Our relationships to nature and the environment are either trivially acknowledged or fantastically exaggerated. Flooding is an occasional annoyance  to some but to others it is a sign of the impending end of times. Tornadoes are a spectacle reserved for the metropolitan or a serious danger for rural midwesterners.  The way climate change is framed often is in these two modes; the spectacle or the trivial. In both instances, it is seen as something separate from the sphere of our personal, social, and macro-societal relations. Yet is it so fantastical to understand how a hurricane or heavy rain or any climatological phenomenon comes to ultimately set and define our ‘everdays’.

 Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Hungry Tide’ precisely acknowledges this connection between marco-climate change, history, society, and ,at the heart of his novel , the personal. The novel follows marine biologist Piya Roy, on a quest to study a rare species of dolphins in the Sundarbans, a mangrove forests in the Bay of Bengal. Helping her on the quest is Forkir, a stoic  local fisherman and Kanai, an arrogant bourgeois translator. As the book descends deeper and deeper the lines between our characters’ personal, political, and social relations get blurred, all within the context of a complex setting, which in of itself is a character. The space the characters inhabit isn’t arbitrary, it doesn’t just ‘stage’ the characters , nor does it get framed in a fantastical and inhuman way. The Sudarbans are a quite fascinating and alien place for characters outside of it, but for the characters who live there , the Sundarbans are part of them.

When recounting this mythical tale, Nirmal [being conjured through his writings,via Kainai] mentions how;

“That’s what happened, then. They crossed the line by mistake and ended up on one of Dokkhin Rai’s islands. Whenever you have a storm like that – one that appears so suddenly out of nowhere – you know it’s the doing of Dokkhin Rai and his demons.”

I grew impatient and said, “Horen! A storm is an atmospheric disturbance. It has neither intention nor motive.”

I had spoken so sharply that he would not disagree with me, although he could not bring himself to agree either. “As to that, Saar,” he said, “let us leave each other to our beliefs and see what the future holds” (Ghosh 123).

This belief Horen is not unlike any  other aetiological myth, but within the context of a  globalized world, Nirmal cannot bring himself to understand how someone can believe that as an adequate explanation. And persistent throughout the book the characters that are more metropolitan and liberal in their socialization, find that the world they project onto the Sundarbans is completely misconstrued. It isn’t just some uncivilized wasteland where tides drown and tigers eat human beings, but it is in some sense “the everyday”. What Ghosh attempts to do in this book is to situate us in a place where climate change has not only just affected, it is actively affecting, but it isn’t the crux of the story. The crux of the story is the relationships between people, and how those relationships get messed around with due to these big, “unchangeable” conditions.

When reading any tremendous novel such as the Parable of the Sower, we can be left with the question of “what now ?”.  After about 329 pages what precisely can be taken from the book ? Can anything be taken from the book ? That is a question many of the characters within even the narrative itself ask Lauren. Harry, Bankole, Grayson and others challenge the Earthseed verses , and generally challenge any sort of  narrative of optimism or hope. Within the genre of Sci-fi and specifically post-apocalyptic fiction  itself hope and optimism are forsaken concepts, dirty words that have no place in such a gritty, grounded , and violent setting. Yet hope and violence aren’t as mutually exclusive as may seem. Violent resistance movements, often are inextricably linked to hope. As the great Huey P Newton says on resistance:

“Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick” – Huey P Newton, Revolutionary Suicide  

Perhaps some readers might give their rhetorical preferences to Harry or Bankole, agnostic figures that retain the patriarchal schema of seemingly every male character in the post-apocalyptic genre and in fiction broadly.  Harry and Bankole start off on the same sort of level, in their relation to Lauren, her ideas and its praxis; chiefly that they are skeptical of them. Harry initially is very hesitant on killing and allowing others into the group, but it’s only until Lauren displays how killing is not something for their group that comes lightly, that violence gives as much pain as it takes away. As this exchange indicates;

“So when you hit that guy’  she said, ‘it was like you hitting yourself’…

‘So that’s why you killed that guy?’

‘I killed him because he was a threat to us. To me in a special way, but to you, too’  (Butler 193).

Violence is not any easy choice, the group never kills for convenience, triviality, revenge, but for pure survival. 

This is particularly interesting as those who can enact violence within these types of stories are typically white men who in some way are colonizing the land and in their violence find a particularly violent means by which to do so.  In Parable of the Sower, the violence is not only just multi-ethnic, but purely defensive. Part of the prepper fantasy is taking one’s land “back” from the savages or the inverse displacing the deviants who inhabit a land.  The violence of Lauren and her group is reminiscent of the Black Panthers’ “Cop Watch” practice, in which the Black Panthers would carry firearms to defend themselves from volatile racist police. Violence without struggle, is at best reactionary and at worst cruelty and sadism.

Rethinking humanity is a tough task, but if anybody can do it’s the great Donna Haraway. Haraway’s thought and logic is that of assemblages. If it is our connection with technology or the earth, she wants us to open new avenues of reframing our own subjectivity. Our way of understanding and shaping this world is one in which everything else is dead and we are the things that imbue things with life. Marx precisely means this when he speaks of our  “species being”, that innate human beings are our creative creatures. We appropriate nature to transform it into something useful or ‘alive’ in some sense. Yet the world is not dead, as Haraway points out. All of nature’s interfaces exist within us and us within it. As she says:

“Vast investments and hugely creative and destructive technology can drive back the reckoning, but cheap nature really is over.”

We are simply using nature or us at it’s whims, but ultimately we have a symbiotic relationship with it. When she talks about ‘cheap nature’ she is critiquing this idea nature is an unlimited source of power that is ripe for the taking. The dichotomy between active participants (temporal dependent subjects)  and an atemporal world is an almost self fulfilling prophecy. The more we frame the world as an object to be appropriated ,maimed, and disfigured, the more we are likely to reduce ourselves to simple objectification. Take the imagery of dead planets in sci-fi for instance, like in the first Alien film when they first land on LV-223. The remnants of what seemed like a vast active community seems like ruins, and the explicit mission of the corporation that sent a team to investigate it is to see what they can extract from it. Yet the planet is very much not dead, in fact the structures of the planet, the architecture of the buildings are almost skeletal. This curiosity, and suspicion that what is ‘dead’, what is ripe for the taking for human exploitation, ultimately leads to the relaxation that the very planet they are standing on contains multitudes of creatures ready to gestate in any poor soul who stumbles upon them.

What a film like Alien shows us is similar to what Haraway coins the Chthulucene. Of it she says:

“.. but rather after the diverse earth-wide tentacular powers and …forces and collected things..with its problematic Greek-ish tendrils, entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in- assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as- humus.”

Human beings are not ‘important’ and we certainly aren’t unified as a unit of stuff. We belong to everything, not in some Neo-Platonic sense, but that the boundary of our existence is constantly sprawling through time and space. The Chthulucene ask us to escape these boundaries of bodies and to start thinking not as subjects or even objects, but to think with everything. The future is not theirs [our descendants] and by pronatalist logic simply ours, but the future belongs to everything always.

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear Cli-Fi is disaster movies. Big blockbusters about humanity trying to survive some gargantuan ecological event, reshaping the world as we know it. As every year approaches, the earth is getting hotter and hotter, and it leaves us in this state of casual resignment to our inevitable destruction, the ‘everyday’ as LeManger puts it. Yet if one were to think about it for a second, the true existential threat that we all face is not some ‘other’, but ourselves. When I say “ourselves,”  I don’t mean it in the individual mode but as a whole species, for the very reason that the technological advances that allow me to type this to you, the infrastructure that allows me to post this on the internet, the market that allows things to be so ideologically chewed through the process of global trade that I don’t even know where the food I eat is coming from—all of it, the very world we have found ourselves situated in is the product of years of ecological transfiguration. Our systems actively that have made our lives so convenient and quick will ultimately be our downfall.

As Lemanger says, “Climate change represents, among other things, an assault on the everyday,” adding, “As Stacy Alaimo and other new materialist thinkers remind us, the environment is not an externality… the world lives inside of us, and we know it.” When examining cli-fi, this is precisely what is at play. Specifically in the disaster film, in all it’s monstruous spectacle, we see an eruption (sometimes literal) of the everyday. Take the 1996 classic Twister, which takes the everyday (i.e americana imagery and life) and inserts a environmental disruption, which like most these films is treated as antagonist. Most of the film is spent trying to defeat a literal tornado, and by the grace of 90’s screenwriters, our protagonist and his love interest survive the disaster and return to the everyday, presumably to return to normalcy. In disaster films, this is often how the stories go: some phenomenon or entity poses an existential threat to humanity; our characters endure and try to survive; through some ingenious means they survive and reverse the disaster; humanity survives.

We see in these films a neoliberal framing and, by extension, a borderer way by which Hollywood and the masses see the Anthropocene. Climate change is not a systematized, slow catastrophe but spectacles to be awed by and to face not with radical creative change but through triumph. The logic of neoliberal capitalism would much readily have us all move to Mars than to stop the flows of capital from siphoning the life out of literally everything. The disaster film reminds us of that true, if not tired, Fredric Jameson quote, “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.