Only 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 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.
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 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.
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:
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.”
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 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 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.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.
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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 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 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 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 respectYou 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 themReasons 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.
– 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.
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.
