In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina, the main character, strains against the cultural restraints of her community that prevent them from recognizing the imminent danger they face from a world ravaged by climate change, societal breakdown, and division. I’ll admit that I am nowhere near done with the book, but the tension between survival and cultural preservation in Parable of the Sower feel ever-relevant to the state of the current global order. Life, it seems, imitates art.
From Parable of the Sower:
All that you touch,
You Change.
All that you Change,
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change
God
Is Change.
Lauren Olamina struggles against the fact that, when faced with the terror, fear, and imminence of change (and death), her community turns away, refusing to make strides for safety, to prepare for what is inevitable, and to lessen the negative impact it might have. Octavia Butler, then, has taken hold of Terror Management theory and placed it into the future, in a not-at-all-unfeasible circumstance of climate disaster. Butler’s characters in Parable of the Sower are a very real reflection of people of the modern day, but when packaged into fiction, their actions become more outrageous and clearly ignorant.
Yet, we all know the people who turn a blind eye to global crises for fear of what it means to them. In some cases, this is framed in terms of mental health: it is absurdly painful to reconcile with what the future will really look like when it is nothing like what we imagined growing up. There are stories of growing old; of moving across the globe; of finding love, adventure and excitement. At our current state, it is unlikely that my generation will grow old. If we move across the globe, it will be as climate refugees searching for a livable environment. If we find love, adventure, and excitement, it will be in stolen moments where we can find a reprieve from struggling to survive, or it will be in ignorance of the struggles of others. That is not to say that there is no value to finding beauty in what exists in front of us, but it is unsurprising that, when the future looks so bleak, many use a preoccupation with the everyday to excuse inaction and create what is, in effect, a productive paralysis.