ecofiction

Radio Free Vermont, by Bill McKibben

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Subtitled A Fable of Resistance, this is the story of radio personality Vern Barclay’s mission to persuade Vermont to secede from the U. S. Seventy-two years old and dismayed by the speed, greed and corruption that have taken over the country, Vern wants to remind Vermonters of all the things they value that are being lost, not just the slower pace of life, but also local food and the strength of community: Vermont’s “free local economy, where neighbors make things for neighbors—and so they actually bother to give them some taste, body, and character.”

He and his accomplices, the young computer specialist Perry Alterson, his pal Sylvia and an Olympic athlete named Trace, come up with various pranks to drive their point home, starting with a protest at the opening of the first Walmart that backfires, spewing raw sewage into the store. Vern also has hosts a podcast that Perry has set up to use over a dial-up connection to foil their pursuers. The podcast’s motto is “Underground, underfoot and underpowered.”

For Vern, this is more of a thought experiment than a serious endorsement of secession. He mostly wants people to wake up and notice that some good things are slipping away. Still, it fits with the push for secession coming from states like Texas and California.

Humor isn’t that easy to write these days. No matter how much you exaggerate what’s happening in this country, reality shocks you by going even farther. Yet McKibben pulls it off. This zany story is full of fun and surprises, but never quite loses touch with the real world, or a possible version of it.

The satire is softened by the characters who are forthright but pleasant, stubborn but polite. I loved seeing a resistance movement that is not only nonviolent but also positive. It’s focused on building a better future, not just tearing everything down, and demonstrating how to take action, in a friendly way of course.

Funny and thought-provoking, I hope this novel from McKibben is the first of many more. It’s a departure from his many nonfiction books, starting with The End of Nature, in form if not in theme, and must have been a hoot to write.

Have you read any of Bill McKibben’s nonfiction books? Try this novel!

The Quiet and the Loud, by Helena Fox

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In this Young Adult novel, Georgia at 18 is barely holding it together. Taking a gap year at home in Sydney, Australia, before college, she keeps getting texts from her alcoholic father who lives in Seattle, Washington. He has been a danger to her for her whole life, but she feels duty-bound to help him. The story opens with a vivid flashback to one such occasion.

Her best friend Tess, also 18, has deliberately gotten pregnant, determined to become a teen mom, and assumes that Georgia will not only bring her smoothies and wait attendance on her, but will also help her raise the child. They’ve been best friends forever, so Georgia feels she must support Tess, even as her attention is being drawn in other directions.

Such as her rewarding part-time work teaching art to children, which offsets her friend Laz’s despair about the climate crisis. Her grandfather, who lives with them, may be losing his marbles, or at least his teeth, but adds comic relief with his relentless pursuit of elderly women.

Georgia’s mother is happily married to successful artist Mel, whose brusque demeanor hides a penetrating insight. She is the one who gifts Georgia with two successful coping mechanisms: kayaking and painting.

Suspense grows as we learn more about how her father’s alcoholism has affected her. As he spirals and Tess becomes mired in post-partum depression, 2019’s wildfires come ever closer, sending Laz into an apocalyptic frenzy and Georgia to the brink of despair.

I loved Fox’s previous novel How It Feels to Float, and am myself overly sensitive to loud sensory input, so I was eager to read this one. I was not disappointed. While the themes can be difficult, Georgia’s voice is a welcome companion.

Much of the writing is gorgeous, especially lyrical passages out in the kayak. And Georgia’s burgeoning feelings for her new friend Calliope are handled with grace and compassion.

Can you recommend a Young Adult novel that you’ve enjoyed?

The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer

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The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world.

Worse, the rest of the world is dead. Something has happened to kill the people and creatures on the other side of the wall. The one man she can see sitting on a bench outside a cottage never moves, nor does his body deteriorate. Eventually it falls over and is covered by vines. Same with the cows lying in the field, the dog on the doorstep.

This is her journal.

She begins writing two years into her isolated existence. Like Mark Watney in The Martian, she must “science the shit out of this” except that her science is that of the last 12,000 years: how to grow enough food to live using only hand tools and the few items in the hunting lodge.

It is her worst nightmare come true:

As a child I had always suffered from the foolish fear that everything I could see disappeared as soon as I turned my back on it. No amount of reason could completely banish that fear. At school I would think about my parents’ house and suddenly I would be able to see nothing but a big, empty patch where it had previously stood.

I’m reminded of the recurrent nightmares my sister and I had when young about a nuclear bomb falling while we were at school. Not surprising given our post-Hiroshima, Bay of Pigs childhood.

I was mesmerized by this woman’s narrative. It is fascinating to watch a society woman learn to chop wood, milk the cow she discovers on her side of the wall, scythe and gather grass for hay, and force herself to go hungry while saving back beans and potatoes to plant in the coming year. Frequently exhausted, she forces herself to keep going because the animals—the dog and cow and a stray cat—have come to depend on her.

The changes in her are subtle. Sometimes she reflects on her previous life, looking for what writers call the through-line. Worrying about the animals, she says:

I’ve suffered from anxieties like these as far back as I can remember, and I will suffer from them as long as any creature is entrusted to me. Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my burden. I always kept quiet about this heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the same way I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends, and the theatre and laugh, keeping out secret, consuming worry in our eyes.

Her grown children are on the other side of the wall. There is nothing she can do for them. There is no future beyond her own life.

One day I shall no longer exist, and no one will cut the meadow, the thickets will encroach upon it, and later the forest will push as far as the wall and win back the land that man has stolen from it. Sometimes my thoughts grow confused, and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me, and is thinking the old, eternal thoughts with my brain. And the forest doesn’t want human beings to come back.

I’m reminded of the summer I lived in a tent in the woods with a friend and her children in a second tent. Life was simple. Keep the tent clean, gather blueberries in the woods, fix the many meals preschoolers require, clean up, entertain the children. My brain did begin to rewire itself that summer.

The narrator says:

I was no longer in search of a meaning to make my life more bearable. That kind of desire struck me as being almost presumptuous . . . I’d spent most of my life struggling with daily human concerns. Now that I had barely anything left, I could sit in peace on the bench and watch the stars dancing against the black firmament.

Doris Lessing said of this book, first published in 1968 in Germany, “women in particular will understand the heroine’s loving devotion to the details of making and keeping life, every day felt as a victory.” I urge you all to read it, regardless of your gender. Read it partly for the occasional insights, partly for the saga of survival, partly for the companionship of the animals, partly for the critique of our human society, mostly for the spellbinding prose.

What novel have you read that you want to immediately urge everyone you know to read?

Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver

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“The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” the man said. “The house is a shambles.”

Thus begins Kingsolver’s ninth novel, set in 2016. Willa Knox and her husband Iano recently inherited the house in Vineland, New Jersey from her aunt and were glad to get it. Not long before, in their fifties, they had been enjoying the rewards of lives spent building their careers and launching their children. Then the magazine Willa wrote for folded, forcing her to go freelance, and the college where Iano had tenure closed, obliging them to give up their house in Virginia.

Iano has managed to get a teaching job nearby, though it is only as an adjunct. Willa had thought they might just make a go of it, even if barely scraping by. Now it turns out that part of this house was built directly on the ground, with no foundation, and the whole thing is starting to tear itself apart: zigzagging cracks in the brickwork, leaks in the roof, ruptures in the ductwork.

It’s not just the two of them either. Iano’s bedbound father Nick, in his nineties and vociferously right-wing, lives with them, as does their daughter Tig, who has turned up after traveling from one organizing project to another since dropping out of college in 2012 to join Occupy Wall Street. Her barista income and Iano’s adjunct salary add up to a pitiful sum.

Then their daughter-in-law dies, and their grieving son leaves the newborn with Willa and Iano while he goes back to Boston to try and revive his startup. As they struggle with the Byzantine medical system and the demented gig economy, Willa and Iano still can’t get over the shock of having followed all the rules only to find themselves in this fix.

But that’s only half the story. In alternating chapters, another story plays out, set in the same block 145 years earlier. Thatcher Greenwood has reclaimed his wife’s childhood home in Vineland, a utopian community founded in the 19th century by Charles Landis. Fueled by his bombastic promises, it has grown and is now run by him as a fiefdom. Thatcher has started teaching science at a local school where his attempts to explain the new science of Darwin, John Stevens Henslow, John Herschel, etc. are stymied by the anti-science Christian principal, putting Thatcher’s job at risk.

His wife Rose and her mother are thrilled to be back in the house her father built—without the help of an architect, so it too is falling down. The two women, though, are only concerned with spending money and reclaiming their status symbols. Thatcher finds someone with a similar outlook to his in Rose’s younger sister, but all too soon the girl is imprisoned in corsets and tea parties.

It is their next-door neighbor, Mary Treat, who becomes his intellectual companion. Treat, a real person as is Landis, is a scientist investigating plants, insects and birds. She maintains a correspondence with Darwin and other scientists and is highly respected by them.

The two stories echo each other in obvious and subtle ways. Both Willa and Thatcher are struggling with a multigenerational family, a precarious income and a collapsing house.

For both of them, the house becomes a metaphor for the social turmoil of their time, when people’s assumptions and expectations about life, including their understanding of natural and economic laws, are being shaken. Demagogical leaders dupe a gullible populace with false promises. As Mary Treat says, “‘When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.’” In both timeframes, we find clashing convictions about religion, science and the natural world.

The book also looks at the ongoing tension, especially in the U.S., between self-sufficiency and interdependence. Both the widowed Mary Treat and Willa are struggling to find ways to survive financially. Nick refuses to accept government help, so Willa has to work around him to get help from Medicaid. Willa is also trying to find a government grant to restore their home, while daughter Tig befriends people in the neighborhood. Rose and her mother draw their validation from their social circle, while Thatcher is up against the community’s rejection of science in favor of a religion that gives man sovereignty over nature.

How we write about social issues in fiction is a common debate among writers and readers. Kingsolver herself has said that she tries to make issues accessible in stories that appeal to a general audience. However, a lot of readers find this book didactic and heavy-handed, even when they agree with Kingsolver’s politics and concerns. I agree that editing some of the more obvious lectures would have made this a better book, but the stories kept me reading to the end.

I appreciated the love between Iano and Willa, the way they supported each other, their tender memories, and physical encounters. There’s some of that in Thatcher and Rose’s marriage, but more interesting to me in that story was his intellectual friendship with Mary Treat.

And I loved Tig. She faces up to the climate emergency and is committed to making do. She says, “‘All the rules have changed and it’s hard to watch people keep carrying on just the same, like it’s business as usual.’” Much of her success (and the family’s) is due to her connecting to the local community, embodied in the Puerto Rican families living next door. I especially love that despite her fury at her brother’s devotion to capitalism, she is the one who is able to deal in a loving way with Nick and all his racist ravings.

Shelter is such a profound concept. There’s more to it than housing or Rose’s sheltered upbringing. All of us seek it, perhaps in faith, perhaps in science, perhaps in nationalism or our tribe. When the foundation of our society is threatened, we need to think carefully about what to tear down and what to rebuild.

Have you read any of Kingsolver’s books? What do you think about her exploration of social issues in fiction?

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler

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This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world.

She and her father, stepmother and young siblings live in a gated community ten miles outside Los Angeles. It is not just gated but fortified against the collapsing society outside, where dire poverty is rampant, services have mostly collapsed, and police and firefighters cannot be trusted. Gangs run amok, many high on a drug that makes them delight in setting fires and killing people.

Lauren comes to the conclusion that society will fail even further and their frail walls will not be able to keep out the mobs who want even the small affluence they have: vegetable gardens, acorns they’ve collected for flour, a sewing machine. She begins to train herself in how to survive, everything from recognising edible wild plants to firing a gun. But her “sharing” means that it is easy to incapacitate her, simply by hurting someone in front of her.

She creates her own belief system, which she calls Earthseed, based on the idea that the only reliable truth is that “God is Change.” Given that, then humanity can shape God. All of her preparations are needed when their fortifications are breached three years later, and she sets out to find a place to regroup and recreate a community.

At first I found this book almost impossible to read. Not because of anything wrong with the book, but because of my own despair. Such a future seems only too likely, maybe not in the next two years, but not that far off. Too many groups today are threatening civil war, and boasting that they are the ones with guns.

Then I remembered the early 1970s. Society seemed to be falling apart in the wake of assassinations, corruption, the Vietnam debacle. My partner pointed out the fragility of supply chains—something the pandemic has brought home to all of us fifty years later. Like many of those who jumped on the back-to-the-land movement at the time, he was motivated less by a desire to be closer to nature and more by wanting to be self-sufficient if—when—the social order imploded.

It didn’t. The country pulled through, damaged and deeply flawed, but holding.

This book felt so real to me, as though it were all happening right now. Just as I despaired in the beginning, I began to hope as Lauren built her community, one person at a time, one kindness at a time.

Have you read this book? What did you think of it?

Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy

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Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica.

The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. The scientific community believes the Arctic terns are extinct, but Franny does find the last few. However, without fish to eat along the way, the terns might not make it to Antarctica, so she must find a way to follow along with them. She must know if any of them make it safely.

Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat with a curmudgeonly captain and quirky crew. Unable to make a living off the meager fish in the sea and hounded by people onshore who are furious that the fishermen are killing the few remaining fish, the sailors are lured by Franny’s promise of a last big haul. So they set off, using her instruments to follow the terns she banded.

But Franny is more than a loner; she is a leaver. She says:

It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.

What and who she has left and why are unclear. Where is the husband she writes to every day? What crime has she committed? Will she find her mother? The tales of her losses begin to unspool in side currents, her dark secrets roiling the story by tossing the reader back and forth in time.

Most of the people in my book club were unsettled by these time shifts and confused by the fragments of several stories that only gradually begin to cohere. The fragmentation, confusion, and dissociation reflect Franny’s state. She, too, is ready to become extinct.

The themes of loss and leaving and migrations are multi-layered, but McConaghy treads lightly. It was only when I finally wrenched myself away from the book at the end that I was able to appreciate how intimately they permeated the story. I also appreciated that, while this future is only to likely to occur and pretty soon, the book is different form other dystopian novels, not frantic or furious. It is a quiet book.

And truly a magnificent one. The writing, the world-building, the offbeat characters, the way McConaghy inspired my immediate allegiance to this damaged woman and her quest: all excellent. My favorite part was when she was on the ship—I so enjoyed the crew members, their community of oddballs and their treatment of Franny.

Because of my outsized love for this story, my disappointment at the end was also outsized. As we drew closer, I wondered how the author would wrap it up. Since I had sometimes wondered if Franny was an unreliable narrator, I was even prepared for it to have all been a dream. However, the actual end seemed to have been written for a different book altogether, so at odds was it with the rest of the book. On this point, everyone in the book club agreed.

One person noted how odd it was that we kept saying we loved the book even as we discussed what bothered us. For example, many members struggled to read it, confused by the fragmented plots and the time shifts. Several said they could only read a little at a time, though I barreled through it, as did at least one other person. Yet we did love it.

We loved the tenderness of this story. We loved the crows who brought her presents and the sailors who gruffly tried to help her. We believed in her mission, we who have seen the chestnut trees disappear, the wild dogwoods, and now the beeches. We’ve tracked the ups and downs of the crabs, oysters and rockfish in the Chesapeake, and participated in bird species counts. In our long lives we’ve known leave-takings and losses.

Read this book. Be prepared to be moved. And moved to action, even if it is only to go outside to appreciate the bright zinnias and sunflowers, to hear the whir of hummingbirds at the feeder, to see the deer moving like ghosts among the trees.

What have you lost that you can never get back? What journeys are you compelled to take?