The slides for today offer an overview of climate and environmental SF, and the changed consciousness of the central characters in “The People of Sand and Slag.” In the Calorie Man,” US agribusiness companies have reshaped the world from India to the Mississippi valley, largely by engineering and releasing crop diseases that only their genetically modified products can survive. How has this changed world altered the consciousness of Lalji or another character in the story? At what particular point do you see a character comprehending the environment and their place in a striking way?
6 thoughts on “Bacigalupi and Environmental Consciousness–Group 1”
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In a world where natural plants have been wiped out and only genetically engineered crops survived, just a few agricultural corporations have been left to monopolistically control the most important sources of food and energy. In the opening scene with the beggar child, it appears that Lalji accepts this world for what it is: corrupt and completely at the mercy of greedy megacorporations. Lalji has no sympathy for the child and no hope for the world at that moment.
I believe Lalji’s first experience of feeling powerless to the corporations is shown in his flashback to trying to plant seeds with his father. Lalji remembers “squatting with his father in desert heat” and believing that once the seeds grow they will be able to feed their family well (20). Lalji waited patiently and excitedly for the seeds to grow a bounty of food but to no avail. He dug the seeds up and found them “already decomposed, tiny corpses in his hand, rotted,” and with the death of those seeds so too died his hope in the natural world. When Lalji discovered that the seeds were infertile, he realized that his own survival, and the survival of the world as a whole, would forever be at the mercy of the giant corporations and their engineered crops.
However, this feeling of powerlessness and defeat does not completely define Lalji’s perception of his environment. Eventually, we see Lalji reject his acceptance of the corrupt world in favor of a desire to take down the tyranny of the megacorps. The final scene, to me, speaks to this aspiration. The scene opens with the bloody murders of Creo and Bowman, which seem to offer anything but hope. However, when Tazi gives Bowman’s “Johnny Appleseeds” to Lalji and asks him to plan them it offers a small beacon of hope in an otherwise dark world. The unpatented, natural seeds offer a small way to fight the megacorps, and though I’m unsure how successful that fight would be, Lalji seems to believe it’s a worthwhile and important effort. The story closes with Lalji hugging the seeds to his chest, smiling, and envisioning “row upon row of green rustling plants.” (28) To me this ending demonstrates that Lalji’s understanding of the world grew much more hopeful from the opening scene with the beggar child or the failed planting with his father. At the end, Lalji is determined to fight for change and take down the evil megacorps.
As Creo and Lalji travel in search of the calorie man, they see the ruins of suburbs around the Mississippi river. I find the age difference between Lalji and Creo as they comprehend the ruins striking. Similar to Lauren and her father in Parable of the Sower, the younger Creo can not remember a time before agribusiness domination over the country. Lalji expresses anger towards the changed world, but Creo calls him a conspiracy theorist. The world has altered Creo to believe in the normalcy of monocultures and big business farming. He does not question the quality of his food because he has eaten the same items his whole life. He can’t cling to the way things used to be because he does not remember.
Another idea I wanted to discuss is the exact point where Lalji bursts out against the agribussiness. During most of the story, he has remained somewhat calm and complacent towards them. It is not until he sees the suburbs does he express true hatred for these businesses. The presence of a reminder of the old world triggers Lalgi to express his true feelings, and it strikes me how he can adjust to the new reality. Lalgi does not spend his entire life thinking about the past, but then again neither do I. I don’t think about how Google steals my data every day because that’s how the world works now. Older People might get more upset at Google because they can imagine the world without internet search engines, but overall most of us are complicit and standby as large companies take advantage of the world.
A telling moment for me was when Lalji was offered a tomato by Bowman. Lalji savored the flavor of a time past. Creo hated it, saying he would rather just eat SoyPro. This small moment made clear the big differences in Lalji’s and Creo’s life experiences. As Bowman then says, Lalji is old enough to remember what food used to taste like. He knows what the world once was, when food had variety and carried more than just sustenance. Lalji remembers what it meant to plant seeds, to grow a real crop. These are things Creo hasn’t even thought of, let alone experienced. This moment makes abundantly clear what it means to be a human being raised in this dystopian society. To be entirely dependent on these monocrops and the industry behind it. Creo has an entirely different relationship to food and to the land itself than Lalji or Bowman does.
Similar to Clara, I was most interested in the relationship to the new SoyPRO controlled world that Creo had in comparison to Lalji’s. In particular the scene that stood out most to me was the one where Bowman explains “SoyPRO[‘s]… most precious quality” to Creo. Creo, in response to Bowman asking what the company’s most precious quality is, answers “‘It’s high calorie.’” Bowman responds with, “‘Oh, AgriGen and their ilk must love you (Creo) very much. So malleable, so… tractable.” It seems that in this new monopolized world, the younger generations are not critical of the major agriculture companies in the way the older generation, such as Bowman and Lalji, are. Throughout the entirety of the story, Creo just blindly accepts the ways of their lives, not even enticed by the ripeness of a fresh heirloom tomato which he declines, saying that he will stick with his SoyPRO. I just thought it was kind of interesting that the younger generation in the story felt the least progressive and critical of the nature of the world. Instead the older generation were the conspiratorial one’s, longing to return to a world they knew before the huge corporations took over.
The most interesting character relationship to the surrounding environment that I saw in “The Calorie Man” is not in Lalji’s nostalgia for what was, but in Creo’s complete conscious integration. Creo, who has grown up in a world dominated by agribusiness and few, specific, genetically modified products, knows only that. And in knowing only that, he does not long for anything more. He fails to recognize the complete power agribusiness companies have over him and other people, and his ignorance confuses Lalji, who knew something else before the genetically modified products took over. The most striking example of that to me is when Bowman offers Lalji and Creo a bite from a tomato. Lalji takes it and enjoys a unique taste of “real” food that he can’t find because of the genetically modified superfood that supplements human diets in his current world. Creo, curiously accepting a bite, remarks that he’ll “stick with SoyPRO” after his face turns up in disgust. Despite a once in a lifetime chance to taste what used to be, Creo wants to stick with what he knows within the domination of human diet by agribusiness companies. It’s striking because the companies control what sustains all human life, and Creo doesn’t care to break out of that which has control over his life.
I agree with Clara that most Creo’s altered consciousness of the world surrounding him is the most interesting. Because he was born and raised in a world dominated by multinational agriculture companies, he cannot imagine or even understand the world before all the man-made plant diseases that wiped out all agriculture other than the genetically modified plants owned by one of the mega-corporations. Along with the tomato example that Clara explains, another striking example of Creo’s altered consciousness of the world is found on page 22 in a conversation between Bowman and Creo. They discuss the characteristics of Creo’s beloved SoyPRO. During the discussion, Creo said that SoyPRO was a high-calorie food. To this comment, Bowman notes how AgriGen, the company that owns SoyPRo, must love Creo because Creo is “so malleable, so…tractable”. I think this is a very telling exchange. Creo, whose whole world had been dominated by AgriGen and their propaganda, answers Bowman’s question regarding SoyPRO’s “mosy precious quality” exactly how AgriGen would have liked him to. Bowman and most likely Lalji can see through this propaganda as they had seen and experienced the world before AgriGen. On the contrary, Creo has known nothing else and believes that SoyPRO is a food high in calories.
Just finished my response and saw that Griffin had a very similar answer haha.