Ecological Culture in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy

9/23/2015 Ecological Culture in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy — Culture Dysphoria — Medium

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nly twelve years late, tipped off by its use in LiberateTate’s

marvelous Time Piece action against the sponsorship of the

Tate Gallery by BP, I’ve been turned on to Margaret

Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy: Oryx and Crake, The Year of

the Flood and MaddAddam. Having read, and been utterly

floored by The Handmaid’s Tale, I had high hopes for her

treatment of environmental degradation and the possible collapse of

civilisation.

I wasn’t disappointed. Atwood rewards the reader with truckloads of food

for thought, delivered here again in the mode of dystopian speculative

fiction. As with The Handmade’s Tale, the flaws of our current social milieu

are laid bare by flipping the calendar forward just a few decades, into a

plausible near future in which those cultural sores have been allowed to

fester.

Future dystopias are a well-trodden literary path, but where Atwood excels

in her use of the device is in revealing the deeper cultural drivers of the

pathologies of contemporary society. Where The Handmaid’s Tale hit

hardest was its stomach-churning depiction of objectification and

exploitation of women. With the MaddAddam trilogy, Margaret Atwood

turns her attention to the subjugation and destruction of nature. Her focus

O

Detail from Time Piece, “a durational performance using words, bodies, charcoal and

sustenance.” The foreground text is from Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood.

Image credit: Elena Polisano

http://www.liberatetate.org.uk/



this time is not primarily on

what disastrous outcomes could

unfold as a direct and proximate

consequence of our current

trajectory — many of those

should be obvious to everyone

already. Rather, in my eyes at

least, Atwood’s main thrust is

exploring a range different

responses that might be

mounted by people wanting to divert civilisation from its ecocidal

trajectory.

Spoiler alert!

The responses canvassed include :

1. Business as usual. The power elite pursues the accumulation of material

wealth, with no regard for the interests of human underclasses or

nonhumans, or the inherent value of ecological systems. It refuses to take

seriously even the prudential threat to itself and future generations, posed

by environmental degradation. (Sound familiar?) Despite having already

experienced devastating climate change and sea level rise, it continues to

burn fossil fuels, under promotion by OilCorps and the Church of

PetrOleum: a gag that cuts close to the bone for me as an Australian, after

our former Prime Minister’s earnest pronouncement that “coal is good for

humanity!” Efforts are made at recycling, including the surreptitious use of

human bodies as ingredients for the SecretBurgers, or as feedstock for

making “garboil”. Most buildings are solar powered, this and other

environmental technofixes leading one character to remark that the

corporate-run living and working Compounds were “so much more truly

green than those purist Gardeners.”

2. Sabotage. A secret group of biotech experts, code-named MaddAddam,

takes to monkeywrenching. Among their exploits are “the splice

porcubeaver that was attacking the fan belts in cars, the bean weevil that

was decimating Happicuppa coffee plantations, the asphalt-eating microbe

that was melting highways.” Presumably, their aim is to topple the power

elite and see it replaced it with a form of social organisation that promotes

social and ecological wellbeing. Eventually they are forcibly recruited by

Crake.

Margaret Atwood. Credit: Thompson

Rivers University

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-13/coal-is-good-for-humanity-pm-tony-abbott-says/5810244

https://www.flickr.com/photos/thompsonrivers/8433144977



3. Rewire and reboot. Scientist and polymath Crake genetically engineers

a new species of humanoid, with characteristics he believes will make them

less likely to develop ecologically destructive practices. After raising a

number of individuals under the tutelage of sex partner and former child

porn idol Oryx, Crake designs and releases an infectious disease that

causes the global near-extinction of Homo sapiens.

4. Bunker down, then rebuild. A “greenie cult” called the God’s Gardeners

practises voluntary simplicity and vegetarianism under doctrine that

blends Christianity with science and environmentalism. They anticipate

the collapse of civilisation — the Waterless Flood — and try to position

themselves to inherit the Earth, by building supply caches (“Ararats”) and

learning survival and self-reliance techniques.

By the end the trilogy, none of these approaches are seen to succeed as

planned. Business as usual was clearly doomed from the start; MaddAddam

failed to create any effective change; Crake’s plan, apart from obviously

completely lacking any empathy, in practice failed to kill all the humans

anyway, or to eliminate from the Crakers the capacity for symbolic thought

or hierarchy, as planned; and the God’s Gardeners splintered, many leaving

for MaddAddam on the basis of its capacity for action, the rest mainly

dying in the Flood, with those who survived finding neither gardening nor

vegetarianism suitable for the world in which they find themselves.

(Not a lot of spoilers from here onwards.)

Nevertheless, Atwood is giving us something to think about with each of

the three plans for change. It seems she has a soft spot for the Gardeners in

particular. She took “Veggie Vows” for the duration of her book tour for

The Year of The Flood. The hymns have been set to music and recorded on

the CD, Hymns of The God’s Gardeners. Atwood encourages readers to use

1/16 The Garden

Hymns of The God’s Gardeners, set to music by Orville Stoeber

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLA754056B7A4CB753&v=IDqGYopOSn8

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2009/aug/30/margaret-atwood-novel-ecology

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA754056B7A4CB753



the hymns “for amateur devotional or environmental purposes,” and gives

on her website a reading list of “books it is thought may have influenced the

founders of the God’s Gardeners.”

To a great extent, God’s Gardeners can be seen as an attempt to construct a

community that takes on the challenge laid down by Aldo Leopold and Val

Plumwood, and outlined in the opening post of Culture Dysphoria, to

construct an ecological culture. By exploring such a worldview in the form

of narrative fiction, Atwood brings the philosophical underpinnings alive in

a way that is utterly inaccessible to dry academic prose.

That’s great. But this is literary fiction, where presumably a critical reading

is encouraged. We should be asking what we can learn from Atwood’s

Gardeners. To what extent does Gardener doctrine stack up as the basis for

an ecological culture? And what is an ecological culture, anyway?

What is an ecological culture?

Drawing on the work of Aldo Leopold and, especially, Val Plumwood, I

suggested in the opening post of Culture Dysphoria that having an

ecological culture means seeing the world and our place in it in factual

evolutionary-ecological terms, and adopting a matching ethical system. For

a working model of what this means in terms of culture and worldview, the

writings of Val Plumwood seem a great place to start. Plumwood, then

married to fellow philosopher Richard Routley and writing under her

married name, argued that an environmental ethic should be

metaphysically grounded in

an ecological outlook or worldview, in which man is seen as part of a natural

community, part of natural systems seen as integrated wholes and with welfare

and interest bound up in the whole, and not as, in the typical Western view, a

separate, self-contained actor standing outside the system and manipulating it in

pursuit of his self-contained interests.

Val and Richard Routley went on to point out that a great many indigenous

cultures possess attitudes resembling this position, along with a

corresponding respect and care ethic. A key aspect of that ethic, as Val had

argued years prior, is the rejection of that precept of the dominant

Western culture she termed the Dominion Assumption, namely that

it is permissible to manipulate the whole earth and what it contains exclusively in

the human interest, that the value of a natural item is entirely a matter of its value

for human interests, and that all constraints on behaviour with respect to nature

derive from responsibilities to other humans.

https://medium.com/culture-dysphoria/culture-dysphoria-89565e0e0abe

https://medium.com/culture-dysphoria/culture-dysphoria-89565e0e0abe

http://yearoftheflood.com/reading-list/



Plumwood later refined her

critique in terms of what she

dubbed human/nature dualism,

being “a system of ideas that

takes a radically separated

reason to be the essential

characteristic of humans and

situates human life outside and

above an inferiorised and

manipulable nature.”

Much of this is encapsulated

neatly in that component of Paul

Taylor’s theory of Respect for

Nature he calls the biocentric outlook:

The beliefs that form the core of the biocentric outlook are four in number:

(a) The belief that humans are members of the Earth’s Community of Life in the

same sense and on the same terms in which other living things are members of

that Community

(b) The belief that the human species, along with all other species, are integral

elements in a system of interdependence such that the survival of each living

thing, as well as its chances of faring well or poorly, is determined not only by the

physical conditions of its environment but also by its relations to other living

things.

(c) The belief that all organisms are teleological centers of life in the sense that

each is a unique individual pursuing its own good in its own way.

(d) The belief that humans are not inherently superior to other living things.



Do the Gardeners have an Ecological

Outlook?

From the first page of The Year of the Flood, the reader is alerted to the fact

that the Gardener worldview is informed by ecology:

Vultures are our friends, the Gardeners used to teach. They purify the earth.

They are God’s necessary dark Angels of bodily dissolution. Imagine how

terrible it would be if there were no death!

This is soon confirmed as a sermon by Adam One, the head of the

Gardeners, makes the anti-anthropocentrism of their doctrine clear:

Griffon vultures eating the body of a human under the Tibetan Buddhist practice of sky burial. Credit: FishOil /

WikiMedia Commons.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vulture_-_Sky_burial.jpg



why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong

to Everything?

…

We pray that we may not fall into the error of pride by considering ourselves as

exceptional, alone in all Creation in having Souls; and that we will not vainly

imagine that we are set above all other Life, and may destroy it at our pleasure,

and with impunity.

This is the point when I knew I

would have to write something

about the MaddAddam series!

Although I had read

environmentally-themed fiction

before, until now I had not seen

a properly ecological outlook

expressed so explicitly in a work

of fiction. Passages such as this

demonstrate that Gardener

credo seeks to deflate human

exceptionalism and the

Dominion Assumption.

Nonhuman beings are seen not

as property: Gardeners are

urged to “accept in all humility

our kinship with the Fishes,” and

presumably with all animal

species.

A key aspect of the ecological outlook as articulated above by Val and

Richard Routley is that the welfare and interest of each individual is bound

up in the whole system, and moreover, that the web of interdependence

operates largely by material appropriation. Every organism — including

plants, which can photosynthesise but depend on the availability of soil

nutrients — depends on ecological nutrient cycles. The very vitality of the

natural world hinges on the cycles of life and death, so that constant flux

can manifest within a materially finite biosphere. As philosopher J. Claude

Evans puts it (emphasis in original)

Life is appropriation. Any ethical theory that does not recognize and affirm this

fundamental fact is not a serious candidate for an environmental ethic.



We’ve already seen above that Atwood depicted the Gardeners’ affirmation

of death right on the first page of The Year of the Flood, and many further

examples are to be found throughout the trilogy. Nature’s web of

appropriation is not just accepted; it is eulogised: “Everything digests, and

is digested. The Gardeners found that a cause for celebration, but Toby has

never been reassured by it.” Indeed, to a degree the Gardeners seem fixated

upon decomposition and predatory appropriation, with little mention

made of mutualistic or commensal ecological relations.

Gardener doctrine recognises the good of predators both at the level of the

ecosystem and of individuals. Adam One’s sermon on Predator Day argues

that “God must have said to them: My Carnivores, I command you to fulfil

your appointed task of culling your Prey Species, lest these multiply

overmuch, and exhaust their food supply, and sicken, and die out.”

Amanita muscaria, a mushroom species that depends on engaging in two-way nutrient

exchange with an associated tree. Also an admixture in Toby’s Enhanced Meditation

preparation, discussed below. Credit: Onderwijsgek / Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amanita_muscaria_3_vliegenzwammen_op_rij.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Onderwijsgek



Echoing Holmes Rolston III — “the cougar’s fang has carved the limbs of

the fleet-footed deer, and vice versa”– the Gardeners’ hymn for Predator

Day, The Water-Shrew That Rends Its Prey, includes the verse:

And who can say if joy or fear

Are each in other’s lasting debt?

Does every Prey enjoy each breath

Because of constant threat?

Since an ecological outlook situates humans as animals in ecosystems, the

affirmation of death and predation must include an acceptance both of the

origin of our sustenance in appropriation, and of the availability of humans

as food to other creatures. The importance of gratitude and reciprocity is

central to most indigenous worldviews and is emphasised in much

contemporary writing on ecological ethics — perhaps most powerfully by

Val Plumwood, whose thought was informed by her own experience of

narrowly escaping falling prey to a saltwater crocodile!

Here, too, Gardener teachings tick the right boxes, at times with great

tenderness:

Through the work of the Carrion Beetles and the putrefying Bacteria, our fleshly

habitations are broken down, and returned to their elements to enrich the lives of

the other Creatures. How misguided were our ancestors in their preserving of

corpses — their embalmings, their adornings, their encasings in mausoleums.

What a horror — to turn the Soul’s husk into an unholy fetish! And, in the end,

how selfish! Shall we not repay the gift of Life by gifting ourselves to Life when the

time comes?

When next you hold a handful of moist compost, say a silent prayer of thanks to

all of Earth’s previous Creatures. Picture your fingers giving each and every one

10/16 The Watershrew T…

The Water-Shrew That Rends Its Prey, set to music by Orvile Stoeber

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLA754056B7A4CB753&v=nul0xELodMg



of them a loving squeeze. For they are surely here with us, ever present in that

nourishing matrix.

The passage above relates to insects and bacteria, but Gardeners are asked

to accept the possibility of being eaten by larger creatures:

As we prepare to leave our sheltering Ararat, let us ask ourselves: Which is more

blessed? To eat or to be eaten? To flee or to chase? To give or to receive? For these

are at heart the same question. Such a question may soon cease to be theoretical:

we do not know what Alpha Predators may lurk without.

Let us pray that if we must sacrifice our own protein so it may circulate among

our fellow Species, we will recognize the sacred nature of the transaction. We

would not be Human if we did not prefer to be the devourers rather than the

devoured, but either is a blessing. Should your life be required of you, rest assured

that it is required by life.

On the other hand…

On the other hand, there is a self-contradictory element to Gardener

doctrine. Atwood leaves it to Ren, one of the younger, less cerebral

characters, to point it out:

When Lucerne and Zeb first took me away from the Exfernal World to live among

the Gardeners, I didn’t like it at all. They smiled a lot, but they scared me: they

Ampilatwatja woman Angelina Luck hunting goannas. Credit: Rusty Stewart / Flickr.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rustystewart/4476347526/in/album-72157623430403828/



were so interested in doom, and enemies, and God. And they talked so much

about Death. The Gardeners were strict about not killing Life, but on the other

hand they said Death was a natural process, which was a sort of a contradiction,

now that I think about it.

Of course, there are strong ethical reasons to boycott the industries of

animal abuse — factory farming — and the production of meat through

deforestation or wasteful grain feeding practices. In the MaddAddam

world, with greater levels of environmental degradation and human

overpopulation, the strength and scope of this necessity would be even

greater. However, Gardener ideology compels vegetarianism not primarily

on those grounds, but instead on the basis of claimed universal ethical

imperative not to eat animals.

The Gardeners seem to

subscribe the idea that making

instrumental use of another

being is inherently disrespectful.

That such a conception of

interspecies ethics leads to anti-

ecological conclusions is a point

that has been very thoroughly

and convincingly made by J.

Claude Evans and Val Plumwood

— the latter couching it in terms

of use/respect dualism. Two

main problems arise.

Firstly, since we depend on

appropriating the bodies of

other organisms for our

nutrition, use/respect dualism dictates that some out-class of beings is not

respected. Usually, this is incorporated in a worldview by way of reducing

that class of beings to mere objects, which can be commodified and held as

property: this is subject/object or person/property dualism. Often, the line

is drawn between animals and nonanimals, in order to justify what

Plumwood has termed “ontological veganism”. This appears to be the case

with the Gardeners, who speak frequently of animal Souls, but never

mention the agency or intentionality of the organisms they eat: plants and

fungi.

Secondly, if it is bad for humans to kill and eat animals, then either it’s also

bad for nonhuman animals to kill and eat eachother, or there is some



essential difference between humans and nonhuman animals. This has

been referred to in academic literature as the predation problem.

Advocates of philosophical veganism have responded divergently. Some,

notably Steve Sapontzis, have insisted that predation is indeed universally

bad, and that humans have a moral duty to interfere with wild natural

systems to reduce the suffering caused by predation, so long as that

interference itself didn’t induce more suffering than it prevented. That, of

course, is a radically anti-ecological position we can reject out of hand, if

we accept the premise that an ecological ethic is required. Others, notably

Carol Adams, accept predation between wild animals, and resort to human

exceptionalism to claim that predation done by humans is not comparable

to predation done by nonhumans. This again is not compatible with an

ecological outlook, in which humans are just another species of animal.

Neither of these options is satisfactory from an ecological point of view.

Val Plumwood, who described her own dietary choice as “context-sensitive

semi-vegetarian”, summarises the problem:

Any attempt to condemn predation in general, ontological terms will inevitably

rub off onto predatory animals (including both carnivorous and omnivorous

animals), and any attempt to separate predation completely from human identity

will also serve to reinforce once again the Western tradition’s hyper-separation of

our nature from that of animals, and its treatment of Indigenous cultures as

animal-like.

The God’s Gardeners’ human exceptionalism and their restriction of

respect to “Creatures” (by implication denying respect to nonanimals) are

apparent in The Water-Shrew That Rends Its Prey:

But we are not as Animals –

We cherish other Creatures’ lives;

And so we do not eat their flesh

Unless dread Famine drives.

Although the predatory feeding behaviour of other species is eulogised by

the Gardeners, in humans it is taken as an aspect of the Fall from the

proper vegetarian state in which God created us. Predator and prey

animals are obviously kin, but kinship between humans and animals is

conditional upon humans not eating animals. Vegetarianism equals loving-

kindness, while meat-eating represents gluttony, pride and disdain. This

form of respect/use dualism is spelled out in Adam One’s Creation Day

sermon, concerning the naming of the animals by humans:



Adam’s first act towards the Animals was thus one of loving-kindness and kinship,

for Man in his unfallen state was not yet a carnivore. The Animals knew this, and

did not run away. So it must have been on that unrepeatable Day — a peaceful

gathering at which every living entity on the Earth was embraced by Man.

How much have we lost, dear Fellow Mammals and Fellow Mortals! How much

have we wilfully destroyed! How much do we need to restore, within ourselves!

The time of the Naming is not over, my Friends. In His sight, we may still be living

in the sixth day. As your Meditation, imagine yourself rocked in that sheltering

moment. Stretch out your hand towards those gentle eyes that regard you with

such trust — a trust that has not yet been violated by bloodshed and gluttony and

pride and disdain.”

Meat-eating should signal gluttony, pride and disdain in humans but not,

apparently, in nonhuman animals. No clear rationalisation is given for such

human exceptionalism in the face of an otherwise ecological worldview.

Somewhat mysteriously, the hymn The Earth Forgives, which celebrates the

interdependence of predator and prey, exceptionalises human predation as

a manifestation of vengeance:

The Deer at length forgives the Wolf

That tears his throat and drinks his blood;

His bones return to soil, and feed

The trees that flower and fruit and seed.

And underneath those shady trees

The Wolf will spend her restful days;

And then the Wolf in turn will pass,

And turn to grass the Deer will graze.

16/16 Buddhas in Sardine…

The Earth Forgives, set to music by Orville Stoeber

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLA754056B7A4CB753&v=RQied3gZnWk



All Creatures know that some must die

That all the rest may take and eat;

Sooner or later, all transform

Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat.

But Man alone seeks Vengefulness,

And writes his abstract Laws on stone;

For this false Justice he has made,

He tortures limb and crushes bone.

Then again, in another sermon, nearly the opposite claim is made, as Adam

One identifies, disapprovingly, violent behaviour as a common ground

between human and nonhuman animals:

What is it about our own Species that leaves us so vulnerable to the impulse to

violence? Why are we so addicted to the shedding of blood? Whenever we are

tempted to become puffed up, and to see ourselves as superior to all other

Animals, we should reflect on our own brutal history.

The literal meaning of the word brutal is apparently not lost on Atwood,

unlike many other writers, whose use of the word to decry human use of

animals I have come to see as a red flag for hidden anthropocentrism.

(Savage, barbaric and primitive fall into the same category, each with telling

etymology.)

Unlike the reasons for exceptionalising humans, the Gardeners’ rationale

for using animality as the criterion for dividing those eligible for respect

from those eligible for use is made clear:

When in extreme need, Adam One used to say, begin at the bottom of the food

chain. Those without central nervous systems must surely suffer less.

Of course, such a rationale has the appearance of making sense, but does

nothing to ameliorate the concerns raised above concerning the anti-

ecological demonisation of predation, or about the creation of an out-class

of beings not owed respect. This type of argument makes an anti-ecological

position seem reasonable because it appeals to the hidden

anthropocentrism inherent in our tendency to rank the worthiness of

beings according to criteria that place humans at the apex of value.



The Gardeners’ focus on sentience, or specifically (since all living beings

are both sensitive and responsive to stimulus), varieties of sentience

mediated by a central nervous system. With this they share common

ground with Peter Singer of Animal Liberation fame, whose appeal to

sentience led Richard Sylvan (née Routley) to quip that Singer simply

trades human chauvinism for sentient chauvinism. Another common

justification is so-called consciousness, a nebulous concept made concrete

by Tom Regan (The Case for Animal Rights) through a long list of criteria

that effectively drills down to mammals, prompting J. Baird Callicott to

complain that the theory ought properly to be called “mammal rights”.

Regan is unabashed about the anthropocentricity of his approach, noting

that he sees humans as “paradigmatic conscious beings”, and admits

mammals to the class on account of their “anatomical and physiological

similarity” to humans.



The Western philosophical tradition exceptionalises humans as superior,

and uniquely morally considerable, on account of their capacity for reason.

Minimally extending this in-group of privilege to a few adjacent branches

of the phylogenetic tree does not go nearly far enough to dismantle the

anthropocentric mindset that brought us the Dominion Assumption and

the ecological crisis. Lowering the bar one or two links down the Great

Chain of Being is not the same thing as denouncing the entire concept. This

The Great Chain of Being from the Rhetorica christiana by Fray Diego de Valades

(1579)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Great_Chain_of_Being_%281579%29.jpg



is what an egalitarian ecological outlook demands, and indeed Atwood’s

readers are briefly given cause to hope the Gardeners achieve it, as Adam

One subverts the concept by reference to the “great chain of

nourishment”. But this hope proves unfounded as his later instruction to

eat low on the food chain endorses the idea of a hierarchy of ethical

considerability.

The minimalism of this kind of ethical extensionism accounts both for its

popularity — as Sylvan & Bennett point out, “it is easier to empathize with a

deer in a field, than the field the deer is in” — and its failure to properly

dissolve anthropocentrism and create a fully ecological ethic. Val

Plumwood complains:

Minimalism claims to be anti-speciesist but is not genuinely so in selecting for

exclusive ethical attention those animals who closely resemble the human, any

more than a culture which values women just in terms of their resemblance to

men is genuinely non-androcentric. Minimalism continues to see consciousness

in singular and cut-off terms, and discounts the great variety of forms of

sentience and mind — hence Singer’s conviction that trees have no form of

sentient or aware life, (which runs counter both to what is disclosed by any

reasonably attentive observation and to scientific evidence). Minimalism is not

able to recognise consciousness as just one among many relevant differences

between species, differences which are largely incommensurable as to value

rather than hierarchically ordered along the lines of resemblance to the human.

Rather Minimalism makes consciousness the basis for an absolute ethical

positioning of all species within a hierarchy based on human norms. Minimalism

does not really dispel speciesism, it just extends and disguises it.

Since we must use other beings, for food if nothing else, an ecologically

ethical culture cannot emerge from a position of respect/use dualism such

as employed by The Gods Gardeners. Instead, it must work from an

ecologically affirmative position of respectful participation, as J. Claude

Evans calls it. Returning to the ethics of kinship and reciprocity, Plumwood

paints a useful picture of what respectful participation looks like:

All living creatures are food, and also much more than food. In a good human life

we must gain our food in such a way as to acknowledge our kinship with those

whom we make our food, which does not forget the more than food that every one

of us is, and which positions us reciprocally as food for others.

I have argued that The Gardeners fall short of this ideal. Did Atwood write

this flaw into Gardener doctrine deliberately? Who can tell? We might

make some guesses based on the fact that Atwood’s writing was informed

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/books/interview-margaret-atwood-on-her-novel-maddaddam-1-3069846



by the arguments made by her vegetarian daughter, while Atwood herself is

not usually a strict vegetarian, and thinks “it might be a good plan to

support locally grown, organic meat.”

Whatever her thoughts there may be, I think the third book in the trilogy,

MaddAddam, is possibly Atwood’s vehicle for sketching a way to fix the

Gardener worldview.

Beyond Gardeners: Toby

Gardener doctrine ends up self-contradictory by trying to blend

ideological vegetarianism with an ecological worldview, as we found above.

Indeed, the Gardener elites realised this and The Year of the Flood tells how

they colluded in private to construct dogma in such a way as to smooth

Psilocybe cyanescens. Like all fungi (and animals), it obtains its energy and nutrients from other organisms, in

this case by digesting dead wood. This or a related species was involved in the Enhanced Mediation that

prompted Toby’s experience of communication with pigs and her (dead) mentor Pilar. Credit: Caleb Brown.

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/books/interview-margaret-atwood-on-her-novel-maddaddam-1-3069846

http://www.treehugger.com/treehugger-radio/author-margaret-atwood-on-the-year-of-the-flood.html

http://mushroomobserver.org/image/show_image/378614



over the appearance of discrepancies. I’ll be discussing that more in a

subsequent post.

In MaddAddam, Atwood explores

possible refinements to

Gardener teachings, through the

post-Flood experiences of key

protagonist Toby. Eventually

Toby realises that Gardener

doctrine was constructed not as

a universal moral theory but

instead as a way to motivate an

appropriate practical response

to the circumstances of the

ecological crisis:

There would be no point in being a

Gardener now: the enemies of

God’s Natural Creation no longer

exist, and the animals and birds —

those that did not become extinct

under the human domination of the planet — are thriving unchecked. Not to

mention the plant life.

Initially forced by hunger to eat animals, she begins at the bottom of the

food chain as Adam One had preached. However, by the end of MaddAddam

Toby notes in her diary without concern that deer are an acceptable source

of animal protein, though not as tasty as pigs. She has replaced Gardener

use/respect dualism with an ethical approach to the ecological

appropriation of animals:

“Snowman-the-Jimmy says the bad people in the chaos ate the Children of Oryx

[animals],” he says. “They killed them and killed them, and ate them and ate them.

They were always eating them.”

“Yes, they were,” says Toby, “but they were eating them in the wrong way.”

Toby retains some of the animistic practices she picked up from her

Gardener mentor Pilar, including regularly conversing with bees, and using

gendered personal pronouns for animals. Animism shares in common with

the ecological outlook a recognition that nonhuman organisms, just like

humans, are individual centres of striving, with a good of their own that is

inextricably bound up with the instrumental and inherent value of others



through ecological webs of

interdependence. A lovely

manifesto by Graham Harvey

explains this with such

eloquence that I struggle to

confine myself to quoting only a

small portion:

All that exists lives

All that lives is worthy of respect

You don’t have to like what you

respect

Not liking someone is no reason for

not respecting them

Respecting someone is no reason

for not eating them

Reasons are best worked out in

relationship — especially if you are looking for reasons to eat someone — or if you

are looking for reasons not to be eaten

If you agree that all that exists is alive and worthy of respect, it is best to talk about

‘persons’ or ‘people’ rather than ‘beings’ or ‘spirits’, let alone ‘biomechanisms’,

‘resources’, ‘possessions’, and ‘objects’

The world is full of persons (people if you prefer), but few of them are human …

Animism is a central feature of a great many indigenous cultures which

operate from an ecological outlook. Animism is commonly described as a

spiritual or religious conviction — as reflected in the Gardener belief in

animal Souls. However, a contemporary, factual understanding of ecology

and evolution ought to accept the animist view as a matter not of belief,

but of fact. This is why Val Plumwood eventually began describe her body

of thought as “philosophical animism”.

Toby’s animistic monologues with bees expand to dialogue with pigs and

dead people, leading her to doubt herself –

Now Toby, she tells herself. Talking pigs, communicative dead people, and the

Underworld in a Styrofoam beer cooler. You’re not on drugs, you’re not even

sick. You really have no excuse.

http://www.bioregionalanimism.com/2007/09/animist-manifesto.html



– but soon finds confirmation of

the reality of her psychedelic-

mediated exchanges through the

testimony of the Craker

Blackbeard, who proved able to

eavesdrop on the nonverbal

conversation, and later to

facilitate two-way discussion

between Toby and the pigs.

Notwithstanding the fact that

the pigs were genetically

modified, complete with human

neocortex tissue, writing this

aspect of the story as if it

“really” happens seems a bold

move by Atwood, perhaps

designed to assert her own

animistic perspective on

nonhuman beings, tearing down

human exceptionalism.

Eventually, the pigs negotiate through Blackbeard and Toby a pact: the pigs

will cease raiding the humans’ vegetable gardens if the humans stop killing

pigs for food. At the same time, the pigs don’t mean to eschew ecological

appropriation in general: they eat their own dead farrow, and dead adults

are “contributed to the general ecosystem.”

This pact is a startling reflection both of Graham Harvey’s Animist

Manifesto (above), and of the ancient Native American story of The Woman

Who Married a Bear, which is discussed in many places but which I first

encountered in Gary Snyder’s The Practice of The Wild.

Echoes of the The Woman Who Married a Bear seem to shine through

elsewhere in MaddAddam, as we hear Toby recount to Blackbeard, in

mythical tones, the story of the time Zeb killed and skinned a bear, and

wore its coat. Toby’s ecological outlook comes up again in her response to

Blackbeard’s questions about the tale:

After Zeb came back from the high and tall mountains with snow on top, and

after he had taken off the skin of the bear and put it on himself, he said Thank You

to the bear. To the spirit of the bear.

A Haida raven rattle depicts a shaman’s

direct interaction and power transfers

with Raven and Kingfisher. Credit: John

Pittman

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doncoyote/15273121956/



Because the bear didn’t eat him,

but allowed him to eat it instead,

and also because it gave him its fur

skin to put on.

A spirit is the part of you that

doesn’t die when your body dies.

No, it is not only fish that die.

People do it as well.

Yes. Everyone.

Yes, you as well. Sometime. Not yet.

Not for a long time.

I don’t know why. Crake made it

that way.

Because…

Because if nothing ever died, but everything had more and more babies, the world

would get too full and there wouldn’t be any more room.”

In Toby, Atwood seems to be offering her vision for a grounded alternative

to the promising but idiosyncratic, knotted-up world of The Gardeners. As

noted above, Atwood seemed rather fond of the Gardener outlook after

writing The Year Of The Flood. But to me, MaddAddam, published four years

after The Year of Flood may have been Atwood’s way of outlining a more

mature ecological wisdom.

Or am I just guilty of confirmation bias?

References are available in the notes: visible as numbered speech bubbles to the

right of the main text.



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Ecological Culture in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy

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