Octavia Butler's Parable Novels and Genealogies of African American Environmental Literature

Introduction

Near the beginning of Parable of the Sower (1993), Octavia Butler's dystopian novel of neoliberal environmental and political catastrophe, there is a scene of almost shocking ambivalence about experiencing natural beauty. In a dream that narrator Lauren Oya Olamina tells us is "ordinary and real [and] happen[ed] years ago when I was little," she discusses the stars with her stepmother, Cora.¹ Cora observes that, living in the greater Los Angeles area when she was young, she could not see so many stars. "City lights, progress, growth, all those things we are too hot and too poor to bother with anymore" had blocked her view.² But now that things have decayed—now that capitalist growth and progress has fallen apart—the stars are vivid, beautiful even, and a needed respite after long, hot, and arid days. In this ecologically damaged Southern California, the dreams of environmental conservationism have come true; progress has been halted, light pollution reversed, and natural beauty is available to all. Except, this is no victory for nature and certainly no good thing for Lauren and Cora's community, Robledo. The revealed splendor of the Milky Way is ominous, marking exposure to risk, violence, drought, and the political and economic ills of the transforming American landscape. Natural beauty is, for these observers, a sign not that destructive progress has been averted (as it has been for so many conservationists) but that it has come to catastrophe. The stars are a warning to the poor and middle-class people of color in Butler's Californian future that, once again, American capitalism has exposed them to dire environmental risks.

Butler's reversal of our aesthetic expectations about the natural world's meaning signals a different mode of environmental thinking than the mainstream environmental movement had produced up to the publication of the Parable books. White environmental writers from Henry David Thoreau and John Muir to Rachael Carson and Wendell Berry had typically suggested that capitalist modernity was despoiling a pure and serene environment, and they employed aesthetic visions of natural beauty to sanctify, celebrate, and mourn what could be lost.³ However, just as Butler's first Parable was nearing publication, what we now call the environmental justice movement was coming to broader attention. A series of grassroots organizing efforts in the 1980s around toxic waste dumping near poor and working-class communities resulted in the publication of Toxic Waste and Race (1987) by the United Church of Christ, statistically confirming the connections between race and toxic exposure that activists had been drawing attention to for years.⁴ This was followed in 1990 by an open letter to the "big ten" environmental organizations, challenging them for their governing boards' lack of diversity and their failure to attend to racial and economic justice as part of environmental organizing.⁵ As Butler was publishing, the rhetoric of environmentalism was beginning to shift substantially away from images of pure nature or prototypical pastoral corrupted by pollution and modernity and toward considerations of unequal exposure and structural racism's effects on human lifeworlds.

Butler's novels are inspired by this moment, but they also inherit a genealogy of environmental thought that stretches far beyond it—one that is still rarely acknowledged in how people tell the story of environmentalism and environmental literature. It is not just that, as many have argued, Butler, as an "important early climate-change intellectual," introduced environmental justice themes into environmental dystopian literature by focusing on the unequal sharing of risk across lines of race, class, and gender.⁶ It is that her way of writing the environment—of writing even soul-refreshing encounters with natural beauty like Lauren's dream of the Milky Way—is haunted by ambivalences and anxieties that, for her characters, beauty does not promise a conserved or sustainable future. This ambivalence is something that Butler shares with a much longer history of environmental thought in African American literature, predating both the commonly recognized birth of the environmental justice movement and the current climate crisis. Whether we turn to the...