Green Planets (35 page)

Such eco-dystopian representations, while harrowing, are indeed part of the utopian project to imagine and bring about positive social change. Scholars of utopia have long recognized the utopian impulse—the impulse toward hope—in dystopian literature. If, as M. Keith Booker writes, “dystopian societies are generally more or less thinly veiled refigurations of a situation that already exists in reality,” then to represent such societies in fiction is an effort to alert readers to
elements of social reality that might otherwise be undetectable as a consequence of their ubiquity.
⁹
Darko Suvin coined the term
cognitive estrangement
to label the utopian literary effort to renew readers' perceptions of normalized, unseen social reality by presenting unfamiliar objects and situations—
nova
—that are nevertheless rationally of this reality. Unlike Victor Shklovsky's
defamiliarization
, which is the artistic attempt to reinvigorate perceptions of the mundane, cognitive estrangement functions with a more political charge. In dystopia, as in all critical utopian fiction, “the real world is made to appear ‘strange' in order to challenge the reader's complacency toward accepted views of history and awaken, through the ‘truth' of fiction, a new perception of the connections between history and the present world.”
¹⁰

By highlighting the connections between fictional
nova
, the present, and historical forces, dystopian fiction operates as “the dark side of hope.”
¹¹
As Lyman Tower Sargent notes, “a defining characteristic of the dystopian genre must be a warning to the reader that something must, and, by implication, can be done in the present to avoid the future.”
¹²
With this assertion, Sargent speaks for a critical dystopia that presents dark futures not to background the machinations of characters but instead to foreground the conditions of possibility for these dark futures' emergence. One of Bacigalupi's fundamental ecotopian strategies is to imagine what the future could look like given the full realization of current developments—in short, to prompt ecotopia through ecodystopian storytelling. His “The Tamarisk Hunter” (2006), for example, is about water—how societies use, abuse, and unfairly apportion it to the detriment of politically and economically disadvantaged citizens. By the third decade of the twenty-first century, rampant suburban development within the Colorado River Basin, careless water use, and the thirsty, invasive tamarisk tree have depleted the water table enough to prompt California to secure its allotment with lawsuits. No one on the river, including the protagonist, Lolo, and his wife, Annie, can touch the water without the threat of punishment, leaving Lolo to reflect on a past when “football fields still had green grass and sprinklers sprayed their water straight into the air.”
¹³
Of course, this past is our now; the story's dystopian
nova
draw our attention to the present and cue us to think about this present as having a role in bringing about a certain kind of future.

Bacigalupi's “The Calorie Man” (2005) and “Yellow Card Man” (2006), both of which take place in the same literary universe as his Nebula- and Hugo-Award-winning novel
The Windup Girl
(2009), likewise extrapolate dystopian futures from specific present developments. These stories envision the inevitable end
of the fossil fuel economy as a monopolistic business opportunity for global corporations who modify and patent food crop genetics. The world economy has run out of oil calories to power its machinery, but it has not run out of food calories to do so. With full legal rights to these food calories, biotech firms such as “AgriGen” and “PurCal” employ intellectual property police to crack down violently on people transporting, growing, and eating pirated food or using such food to nourish the genetically modified animals whose calorie-fed movements power spring winders and computers. The calorie companies have more than IP police, however: “What makes [AgriGen's patented grain] SuperFlavor so perfect from a CEO's perspective” is its
sterility.
¹⁴
Monsanto's terminator technology has been perfected, and its consequences realized in this imagined future. As the protagonist of “The Calorie Man” has learned through childhood experience, planting seeds obtained from crops originally grown from calorie monopoly seeds is futile. They will not germinate—radically reconfiguring the relationship between farmers, corporations, and the natural world.

As Dale Knickerbocker argues, “it is possible to see dystopia as a call to pursue its opposite.”
¹⁵
Bacigalupi's fiction calls us to pursue modes of thinking and social being that would prevent, for example, the unjust privatization of “a privilege that nature once provided willingly”—the automatic reproduction of plant life.
¹⁶
Of course, such natural resources as water and food are
already
unjustly politicized and privatized, and Bacigalupi's fiction is of a piece with nonfictional modes of social commentary like critical journalism and documentary film that expose why, how, and to what effects. If we take Bacigalupi at his word, he creatively represents future consequences of current developments to raise in readers the question “Does that seem like something we want to be going toward?”
¹⁷
Bacigalupi has a clear ecotopian motivation for writing ecodystopias. He wants first to place readers in worlds where the negative consequences of present ways of thinking and being are distressingly palpable and second to use these possible worlds to influence readers to take action. In addition to imagining possible futures, another one of Bacigalupi's ecotopian strategies is thus analogous to philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy's strategy for social change. Dupuy, Slavoj Žižek notes, proposes to confront dystopian disaster like this:

We should first perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities (“If we had done this and that, the calamity that we are now experiencing would not have occurred!”) upon
which we then act today. We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny—and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.
¹⁸

Ultimately, Bacigalupi's ecodystopian fiction displays “some critical awareness of the present,” as Peter Fitting notes of critical dystopia in general, and it attempts “to explain how this dystopia came about” in an effort to get readers to think about and act in the world differently.
¹⁹

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

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

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

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

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