How Has Sci-fi Literature Informed On American Environmentalism, It`s Issues And Solutions?

Under the pseudonym of John Christopher, Samuel Youd penned in The Death of Grass the words, 'green wheat swayed inwards with the summer breeze, and beyond the wheat, as the ground rose, they saw the lusher green of pasture'. The scene of the English countryside is thus portrayed in its romantic imagery, as the impending doom of urban starvation is soon revealed. This passage and indeed many aspects of the 1956 text, resemble in their content the style and ideas of Rachel Carson, in her famous work Silent Spring. The comparisons do not end at mere authorship, as the environmentalist undertone in the sci-fi classic by Youd make it an exemplar of literature within the genre proposing - indeed fulfilling - the fears and prophecies of the environmental movement. The entire body of work that pursued an environmental recognition in the United States during the 20th century, with notable writers including Carson at the fore, was in many cases both reflected and substantiated by the imaginings of writers who invented tales from the same ideas; though not necessarily of the same world. Those working in 20th century United States to inspire renewed environmental importance and concern, necessarily uncovered issues and dedicated themselves to debating solutions. Many issues thus surfaced, as American's and their modern society developed and progressed further from 'nature'; some work being centred on the growth of urbanity, others the sustainability of consumer culture, others yet the question of whether technology could ensure survival, and so forth. The ideas and concepts are the real focus of this essay, as it was these which literature served to validate, or at least encapsulate. For a start, and beginning with the widest point, Aldo Leapold sought (in A Sand County Almanac) to raise awareness of a progression in public consciousness away from a spiritual sense of the environment toward a simply economic one. Leopold attempted to influence his readers, in no uncertain terms, to renew some philosophical thought of the land around them, rather than equate it to production potential and the wealth it could bring. The work served as an indictment of 'Modern Man', and his resultant consumerist values; He has no vital relation to [the land]; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a 'scenic area', he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and any other natural products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has 'outgrown'. The whole dynamic which can be summarised from Leopold's work - that in modernity man no longer senses any inherent connection to nature except for his own material benefit - is one asserted elsewhere and with a variety of cases. Building on this, the theories of such ecological proponents as Lewis Mumford, give credence to an increasingly metropolitan social pattern, making the consensus bend toward the sentiments of the city. In this theory, the environment is subordinate to man's desires and needs, but these in themselves are oriented around the urban, not rural, mind. Two parts of a book, wrote by Mumford for publication in 1938, are considered here. In the first Mumford highlights the distinction between the machine and the organism, and thereby our focus on the one or other; on basic, quantitative terms which promote industry and the progressive norm in an immediate sense, or on holistic, qualitative terms which show due concern for the environment the individual exists within and promote the sense of long-term effect. Second, Mumford tackles the truest expression of his theory in the form of the city, in many ways identifying with the interpretation of squalor and ill-health publicized by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. The city, allowed to develop without environmental concern along unrestricted, industrialist lines, soon proceeds to taint both the natural world around it (i.e. by pollution or expansion) and the sentiments of its inhabitants according to thinkers such as Mumford. 'Life means metropolitan life', which describes the perceived issue in the 20th century that Americans were being capitalist (or simpler still, economic) before being green, that the typical person was more inwardly concerned with personal life than engaged with it's external impacts. Astride this was the fear that such an ethos was influential, and with the spread of pollution came the concurrent spread of ideals; Though the physical radius of the metropolis may only be only twenty or thirty miles, it's effective radius is much greater: it's blight is carried in the air, like the spores of a mold. Last in this broad yet brief picture of key environmentalist thought, are the issues themselves. Two in particular have been stressed by Barry Commoner, and earlier, Karl Sax; these are the American faith in and overuse of technology, the other depletion by overpopulation. A product of the consumer culture, Commoner noted 'the blind, ecologically mindless progress of technology [that] has massively altered our daily environment'; further still that 'we have created for ourselves a new and dangerous world'. Karl Sax saw a more fundamental cause for human abuse of his environment than alteration by chemicals and such, he sees the realisation of Malthusian ideas in the quite natural, religious reproductive problem, and that the environment is not only being degraded but is becoming less and less hospitable in resources for a burgeoning population. Essentially, without action against birth rates or miracles in sources of energy, 'our industrial culture will be but a brief episode in human history'. These representations of key issues - science and population - are mirrored in the works of Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich respectively, and will form the core of this discussion with their literary counterparts.

EXCERPT - contact for full text (awarded distinction; School of History @ University of Kent)