[Encompassing everything from the ecosystems novel to sci-fi, a
growing body of literature is imagining and interrogating the past,
present, and future of the planets climate. ]
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HOW ECO-FICTION BECAME REALER THAN REALISM  
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Lynne Feeley
August 18, 2022
The Nation
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_ Encompassing everything from the ecosystems novel to sci-fi, a
growing body of literature is imagining and interrogating the past,
present, and future of the planet's climate. _

Iceberg in Newfoundland, natalielucier (CC BY 2.0)

 

The day the landrus arrives, the people do nothing. They have had days
like this before, when unknown animals have appeared on the outskirts
of the city. Some are species that have somehow returned from
extinction; some are mutations that have found their way to the city
from nuclear waste dumps. But all of them, in the words of the
city’s people, are “kin.” Many years ago the people agreed by
“collective decision” not to kill any kin whose intent seemed
harmless, so while the landrus _is _flattening the people’s crops
as it drags its walrus-like body from the creek to the fields,
destroying crops and damning the people to a hungry winter, it is
clear that the animal means no harm. So they watch it, they sketch it,
and they have meetings about it, but they don’t run it out of town,
they don’t detain it, and they don’t hunt it.

Soon it becomes clear that all the flattening of the fields is for the
purpose of nesting. The lone landrus is readying a breeding ground. A
hundred pregnant landruses are coming, but to reach the breeding
ground, they will need the people’s help to cross a stretch of
impassable, jagged asphalt. Debate intensifies and camps begin to
form: help the landruses across, leave them to their fate, or drive
them out. But it’s no matter, because while the adults are meeting,
their children have taken action. They have built a snow bridge to
help the landruses, even if this means the people may ultimately be
displaced from the city.

This is the arc of Phoebe Wagner’s short story “Children of
Asphalt,” which appeared in the 2021 anthology _Multispecies
Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures_. As a work of solarpunk fiction, the
story takes place in a world where cooperation and mutual aid have
replaced the ruthless self-interest of capitalism, and where the
decisive binary, and hierarchy, between humans and the nonhuman world
has dissolved. Wagner’s story is an especially ingenious example of
solarpunk in the way it plays with readers’ expectations: Were this
a work of realism, the landrus would be dead, or dissected, or bred,
or kept in a zoo, or otherwise monetized. (When I taught this story in
my Climate Fiction class, one student was certain that an entrepreneur
would make landrus-skin hats.) But the people do none of this, and
when the adults come close, the children keep them in check. With each
expectation that the story brings up in the reader, only then to
thwart, Wagner clarifies the difference between a solarpunk future and
our capitalistic present.

In her new collection of essays _Death by Landscape_, the novelist
and essayist Elvia Wilk dedicates an essay to the politics of
solarpunk fiction. While solarpunk is “built on a clear-eyed
understanding of the dystopian present,” particularly the uneven
distribution of climate dystopia according to class, nationality, and
race, it is nonetheless “curiously optimistic” about our planetary
future. It offers a picture of an ecologically enmeshed and abundant
future where radical egalitarianism extends within and beyond the
human species. As any of the various solarpunk manifestos
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around online will tell you, the only thing solarpunk fiction cannot
be is dystopian. These manifestos also make the case that while
solarpunk is currently being visualized in fictions like Wagner’s
short story, its makers are invested in practical and immediate
solutions to the climate crisis. The stories may be speculative, but
the worlds they build are being presented as plausible. To Wilk, the
purpose and promise of solarpunk is to “close the plausibility
gap” between our dystopian present and a non-dystopian
future—between landrus-skin hats and children being willing to give
over the city—by “expanding the aesthetic imaginary.”

Solarpunk fiction is among a constellation of literary works that
attract Wilk’s attention for their expanded imaginaries about life
during and after the climate crisis. Wilk’s starting point is that
the climate crisis has laid bare certain ecological facts: the
interdependence of all species, the porousness of bodies, the false
separation between humanity and the rest of the nonhuman world, and
the false exaltation of human modes of knowing. Wilk’s interest is
in works of literature and art that take these ecological facts as
their narrative conceits. Her book catalogs an important, growing body
of literature that would not traditionally appear under the banner of
“nature writing” or “environmental literature” but that is
fundamentally _ecological_ in what it allows for in its fictional
universes: the blurring, rotting, merging, and grafting that
characterize life from an ecological perspective.

There are, then, stories of women who are transformed into plants
(Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape”), and stories of plants
that have consciousness (Jonathan Sarno’s film _The Plants Are
Watching_), stories of people decaying into compost (Jenny
Hval’s _Paradise Rot_), and stories of people giving themselves
over to black holes (Jonathan Lethem’s _As She Climbed Across the
Table_). These types of stories are “weird” in the way Mark
Fisher, one of Wilk’s main interlocutors, defines the term: as that
which “lies beyond standard perception, cognition, and
experience.” But they are neither weird nor false from an ecological
viewpoint. They are speculative fictions that are in some ways—at
least in this “ecological fact” kind of way—realer than realism.

Wilk declines to discuss her literary archive in terms of genre, but
it is nonetheless the case that each essay focuses on (let’s call
it) a cache of texts that share basic narrative conceits reflective of
an ecological principle. Rough groupings emerge. The first essay in
the collection, for example, is devoted to what she calls the
“ecosystems novel.” The name is a riff on the so-called systems
novel, wherein a hero figure finds himself tangled up in larger
sociopolitical, economic, or technological systems. The systems novels
of Pynchon, DeLillo, and the like may undo what Amitov Ghosh calls the
“individual moral adventure story” by enmeshing their protagonists
in larger systems, but according to Wilk they still uphold the
distinction between the human realm and the ecological realm. And
rather than challenging the binary between figure and ground—the
binary that Wilk finds especially untenable in the era of climate
crisis—systems novels ultimately reinforce this (ecologically false)
distinction. “In books about systems, men tend to emerge from the
background rather than merge into it,” Wilk writes.

The ecosystems novel, on the contrary, would not “focus on the story
of a person against the backdrop of the world,” Wilks explains.
Rather, it would take as its conceit that “the human is not a
self-contained element but completely inseparable from all other
organisms, both on micro and macro levels,” and it would endeavor to
tell a story reflective of this truth. In addition to the
woman-turned-plant stories that open the essay, Wilk lists Richard
Powers’s 2018 _The Overstory_, Helen Philips’s 2019 _The Need_,
and Tricia Sullivan’s 2016 _Occupy Me_ as examples of narratives
that portray “ecological dependencies” and “insist that figure
and ground are not distinct from each other.” Wilk’s own
novel, _Oval_, published in 2019, makes a similar attempt to blur
these boundaries, with its ecovillage set atop a human-made
mountainside that has a mind and body of its own. Wilk’s discussion
of the limitations of the systems novel suggests that the ecosystems
novel, in its foregrounding of all creatures’ original enmeshment,
may better capture “what it means to be a person in an age of
drastic ecosystemic decline—of planetary extinction.”

Wilk also examines narratives sometimes labeled as the New Weird, an
area of science fiction in which the otherworldly impulses of writers
like Lovecraft are updated in such a way that the weird occurrence is
treated not as “freaky or frightening” but simply as evidence that
our everyday experience of consciousness is constricted and flattened
out—until, quite suddenly, it isn’t. Jeff
VanderMeer’s _Annihilation_ serves as an example. Yet Wilk’s
essay makes the striking observation that perhaps the New Weird
isn’t so new after all: Wilk splices her discussion
of _Annihilation _together with readings of works of Christian
mysticism from the medieval period in which their women authors access
the higher reaches of human consciousness and divine love through acts
of extreme self-negation. It is through this pairing of the
contemporary and the medieval that Wilk is not only able to
characterize ways of knowing that fall outside of the bounds of our
shallow and constrained view of rationality but also to begin to
sketch out a longer history of these alternative epistemologies.

In my estimation, Wilk does not do enough with this insight that the
“new” awareness of ecological facts, such as interdependence,
porousness, lack of bodily integrity and control, and the limits of
human consciousness, represents less a discovery of these principles
and more a mainstreaming of them. Certainly, there have always been
people whose lived experiences and literary works have not allowed
these ecological facts to fade from view, and it seems that privilege
must be in play where these principles are allowed largely to be
forgotten.

The appearance of medieval mystics in an essay about the New Weird
raises the idea of a much longer history of the ecological insights
that Wilk tracks across contemporary fiction, and it raises the
prospect of an altogether different kind of cultural history—one of
writers and artists who were working with the ecological viewpoint
long before the climate crisis made it much harder for some people to
deny.

Yet Wilk’s account does make it feel as though we are seeing a
groundswell of contemporary literature that is working from an
ecological metaphysics. Wilk writes that these works challenge
traditional Western literary forms, particularly in their effort to do
away with the singular human figure set against a static and
meaningless backdrop. In a way, these narrative strategies seem
perfectly aligned with the ecological and metaphysical revelations of
the Anthropocene. But there’s also a way in which they seem
misaligned with the historical revelations of it—namely, that a
subset of humans has driven the planet to the brink of catastrophe
because for centuries it has been able to deny or avoid ecological
facts.

In some climate circles, there’s been a move away from talking about
“humanity” as responsible for the climate crisis, and a move
toward talking about capitalism, or even specific corporations and
individuals, as culprits. The critic Kate Aronoff, for example,
prompts us to name names: “We” didn’t cause climate disruption;
ExxonMobil did. In these types of, albeit nonfictional, narratives,
the push is precisely to rescue the “figure-ground” narrative form
from the historically false way of telling the story as if vast
numbers of undifferentiated humans played equal roles in the drama.

The narratives Wilk discusses capture and manifest something about
ecology that is lost in the “individual moral adventure” story,
but we should not lose sight of the fact that enough wealth and power
can produce lives capable of at least partially eliding some of the
constraints of an interconnected world. If one way of describing the
climate crisis is as the place where ecological fact and historical
fact come into conflict and rub each other to the bone, then it seems
that, if there is any use value left in the “figure-ground”
narrative structure, it is to zero in on exactly how some individuals
have moved through history not as heroes of the culture but as climate
villains.

There are several essays in _Death by Landscape _in which the figure
of Wilk is brought into focus. “Extinction Burst,” for example,
describes Wilk’s experience with eye movement desensitization and
reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, a treatment for PTSD that regards
traumatic stress as a physiological phenomenon and uses eye movement
to move traumatic memories from one hemisphere of the brain to the
other. “Ask Before You Bite” follows Wilk as she participates in a
night of live action role-play (LARP) and uncovers the deeper purpose
of progressive LARP-ing communities to create a world in which the
rules of engagement, particularly around consent, are explicitly named
and proactively installed, the effect of which is, for Wilk, to
maximize freedom while minimizing harm. There are lessons in these
essays about creating new types of narratives for the era of climate
crisis that loosely link them to the others in the collection; but
what lasts are these little brutal gems of images, the Wilk whose
involuntary trauma-response to stress is to fall suddenly asleep, the
Wilk who receives a consensual slap by a stranger at a Nordic LARP-ing
quest. In these essays, it is the lucidly observed idiosyncrasies of
everyday life, so profoundly strange, that expand our sense of the
beautiful and the possible, no landrus required.

_Lynne Feeley [[link removed]]'s work
has appeared in the L.A. Review of Books, Boston Review,
and Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at
Princeton._

_Copyright c 2022 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without__ __permission_
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Distributed by__ _PARS International Corp
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