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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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:
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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
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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– 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
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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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