New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.
“We do not worship God. We perceive and attend God. We learn from God. With forethought and work, We shape God. In the end, we yield to God. We adapt and endure, For we are Earthseed, And God is Change.”
Summary:
Lauren Olamina and her family live in a walled, 11 home community in Robledo, California. The story begins in 2024, a time when economic and political crises are destroying the United States. Lauren’s father is the community minister and acts as a leader of the neighborhood while preaching Baptist beliefs. Meanwhile Lauren creates her own religion called Earthseed that she believes will create action. Most people who are not fortunate enough to live in a protected community are impoverished, starving, desperate, and sometimes violent.
Lauren knows that as conditions get worse outside, it puts the community in more danger of being a target. She tries to warn her father and her friends, but she is met with denial and fear. Her best friend, Joanne is scared by her doomsday prophecy and tells adults in the community about Lauren’s ideas, which gets back to her father. He tells her the importance of educating people instead of scaring them, however they both disagree on the degree of action that should be taken before disaster. However, her instincts are proven correct when the community is broken into many times and finally burned to the ground by pyro addicts. Lauren unites with two other community members who survived, Harry and Zahra, and they begin their journey North to find cheaper water and work that will pay with money.
The group of travelers experience many violent encounters and must learn to trust each other in order to survive. They pick up a few trustworthy people along the way to increase their chances of safety. Lauren uses this as an opportunity to start teaching them about Earthseed. Eventually, they reach the estate of Bankole’s sister, which is burned to the ground. The group concludes that they will stay on the land and form a self-sufficient community there instead of looking for work at corrupt corporations. The settlement is called Acorn.
Butler uses the story of Lauren and the other travelers to express a common theme in environmental thought; that hopelessness leads to inaction, therefore by taking action first, one can create their own hope in a situation. This message is conveyed through Earthseed, which is an intermediate step between religious and secular environmentalism. However, Butler’s story also inverts typical environmental narratives by bringing forth an African American teenage girl as the protagonist and saviour of the group, a perspective which has not been explored or represented much in other environmental literature.
Sources:
Borsodi, Ralph. Flight from the City. Harper & Row, 1933.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” Https://Www.Gutenberg.Org/Files/29433/29433-h/29433-h.Htm, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29433/pg29433-images.html.
Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, From Colonization to Standing Rock. Beacon Press, 2019.
Kent, Eliza. Earthseed: Invented Religion and Science Fiction. Skidmore, 2022, https://www.skidmore.edu/fye/summer_reading/2022/essays-and-reflection/posts/2022/earthseed.php.
Padilla Carroll, Valerie. Who Gets to Go Back-to-the-Land? Gender and Race in U.S. Self-Sufficiency Popular Culture. University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
Penniman, Leah. “Black Gold.” All We Can Save, One World, 2020, pp. 301–10.
Schrepfer, Susan R. Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism. University Press of Kansas, 2005.