Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Ecofiction

3. Contemporary Ecofiction

32 3 Contemporary Ecofiction Most of the authors from the 1970s were in the beginning or middle of their careers, and have continued to write. Over the past quarter century, many new authors have emerged and a wide variety of ecofiction continues to be written. This chapter will consider the major subdivisions of contemporary ecofiction. philosophical/spiritual Many books by Native Americans have a strong philosophical/spiritual tradition . Indian cosmology is also reflected in the works of non-Native authors, most notably Frank Waters. See chapter 4, “Native American and Canadian Fiction,” for many others. Other novelists draw on a wide variety of philosophical and religious traditions both ancient and modern. Although some of their works are ruminative, many others are exciting and action packed. The Testament of Yves Gundron (2000) by Emily Barton takes place on a medieval European island. When Yves invents the harness and then the twoand the four-wheeled cart, agriculture is revolutionized, but unanticipated consequences occur as greed, envy, and doubt upset the islanders’ formerly impoverished but relatively stable lives. The situation is further complicated contemporary ecofiction 33 when an airplane from the future carrying an anthropologist crashes on the island. Set in a very different time and place, Buffalo at the turn of the twentieth century, Lauren Belfer’s City of Light (1999) is another fascinating consideration of technological progress versus natural and cultural preservation. Pantheism and activism commingle in Rick Bass’s fiction. His first collection , The Watch (1989), introduces the themes of crossing the internal and external boundaries between civilization and wildness; predatory relationships , captivity, escape, and quests; characters with incredible speed, power, and endurance; and the inherent magic of nature, often expressed in luminescence . In Platte River (1994) his fiction becomes more complex and fantastic. The story “Mahatma Joe” is about an evangelist whose faith is extended to the vegetables he raises to ship to Africa. The title novella introduces a theme that might be called “the human animal.” Several stories in In the Loyal Mountains (1995) explore what Alan Weltzien terms “the interstices between wilderness -wildness and domesticity-tameness.”1 The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (1997) consists of three highly varied novellas. In “The Myth of Bears,” Trapper , the human equivalent of an old hunting dog, tracks his escaped, elk-like wife Judith through a harsh Yukon winter. The heart is the primary locus of “Where the Sea Used to Be,” in which a geologist falls in love with the land, flying, and a woman. Myth and magic are intertwined with natural history and family relationships in the title novella, the story of a near-wilderness ranch in West Texas. In the novel Where the Sea Used to Be (1998), the scene shifts to a fictionalized version of Bass’s Montana home, “Swan Valley.” Mel, a wolf biologist, muses on the limitations of science, which must be fused with spirituality to tell the whole truth. Geologist Wallis learns to love the valley and decides not to reveal his oil discoveries, but his boss, old Dudley, finds his map and the drilling proceeds. The novel echoes Moby Dick, with Dudley as Ahab, but instead of just Ishmael being saved by a floating coffin, the entire valley is saved with the departure of Dudley’s flaming coffin downriver in a Viking-style funeral. Fiber (1998), an amalgam of story and essay, is Bass’s shortest but most experimental and challenging book. After describing the 34 where the wild books are first three phases of his life as geologist, artist, and activist, Bass explains that he can no longer be sure how much of any story is fiction and how much is activism. The title story in the collection The Hermit’s Story (2002) describes a dog trainer’s wondrous surprise as a hole in the ice becomes a passage not to watery death but to a crystalline ice cavern that saves her. Bass turns to historical fiction in The Diezmo (2005), a powerful account of the psychological , social, and, to a lesser extent, environmental horrors of war. He returns to ecofiction in the short-story collection The Lives of Rocks (2006). R. M. Berry’s Leonardo’s Horse (1997), whose locale shifts between Renaissance Italy and modern America, considers similar issues. The Plague Years (1997) by Ann Benson takes a similar approach, alternating between the fourteenth -century Black Death and 2005 when the world is suffering from “the Outbreaks...