Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Environment

One of the classes I'm taking this semester is "Ecocriticism." I honestly didn't have the slightest idea of what to expect from the course other than that I would be expected to read Walden at some point (and we have). I won't lie, the first few weeks of the course were pretty unexciting for me. However, recently we began working on the role of apocalypse narratives in ecocriticism.

Unsurprisingly, I deeply enjoyed reading a speculative fiction book on the apocalypse. The example of apocalypse we used for the course was Margret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth and complexity of the apocalypse envisioned in the novel. This apocalypse is not brought about by a singular event, occurance, or discovery, but instead, a chain of interrelated causes, varying from proliferation of science and technology, consumerism, triviality of society, and more.

In class, our professor wanted to try to pin down the biggest causes of the apocalypse Atwood envisioned. Quite frankly, I thought it was impossible, everything was related. Obsession with sex leads to desire for health products to maintain youth. These people provide a willing market for scientific corporations to exploit. The money they bring in leads to the power to advance technology, but also breeds intense competition between corporations, leading to acts of terrorism (often bio-terrorism). Companies gain technological advancements that would allow them to cure disease, but they dare not allow the product to be perfect, because if it was, they would destroy their own market. Economy drives the engine of a vicious cycle.

Another upcoming assignment for the course was to pick any book dealing with ecocriticsm and read it independently, providing a report to the class on the new view we discovered. A search in the library using simply the term ecocriticism linked me to numerous books with mostly uninteresting titles. One caught my eye though: Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien. Jackpot.

While mostly ignored recently, my interest and fascination for fantasy and science fiction had begun resurfacing as a legitimate area of inquiry for my studies when I began Oryx and Crake. Finding a book on the environmental vision of Tolkien solidified the occasional wandering thoughts I'd been having about the genre. In particular, I began thinking of how much science fiction and fantasy (a little more so the latter than the former) depicts nature as a friendly, benign force that we must appreciate and embrace. Additionally, kids movies and stories seem to often be rich in environmental propaganda (if you'll forgive the term).

Think Fern Gully and Peter Pan. In both, man and technology are to a greater or lesser degree, evil, and must be defeated. In The Chronicles of Narnia, the preservation of the natural world is tantamount, with God/Jesus taking the shape of a lion and bestowing sentient life on animals as well as tree and water spirits (not to mention interesting in the blend of Christianity and paganism).

In Final Fantasy VII, you fight to save the world, first from the economic and technological powers that would seek to suck the world dry of all its value, and then from an alien/psychotic who seeks to destroy the world. At the end, the power of Holy is not enough to stop the destruction of the earth by itself, but the Lifestream, an embodiment of the natural world (as glowing green tendrils, in case the connection wasn't clear enough) intervenes, helping Holy to stop the apocalypse and simultaneously overrunning the largest city with green plant-growth.

I'm finding the possibilities for this subject that I was grudging to engage in very exciting (and a little overwhelming). For the end of the semester, I have to write a sizable research paper on some topic within the field. Before I was worried about what I could possibly write that wouldn't bore me to tears. Now I'm worried that I will struggle to define a topic that I can write only ten to fifteen pages on.