New York: John Wiley, 1978), p. 4.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
The Utopianism of Science 141
(broadly definable as the drawing of conclusions based on observation) and
more on deductive reasoning (the use of observations to refine a previous
hypothesis).6 This reasoning and refinement, moreover, is often imagined
as a collective endeavour, as scientists build on the work of other scientists,
and expect that at all times results will be disseminated widely. What
I describe here is a deliberately forward-looking as well as collaborative
activity. It imagines a longitudinal enterprise carried out by dispersed
actors over time and space, whose ultimate goal – sought step by step –
is truth. For this reason, as science studies pioneer Helga Nowotny reminds
us, the refinement of the scientific method in the nineteenth century ‘made
a certain kind of future thinkable’, a future ‘deeply moulded by the belief in
progress’.7 In other words, science is driven by a notion that the future
holds – indeed, is equivalent to – cumulative knowledge and
enlightenment.
Science understood thus could be called a utopian project. Of course,
such a claim depends much on how one defines science. I acknowledge that
the conceptualisation of science I outline here is a particular view, sub-
scribed to by scientists, but not necessarily born out in practice. One must
be careful to distinguish between the ideology that undergirds scientific
activities and the discrete activities themselves. For Thomas Kuhn, the
everyday work of ‘normal science’ has little to do with the paradigm
shifting of ‘revolutionary science’: the normal scientist solves relatively
local problems within a given paradigm, and only a particularly stubborn
problem or set of problems would result in a rethinking of the paradigm
itself.8 At this point, it must be said that the emphasis on revolutionary over
normal science differs between scientific disciplines – for example, the
biological sciences operate within what is accepted as the relatively durable
paradigm of Darwinian theory while the expectation in physics, what with
comparatively recent upheavals such as relativity and quantum mechanics,
is that there may yet be more major shifts to come. Even so, many scientists
across the fields – who can hardly be assumed to be working in ignorance of
Popperian and Kuhnian descriptions of their endeavours – tend to see both
the ‘consensus’ research of normal science and the major discoveries of
6
Inductive reasoning might, however, play a part in the formulation of the earlier hypothesis; see
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (first published 1959; London: Routledge, 1992), pp.
3–7; Peter Medawar, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 48.
7
Helga Nowotny, ‘Science and Utopia: On the Social Ordering of the Future’, in Everett Mendelsohn
and Helga Nowotny (eds.), Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science between Utopia and Dystopia (Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1984), p. 8.
8
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first published 1962; University of Chicago
Press, 1996), pp. 52–76.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
142 Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity
revolutionary science as differently sized – and sometimes ‘tentative’ and
‘approximate’ – steps towards truth.9
To describe science as utopian depends, too, on how one deﬁnes utopia.
The idea of science as perfectibility is not readily compatible with the
notion of utopia as perfection; the one suggests progress and the other
attainment. Science, in utopian scholar Krishan Kumar’s idealist descrip-
tion of it, ‘knows no end. It has no point of rest or stability. It constantly
undermines existing beliefs and practices’.10 The utopia, in contrast, sug-
gests just such an end. To be fair, this has led both writers and scholars of
utopia to distinguish between the pure utopia and other forms, such as the
‘critical utopia’, whose narratives, according to Tom Moylan, ‘reject utopia
as blueprint while preserving it as a dream’.11 In considering the utopianism
of science, then, it pays to distinguish, as Patrick Parrinder does, citing the
work of H. G. Wells, between ‘the classical utopia of static perfection and
the “modern” utopia characterised by a continuous process of political and
social improvement’. For Parrinder, the modern utopia is more appropri-
ately described as ‘uchronia’, so committed is it to a ‘kinetic’ mode of
hopeful, forward movement.12 Or, following Carl Freedman, one could
distinguish between the traditional, topographical utopia inaugurated by
Thomas More and the ‘hermeneutic’ utopia theorised by Ernest Bloch –
a psychological and philosophical stance, rather than a place, ‘to be found
in the Not Yet, or the Not-Yet-Being, or the In-Front-of-Us’.13 In referring
to the utopianism of science, then, I am invoking not just the conventional
conceptualisation of science as an aggregation towards truth, but also
Wellsian and Blochian understandings of modern utopia as mobile.
These are all relevant to the idea that underpins the scientiﬁc method –
that science is a collaborative and gradual advancement of human
knowledge.
For all this, however, science is not overtly utopian; that is, it is wary of
advertising its efforts towards truth. As I have already suggested,

9
Gauch, Scientiﬁc Method in Practice, p. 99, quoting from American Association for the
Advancement of Science, The Liberal Art of Science: Agenda for Action (Washington, DC:
American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1990), p. 20.
10
Krishan Kumar, Utopianism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990), p. 59.
11
Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York:
Methuen, 1986), p. 10.
12
Patrick Parrinder, Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientiﬁc Revolution to Brave New World
and Beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015), p. 4.
13
Carl Freedman, ‘Science Fiction and Utopia: A Historico-Philosophical Overview’, in
Patrick Parrinder (ed.), Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of
Science Fiction and Utopia (Liverpool University Press, 2000), p. 74.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
The Utopianism of Science 143
objectivity, that mainstay of the Popperian scientific method, precludes the
expression of wishfulness and the normative push towards what is ethically
‘right’ that some might associate with utopian thinking. For Popper,
following Immanuel Kant, ‘scientific knowledge should be justifiable,
independently of anybody’s whim: a justification is “objective” if in
principle it can be tested and understood by anybody’.14 One could say
that the practitioners – and, with it, the practice – of the scientific method
are to some degree informed by a utopian ideology, even if they do not
explicitly espouse it. Ethical duty is, apparently, for others to impute to
science, and not for science to ascribe to itself.
Such a task has often fallen to those who would communicate or
popularise science, including the authors who employ scientific
understandings in climate change novels. The utopian potential of
science has been a theme in science fiction since the advent of
modern science in the nineteenth century: novels such as Edward
Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and Wells’s A Modern Utopia
(1905) have shaped their utopian worlds out of scientific and techno-
logical advances.15 This is not to suggest that there has been universal
utopianism in science fiction: many twentieth-century dystopian fic-
tions have associated scientific progress with psychological and cul-
tural alienation, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) to
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Even in green uto-
pian science fiction narratives, such as Ursula K. LeGuin’s
The Dispossessed (1974) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), the
potential gulf between naïve technological determinism and a just
utopian society has continued to be a topic of concern and scrutiny.
Nonetheless, this possibility of science as itself compromised has led
to a distinctive recent brand of scientific utopianism, centred on the
figure of the scientist as a lone heroic voice, a trend that Roslynn
Haynes analyses as part of a late-twentieth-century stereotype of
‘scientist as idealist’.16 Haynes astutely ascribes the rise of the idealist
scientist in literature towards the end of the century to a growing
environmental awareness among authors and readers. Indeed, the type
of the utopianist scientific hero becomes pertinent in a time of global
ecological concerns.

14
Popper, The Logic of Scientiﬁc Discovery, p. 22.
15
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 4.
16
Roslynn D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 311–12.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
144 Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity
‘Science in the Capital’
Perhaps the most rigorous literary defender of scientific utopianism in
recent times is Robinson. A major science fiction writer, with both the
Hugo and Nebula awards to his name, Robinson displays in his work
a profound interest in science and politics. Many of his novels are explicitly
utopian scenarios for environmental and social justice that successfully
combine scientific technology and progressive politics. His first novels –
the ‘Three Californias’ trilogy of The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast
(1988) and Pacific Edge (1990) – are experiments in narrating disaster,
dystopia, and utopia respectively, ultimately imagining the successful
green reconstruction of a devastated California. More sustained in its
utopianism is Robinson’s great critical and popular success, the Mars
trilogy of Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1999),
an elaborate narrative in which human colonisers on Mars successfully
terraform the planet – that is, transform its biosphere into a version of
Earth’s – by living a kind of scientifically informed, ethically minded, green
socialism called ‘eco-economics’.17 The utopian terraforming of Mars thus
provides a space in which the physical alteration of the planet coincides
with the political conversion of its new inhabitants, that is, ‘humans are
areoformed – shaped by Mars – even as Mars is terraformed’.18
The ‘Science in the Capital’ trilogy might represent a rare foray for
Robinson into near contemporary realism and away from the futuristic
science fiction of much of his work, but it constitutes a high point in
Robinson’s environmental fiction inasmuch as it spells out, in a narrative
space free of otherworldly distraction, his ideas for scientific utopianism in
the service of environmentalism.19
Robinson explicitly identifies himself as a utopian science fiction writer,
and, in doing so, demonstrates a scholarly awareness of its generic history.
Speaking of the Mars trilogy, Robinson has employed a definition that
echoes Parrinder’s formulation of it as kinetic. He rejects static descriptions
of ‘Utopia as “pie-in-the-sky”, impractical and totalitarian’, and instead

17
The idea of ‘terraforming’ was invented by science ﬁction writer Jack Williamson in 1942; see Brian
Stableford, ‘Science Fiction and Ecology’, in David Seed (ed.), A Companion to Science Fiction
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), p. 134, and Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change:
Terraforming Earth (Seattle: Amazon Shorts, 2005), p. 1. For a description of ‘eco-economics’, see
Robinson, Red Mars (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 298.
18
Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century
(New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 279.
19
Adam Trexler, focusing on the novels’ politics, labels this a ‘technocratic, even bureaucratic,
utopianism’, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2015), p. 155.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
The Utopianism of Science 145
insists, ‘Utopia has to be rescued as a word, to mean “working towards
a more egalitarian society, a global society”.’20 Fredric Jameson writes of
the Mars trilogy that, even in its conclusion, the reader is aware that the
‘achievement’ of utopia on Mars ‘must constantly be renewed’, so much so
that ‘utopia as a form is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is
rather simply the imperative to imagine them’.21 Robinson retains such an
emphasis with the ‘Science in the Capital’ trilogy, remarking:
I think of myself as a utopian novelist . . . Utopia is a name for one course of
history, a progressive course in which things become more just and sustain-
able over the generations. We’re not there now, but depending on what we
do, and what our descendants do, we could still be said to be living in
a utopian history, as being on the path. I prefer to work as if that were the
case. And it seems to me the great work continues.22
Thus, for Robinson, goodness exists not as panoply, in a simple utopian
sense, nor even as possibility, in Moylan’s critical utopian sense, but as
perfectibility, with that perfectibility premised on a mapping of scientific
practice onto scientific ideals.
Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and
Counting (2007) acquired the informal label of the ‘Science in the Capital’
trilogy from the author’s working title for the first novel in the sequence.23
As with the ‘Mars’ trilogy, the three novels are ideally discussed together, as
they resemble not just a trilogy but a single text in the style of a Victorian
triple-decker, as Robinson has himself indicated.24 Indeed, they have more
recently been abridged and re-issued as a single novel, Green Earth (2015).25
The scenario depicted in the novels is one of ‘abrupt climate change’,
a term and concept Robinson borrowed from a 2002 report to the National
Research Council that reconceptualised climate change as possible within
three to five years.26 The trilogy narrates global climate catastrophe from

20
Bud Foote, ‘A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson’, Science Fiction Studies 21.1 (1994), 56.
21
Fredric Jameson, ‘“If I Can Find One Good City, I Will Spare the Man”: Realism and Utopia in the
Mars Trilogy’, in Patrick Parrinder (ed.), Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and
the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia (Liverpool University Press, 2000), p. 231.
22
Imre Szeman and Maria Whiteman, ‘Future Politics: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson’,
Science Fiction Studies 31.2 (2004), 185.
23
Robinson changed the names of his second and third novels, ‘The Capital in Science’ and ‘Global
Cooling’, when his publisher insisted on more ‘novelistic’ titles; Moira Gunn, interview with Kim
Stanley Robinson, Tech Nation: IT Conversations, 4 April 2007, http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org
/shows/detail1773.html.
24
Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change, p. 16; David Seed, ‘The Mars Trilogy: An Interview’,
Foundation 68 (1996), 76.
25
Robinson, Green Earth (New York: Del Rey, 2015).
26
Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change, p. 6.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
146 Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity
the perspective of a group of scientists and policy wonks in Washington,
DC: biologist Frank Vanderwahl; Diane Chang, the director of the
National Science Foundation, or NSF; fellow NSF scientist Anna
Quibler; and Anna’s husband, Charlie, environmental advisor to the
ecologically committed Senator Phil Chase. Also depicted are the
Quiblers’ young children, Nick and Joe. In the course of events,
Washington, DC, experiences extreme floods and record-breaking winters,
with this microcosm dramatically emblematic of global chaos, climatic and
otherwise: ‘they were entangled in a moment of history when climate
change, the destruction of the natural world, and widespread human
misery were combining in a toxic and combustible mix’ (Fifty, 4). Yet,
the narrative’s tone and dénouement are hopeful and happy: the scientists’
lives acquire a spiritual depth thanks to their friendship with a group of
political exiles from the fictional Buddhist island nation of Khembalung;
lonely misfit Frank finds true – if unlikely – love with a government
intelligence agent enmeshed in rogue secret service operations; and
romance blossoms between Phil Chase and Diane Chang, who end the
narrative as, respectively, President and Presidential Science Advisor.
Diane and Phil’s wedding is the comic happy ending of the trilogy, just
as Anna and Charlie’s marriage provides its ballast.
The trilogy’s moral, then, is that science and politics in concord will save
the day – such concord enables the narrative’s large-scale scientific inter-
ventions, which ultimately mitigate and stabilise the many climate change
disasters. But Robinson’s scientists must learn not only to engage with
policy but to refine and acknowledge their scientific aspirations, ensuring
that ‘normal science’ is leavened with a compassionate outlook. This much
is put into train when the Khembalis, whose home is affected by rising sea
levels, establish an embassy in an office in the NSF building. When they are
invited by Anna to give an NSF seminar on Buddhist ideas of knowledge
and progress, they propose a marriage of scientific with Buddhist enlight-
enment, that is, the introduction of compassion to scientific ratiocination.
As the Khembali spiritual leader Rudra Cakrin explains, compassion is
definable as ‘Right action. Helping others. . . . Reduce suffering’ (Forty,
236). The knowledge gained by science and the compassionate wisdom of
Buddhism make them ‘parallel studies’, according to Rudra Cakrin, in
which science has ‘specialized, through mathematics and technology, on
natural observations, finding out what is, and making new tools’, while
‘Buddhism has specialized in human observations, to find out – how to
become. Behave. What to do. How to go forward’ (Forty, 236). That is, the
two are complementary.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
The Utopianism of Science 147
What is more, the novel frames the interweaving of Buddhism with
science not as a simple ideological choice but as a biological imperative.
Rudra Cakrin aligns the Buddhist concept of ‘compassion’ with scientific
understandings of ‘altruism’ as the ‘best adaptive strategy’ (Forty, 238); that
is, fellow feeling has been identified by behavioural ecologists as one way
for species to ensure their survival: ‘in Buddhism we have always said, if you
want to help others, practice compassion; if you want to help yourself,
practice compassion. Now science adds, if you want to help your species,
practice compassion’ (Forty, 238). This echoes Frank’s conclusions in his
ongoing sociobiological observations and analyses of fellow human beings.
Earlier in the novel, when stuck in a queue of cars on the Beltway in
Washington, DC, Frank reflects on how the merging of two lanes of traffic
replicates the prisoner’s dilemma – the game theory scenario in which, as
discussed in chapter 1, two prisoners are kept separate and each is asked to
inform against the other in order to gain his release. Assuming that the
game is only played once, the best strategy is the selfish one of informing; if
the game is played many times with the same opponent, the best strategy –
and arguably the one that is eventually learned – is for both prisoners to
cooperate and remain silent. Translated into the experience of driving in
merging traffic on the Beltway, this predicts that if drivers base their
decisions on individual good (with each vehicle cutting off merging traffic
and trying to get ahead), delays result, but, if drivers act towards the
common good (by taking turns), traffic flows more easily. Frank muses,
‘In traffic, at work, in relationships of every kind – social life was nothing
but a series of prisoner’s dilemmas. Compete or cooperate? Be selfish or
generous? It would be best if you could always trust other players to
cooperate, and safely practise always generous’ (Forty, 112). When trans-
lated into optimal behaviour in the Anthropocene, humans must learn the
answer to the prisoner’s dilemma. Frank realises, as he listens to Rudra
Cakrin’s lecture, that ‘it is an invocation for all to make the “always
generous” move, for maximum group return, indeed maximum individual
return’ (Forty, 238). As Timothy Morton notes, ‘hyperobjects’ have
brought future humans ‘into the adjoining prison cell’.27 Climate change,
according to Frank, the Khembalis, and indeed the trilogy, is the prisoner’s
dilemma writ large, while the union of politics and science – when science
is a compassionate version of itself – is the intergenerational solution that
humans have evolved to make.

27
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 123.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
148 Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity
Following Frank’s lead, the NSF enters a renewed phase of compassio-
nate science, achieved through the cooperation of Diane, Frank, and Anna;
here, Robinson’s preference for detailed plot interactions and character
ensembles plays out in terms of form the idea of collaboration that is at the
heart of the novel in terms of theme. Through their actions, large-scale,
international, geoengineering projects are enacted, including the salinisa-
tion of the Atlantic to reactivate the Gulf Stream and the use of genetically
modified species of lichen to encourage tree growth in a massive carbon
sequestration farm in Russia. And, when Phil Chase is elected president,
his left-leaning, socially minded, long-termist policies provide the ideal
context for a Buddhist-inflected scientific enlightenment to be translated
into action. He negotiates, among other things, a deal with an environ-
mentally devastated China in which the United States sends technological
and financial aid to help build a greener Chinese economy in return for
China’s agreement to a carbon cap.
One might think that Robinson’s foreshortened version of evolution, in
which compassion emerges as an adaptive strategy, would place an empha-
sis on present obligations to future generations and specifically on parental
care as a way of achieving this relatively short-term adaptation. Certainly,
Robinson’s public statements on climate change have focused on the
importance of recognising our intergenerational legacy and invoked par-
enting as an analogy: climate change represents the utilitarian exploitation
of future humans – ‘the victims in this competition are the future genera-
tions to come’ – and behavioural change as an adaptive strategy is akin to ‘a
mother–daughter chain, of generations holding hands’.28 In Robinson’s
novels, however, posterity, as a joint concern of politics, science, and the
spiritual expression of compassion, is a social and collaborative concern,
rather than a familial one. That cooperation based not on ‘kinship’ but on
‘empathy’ might be beneficial to evolution is precisely what Frank reads in
the science journal Nature, his conclusion being that this is ‘group selec-
tion’ but only if individuals realised that ‘other groups’ constituted a larger
group: ‘the story of human history so far [was] successive enlargement of
the group’ (Fifty, 282). Frank’s sociobiological analysis of ‘altruism-as-
adaptation’ (Fifty, 281) is increasingly refined, then, to encourage collabora-
tion with, or being ‘always generous’ to, all humans. It would seem, then,
that parent–child relationships are hardly the place to look in the novel for
expressions of passing on environmental legacy; indeed, children are cared

28
Robinson, ‘Climate Change and the Pursuit of Happiness’, lecture at Sustainable Actions for
a Sustainable Future Conference, Missouri State University, 22 April 2009.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
The Utopianism of Science 149
for and cared about outside domestic, secure spaces, as well as within them.
Thus, when the Quiblers’ young son, Joe, is suspected by the Khembalis to
be an incarnation of Rudra Cakrin upon his death, Joe is closely watched,
cared for, and, indeed, loved by that community; meanwhile, his brother,
Nick, is mentored by Frank and encouraged in his scientific interests.
Moreover, parenting emerges, for the parental characters themselves, as
one of many manifestations of the self. Near the end of the final novel, for
example, Anna and Charlie take delivery of photovoltaic panels for their
home; this is not framed as a domestic issue but, rather, occurs alongside
the information they exchange and political actions that they make as
a scientist and a policy advisor. Even Charlie’s decision to give up working
full time for Phil Chase is about assuming a range of roles and identities
rather than defining himself as any one of these: his departure from Phil’s
staff is neither permanent nor total, as he promises it will be for a ‘couple of
years’ (Sixty, 457) and he commits to daily phone conversations with the
White House staff. After all, as Frank discovers in the second novel when
he becomes homeless and divides his time between a neo-palaeolithic
existence in Rock Creek Park and his work at the NSF, life is ‘parcellated’:
‘No one saw enough to witness your life and put it all together’ (Fifty, 74).
Such a parcellated life is divided up among multiple and shifting identities.
Accordingly, the reader is not called on to identify with any one
character, either for very long or in any strictly focalised way. Although it
is possible to identify Frank as the central character, it is significant that his
experiences do not come to the fore until the second novel; the first novel
opens with Anna and expends narrative energy on the Quiblers, energy
which is then diffused in subsequent instalments in the trilogy. Another,
perhaps more obvious candidate for the role of hero is “Unconventional,
unpredictable, devil-may-care” (Sixty, 49; original emphasis) Phil; yet, even
this mercurial character enjoys only a brief moment of focalisation when he
takes office at the start of the third novel. Finally, one might, as Adam
Trexler does, focus on Diane as the initiator of the scientific and political
collaborations and renegotiations – or ‘boundary work’ – that so drama-
tically resolve the novel’s climate change crises, and identify her as the true
‘embodiment of the NSF’s power, will, and effectiveness’.29 Even so, Diane
is only one of many important actors in the drive to the plot’s resolution
(and her identity is, one might add, formed – in the Arendtian mode
discussed in the previous chapter – in coalition and dialogue). It would

29
Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, p. 160.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
150 Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity
seem, then, that the nature of Robinson’s collaborative and coalitional
utopian vision does not require exclusive reader identification.
That is, Robinson’s trilogy eschews the usual patterns of identificatory
plot and character development, and, along with this, subsumes parental
care, attachment, activities, and identity within characters’ public and
communal roles, all under the rubric of a larger compassion and empathy.
Intergenerational care is not only reassigned away from the private and
domestic and towards the scientific and political, it is also concerned with
non-human animals. It is not just that Frank’s Palaeolithic experiment
makes him aware of his status as a human animal – as ‘Primate in forest’
(Fifty, 40) – but it is also that the novel depicts the effects of the many
extreme weather events on zoo animals, showing how many die or escape,
as Frank comes to be involved with these animals as a volunteer tracker.
Yet, the trilogy’s admirable version of posterity is not as radical as it
could be, even as it gestures to the inclusion of the non-human, the need
to redefine notions of compassion and care, and the instability of iden-
tity. In the final analysis, these are relayed as descriptions of the actions of
a small group of people in a plot that, for all its mentions of nations and
groups from elsewhere in the world, represents a heteronormative and
mostly white version of American life and is focused on a narrowly
American and anthropocentric solution – specifically, geoengineering
projects initiated by top-down federal government – to a crisis of unpre-
cedented spatial and temporal scale and complexity. Ursula Heise notes
that the trilogy ‘remains for the most part stuck in Washington and
American government perspectives . . . and the omniscient narrator never
relinquishes his grip of this local scene to let other perspectives and
discourses percolate’, a point echoed by Trexler.30 Timothy Clark, citing
‘the way Washington politics is simplified’ and the presence of ‘so US-
centric a focus on a global issue’ in the novels, concludes that ‘even
Robinson’s ambitious project is a form of intellectual
miniaturization’.31 Moreover, Jeanne Hamming reads Robinson’s
attempt at rewriting the gender and racial norms that inform environ-
mental attitudes as ultimately collapsing into a preoccupation with white,
American masculinity: ‘any attempt to articulate a post-national, post-
global-warming subjectivity can only reproduce . . . the very power
structures that continue to drive American identity and environmental
30
Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 207; Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, p. 166.
31
Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London:
Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 79.

Radical Ecocentric Posterity

What possibilities might there be for a radical ethical concern for the future
that includes non-human organisms, communities, and processes within
the compass of moral considerability, not simply for their ability to
increase humans’ flourishing, but for their own and other non-human
flourishing? Put another way, what might an ecocentric scientific utopian-
ism look like? As I suggested in chapter 1, there is a useful distinction to be
made between the two types of human ethical responses to the non-human
put forward by Nussbaum. The first is a eudaemonistic account, which, in
Nussbaum’s terms, is a sympathetic response to a non-human animal in
which its distress, suffering, or other non-flourishing suggests a ‘common
vulnerability’ with the human witnessing that distress; it requires, there-
fore, a recognition of shared grounds of suffering between the human and
non-human, such as pain and hunger.33 The second is one of wonder at the
marvellous complexity of the non-human animal.34 For Nussbaum, the
two are usually linked in some way (with wonder as a support and
motivation for sympathy); crucially, however, Nussbaum speculates that
they are separate emotions.35 More importantly for my purposes here,
Nussbaum clarifies elsewhere that wonder as the basis for an ethical
attitude to non-human animals is not about the relevance of the non-
human to human flourishing. She extends the capabilities approach of
Amartya Sen (extrapolating from the concept of eudaemonia to argue that
the capability, or freedom, to achieve eudaemonia is a fundamental free-
dom) to include human as well as non-human animals, and bases this
measure of capability on the wonder of non-human animals: ‘if we feel
wonder looking at a complex organism, that wonder at least suggests the
idea that it is good for that being to flourish as the kind of thing it is’.36 This
element of wonder asks for an understanding of non-human suffering as

32
Jeanne Hamming, ‘Nationalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Climate Change in the Novels of
Kim Stanley Robinson and Michael Crichton’, Extrapolation 54.1 (2013), 42.
33
Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, p. 319. 34 Ibid., p. 321. 35 Ibid., p. 322.
36
Nussbaum, ‘Beyond “Compassion and Humanity”: Justice for Nonhuman Animals’, in Cass
R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions
(Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 306.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
152 Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity
appropriate to that organism and the system in which it exists, as far as
possible: ‘It wants to see each thing ﬂourish as the sort of thing it is.’37
Nonetheless, Nussbaum’s use of wonder in this way is limited by a need
to draw the line of moral considerability somewhere: that is, not every
organism is capable of invoking wonder. Building on Peter Singer’s ani-
mal-rights utilitarianism, which proposes a calculus of moral inclusion for
humans and non-humans based on sentience (the more sentient a being,
the greater its rights and its importance in calculations of utility),
Nussbaum adds, citing James Rachels, the criterion of complexity.38
Both the ability to feel pain and the vulnerability to it, thanks to the
diversity of harms that might occur in the life of a complex being, are
thresholds to membership of this moral community of human and non-
human beings: ‘More complex forms of life have more and more capabil-
ities to be blighted, so they can suffer more and different types of harm.’39
Nussbaum’s position, focused on individuals, precludes a consideration of
the ecological interactions played by all organisms, missing, for example,
the signiﬁcant potential for harm to beings on the wrong side of the
sentientist line to bring harm to those on the right side of it. Moreover,
the judgement of moral considerability based on sentience and complexity
is predicated on a very human understanding of pain and distress; cer-
tainly, to some extent, an ethical response to the non-human will always
demand a human perception and calibration, but Nussbaum’s account of
the limits of wonder reproduces the limitations of eudaemonistic responses
to non-human suffering: it is suffering when the human can imagine that
it is.
Where, then, might a third response, more than either eudaemonism or
wonder, come from? The ethical model put forward by Cuomo offers
a promising set of proposals. Cuomo’s work on environmental ethics stems
from an ecofeminist concern, like that of Catriona Sandilands, with the
risks of applying an identitarian and essentialist logic to terms such as
‘women’ and ‘nature’.40 Cuomo particularly cautions against ‘representing
humans, women or nature in ways that are static and bounded’.41 At the

37
Ibid., p. 306.
38
Ibid., p. 308; Peter Singer, ‘Animals and the Value of Life’, in Tom Regan (ed.), Matters of Life and
Death: New Introductory Essays on Moral Philosophy, 3rd edn. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), pp.
280–321; James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford
University Press, 1990).
39
Nussbaum, ‘Beyond “Compassion and Humanity”’, p. 309.
40
Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
41
Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities, p. 34.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
Radical Ecocentric Posterity 153
same time, Cuomo is mindful of the need to account for humans’ ethical
position vis-à-vis the non-human; as she reminds us: ‘Although nature and
human nature cannot provide universal, static norms, it is still meaningful
to characterize the social/natural world as comprised of ethical agents and
objects with interests and levels of well-being.’42 Like Nussbaum, what
Cuomo proposes is an ethics of flourishing, inspired in part by Aristotle’s
terms of eudaimonia; she contends that the value of the flourishing of non-
human beings lies in their constitutive value to other beings, including –
but not restricted to – humans. In a suggestive combination of Aristotelian
and Leopoldian sensibilities, she states:
The basic claim [of Aristotle’s] is that we are political as surely as we are
human, and so our social units ought to promote our flourishing as social
selves, which in turn creates a stronger polis. What would follow from the
observation that we are ecological beings – ‘mere citizens of the biotic
community’, in Aldo Leopold’s words – as surely as we are human?
Perhaps social units ought to promote our flourishing as ecological selves,
and therefore some degree of flourishing of nonhuman life, in order to
create a stronger ecological community.43
In an argument that resembles Sandilands’s Arendtian account of human
agency as coalitional (discussed in the previous chapter), Cuomo develops
such agency further as ecological.44
Importantly, Cuomo’s model of flourishing finds moral positions for
human and non-human organisms in a way that avoids assigning value to
the non-human from a human perspective (while, importantly, not erod-
ing human accountability to the non-human). Key to this is not just her
analysis of flourishing as a criterion for moral considerability, but her
location of the capacity for flourishing in an organism’s ‘dynamic
charm’.45 Writes Cuomo, ‘it is an entity’s dynamic charm – its diffuse,
“internal” ability to adapt to or resist change, and its unique causal and
motivational patterns and character – that renders it morally considerable,
and that serves as a primary site for determining what is good for that being
or thing’.46 Dynamic charm describes a process both unique and intrinsic
to an organism, and hence situates its moral value within it rather than in
the (human) other. It references not just complexity but the

42
Ibid., p. 34.
43
Ibid., p. 69; original emphasis. See also Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on
Conservation, illustrated edn. (ﬁrst published 1949; Oxford University Press, 2001) p. 171.
44
Sandilands, Good-Natured Feminist, pp. 155–62.
45 46
Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities, p. 70. Ibid., p. 71; original emphasis.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
154 Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity
unpredictability and mutability of all living entities in themselves and in
interaction with the communities to which they belong.
Thus, Cuomo’s conceptualisation of dynamic charm as the basis of
moral considerability encompasses both the biocentric and ecocentric
(where, as Robin Attfield explains, the ecocentric affords moral consider-
ability to ecosystems or even the biosphere while the biocentric is con-
cerned with individual organisms).47 It avoids the holism of a Leopoldian
‘land ethic’, yet it captures a moral attitude to ecosystems.48 Moreover, it is
distinct from Nussbaum’s extreme biocentric and individualist emphasis
on an organism’s complexity and sentience. Drawing in part on the work
of Jon Moline, Cuomo explains that the idea of dynamic charm:
gives us reason to ‘count’ some individuals in the moral universe, without
committing ethics to promoting the individual interests of protozoa or
plants, while still appreciating the value of plants and other members of
biotic communities: individual members of ‘higher’ (sentient, conscious)
species are capable of response in ways not exhibited by individual plants,
for example, so some sentient animals might be morally valuable as indivi-
duals, while plants are only valuable as members of species, populations, or
communities.49
Aside from the questionability of some of Cuomo’s plant/animal bound-
aries in the light of some startling recent findings in botany (investigations
into plant intelligence, for example), her consideration of biotic member-
ship as well as individual sentience allows the moral inclusion of all
organisms, without necessarily emphasising non-complex beings as
individuals.50
Cuomo’s ethical framework has two important corollaries for scientific
utopianism. First, her invocation of charm is no unquestioning or unscien-
tific account of the mystery of nature, for it acknowledges that a degree of
comprehension is crucial to achieving an ethical attitude: ‘science and
other empirical inquiries can, in theory, give us the kind of information
we need to proceed with as much respect as possible with regard to living
systems’.51 After all, scientific comprehension of ecological processes would

47
Robin Attﬁeld, Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century, 2nd edn. (London:
Polity, 2014), p. 39.
48
Leopold, Sand County Almanac, p. 171.
49
Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities, p. 71; see Jon N. Moline, ‘Aldo Leopold and the
Moral Community’, Environmental Ethics 8.3 (1986), 99–120.
50
See, for example, Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and
Science of Plant Intelligence (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015), and Anil Ananthaswamy, ‘Roots
of Consciousness’, New Scientist 224 (6 December 2014), 34–7.
51
Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities, p. 71.

Flight Behaviour
Kingsolver’s treatment of climate change sees a fuller exploration of the
need for science to develop a more hopeful and compassionate sense of its
responsibility to the future. It effects this through identification with
a central character, who bridges two communities – a scientific research
group and a rural township – and their two perspectives. This bridging
enables the incorporation of science with an ethics of parental care, even as
it introduces ecological insights to protagonist and reader. Yet, the human
exceptionalism of care threatens to turn this novel into a deeply anthro-
pocentric exercise, in which non-human organisms and their ecological
habitats are placed at the eudaemonistic service of humans. Still, the novel,
I argue, makes possible an alternative and radically ecocentric reading, in
which the flourishing of the non-human is of ultimate significance.

52
Lisa H. Sideris, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (Oakland, CA:
University of California Press, 2017), p. 26.
53
Ibid., p. 27.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
156 Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity
Novelist and essayist Kingsolver has enjoyed popular and critical acclaim
as a writer of contemporary American life, as well as a reputation as
a proponent of a strongly ecological worldview; all her novels – from
The Bean Trees (1988) onwards – demonstrate the interconnectedness of
human and non-human communities. Over the course of her career, she
has become ever more committed, as she puts it, to the ‘collaborative
survival’ of both human and non-human species; that is, she imagines
a future not merely constituted of – but achieved through – ecological
cooperation.54 Many of her novels are concerned with the struggle of rural
families and communities (often with women at their centre), and with the
way in which such dramas play out against wider issues of environment-
alism. Often setting her narratives in the southern United States (though
the African context of her best-known work, The Poisonwood Bible of 1998,
is a marked departure from this), Kingsolver has increasingly become
identified with the Appalachian region.55
Her seventh novel, Flight Behaviour, brings together all these themes in
its story of Dellarobia Turnbow, a young woman living in the deprived
agricultural belt of east Tennessee, who unwittingly finds herself at the
centre of climate change crisis when its ecological effects unfold in her
backyard. Intelligent but undereducated, mother-of-two Dellarobia is
trapped in a loveless marriage to the well-meaning but unambitious Cub.
The couple live in financial dependence on Cub’s overbearing parents,
sheep farmers who are themselves struggling with debt as a result of
a precarious side-venture. As the novel opens, Dellarobia is on the verge
of throwing away this unfulfilling life for a tryst with a handsome tele-
phone repairman. But, on her way to a rendezvous in a hunting hide on the
Turnbow property, she encounters the impressive sight of millions of
monarch butterflies in diapause, or hibernation: in this ecologically plau-
sible (though so far, fortunately, unrealised) scenario, the butterflies have
been thrown off their migratory path by the increasingly wild weather
events wrought by climate change and forced to overwinter in Appalachia
rather than their customary destination of the Michoacán highlands in
Mexico. The sight of the roosting monarchs not only inspires Dellarobia to
return to her family, it is hailed as a miracle by her God-fearing Southern
Baptist community and divides the Turnbow family, who had planned to
sell their land to loggers in an attempt to evade bankruptcy. It also attracts
54
Stephen L. Fisher, ‘Community and Hope: A Conversation’, Iron Mountain Review 28 (Spring
2012), 32.
55
Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), pp. 98–9.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
Radical Ecocentric Posterity 157
the notice of a scientific team led by an eminent entomologist named Ovid
Byron, whose investigations reveal that not only deforestation but the
onset of winter could wipe out the entire species, as the planet’s unsettled
weather patterns have effectively reduced the monarchs to this one eastern
migrating population.
The novel’s setting is a notoriously conservative and economically
disadvantaged region of the United States; its context is the encounter
between climate change denialism and the hard evidence of climate
change’s ecological impact. As Kingsolver has put it, her novel tackles the
‘culture war’ of climate change where the stakes are highest: ‘I live in
southern Appalachia . . . the people most affected by climate change
already are people among whom I live: rural conservative farmers. And it
strikes me that these are the same people who are least prepared to under-
stand and believe in climate change and its causes.’56 In the novel, the
ideological gulf between the scientists and the locals is focalised through
Dellarobia: her assessment is expressed in pithy descriptions of the two
sides. In conversation with her sceptical husband, Dellarobia realises:
‘Teams had been chosen, and the scientists were not us, they were them’
(231; original emphasis). As she explains it to Ovid, the ‘environment got
assigned to the other team. Worries like that are not for people like us.
So says my husband’ (445). The ‘teams’ that Dellarobia identifies are
defined by whether they treat the world as an opportunity for investigation
and deductive reasoning or approach it as a matter of faith. The scientific
method, captured in Ovid’s simple explanation to Dellarobia’s son, means
that ‘a scientist doesn’t just make a wild guess. . . . He measures things. He
does experiments’; in order to ‘discover the truth’, scientists ‘ask’ (164).
The townspeople of Feathertown, in contrast, take ‘the Word on faith’ (83)
and are passive consumers of mass media; Cub maintains that ‘Weather is
the Lord’s business’ (361). Dellarobia’s analysis, as paraphrased by Ovid’s
folklorist wife, is of a ‘territorial divide’ (543) that only deepens as markers
of difference reflexively shape identity.
Dellarobia is able to evaluate this divide, for both herself and her reader,
because she is able to cross it. Born and raised in Feathertown, she is also
possessed of a scientific mind, what Ovid calls ‘a talent for this endeavour’
(392). It is Dellarobia, who, for example, finds that she alone of the
Turnbow family is capable of understanding the behaviour of sheep by
dint of attentive observation, that is, by her commitment to the deductive
reasoning that defines the scientific method. Set apart from her community

56
Bryan Walsh, ‘Barbara Kingsolver on Flight Behavior’, Time (8 November 2012).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
158 Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity
by her inherent inquisitiveness – she recalls being kicked out of Bible class
for ‘her many questions’ (83) – Dellarobia feels inexplicably at ease with the
scientists when she starts helping them. She thus not only straddles the two
communities; she facilitates the reader’s sympathy with both sides, as she
expresses this sympathy herself. Indeed, as Axel Goodbody points out,
Kingsolver depicts conservative denialism ‘with sympathy and
understanding’.57 Dellarobia realises that Cub’s annoying habit of channel
surfing, which she derides as ‘ADHD TV’ (154), echoes a wider community
strategy of ignoring bad news: ‘If people played their channels right, they
could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives’
(357). This is an understandable response, Goodbody reminds us, from
a marginalised and underprivileged people who inhabit ‘a world over
which they have little control’ and who therefore seek to ‘avoid confronta-
tion with inconvenient truths’.58 At the same time, as the scientists interact
with Dellarobia, they command sympathy too: ‘We are scientists. Our job
here is only to describe what exists’, Ovid explains, ‘But we are also human.
We like these butterflies, you know?’ (204). Moreover, his deep grief at
their impending extinction – expressed in Dellarobia’s realisation that ‘the
one thing most beloved to him was dying’ (315) – reveals that, for all their
earnestly spouted dispassion, the research team, particularly Ovid, are
motivated by something like love for the butterflies.
While Dellarobia fulfils an important intermediary function for the
reader (not to mention for other characters in the novel), she also, impor-
tantly, transforms into an apprentice ecologist over the course of the
narrative. The novel is, as commentators have noted, her
Bildungsroman.59 Dellarobia becomes Ovid’s research assistant, and even-
tually separates from Cub and enrols on a college degree with the intention
of becoming ‘Some kind of scientist’ (587); that her scientific awakening
constitutes a kind of rebirth is even implied by the internet meme brought

57
Axel Goodbody, ‘Risk, Denial and Narrative Form in Climate Change Fiction: Barbara Kingsolver’s
Flight Behavior and Ilija Trojanow’s Melting Ice’, in Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner
(eds.), The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture
(Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014), p. 50.
58
Ibid., pp. 50–1.
59
Sylvia Mayer, ‘Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the Climate Change Novel, and the
Narrative of Anticipation’, in Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner (eds.), The Anticipation of
Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014), p. 30. However, Linda Wagner-Martin’s analysis of the novel as
Bildungsroman concludes – not entirely convincingly – that Dellarobia does not develop and that
even ‘her personal thirst for knowledge’ is ‘given to her’ by Ovid; Wagner-Martin, Barbara
Kingsolver’s World: Nature, Art, and the Twenty-First Century (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp.
196–7.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
Radical Ecocentric Posterity 159
about by the brief media interest in her story – Photoshopped onto
Botticelli’s famous painting, Dellarobia becomes ‘the Butterfly Venus’
(294). Dellarobia’s entry into the scientific community has several ramifi-
cations. First, it enables the relaying of scientific information from Ovid to
Dellarobia and sometimes her son, and from Dellarobia to friends and
family, not to mention to the reader; these ecological findings reveal both
the dynamic charm of the monarch butterflies and the damage being done
to their ability to flourish. As Ovid explains, the monarchs perform several
long migrations over the course of a year: hatched in Canada, they winter
in Mexico because of their vulnerability to the cold; they then fly north to
Texas for the milkweed plants that are their larval food; the hatched
caterpillars journey further north, repeating the process, till three spring
generations have fed and migrated northwards; then, after this, the third
generation flies to Mexico to winter and repeat the process. The butterflies
possess a complexity that gives them dynamic charm. And, not only are the
distance and pattern of migration impressive, but the question of how
successive generations are able to return to the very same trees as previous
ones, never having been there, is a mystery or, to invoke Nussbaum, an
object of wonder. It is not, however, any individual butterfly but the
butterflies as a ‘complicated system’ (200) that warrants such wonder.
What Dellarobia also learns, however, is that the wonder of their migration
has been disrupted by human destruction of the environment, a disruption
that could spell the death of this particular population and the near
extinction of the species.
Furthermore, Dellarobia’s initiation into science is not just a journey of
discovery for her; it allows her to bring something of her own to the
scientific endeavour. This something is the exercise of parental care.
Dellarobia’s experience of parenting is depicted as consumed by anxiety
about her children’s limited future: living a subsistence existence, she finds
herself refraining from ‘counting on things being fine. Meaning her now-
living children and their future, those things’ (320). Ovid’s concerns for the
future of the butterflies are focalised through Dellarobia as a luxury in
contrast with the ‘real’ fears of a parent whose children’s future seems
hopeless: ‘If Ovid Byron was torn up over butterflies, he should see how it
felt to look past a child’s baby teeth into this future world he claimed was
falling apart’ (320). Eventually, however, her concerns become
a heightened version of Ovid’s, a fear for the loss of the future for the
sake of her son: ‘Dellarobia felt an entirely new form of panic as she
watched her son love nature so expectantly, wondering if he might be
racing toward a future like some complicated sand castle that was

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
160 Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity
crumbling under the tide’ (341). That is, Dellarobia combines her experi-
ence of poverty-stricken parenthood with her new ecological understand-
ing of the threatened global environment into a very particular view of
posterity.
Dellarobia – and the reader with her – develops an enhanced under-
standing of the future predicated on parental care. More than that,
Dellarobia specifically employs this to redress what she comes to see as
the shortcoming of science: its objectivity. In a pivotal conversation
between Ovid and Dellarobia, the ‘febrile biosphere’ is brought into the
same frame as a sick child. Ovid compares the warming planet to
a child developing a fever: a small change of two degrees creates ‘a low-
grade fever’ that makes Dellarobia think of her ‘children’s cheeks hot to
the touch, their racked sobs that wrenched her will for living’ (386);
with a further rise of two and a half degrees, Dellarobia would ‘head for
the emergency room’ (386). As Ovid reveals, these are the same tem-
perature rises that create the grim scenario of the latest report from the
Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change; thus ‘we are headed for
the ER’ (386). Moreover, Ovid compares the seemingly invisible phe-
nomenon of climate change to the growth of a child: ‘“A trend is
intangible, but real,” he said calmly, “A photo cannot prove a child is
growing, but several of them show change over time. Align them, and
you can reliably predict what is coming . . . ”’ (387). Thus, imagining
the climate-changed future should be no less difficult than imagining
‘Your children’s adulthood’ (389). It would seem that what is being
asked for is the response of a caring parent. Importantly, Dellarobia
takes this further, and translates parental care into an ethical stance
based primarily on hope. She concludes to Ovid, ‘I’m not saying I don’t
believe you, I’m saying I can’t’ (392; original emphasis).
Misunderstanding this as a statement of intellectual rather than ethical
or psychological inability, Ovid praises her talent for science but warns,
‘For scientists, reality is not optional’ (392). Yet, Dellarobia continues
to express ‘hope’: ‘Are we at least allowed to hope that the butterflies
will make it through this winter?’ (392). Later, she objects to his
pessimism, ‘Don’t say that, “too late.” I hate that. I’ve got my kids to
think about’ (443). Where Robinson presents a utopian view of
a science of compassionate Buddhist enlightenment, Kingsolver’s
novel, through Dellarobia, seems to suggest that science should be
imbued with parental hope and care: as Goodbody puts it, Dellarobia
comes to possess a ‘blend of cognitive knowledge, ethical commitment

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
Radical Ecocentric Posterity 161
to future generations, and faith in the ability of people to change
things’.60
At this point, the novel’s scientific utopianism is capable of offering
either an anthropocentric or ecocentric account of posterity. That is, on
the one hand, it is concerned with the biosphere and the butterflies that
represent it synecdochically for the sake of human well-being, and, in
comparing responsibility to the biosphere to parental obligations to chil-
dren, it implies that this is where the ethical response lies; on the other
hand, however, the butterflies exhibit a dynamic charm in and of them-
selves. Much, then, depends on the narrative’s treatment of the butterflies
and, particularly, of their future relative to human futures.
On one reading, the butterflies act as pointers to Dellarobia’s identity,
particularly, her maternal identity. She is aligned with the bright orange
monarchs not just by her ‘flame-coloured hair’ (1), but by her recurring
need for a ‘flight path’ out of her narrow life.61 The colour of the butterflies
also brings to mind Dellarobia’s first child, stillborn with a ‘fine hair all
over its body that was red like hers’ (14), who is further united with the
butterflies as something to be mourned ‘while most people paid no atten-
tion’ (316). Dellarobia explicitly connects this baby with the butterflies,
thanks to the poignant Mexican belief that the monarchs are the souls of
dead children; she tells Preston that ‘one of those [butterflies] is ours’ (583).
This belief links Dellarobia’s first child with the unfortunate Michoacán
children who have been killed in mudslides caused by excessive rainfall and
deforestation. It thus identifies the butterflies with all children, including
Dellarobia’s surviving children, and potentially, with children of the
future. Whether this aligns the monarchs with future children in an
expression of hope (since Dellarobia herself, identifiable with the butter-
flies, has a hopeful future ahead of her) or as potential victims of climate
change and other anthropogenic environmental crises is a moot point.
What is clear, on this reading, is that the monarchs are enablers of a human
story of loss, determination, and hope.
At the same time, the butterflies, in the novel’s ecological explanations,
are shown to possess a charm and complexity unknown to and seemingly
aloof from humans; indeed, they represent an ability to flourish that is
oddly superior to that of humans’. The ‘complicated system’ (200) of
monarchs elucidated by Ovid is, after all, a compressed statement of
intergenerational dynamics; because it lives only six weeks, no single

60
Goodbody, ‘Risk, Denial and Narrative Form’, p. 48.
61
Wagner-Martin, Barbara Kingsolver’s World, p. 4.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
162 Science, Utopianism, and Ecocentric Posterity
monarch makes the annual migration from Mexico to Canada and back,
which must thus occur in several generational stages. What the monarch
provides in the novel, then, is an ironic comment on humanity: the
monarch trajectory, one species’ elegant exercise in intergenerational coop-
eration, stands in stark contrast to humans’ failure to maintain such
cooperation themselves. That the monarch is also in danger of being
extinguished by humans’ failure has the potential to render that contrast
tragic.
The narrative’s conclusion holds the novel’s two possibilities – the
anthropocentric and the ecocentric – in delicate balance. Dellarobia sepa-
rates from her well-meaning but ineffectual husband, enrols into college,
and encourages her son to follow in her footsteps, all of which promises to
end the novel on a deeply anthropocentric note of scientific utopianism.
Such a dénouement would turn the fate of the monarchs into a metaphor
for a happy ending of human triumph. Yet, something very different – and
potentially profoundly ecocentric – happens instead. The freakishly wet
and snowy weather that has dominated the narrative from the outset results
in unprecedented flooding across the county, as wild weather events occur
throughout the world. As the waters rise around her home, Dellarobia is
alone: her children are at school or with her in-laws. Thus, she takes in the
enormity of the situation alone and with a sense of fascinated calm: ‘She
comprehended the terms of what she saw, but couldn’t turn away from it’
(594). She witnesses the butterflies emerge from their hibernation, for the
monarchs, it seems, have survived in sufficient numbers to recommence
their migration for now. Yet, the reader is ignorant of whether or not
Dellarobia, on the brink of embarking on her own journey, will also
manage to take flight, and, indeed, it seems likely that the novel ends
with her impending death or, at the very least, the devastation of both the
life that she has and the new one she anticipates. It seems, then, that she is
witness to the environmental disaster that will lead to her destruction, on
the one hand, and the awakening of the butterflies in a miraculous survival
for this remnant of the species, on the other.
The novel’s ending has puzzled commentators. According to Sylvia
Mayer, it ‘can be ambiguously read: either as a sign of destruction, or as
a sign of cleansing and renewal’.62 That depends, indeed, on whether one’s
empathy and sympathy stay with Dellarobia or shift entirely to the butter-
flies (when, up till now, attention had been directed at the butterflies
through sympathy with Dellarobia). Curiously, readers on both sides

62
Mayer, ‘Explorations of the Controversially Real’, p. 31.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 43.229.88.200, on 19 Jul 2021 at 18:18:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.006
Radical Ecocentric Posterity 163
have mistaken this, for different reasons, as a tragic ending. In Linda
Wagner-Martin’s anthropocentric reading, the monarchs and Dellarobia
are all doomed, so that this ‘last irretrievable chapter’ shows that
‘Dellarobia, like the butterflies, has no more choices’.63 Meanwhile,
Clark seeks, but does not find, an ecocentric reading; elsewhere so keen
to examine Anthropocene novels for the possibility of a scalar shift away
from the human, he interprets this novel’s conclusion as one in which
Dellarobia survives, and in which the butterflies ‘have come almost entirely
to symbolize a positive turning point in one character’s life’, a symptom of
the novel’s tendency to engage the reader in an ‘individualizing way’.64 He
particularly opines that ‘a pointed disjunction between the individual
character’s story and the fate of the insects would have made the text
more provocative as a climate change novel . . . the survival of the butter-
flies could have been juxtaposed with some personal defeat or
resignation’.65 And yet, such a disjunction is precisely what has happened,
for there occurs a significant ‘defeat’ of some kind for Dellarobia; thus, the
novel does indeed end with a provocative version of the future in ecocentric
terms. The fate of the monarchs, that is, takes precedence over any
eudaemonistic investment in or by Dellarobia.
Such misapprehension on Clark’s part, however, is telling, for it has to
do with the novel’s destabilisation of identification and empathy at this
point, specifically, the abruptness of the turn away from Dellarobia as the
facilitator of an overwhelmingly conservative and conventional set of
readerly sympathies and parental ethics, towards a distinctly unconven-
tional and radical kind of posterity. The novel shocks the reader out of an
emotional connection with Dellarobia. So much is this so that it ends on
a note of emotionlessness. Dellarobia’s response to her impending death
involves neither alarm and therefore disaster and tragedy, nor sadness and
with it melancholy and lament. This is not the tragic spectatorship
demanded by a eudaemonistic reading; it is, rather, a critically reflective
spectatorship in appreciation of the monarchs’ flourishing.
Kingsolver’s novel facilitates what Robinson’s scientific utopianism fails
to achieve: the ultimate reversal of what Nussbaum, after Frans de Waal,
calls ‘anthropodenial’, that is, the wilful denial of our animality and the
arrogant claim to human transcendence.66 With the monarchs’ survival, it
is less that we progress towards a tragic sympathetic understanding of our
63
Wagner-Martin, Barbara Kingsolver’s World, p. 197. 64 Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, p. 177.
65
Ibid., p. 178; original emphasis.
66
Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013),
p. 184.

The Sense of No Ending

The method of analysis employed in this book has focused on readers’

journeys of identification, sympathy, and empathy, in order to show how
some of those journeys might be derailed, destabilised, or otherwise
disrupted, and expectations, norms, and ethics built on identity, emotion,
and knowability might be held up to scrutiny. In the age we now call the
Anthropocene, such ontological certainties should not be taken for
granted. What this has meant, among other things, is a critical awareness
of endings, for even critical readerly journeys must end: they may not
always be resolved, but they necessarily reach the final page.
The authoritative – perhaps, one should say, the last – word on literary
endings has long been identified as belonging to Frank Kermode, who
mused, in The Sense of an Ending (1967), on the reasons we expect
narratives to end the way they tend to do, with finality, resolution, and
a sense of a higher meaning. According to Kermode, we render human
existence and time significant by suggesting to ourselves that it is how
everything ends (everything being existence, time, and so on) that gives it
meaning. Specifically, Kermode distinguishes between two attitudes to
time – chronos and kairos, where ‘chronos is “passing time” or “waiting
time’” and ‘kairos is the season, a point in time filled with significance,
charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end’.1 We prefer,
says Kermode, kairotic preoccupations with meaning over the merely
chronological experience of life – indeed, such kairotic concerns make
the mundanity of the chronological bearable. It is this preference that
drives the production, communication, and reception of narrative.
The process of narrative, in Kermode’s formulation, is simply the chron-
ological space between beginning and end; as he puts it somewhat aphor-
istically, though we know that ‘tick’ must be followed by ‘tock’, the gap

1
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (ﬁrst published 1967; Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 47.

165

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:28:00, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.007
166 Conclusion
between them must be filled, even as the importance of that gap is
determined solely by tick’s leading to tock. But it is how the narrative
ends that gives all its events a kairotic dimension. Indeed, says Kermode, it
is the need for kairotic meaning-making that drives Judaeo-Christian
myths of apocalypse, for this most important and enormous of endings
gives sense and significance to the everyday of life. Kermode’s analysis
highlights the psychological impulse that fuels the reader’s desire for the
end and its meaning. The result is an important recognition, which Peter
Brooks would go on to develop in his psychoanalytical studies of the
‘masterplot’, that the desire for deferral, with its prolongation of enjoy-
ment, is nothing without the desire for dénouement, with its satisfaction
and its rendering of meaning.2
Yet, many of the novels discussed in this book interrogate, scrutinise,
and even resist ‘happy’ endings, that is, endings that are definitive, satisfy-
ing, or kairotic. For example, the last paragraph of The Road ends the novel
with a pastoral vision in the present tense, so that destruction is replaced
with a disjunction that the reader might interpret as memory, eulogy, or
even simply hallucination. The dénouement of The Carhullan Army takes
place offstage, as it were, so that what is highlighted instead is the novel’s
metatextual status as unfinished testimony and manifesto. Similarly, Flight
Behaviour ends ambiguously, shifting focus away from the human prota-
gonist and refusing to confirm her fate. Meanwhile, The Stone Gods loops
back to its start, and insists on beginnings rather than endings; indeed, it
rejects the return to the known for the embrace of the unknown, brought
on by love as an intervention. Why, in the Anthropocene, when humans
are threatened by a physical but not cosmological end times, is narrative
dominated not by the sense of an ending but by the wish for no ending?
This is, I argue, no simple denial or avoidance of anxiety. This is an active
critique of the kairotic wish for endings as ultimately unproductive,
a critique emboldened by the concerns of the Anthropocene.
This is because kairos in Kermode’s terms describes not simply the wish
for endings but the need for meaning; specifically, it references, paradoxi-
cally, the desire for continuity. Simon Scheffler has described the extent to
which philosophical well-being in the present depends on the guarantee of
a continued human existence into the future; this girds, says Scheffler, our
very purpose and will – the longevity of the human species is part of the
value we place on the smallest and most prosaic daily activities.3 And, as Lee

2
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
3
Samuel Schefﬂer, Death and the Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:28:00, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.007
Conclusion 167
Edelman suggests, the child is a convenient mascot for these existentialist
longings for continuity.4 To read Edelman and Scheffler in Kermodian
terms is to recognise that the happy ending is also the promise of posterity:
it is not the ‘after’ in ‘happily ever after’ that matters so much as it is ‘ever’
(and, certainly, ‘happily’ helps). Edelman, after all, aligns readerly and
romantic impulses to show that the desire for endings – what in Kermode’s
terms is our kairotic desire for narrative ‘concordance’ – is part of
a heteronormative sexual desire for dynastic stability and continuity; he
goes as far as to castigate happy endings not as moments of closure per se
but as fulfilments of nuclear family fantasies. In other words, Edelman’s
analysis suggests that what we ask of our stories and of our lives are endings
(for which, read versions of the future) that look like us.
In the Anthropocene, that wish for a recognisable and knowable future
looks futile, its ethics appear suspect, and its fears – that the end of human
procreation is the end of the world – are rendered absurd. The radical
endings of many of the climate change novels discussed in this book, in
contrast, offer up possibilities for different kinds of posterity. That is, these
novels end with the awareness that endings do not bring neatly resolved
meanings, that the future need not resemble us, and that it is, indeed,
unknowable. Some invite us to consider not just the contingency and
radical unknowability of our own identities, but, as in The Stone Gods, to
consider the trauma that makes us seek stability and knowability, including
our desire to render the future knowable. Some express, too, the unknow-
ability of (non-human) others, though they invite no less a sense of wonder
at their flourishing. It is towards such radical versions of posterity that the
deceptively conventional form of the climate change novel beckons. And it
is such a critical awareness of our empathetic and emotional impulses, and
their role in an ethics of an unknowable future, that this book has
attempted to foster.

4
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004).

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Embodied Self.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. ‘Introduction: Emerging Models of
Materiality in Feminist Theory’. In Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman
(eds.), Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2008, 1–19.
Ananthaswamy, Anil. ‘Roots of Consciousness’. New Scientist 224 (6 December
2014), 34–37.
Andermahr, Sonya. Jeanette Winterson. Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2009.
Andre, Claire, and Manuel Velasquez. ‘Justice and Fairness’. Issues in Ethics 3.2
(1990). https://legacy.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3n2
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought.
First published 1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
The Human Condition, 2nd edn. First published 1958; Chicago University Press,
1998.
The Origins of Totalitarianism. First published 1951; New York: Shocken, 2004.
Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans.
Robert Baldick. New York: Vintage, 1962.
Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. David Ross and rev. J. L. Ackrill and
J. O. Urmson. Oxford University Press, 1980.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Asher, Kenneth. Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions. Cambridge University Press,
2017.
Attﬁeld, Robin. Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century,
2nd edn. London: Polity, 2014.
‘Non-Reciprocal Responsibilities and the Banquet of the Kingdom’. Journal of
Global Ethics 5.1 (2009), 33–42.
Atwood, Margaret. MaddAddam. New York: Nan A. Talese–Doubleday, 2013.
Oryx and Crake. First published 2003; London: Virago, 2004.
The Year of the Flood. First published 2009; London: Virago, 2010.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007.
168

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:29:57, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.008
Works Cited 169
‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter
Comes to Matter’. Signs 28.2 (2003), 801–31.
Barnes, Brookes. ‘Winner in the Amazon War’. New York Times (3 July 2014).
Barnes, Elizabeth. States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American
Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Barry, Brian. ‘Humanity and Justice in Global Perspective’. In J. Roland Pennock
and John W. Chapman (eds.), Ethics, Economics, and the Law. New York
University Press, 1982, 219–52.
Benhabib, Seyla. ‘Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition
and Jürgen Habermas’. In Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public
Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, 73–98.
Berry, Wendell E. ‘The One-Inch Journey’. Audubon (May 1971): 4–11.
The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1971.
Blackmore, Tim. ‘Life of War, Death of the Rest: The Shining Path of Cormac
McCarthy’s Thermonuclear America’. Bulletin of Science, Technology and
Society 29 (2009), 18–36.
Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988.
Boxall, Peter. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Bracke, Astrid. Climate Crisis and the Twenty-First-Century British Novel. London:
Bloomsbury, 2018.
Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Basingstoke:
Palgrave–Macmillan, 2007.
Brinkmeyer, Robert H. Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern
Writers and the West. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994.
Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century
America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Buell, Frederick. From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the
American Century. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. First published 1962; London: Penguin, 2000.
Chabon, Michael. ‘Dark Adventure: On Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’. Maps
and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands. San Francisco:
McSweeney’s, 2008, 107–20.
Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept.
London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Clarke, Jim. ‘Reading Climate Change in J. G. Ballard’. Critical Survey 25
(2013), 7–21.
Cohen, Tom, ed. Telemorphosis: Essays in Critical Climate Change. Ann Arbor, MI:
Open Humanities Press, 2012.
Cohen, Tom, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller. Theory and the Disappearing
Future: On De Man, on Benjamin. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:29:57, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.008
170 Works Cited
Colebrook, Claire. Death of the Posthuman: Essays in Extinction. Ann Arbor, MI:
Open Humanities Press, 2014.
Collado-Rodríguez, Francisco. ‘Trauma and Storytelling in Cormac McCarthy’s
No Country for Old Men and The Road’. Papers on Language and Literature 48
(2012), 45–69.
Collard, Andrée, with Joyce Contrucci. Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence against
Animals and the Earth. London: Women’s Press, 1988.
Coole, Diana. ‘Too Many Bodies? The Return and Disavowal of the Population
Question’. Environmental Politics 22.2 (2013), 195–215.
Cooper, Lydia. ‘Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative’.
Studies in the Novel 43 (2011), 218–36.
Cuomo, Chris J. Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethics of Flourishing.
London: Routledge, 1998.
Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. London: Women’s
Press, 1978.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selﬁsh Gene. First published 1976; Oxford University
Press, 1989.
Debrix, François, and Alexander D. Barder. Beyond Biopolitics? Theory, Violence,
and Horror in World Politics. London: Routledge, 2012.
De Bruyn, Ben. ‘Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes: Care,
Ruin and Vision in McCarthy’s The Road and Harrison’s Ecocriticism’.
English Studies 91 (2010), 776–89.
De-Shalit, Avner. Why Posterity Matters: Environmental Policies and Future
Generations. London: Routledge, 1995.
Dillon, Sarah. ‘Imagining Apocalypse: Maggie Gee’s The Flood’. Contemporary
Literature 48 (2007), 374–97.
‘Literary Equivocation: Reproductive Futurism and The Ice People’.
In Sarah Dillon and Caroline Edwards (eds.), Maggie Gee: Critical Essays.
Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015, 101–32.
Eaubonne, Françoise d’. Féminisme ou la Mort. Paris: Femme et Mouvement,
1974.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004.
Edwards, Tim. ‘The End of the Road: Pastoralism and the Post-Apocalyptic
Waste Land of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’. Cormac McCarthy Journal
6 (2008), 55–61.
Ehrlich, Paul R. The Population Bomb. 1968; London: Pan, 1971.
Ehrlich, Paul, and Anne Ehrlich. ‘The Politics of Extinction’. Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists 37.5 (1981), 26.
Ellam, Julie. Love in Jeanette Winterson’s Novels. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010.
Estes, Andrew Keller. Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013.
Estrin, Barbara L. ‘Mutating Literary Form and Literalizing Scientiﬁc Theory in
Liz Jensen’s Ark Baby’. Critique 47 (2005), 41–56.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:29:57, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.008
Works Cited 171
Fisher, Stephen L. ‘Community and Hope: A Conversation’. Iron Mountain
Review 28 (Spring 2012), 26–32.
‘Floods in Carlisle – January 2005’. Met Office. 29 October 2012. www.metoffice
.gov.uk/climate/uk/interesting/jan2005floods
Foote, Bud. ‘A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson’. Science Fiction Studies
21.1 (1994), 51–60.
Freedman, Carl. ‘Science Fiction and Utopia: A Historico-Philosophical
Overview’. In Patrick Parrinder (ed.), Learning from Other Worlds:
Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia.
Liverpool University Press, 2000, 72–97.
Ganteau, Jean-Michel. ‘“Rise from the Ground like Feathered Mercury”: Baroque
Citations in the Fiction of Peter Ackroyd and Jeanette Winterson’.
Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics 5 (2005), 193–211.
Gardiner, Stephen. The Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate
Change. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Gates, Barbara T. ‘A Root of Ecofeminism: Ecoféminisme’. In Greta Gaard and
Patrick D. Murphy (eds.), Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory,
Interpretation, Pedagogy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998, 15–22.
Gauch, Hugh G. Scientific Method in Practice. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Gee, Maggie. The Ice People. First published 1998; London: Telegram, 2008.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Godfrey, Laura Gruber. ‘“The World He’d Lost”: Geography and “Green”
Memory in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’. Critique 52 (2011), 163–75.
Goodbody, Axel. ‘Risk, Denial and Narrative Form in Climate Change Fiction:
Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Ilija Trojanow’s Melting Ice’.
In Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner (eds.), The Anticipation of
Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture.
Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014, 39–58.
Goodpaster, Kenneth E. ‘On Being Morally Considerable’. Journal of Philosophy
75 (1978), 308–25.
Gosseries, Axel. ‘The Egalitarian Case against Brundtland’s Sustainability’. GAIA
14.1 (2005), 40–6.
Graulund, Rune. ‘Fulcrums and Borderlands: A Desert Reading of Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road’. Orbis Litterarum 65 (2010), 57–78.
Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her. New York: Harper
and Row, 1979.
Grindley, Carl. ‘The Setting of McCarthy’s The Road’. The Explicator 67 (2008),
11–13.
Griswold, Robert L. Fatherhood in America: A History. New York: Basic Books,
1993.
Groves, Christopher. Care, Uncertainty, and Intergenerational Ethics. Basingstoke:
Palgrave–Macmillan, 2014.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:29:57, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.008
172 Works Cited
Gunn, Moira. Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Tech Nation:
IT Conversations. 4 April 2007. http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/
detail1773.html
Gwinner, Donovan. ‘“Everything Uncoupled from Its Shoring”: Quandaries of
Epistemology and Ethics in The Road’. In Sara L. Spurgeon (ed.), Cormac
McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road.
New York: Continuum, 2011, 137–56.
Haldane, J. B. S. The Causes of Evolution. London: Longmans, Green and Co.,
1932.
Hall, Dennis. ‘The Land Is Borrowed from Our Children’. Michigan Natural
Resources 44.4 (1975), 2–3.
Hall, Sarah. The Carhullan Army. London: Faber, 2007.
Hamming, Jeanne. ‘Nationalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Climate Change
in the Novels of Kim Stanley Robinson and Michael Crichton’. Extrapolation
54.1 (2013), 21–45.
Hansen, James. Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate
Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. London: Bloomsbury,
2009.
Haraway, Donna J. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. Simians, Cyborgs and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991, 149–81.
Hardin, Garrett. ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. Science 162 (13 December 1968),
1243–8.
Haynes, Roslynn D. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in
Western Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination
of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Hendrixson, Anne, and Erica Gies. ‘If You Care about Climate Change, Should
You Have Children?’ New Internationalist 480 (March 2015). http://newint
.org/sections/argument/2015/03/01/climate-change-children
Heyd, David. ‘A Value or an Obligation? Rawls on Justice to Future Generations’.
In Axel Gosseries and Lukas H. Meyer (eds.), Intergenerational Justice.
Oxford University Press, 2012, 168–89.
Hollinger, Veronica. ‘“Something like a Fiction”: Speculative Intersections of
Sexuality and Technology’. In Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger,
and Joan Gordon (eds.), Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction.
Liverpool University Press, 2008, 140–60.
Honeyman, Susan. Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations of Childhood in
Modern Fiction. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2006.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Stephen Buckle.
First published 1748; Cambridge University Press, 2007.
An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. David Guggenheim, perf. Al Gore. Lawrence Bender
Productions, 2006.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:29:57, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.008
Works Cited 173
James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.
Jameson, Fredric. ‘“If I Can Find One Good City, I Will Spare the Man”: Realism
and Utopia in the Mars Trilogy’. In Patrick Parrinder (ed.), Learning from
Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and
Utopia. Liverpool University Press, 2000, 208–33.
Jeffries, Stuart. ‘Jeanette Winterson: I Thought of Suicide’. The Guardian
(22 February 2010).
Jensen, Liz. The Rapture. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
Johns-Putra, Adeline. ‘Climate Change in Literature and Literary Studies: From
Cli-Fi, Climate Change Theater and Ecopoetry to Ecocriticism and Climate
Change Criticism’. WIREs Climate Change 7 (2016), 266–82.
‘Environmental Care Ethics: Notes toward a New Materialist Critique’. sym-
plokē 21.1–2 (2013), 125–35.
‘A New Critical Climate’. symplokē 21.1–2 (2013), 9–12.
Jones, ed. ‘Saving the Soil – by Private Initiative’. Christian Science Monitor
(5 January 1983), 23.
Josephs, Allen. ‘What’s at the End of The Road?’, South Atlantic Review 74 (2009),
20–30.
Kaufman, Gayle. ‘The Portrayal of Men’s Family Roles in Television
Commercials’. Sex Roles 41 (1999), 439–58.
Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Kellogg, Carolyn. ‘Edan Lepucki Thanks Colbert Nation for Making California
a Hit’. Los Angeles Times (22 July 2014).
Kelly, Janice, and Laura Tropp. ‘Introduction: Changing Conceptions of the
Good Dad in Popular Culture’. In Laura Tropp and Janice Kelly (eds.),
Deconstructing Dads: Changing Images of Fathers in Popular Culture. Lanham,
MD: Lexington, 2016, xi–xx.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. First
published 1967; Oxford University Press, 2000.
Keyes, Ralph. ‘Some of Our Favorite Quotations Never Quite Went that Way:
Did They REALLY Say It?’ Washington Post (16 May 1993), L10.
Kılıç, Mine Özyurt. Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England Novel. London:
Bloomsbury, 2013.
Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behaviour. London: Faber, 2012.
Kollin, Susan. ‘“Barren, Silent, Godless”: Ecodisaster and the Post-Abundant
Landscape in The Road’. In Sara L. Spurgeon (ed.), Cormac McCarthy: All
the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road. New York: Continuum,
2011, 157–71.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions. First published 1962;
University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Kumar, Krishan. Utopianism. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990.
Kunsa, Ashley. ‘“Maps of the World in Its Becoming”: Post-Apocalyptic Naming
in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’. Journal of Modern Literature 33 (2009),
57–74.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:29:57, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.008
174 Works Cited
‘Landmark U.S. Federal Climate Lawsuit’. Our Children’s Trust. www
.ourchildrenstrust.org/us/federal-lawsuit
LaRossa, Ralph. ‘The Culture of Fatherhood and the Late-Twentieth-Century
New Fatherhood Movement: An Interpretive Perspective’. In Laura Tropp
and Janice Kelly (eds.), Deconstructing Dads: Changing Images of Fathers in
Popular Culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016, 3–30.
The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History. University of
Chicago Press, 1997.
Lederman, Shmuel. ‘Agonism and Deliberation in Arendt’. Constellations 21.3
(2014), 327–37.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation, illustrated
edn. First published 1949; Oxford University Press, 2001.
Lepucki, Edan. California. First published 2014; London: Abacus, 2015.
Lilley, Deborah. ‘Unsettling Environments: New Pastoral in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
Never Let Me Go and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army’. Green Letters 20.1
(2016), 60–71.
Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back—and
How We Can Still Save Humanity. First published 2006; London:
Penguin, 2007.
Lupton, Deborah, and Lesley Barclay. Constructing Fatherhood: Discourses and
Experiences. London: Sage, 1997.
MacGregor, Sherilyn. Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the
Politics of Care. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006.
Maczynska, Magdalena. ‘This Monstrous City: Urban Visionary Satire in the
Fiction of Martin Amis, Will Self, China Miéville, and Maggie Gee’.
Contemporary Literature 51 (2010), 58–86.
Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History
and Science of Plant Intelligence. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015.
Mangrum, Benjamin. ‘Accounting for The Road: Tragedy, Courage, and Cavell’s
Acknowledgement’. Philosophy and Literature 37 (2013), 267–90.
Mayer, Sylvia. ‘Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the Climate
Change Novel, and the Narrative of Anticipation’. In Sylvia Mayer and
Alexa Weik von Mossner (eds.), The Anticipation of Catastrophe:
Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture. Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014, 21–37.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. First published 2006; London: Picador, 2007.
McCaulay, Diana, Michael Mendis, and Maggie Gee. ‘The Untold Story:
The Environment in Fiction’. Hay Festival, 29 May 2014.
McCulloch, Fiona. Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction: Imagined
Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2012.
McKay, Margaret. ‘An Interview with Maggie Gee’. Studia Neophilogica 69.2
(1997), 213–21.
Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William
W. Behrens. The Limits to Growth: A Report on the Club of Rome’s Project
for the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books, 1972.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:29:57, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.008
Works Cited 175
Medawar, Peter. Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought. London: Methuen,
1969.
Mehnert, Antonia. Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in
American Literature. London: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2016.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.
Trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2010.
Mellor, Mary. ‘Ecofeminist Political Economy and the Politics of Money’.
In Ariel Salleh (ed.), Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write
Political Ecology. London: Pluto, 2009, 251–67.
Feminism and Ecology. London: Polity Press, 1997.
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific
Revolution. First published 1980; San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990.
Earthcare: Women and the Environment. London: Routledge, 1995.
Merola, Nicole M. ‘Materializing a Geotraumatic and Melancholy Anthropocene:
Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods’. Minnesota Review 83 (2014), 122–32.
Moline, Jon N. ‘Aldo Leopold and the Moral Community’. Environmental Ethics
8.3 (1986), 99–120.
Monbiot, George. ‘Civilisation Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern: Are
We There Already?’ The Guardian (30 October 2007).
Morrison, Jago ‘“Who Cares about Gender at a Time like This?” Love, Sex
and the Problem of Jeanette Winterson’. Journal of Gender Studies 15
(2006), 169–80.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010.
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian
Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986.
Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO:
Westview, 2000.
Murtaugh, Paul A., and Michael Schlax, ‘Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies
of Individuals’. Global Environmental Change 19.1 (2009), 14–20.
Næss, Arne. ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement:
A Summary’. Inquiry 16.1–4 (1973), 95–96.
Næss, Arne, and David Rothenberg. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of
an Ecosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education,
updated edn. First published 1984; Berkeley: University of California Press,
2013.
Nowotny, Helga. ‘Science and Utopia: On the Social Ordering of the Future’.
In Everett Mendelsohn and Helga Nowotny (eds.), Nineteen Eighty-Four:
Science between Utopia and Dystopia. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984, 3–18.
Nussbaum, Martha C. ‘Beyond “Compassion and Humanity”: Justice for
Nonhuman Animals’. In Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:29:57, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.008
176 Works Cited
(eds.), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. Oxford University
Press, 2004, 299–320.
‘Compassion and Terror’. Daedalus 132.1 (2003), 10–26.
Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press,
1990.
Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2013.
Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press,
2001.
Onega, Susana. ‘The Trauma Paradigm and the Ethics of Affect in Jeanette
Winterson’s The Stone Gods’. In Susana Onega and Jean-Michael Ganteau
(eds.), Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2011, 265–98.
O’Neill, Brian C., Michael Dalton, Regina Fuchs, et al. ‘Global Demographic
Trends and Future Carbon Emissions’. PNAS 107 (2012), 17521–6.
O’Neill, John. Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-Being and the Natural
World. London: Routledge, 1993.
Ortner, Sherry B. ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’ In Michelle
Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds.), Woman, Culture, and
Society. Stanford University Press, 1974, 67–87.
O’Toole, Garson. ‘We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors; We Borrow
It from Our Children’. Quote Investigator: Exploring the Origins of
Quotations. http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/22/borrow-earth/#;note
-5296–1
Otto, Eric C. ‘“From a Certain Angle”: Ecothriller Reading and Science Fiction
Reading The Swarm and The Rapture’. Ecozon@ 3 (2012), 106–21.
Padel, Ruth. ‘Slices of Toast’. London Review of Books 29.5 (8 March 2007), 31.
Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press, 1986.
Parrinder, Patrick. Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to
Brave New World and Beyond. Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2015.
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993.
Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. First published 1959; London:
Routledge, 1992.
Proctor, Robert. Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Pykett, Lyn. ‘A New Way with Words? Jeanette Winterson’s Post-Modernism’.
In Helena Grice and Tim Woods (eds.), ‘I’m Telling You Stories’: Jeanette
Winterson and the Politics of Reading. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, 53–60.
Rachels, James. Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism.
Oxford University Press, 1990.
Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001.
Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:29:57, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.008
Works Cited 177
Reese, Diana. ‘Michael Brown’s Mother Inspires Controversial Artwork by Mary
Engelbreit’. Washington Post (25 August 2014).
Riley, Frank. ‘John Muir’s Legacy Still Strong in Glacier Country’. Los Angeles
Times (14 August. 1988), 5.
Rine, Abigail. ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention: Rethinking the Future’.
In Ben Davies and Jana Funke (eds.), Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and
Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2011, 70–85.
Robinson, Iain. ‘“You Just Know When the World is About to Break Apart”:
Utopia, Dystopia and New Global Uncertainties in Sarah Hall’s
The Carhullan Army’. In Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard (eds.), Twenty-
First Century Fiction: What Happens Now. Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan,
2013, 197–211.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. ‘Climate Change and the Pursuit of Happiness’ [lecture].
Sustainable Actions for a Sustainable Future Conference, Missouri State
University, 22 April 2009.
Fifty Degrees Below. First published 2005; London: HarperCollins, 2006.
Forty Signs of Rain. First published 2004; London: HarperCollins, 2005.
Green Earth. New York: Del Rey, 2015.
Imagining Abrupt Climate Change: Terraforming Earth. Seattle: Amazon Shorts,
2005.
Red Mars. New York: Bantam, 1993.
Sixty Days and Counting. London: HarperCollins, 2007.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional
Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1978.
Salleh, Ariel. ‘Class, Race, and Gender Discourse in the Ecofeminism/Deep
Ecology Debate’. In Max Oelschlaeger (ed.), Postmodern Environmental
Ethics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, 79–100.
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century
American Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Sandilands, Catriona. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for
Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
‘Sarah Hall – The Carhullan Army’. Bookclub, BBC Radio 4, 9 December 2010.
Schefﬂer, Samuel. Death and the Afterlife. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Sears, John. ‘“Making Sorrow Speak”: Maggie Gee’s Novels’. In Emma Parker
(ed.), Contemporary British Women Writers. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004,
55–67.
Seed, David. ‘The Mars Trilogy: An Interview’. Foundation 68 (1996), 75–80.
Sellars, Wilfred. ‘Philosophy and the Scientiﬁc Image of Man’. In Robert Colodny
(ed.), Frontiers of Science and Philosophy. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962,
35–78.
Seymour, Nicole. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological
Imagination. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
Sideris, Lisa H. Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World.
Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 25 Mar 2019 at 12:29:57, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162.008
178 Works Cited
Sidgwick, Henry. Practical Ethics: A Collection of Addresses and Essays. First
published 1898; Oxford University Press, 1998.
Singer, Peter. ‘Animals and the Value of Life’. In Tom Regan (ed.), Matters of Life
and Death: New Introductory Essays on Moral Philosophy, 3rd edn. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1993, 280–321.
Snyder, Phillip A. ‘Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’. Cormac
McCarthy Journal 6 (2008), 69–86.
Solomon, Robert C. In Defense of Sentimentality. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Squire, Louise. ‘Death and the Anthropocene: Cormac McCarthy’s World of
Unliving’. Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012), 211–28.
‘The Subject Reconsidered: Death-Facing and Its Challenges in Contemporary
Environmental Crisis Fiction’. PhD dissertation. University of Surrey, 2014.
Stableford, Brian. ‘Science Fiction and Ecology’. In David Seed (ed.),
A Companion to Science Fiction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, 127–41.
Stark, Hannah. ‘“All These Things He Saw and Did Not See”: Witnessing the
End of the World in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’. Critical Survey 25.2
(2013), 71–84.
Stein, Rachel. Introduction. In Rachel Stein (ed.), New Perspectives on
Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004, 1–17.
Stevenson, Christian M., Cedric O. Puleston, Peter M. Vitousek, et al. ‘Variation
in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) Land Use Indicates Production and Population
Peaks Prior to European Contact’. PNAS 112 (2015), 1025–30.
Sturgeon, Noël. Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and
the Politics of the Natural. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2009.
Sunderland, Jane. ‘“Parenting” or “Mothering”? The Case of Modern Childcare
Magazines’. Discourse and Society 17.4 (2006), 503–27.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of
a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.
Szeman, Imre, and Maria Whiteman. ‘Future Politics: An Interview with Kim
Stanley Robinson’. Science Fiction Studies 31.2 (2004), 188–99.
Talbot, Lee M. ‘A World Conservation Strategy’. Journal of the Royal Society of Arts
128.5288 (July 1980).
Thant, U. Statement at Presentation of Declaration on Population Growth,
10 December 1967. www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/
rights
Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015.
Trexler, Adam, and Adeline Johns-Putra. ‘Climate Change in Literature and
Literary Criticism’, WIREs Climate Change 2.1 (2011), 185–200.
Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care.
New York: Routledge, 1993.
Tronto, Joan, and Berenice Fisher. ‘Towards a Feminist Theory of Caring’.
In Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson (eds.), Circles of Care: Work and

Cult Classic Origins: Blow-Up
No ratings yet
Cult Classic Origins: Blow-Up
10 pages
How To Speak of Animals (Umberto Eco)
No ratings yet
How To Speak of Animals (Umberto Eco)
2 pages
Personal Glances The Case Against The Younger Generation
No ratings yet
Personal Glances The Case Against The Younger Generation
17 pages
And of Clay Are We Created (Analysis)
No ratings yet
And of Clay Are We Created (Analysis)
6 pages
Metropolitan Lovers The Homosexuality of Cities Julie Abraham PDF Download
50% (2)
Metropolitan Lovers The Homosexuality of Cities Julie Abraham PDF Download
91 pages
The Rain Horse
100% (1)
The Rain Horse
3 pages
Geography, Empire, and Environmental Determinism
No ratings yet
Geography, Empire, and Environmental Determinism
12 pages
John Henderson, Knowing Someone Through Their Books: Pliny On Uncle Pliny
No ratings yet
John Henderson, Knowing Someone Through Their Books: Pliny On Uncle Pliny
30 pages
Response Paper To: Do Artifacts Have Politics? by Langdon Winner
100% (2)
Response Paper To: Do Artifacts Have Politics? by Langdon Winner
3 pages
Thames The Biography 1St Edition Edition Peter Ackroyd Ready To Read
100% (1)
Thames The Biography 1St Edition Edition Peter Ackroyd Ready To Read
165 pages
Edges - Richard Sennett
No ratings yet
Edges - Richard Sennett
8 pages
Kabuliwala by R.N. Tagore
No ratings yet
Kabuliwala by R.N. Tagore
9 pages
Rebuilding Communities After Displacement Sustainable and Resilience Approaches Mo Hamza Instant Download
100% (1)
Rebuilding Communities After Displacement Sustainable and Resilience Approaches Mo Hamza Instant Download
84 pages
The Glass Flowers
No ratings yet
The Glass Flowers
57 pages
Just Freedom A Moral Compass For A Complex World Philip Pettit PDF Download
100% (1)
Just Freedom A Moral Compass For A Complex World Philip Pettit PDF Download
79 pages
Peripheral Vision: Phil Smith Sandra Reeve
100% (1)
Peripheral Vision: Phil Smith Sandra Reeve
25 pages
A Reinvention of Realism in Raymond Carver
100% (2)
A Reinvention of Realism in Raymond Carver
17 pages
ARMA Medieval Maiello
100% (1)
ARMA Medieval Maiello
25 pages
Wordsworthian Nature vs. Tropical Reality
No ratings yet
Wordsworthian Nature vs. Tropical Reality
6 pages
Feeling Things Objects and Emotions Through History 1st Edition Stephanie Downes Online PDF
100% (1)
Feeling Things Objects and Emotions Through History 1st Edition Stephanie Downes Online PDF
88 pages
Mitchell, WJT - Holy Landscape (Israel, Palestine, and The American Wilderness) (2000)
No ratings yet
Mitchell, WJT - Holy Landscape (Israel, Palestine, and The American Wilderness) (2000)
32 pages
The Crab Walks
100% (1)
The Crab Walks
80 pages
The Story of An Hour by Kate Chopin-1
100% (1)
The Story of An Hour by Kate Chopin-1
3 pages
To End A War Richard Holbrooke Download
No ratings yet
To End A War Richard Holbrooke Download
31 pages
Wetland PDF
No ratings yet
Wetland PDF
40 pages
Excerpt From Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman
No ratings yet
Excerpt From Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman
14 pages
NAMES - Maya Angelou
No ratings yet
NAMES - Maya Angelou
6 pages
Lets Go To Golgotha
No ratings yet
Lets Go To Golgotha
7 pages
Exploring Empire's Modern Relevance
No ratings yet
Exploring Empire's Modern Relevance
33 pages
Cultural Impact on Family Dynamics
No ratings yet
Cultural Impact on Family Dynamics
25 pages
Migration and The Making of Industrial Sao Paulo by Paulo Fontes PDF
No ratings yet
Migration and The Making of Industrial Sao Paulo by Paulo Fontes PDF
31 pages
Rudy Acuna - Book Footprints Out of Purgatory Draft Introduction
No ratings yet
Rudy Acuna - Book Footprints Out of Purgatory Draft Introduction
32 pages
The Real World of Technology Revised Edition Ursula M Franklin Download
100% (1)
The Real World of Technology Revised Edition Ursula M Franklin Download
55 pages
Cuban Sugarcane Ethanol Benefits
No ratings yet
Cuban Sugarcane Ethanol Benefits
65 pages
The Christian Home in Victorian America 1840 1900 Annas Archive
No ratings yet
The Christian Home in Victorian America 1840 1900 Annas Archive
236 pages
Language and Identity in Twain and O'Neill
No ratings yet
Language and Identity in Twain and O'Neill
9 pages
Tim Choy - Air's Substantiations
No ratings yet
Tim Choy - Air's Substantiations
38 pages
'Luigi Ghirri: Architecture, Word and Image': 'Architettura, Imagine e Parola' - David Campany
No ratings yet
'Luigi Ghirri: Architecture, Word and Image': 'Architettura, Imagine e Parola' - David Campany
4 pages
(Ebook) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of The Ordinary by Tracy B. Strong ISBN 9780742521438, 0742521435 Download
100% (1)
(Ebook) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of The Ordinary by Tracy B. Strong ISBN 9780742521438, 0742521435 Download
91 pages
Lisa Blackmore, On The Tides of Time: Alexandre Da Cunha's Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset
No ratings yet
Lisa Blackmore, On The Tides of Time: Alexandre Da Cunha's Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset
9 pages
Global Intellectual History PDF
No ratings yet
Global Intellectual History PDF
12 pages
John Potts - Future Fear - Fear of The Future From Prehistory To Climate Change-Palgrave Macmillan (2024)
No ratings yet
John Potts - Future Fear - Fear of The Future From Prehistory To Climate Change-Palgrave Macmillan (2024)
233 pages
Abstract:: "The Earth Does Not Belong To Us. We Belong To The Earth."
No ratings yet
Abstract:: "The Earth Does Not Belong To Us. We Belong To The Earth."
5 pages
Hadrian S Wall Adrian Goldsworthy Instant Download
100% (2)
Hadrian S Wall Adrian Goldsworthy Instant Download
180 pages
Teotihuacan
No ratings yet
Teotihuacan
10 pages
Operation Bucharest Jack T Chick PDF Download
100% (1)
Operation Bucharest Jack T Chick PDF Download
41 pages
J. D. McClatchy Paris Review
No ratings yet
J. D. McClatchy Paris Review
26 pages
Perry Anderson 2021 (Edgerton S Britain)
No ratings yet
Perry Anderson 2021 (Edgerton S Britain)
13 pages
Full Essay #3
No ratings yet
Full Essay #3
4 pages
Can Pictures Lie
No ratings yet
Can Pictures Lie
10 pages
'In Alia Effigie': Caravaggio's London Supper at Emmaus, by Charles Scribner III
100% (1)
'In Alia Effigie': Caravaggio's London Supper at Emmaus, by Charles Scribner III
9 pages
Anatomy of A Street
No ratings yet
Anatomy of A Street
55 pages
Parque del Este Heritage Strategies
No ratings yet
Parque del Este Heritage Strategies
87 pages
Captain America: Post-9/11 Identity & Geopolitics
No ratings yet
Captain America: Post-9/11 Identity & Geopolitics
19 pages
Ba Prog. Vi Sem. Syllabus PDF
No ratings yet
Ba Prog. Vi Sem. Syllabus PDF
49 pages
Frankissstein
No ratings yet
Frankissstein
10 pages
05 - Coffin - Villa in The Life 9-22
No ratings yet
05 - Coffin - Villa in The Life 9-22
9 pages
Climate Change and The Contemporary Novel 1st Edition Adeline Johns-Putra Download
No ratings yet
Climate Change and The Contemporary Novel 1st Edition Adeline Johns-Putra Download
163 pages
Volume2 Johns Putra
No ratings yet
Volume2 Johns Putra
17 pages
Climate Change and The Contemporary Novel 1st Edition Adeline Johns-Putra Instant Download 2025
No ratings yet
Climate Change and The Contemporary Novel 1st Edition Adeline Johns-Putra Instant Download 2025
119 pages
Mangalacarana With Borders and Next Section v4
No ratings yet
Mangalacarana With Borders and Next Section v4
22 pages
Money Can Buy Us Happiness
No ratings yet
Money Can Buy Us Happiness
3 pages
Yoga Sutra Lectures
0% (1)
Yoga Sutra Lectures
65 pages
Objectives & Objectivity of Research
No ratings yet
Objectives & Objectivity of Research
13 pages
Synthesis Essay Outline
No ratings yet
Synthesis Essay Outline
2 pages
Dokumen - Pub Black Sun Depression and Melancholia European Perspectives A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism 0231214537 9780231214537
No ratings yet
Dokumen - Pub Black Sun Depression and Melancholia European Perspectives A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism 0231214537 9780231214537
248 pages
Notes - The Ball Poem
No ratings yet
Notes - The Ball Poem
2 pages
C Peter King, Augustine: Against The Academicians and The Teacher (Hackett), Vi-Xx
0% (1)
C Peter King, Augustine: Against The Academicians and The Teacher (Hackett), Vi-Xx
12 pages
Austin's Theory of Sovereignity
83% (6)
Austin's Theory of Sovereignity
9 pages
Chapter 2, Traits, Motives and Characteristics of Leadership
No ratings yet
Chapter 2, Traits, Motives and Characteristics of Leadership
40 pages
Ways of Curating' Hal Foster Review
No ratings yet
Ways of Curating' Hal Foster Review
6 pages
Ways of Knowing As A Framework For Developing Reflective Practice Among Nursing Students
No ratings yet
Ways of Knowing As A Framework For Developing Reflective Practice Among Nursing Students
11 pages
Marxist Jurisprudence
0% (1)
Marxist Jurisprudence
4 pages
Writing A Free Paragraph
No ratings yet
Writing A Free Paragraph
5 pages
Essay Writin1
No ratings yet
Essay Writin1
5 pages
FSD BS Information Technology Morning
No ratings yet
FSD BS Information Technology Morning
14 pages
Verbal Ability Practice Questions Set 2 1
No ratings yet
Verbal Ability Practice Questions Set 2 1
7 pages
Masculinity: Things Fall Apart
No ratings yet
Masculinity: Things Fall Apart
1 page
What Is Discourse Analysis
No ratings yet
What Is Discourse Analysis
19 pages
Probability Concepts for Students
No ratings yet
Probability Concepts for Students
39 pages
9 +Keynote+PAC+Arusha+2024 Shivji
No ratings yet
9 +Keynote+PAC+Arusha+2024 Shivji
4 pages
Unit 5: We Are What We Eat: Final Writing Task (Assignment 6)
No ratings yet
Unit 5: We Are What We Eat: Final Writing Task (Assignment 6)
2 pages
Ephemeral and Site-Specific Encounters W
No ratings yet
Ephemeral and Site-Specific Encounters W
174 pages
Periyar 1000 MCQ English@Tnpscfree
No ratings yet
Periyar 1000 MCQ English@Tnpscfree
242 pages
DBQ Period 1 Answers
No ratings yet
DBQ Period 1 Answers
18 pages
Why Philosophy Is More Fun (And Useful) Than You Think
No ratings yet
Why Philosophy Is More Fun (And Useful) Than You Think
2 pages
At Doom's Gate A Guide
No ratings yet
At Doom's Gate A Guide
215 pages
Temple Grandin - Animals in Translation
100% (1)
Temple Grandin - Animals in Translation
1,774 pages
Confidence
No ratings yet
Confidence
2 pages
Medieval Decay and Political Rot
No ratings yet
Medieval Decay and Political Rot
52 pages