MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

For too long, people have cast the issue of environmentalism in terms of “destroying the earth will destroy human life.” At the core of this ethical construct is the assumption that the moral imperative behind saving the planet is saving human life. But what if that is a flawed imperative. In what moral direction ought we to frame that discussion.

Two contemporary works – one science fiction, one fantasy – ask us to consider the way in which we frame our approach to environmental morality. Rather than seeing the earth in service to mankind, authors N. K. Jemisin, in her Broken Earth trilogy, and Naomi Novik, in Uprooted, eschew a utilitarian approach to environmentalism in favor of a perspective that clearly articulates a failure of our limited human empathy. Indeed, both works suggest that future human evolution may not even be “human” as we understand it.

The focus of my paper is to look at how these works of fiction compel us to discuss our relationship with our environment from the perspective that we are a part of, rather than apart from the world in which we live. In particular, I will be examining images of destruction (humans as “plague”) and images of nourishing (motherhood, childbirth, and death/resurrection) in both works to articulate a moral imperative wherein we must save the earth not because we want humans to survive, but because the world itself is as valuable (if not more so), than are human beings as we exist today.