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Anthropocentrism and the Difficulty of Dealing with Climate Change: A Chronotopic Analysis of Three American Climate Change Novels

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Anthropocentrism and the Difficulty of Dealing with

Climate Change: A Chronotopic Analysis of Three

American Climate Change Novels

Zaza de Ridder 10588817

Research Master Literary Studies University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Prof Esther Peeren Second reader: Dr Hanneke Stuit 16 June 2020

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2 Table of Contents

Introduction ... 3

Chapter 1: Global Ecological Awareness and the Chronotopic Disturbance of Climate Change ... 8

Signs of Climate Change in Rural and Urban Areas ... 9

Urban Characters as the Catalyst for Ecological Awareness ... 16

Climate Change as Chronotopic Disturbance ... 19

Conclusion ... 22

Chapter 2:The Temporal and Spatial Mismatch between Climate Change and Its Protests .. 23

The Clashing Time Scales of Climate Change and Human Lives... 23

Local Protests versus Global Climate Change ... 25

Conclusion ... 32

Chapter 3:Climate Change-Related Disasters and the Persistence of Inertia and Anthropocentrism ... 33

Deforestation in The Overstory ... 34

Flooding in Flight Behaviour ... 36

Hurricanes in 10:04 ... 39

Conclusion ... 43

Conclusion ... 45

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3 Introduction

In Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018) man-made changes to the world are influencing the climate. Deforestation results in higher average temperatures all over the planet and causes small avalanches on forestless hills on the local level. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012) features the sudden appearance of butterflies that are not suited for the cold climate of Tennessee. Although the new butterflies are beautiful, their migration further north is a sign of a world that is getting warmer and warmer. In Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), the citizens of New York City have to deal with two hurricanes. During this time, the characters reflect on the precarity of their future and city in the face of unpredictable weather patterns. All three novels thus thematize the issue of climate change and the impact it has on the planet and the people, animals and plants living on it.

As such, the three novels form part of the developing literary genre of climate change fiction. A lot has been written on this genre and its role in making readers understand climate change and the disasters that will occur if nothing is done to combat it. According to Astrid Bracke, there is a mismatch between what people see of climate change and what is really happening (4). This mismatch results in cognitive dissonance or “knowing about the climate crisis, but continuing to live life as if nothing is the matter” (Bracke 3). With the climate crisis being difficult to grasp in its full complexity, Bracke argues that the act of storytelling can make it more understandable. She sees storytelling as “an inherently human way of making sense of the world”, in which “different futures can be imagined” (Bracke 7). Especially in times of crisis, novels can “function as experimental spaces in which actual and imagined circumstances are played out” (Bracke 7). They can help readers to grasp what climate change can lead to and to imagine ways of addressing it. Climate change novels therefore “participate in the construction of new narratives, providing alternatives and new ways of making sense of crisis” (Bracke 4).

Antonia Mehnert similarly argues that “the cultural realm offers a rethinking and reimagining of contemporary environmental problems such as climate change that not only intervenes in current debates but also fundamentally shapes them” (2). Through climate change fiction, people can make sense of the crisis that is occurring and reduce their cognitive dissonance. Moreover, through literature new narratives are constructed that also help construct public views on climate change. Such new narratives can also make people take the problem of climate change (more) seriously. Mahlu Mertens and Stef Craps, for example, suggest that climate change fiction “might help make people care about and relate to it” (134). The genre of

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4 climate change novels thus is thought capable of making people better understand climate change, see the world in new ways, and prompt them to take action in relation to climate change. In this thesis, however, I will show how the three previously mentioned novels underline that this step from caring about climate change to taking action to counter it is not as straightforward as Mertens and Craps seem to think.

An important aspect of climate change is its temporality. The gigantic temporal and spatial scale of climate change causes Rob Nixon to call it a form of slow violence – as opposed to violence that is immediate (Mertens and Craps 136). Mertens and Craps write about the difficulty of grasping the difference in timespan between a human life and the process of climate change. Because climate change is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Mertens and Craps 136), people cannot see it completely, but only in parts. This also causes problems for literary writers. Extending the human time scale “undermines concepts of human individuality and sociality” that have influenced the way stories are told (Heise 2019: 278). In novels, the narrated time can be extended to “inhuman temporalities”, but this means imaging a future in which human life might no longer exist (Mertens and Craps 135). Spatially, climate change mostly only becomes visible in “local and temporal manifestations”, such as, for example, increasingly hot summers (Mertens and Craps 136). In sum, climate change “exceeds human perception and can only be understood as a complex, multi-layered network of relations stretched out both in time and space” (Mertens and Craps 136).

Although Mertens and Craps stress the importance of climate change as a layered network stretched out in time and space, they focus primarily on the role of time in climate change fiction. Other scholars such as Bracke also concentrate on its temporal dimension. Not much has been written yet about the role of spatiality in this genre. To address this gap, in this thesis I will focus on the role of space in climate change novels. Specifically, I will analyze how such novels mediate the massive spatial distribution of climate change noted by Mertens and Craps. I will do this by using the concept of the chronotope, which was developed by the twentieth-century Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to describe “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84). A chronotope is a combination of a particular construction of temporality and a particular construction of spatiality, in which only particular plots can occur. Although I will focus on spatiality, I will also comment on the novels’ temporality, as Bakhtin argues that they are interrelated and should therefore always be looked at in tandem.

Importantly, Bakhtin distinguishes between major and minor chronotopes. Whereas major chronotopes determine a novel’s genre (with, for example, the chronotope of the road

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5 producing the road novel and the chronotope of the idyll producing the family novel) and govern the main plot, they may contain one or more minor chronotopes, which produce specific plot elements (Bakhtin 250, 252). All motifs in a story can thus have their own chronotopes, which interact in a dialogic manner with the major chronotope and with each other (Bakhtin 252). Together, major and minor chronotopes are “the organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel” (Bakhtin 250).

In my analysis of the novels by Powers, Kingsolver, and Lerner, I will show how the major chronotope of climate change fiction generates three main plot elements. The first is the observance of local climate change. These observations, which are always made by human characters, usually take place in outside settings, when a character is, for example, walking through the city, driving a car, or sitting in a park. The second plot element is that of the emergence, on the part of human characters, of resistance to or protest against climate change. Such resistance or protest often concentrates in a local place where specific causes or effects of climate change are contested. In terms of temporality, there is an acute awareness of a disastrous future whose approach has to be slowed down. The third plot element is marked by the occurrence of one or more (small) climate change-related disasters which happen suddenly and affect the main characters to various degrees. Again, the consequences of these disasters are predominantly described from a human perspective. In the novels, these major plot elements take a specific shape depending on the minor chronotopes with which the major chronotope of the climate change novel interacts.

Stef Craps and Rick Crownshaw, who have also written about climate change novel plots, although not through the lens of the chronotope, argue that there are two main kinds of scenarios in climate change narratives. One involves a narrative of resilience and adaptability, the other a narrative of collapse and extinction (Craps and Crownshaw 5). In the climate change novels I focus on in this thesis, notably, pieces of both scenarios are combined. On the one hand the characters of the novels resist certain processes and actions that will speed up climate change, but on the other hand the novels also make clear that the characters do not do enough to stop climate change-related disasters from occurring. This shows that the plot structure of a climate change novel can be more complex than Craps and Crownshaw allow for, since it may comprise multiple minor chronotopes interacting in complex ways with each other and with the major chronotope.

Adam Trexler argues that climate change novels are usually set in urban centers (Trexler 76). On the other hand, Bracke discusses how the narrative of environmental collapse and that of the pastoral are strongly connected (Bracke 31). In this thesis, I show that climate change

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6 and the disasters it causes are envisioned by Powers’, Kingsolver’s and Lerner’s novels as affecting both rural and urban spaces. However, there are significant differences in the way minor urban and rural chronotopes relate to and interact with the major climate change novel chronotope. Following Bracke’s highlighting of the pastoral, my analyses of the novels, particularly those of Powers and Kingsolver, will highlight the role played by the minor chronotope of the rural idyll. I will argue that the contrast drawn in the novels between how climate change is perceived and engaged with in the rural and the urban perpetuates the diametrical opposition of city and country challenged by Raymond Williams in his book The

Country and the City. He wants to get rid of the image of the country as “a natural way of life:

of peace, innocence” and the city as an “achieved centre: of learning, communication” (Williams 1). Instead he argues that our images of the rural and the urban are constructed and inherently connected (Williams 289). However, he also acknowledges that such images can become engrained and perceived as natural, making them difficult to shift. In my analysis of the three novels, I will examine which minor rural and urban chronotopes appear in these three climate change novels and how they (separately and in relation to each other) mediate the phenomenon of climate change through the events and characters (including non-human ones) they accommodate. As Bracke emphasizes, by analyzing fictional climate change narratives it becomes possible to recognize the “stereotypes and structures and remember that climate crisis and nature are narrated” (Bracke 10).

The three novels I focus on were all published in the last decade and written by American writers. They are all set in the Unites States and thus show a localized version of climate change from a western perspective. This is something on which I will comment in my chapters, as the novels make clear that most of the characters featured can afford to choose whether or not they pay attention to climate change. The Overstory follows nine main American-born characters, whose lives are connected by a “network-like narrative” and overlapping story lines (Caracciolo 60). What primarily ties them together is their relationship to trees. In my analysis, I will focus on the characters of Nick Hoel, an artist, and Patricia Westerford, a biologist who researches plant intelligence, who both spent their youth in rural areas. Lerner’s 10:04 is a work of autofiction, featuring a character and narrator named Ben who is a writer living in New York. The autonarration mixes “reality and textuality” (Gibbons 75), as Ben is writing a second novel that will turn out to be 10:04. Flight Behaviour, finally, is set in a town in the Appalachian Mountains and narrates the life of Dellarobia, an uneducated and lower-class young mother of two. When monarch butterflies appear in the valley where she lives, scientists set up camp on her property to study the butterflies.

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7 My analysis will be structured according to the three main plot elements of the climate change fiction novel that I distinguished above. In the first chapter, I will look at the local manifestations of climate change that are present in the novels and the warnings that are given of possible future disasters. In all novels, certain effects of climate change, like rising average temperatures, are remarked upon by the characters. I will analyze how different communities, part of rural and urban minor chronotopes, react to these signs. In Chapter Two, I will examine how resistance and protest appear in the novels. Here, I will focus on where these protests take place and how the characters attempt to stave off climate change’s progression. In the third chapter, I will focus on the spaces in which the (small) climate change-related disasters in the novels unfold. I will analyze how the degree to which these disasters are seen to affect the different human and nonhuman characters depends on their specific location and socioeconomic status. In my conclusion, I will sum up how, in the novels, minor rural and urban chronotopes interact with the major chronotope of the climate change novel and what kind of narratives this produces about climate change’s spatial dimension. I will focus specifically on what the novels have to say about how this spatial dimension, in addition to its temporality, affects people’s readiness to take climate change seriously and undertake actions to halt or slow its progress. This will be seen to challenge some of the aforementioned scholarship on climate change fiction, especially with regard to the envisioned role for fiction in fighting a global environmental crisis.

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8 Chapter 1: Global Ecological Awareness and the Chronotopic Disturbance of Climate Change

One aspect of global warming and climate change is that the normal weather patterns of a particular place can change. The temperature can get higher, but the weather can overall also become more extreme and changeable (NASA). These local effects of the global phenomenon differ per place, but are noticeable everywhere on the globe. The first characteristic plot element of the chronotope of the climate change novel consists of the emergence and apprehension of signs of climate change. In this chapter, I will focus on the way these signs appear in Flight

Behaviour, The Overstory and 10:04, and on how they are noticed and responded to by the

characters. Although the changes in the weather, heralding climate change as a problem in the fictional world, are different in each novel, in each case they are evident and remarked upon. This is consistent with Mertens and Craps’ claim that the manifestations of climate change are locally visible.

In the first section of this chapter, I will focus on the weather changes featured in the novels and the way they are presented. I will connect the emergence of weather changes to the spaces in which these changes are observed or described. Ursula Heise discusses in her book

Sense of Place, Sense of Planet how local contexts can play a role in the awareness of citizens

of large-scale ecological developments such as climate change (Heise 2008: 39). A starting point is, for example, the observation of local weather (Heise 2008: 55). All three novels, I will show, feature such local observations. In the second section, I will discuss the way global warming, on the basis of the weather changes, is portrayed in the novels as either a fact or a belief. Again, I will explore how these ways of portraying climate change are linked to specific spaces, in order to show that the development of a global ecological awareness, which Heise deems necessary to combat climate change, is not only dependent on having a ‘sense of place’ but also on having access to particular information and on what one’s peers believe. In the third section, I will analyze how the signs of climate change impact the ways of life of people in rural and urban spaces, and what happens when different minor chronotopes interact with the major climate change novel chronotope. I will argue that, in Flight Behaviour, the emergence of the monarch butterflies as a sign of climate change disturbs the chronotope of the idyll that originally characterized the novel’s fictional world. A disturbance of the metropolitan chronotope occurs in 10:04, where climate change makes people confused about the way they should behave in unseasonable warm weather. In The Overstory, the narrative shows how

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9 climate change disrupted the idyllic pre-climate change chronotope of the past by contrasting it with the present-day chronotope.

Signs of Climate Change in Rural and Urban Areas

From the beginning of all three novels, signs of climate change are described. In the first pages of Flight Behaviour, which is set in the fictional town of Feathertown in Tennessee, near the Appalachian Mountains, attention is drawn to the rainfall that has plagued the town for months, which is uncommon for the seasons the novel covers as well as in general. Attention is drawn to the excessive rainfall in three places. The uncommonly wet weather of the recent period is first mentioned when Dellarobia is looking down over the fields from her pasture: “In the next field over, the orchard painstakingly planted by the neighbors last year was now dying under the rain” (Kingsolver 3). There has been so much rain that the fragile newly planted orchard could not survive. The second time the effect of the rain is noted is in relation to the garden of Hester – Dellarobia’s mother-in-law – where the flower beds had “melted under the summer’s endless rain, and so had the garden” (Kingsolver 24). Thirdly, it is noted that “the neighbors’ tomato crop had melted to liquid stench on the vine under the summer’s nonstop rains” (Kingsolver 28). Whereas the decaying of the flower beds is bad for the idyllic aesthetics of the town, the dying of the orchard and tomatoes will have significant effects on the finances of the farmers. These consequences of crop failures are also mentioned by Trexler as one of the predicted economic outcomes of climate change (Trexler 2).

The focus in Flight Behaviour on signs of climate change in gardens is significant. Gardens, according to Leo Marx, are traditionally a symbol of the pastoral ideal. In the pastoral, it is not pure nature that is admired, but “improved nature, a landscape that is a made thing, a fusion of work and spontaneous process” (Marx 112). The gardens in Flight Behaviour are exactly this, as they have been planted by the neighbors and are then expected to flourish under the normal weather conditions of the area. Their decaying is a symbol of the loss of an idealized nature that is a staple of pastoral climate change narratives (Bracke 136).

This loss, notably, is observed from a distance in all three instances. Dellarobia is observing the orchard from her own land, standing at the top of the pasture and looking down over her house, her family’s fields, and the fields of the neighbors. There is thus a physical distance between the place where she is standing and the dying orchard that she sees, which has an effect on the way she sees it: “from here it all looked fixed and strange” (Kingsolver 3). The viewing point and distance make the fields touched by excessive rain look unfamiliar and allow them to be separated from her own house and land, and the house of her neighbor. The effects

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10 of climate change, therefore, can be seen as not (yet) affecting Dellarobia’s own familiar environment.

In the second fragment, as she describes the effects of the torrential rain on Hester’s roses, Dellarobia is in her car, viewing the flowerbeds from behind the window, which again distances her from the signs of climate change. The third passage has Dellarobia not actually looking at the destroyed tomato crop, but thinking about it. She is standing at a skirting table on shearing day in her mother-in-law’s house, with her neighbor’s farm not visible. Thus, the description of the tomato crops is a focalization of the past, installing a temporal distance on top of a spatial one. In all three instances, then, there is a distance, in space or in space and time, and sometimes also a physical barrier (a window or a wall), between Dellarobia and what she focalizes. This distance or barrier can be seen to indicate her unwillingness to acknowledge climate change at the beginning of the novel, which I will further discuss in the next section.

Other signs of climate change are also present in Flight Behaviour. While the Tennessee mountains endure heavy rainfall and experience a relatively mild winter in terms of the temperature, the weather in other places has become for some animals too hot to survive. The novel draws particular attention to the fact that, because of this, monarch butterflies are migrating to the Appalachian Mountains instead of their usual hibernation place in Mexico. The butterflies need a place with stable weather which is cold enough to go in hibernation: “Every year that we record temperature increases, the roosting populations in Mexico move farther up the mountain slopes to find where it’s still cool and moist” (Kingsolver 203). When cool and moist spaces can no longer be found in the Mexican mountains, the butterflies cross the American border. This illustrates how climate change not only impacts the weather, but through the weather also the migration patterns of animals. Monarch butterflies experience the effects of climate change with particular intensity, because their migratory patterns are closely related to weather stimuli (Batalden et al. 1365). These close ties suggest that “monarchs could be impacted negatively by ongoing global climate change processes” (Batalden et al. 1365). The monarchs’ appearance in the Appalachians should therefore be considered a sign of the presence and progression of climate change.

By featuring different signs of climate change, the novel shows how it affects both humans and non-humans, as the character of Dr Byron makes explicit:

“We are seeing a bizarre alteration of a previously stable pattern,” he said finally. “A continental ecosystem is breaking down. Most likely, this is due to climate change. Really I can tell you I’m sure of that. Climate change has disrupted this system. For the

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11 scientific record, we want to get to the bottom of that as best we can, before events of this winter destroy a beautiful species and the chain of evidence we might use for tracking its demise”. (Kingsolver 315)

Dr Byron and his team of scientists issue this warning from their provisional lab in Dellarobia’s garden. Although it may be impossible to save the butterflies from dying, it is possible to figure out what exactly is happening and use this knowledge to act to prevent extinction. In the context of his serious scientific statement, Dr Byron’s reference to the butterflies as a ‘beautiful species’ is striking. It can be read as a strategic response to the fact that the inhabitants of Feathertown cannot understand that the emergence of a beautiful animal like the monarch butterfly may mean something negative, as beauty cannot be bad in their eyes. However, as Dr Byron emphasizes, climate change will also cause beautiful things, such as gardens and butterflies, to be destroyed.

In 10:04, the effects of climate change are visible in the very first sentence of the novel: “The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway and the agent and I were walking south along it in the unseasonable warmth” (Lerner 3). Throughout the novel, the weather is mentioned and the fact that it is uncommonly warm for the time of the year is emphasized. The exact words ‘unseasonable warmth’ are repeated multiple times: “I walked into the unseasonably warm December afternoon” (Lerner 32); “it was still unseasonably warm but there was now a hint of winter in the air” (Lerner 66); “when my shift was over I left the co-op […] and, since it was unseasonably warm, decided to take a long walk” (Lerner 107). The repetition of these words places a notable emphasis on them. Although “warmth” is in itself a rather neutral word, qualifying it as unseasonable creates an uncanny, uncomfortable connotation. Furthermore, warmth is associated with climate change through the notion of global warming. The global average temperature is getting higher, with an expected rise of three degrees Celsius this century (Houghton 13-14). A weather type that is unseasonable is also associated with climate change, as climate change causes extreme and irregular weather. These irregularities may take the form of extreme heat, heavy rains and strong hurricanes (NASA). The combination of both words thus evokes a strong association with climate change that is highlighted by its repetition, making the signs of climate change jump off the page.

The repeated identical references to the signs being noted by the narrator, however, also suggest an attitude of numbness or indifference towards climate change. The signs are everywhere and recurrent, but noticing them does not lead to any action on the narrator’s part.

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12 He does not seem alarmed by the signs; they are just part of his everyday environment. This is reinforced by the fact that the unseasonable warmth takes place in every season the narrative covers. The fact that the unseasonable warmth is ongoing almost makes it seem normal, no longer uncanny at all. Ben de Bruyn suggests that, in the novel, the weather sometimes has a “defamiliarising impact” on the characters’ bodies (De Bruyn 963-964). However, I want to argue that, through the repeated references, the changing weather is made into something to which the main character and narrator, who is a writer and therefore presumably good with words, remains so indifferent that he does not even bother to change the formulation he uses to describe it. Rather than having a defamiliarizing effect, it has become familiar.

The novel’s main character, Ben, is convinced that the climate is changing, but does not take much action to minimize it. He does do volunteer work at a food cooperative, where “most of the goods are environmentally friendly, at least comparatively, and, whenever possible, locally sourced” (Lerner 95). In this way, he participates in an organization that is committed to sustainability. However, apart from these once-a-month shifts, he seems almost indifferent towards climate change. This suggests that the signs of climate change have led to an impasse in Lauren Berlant’s sense of “a time of dithering from which someone or some situation cannot move forward” (Berlant 4). In 10:04, it seems, individuals are stuck in the position of knowing that the world is in a crisis without being able to do more than accept this. The impasse manifests as “a space of time lived without a narrative genre” (Berlant 199), without a frame that can make sense of it. No development is possible in this situation.

The impasse causes a confusion which manifests when Ben is sitting on a bench in the park, imagining his future daughter sitting next to him and asking questions about what the world will be like when she grows up. She asks: “Why reproduce if you think the world is ending?” (Lerner 94). In this question, Ben’s conflicted feelings come to the fore. He certainly believes in climate change and is convinced that the city will soon be flooded. This idea preoccupies him. He tells his students that they “shouldn’t worry about [their] literary careers, should worry about being underwater” (Lerner 217) and, when making financial decisions, he thinks: “I bought him a sixty-dollar T-rex puzzle because I would make strong six figures and the city would soon be underwater” (Lerner 153). At the same time, Ben also thinks about having children, which suggests he does envision a long-term future.

In the novel, then, the question of why anyone would act in a certain way if this seems irreconcilable with what you believe is crucial. This brings me back to the idea of cognitive dissonance. According to Bracke, cognitive dissonance is “knowing about climate crisis, but continuing to live life as if nothing is the matter” (3). She argues that this is typical for the

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13 climate crisis, because it is hard to keep it in mind in everything you do: “We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything” (Bracke 3). This denial is what is portrayed in 10:04. Although Ben’s image of the future is one where the city is underwater, he denies or pushes away this image in his everyday life as well as in taking decisions about the distant future. Ben, therefore, is not only in an impasse, a situation lacking a frame to make sense of it, but denies this impasse through his cognitive dissonance.

In terms of the novel’s engagement with the spatial dimension of climate change, it is significant that the warmth or the weather are often mentioned in scenes where Ben is walking through the city, describing what he sees and experiences. Rebecca Solnit argues that urban walking is an activity which, compared to rural walking, looks like primordial hunting and gathering (Solnit 174). She states that “the urbanite is on the lookout for particulars, for opportunities, individuals, and supplies, and the changes are abrupt” (Solnit 174). Rural walking, on the other hand, is connected to the experience of a love of nature (Solnit 173). It therefore also has a “moral tone of nature appreciation”, which urban walking lacks (Solnit 173-174). However, this also means that the rural walker walks through the country looking at “the general – the view, the beauty” but does not take anything particular from it like the urban walker (Solnit 174). In 10:04, on his city walks, Ben absorbs all the life around him and acutely senses the changes in air temperature. He does not just appreciate what he sees, but takes everything in. In this regard, his mode of walking accords with Solnit’s description of urban walking. The connection made in the novel between urban walking and the perception of the effects of climate change could be seen as constituting a minor chronotope. The space-time of the city walk enables Ben to observe the weather and experience its irregularity. It seems as if this specific combination of spatiality – being in the city and walking through it – and temporality – the length of the walk and its timing, often in the late afternoon or evening – is particularly conducive to the apprehension of the signs of climate change.

In the first chapter of The Overstory, signs of climate change also appear when changes in the climate that occurred in the previous century are described. The weather is not always center stage in the narrative, but it is mentioned frequently. In the first chapter, for example, a large snowstorm prevents the character Nick Hoel from returning home from the city to his family’s farmhouse, and after spending the night in the car at a rest area by the road, he ultimately finds his parents and grandparents dead in the farmhouse. In other instances, the narrator mentions how exceptional weather has become the new normal: “Mimi sits baking in the grass, even in the shade of her pine. The hottest year on record will soon be followed by an even hotter one. Every year a new world champion” (Powers 489).

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14 Not only changes in weather are described in the novel, but also the effects these changes have on nature. When the character Patricia Westerford walks through the forest that she lives in, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the Appalachian Mountains, she describes the trees that are dying:

She ducks through drooping rhododendron tunnels, along black cherries that remember old road cuts, past sourwoods and aromatic sassafras. Magnolia and striped maple fill in for the decimated chestnuts. The hemlocks are dying, hit by adelgids and helped by acid rain. High above, on the Appalachian spine, the Fraser firs are all dead. All around her, the forest reels from the hottest, driest year since the beginning of record-keeping. Yet another freak, once-in-a-century event, almost annual these days. Fires are popping up all over the park. Code Red every third day. (Powers 437).

In this fragment, it is made clear that global warming has a big impact on the forest. Every year it is getting hotter and drier, which causes fires to ignite and burn parts of the forest. Another aspect of climate change highlighted is the combination of insect plagues and acid rain, which is causing the hemlocks to die. Apart from this, the extraordinary weather is happening more often than before. Once-in-a-century events have become regular occurrences through the influence of climate change. The fragment thus shows how the temporal structure of the climate change chronotope comprises a changed perception of what extreme weather is.

In the quote above, Patricia is walking through the forest and perceiving the effects climate change has on the trees. The minor chronotope of the walk as a space-time in which climate change can come to the fore here seems to be expanded to include not only urban walking but also forest walking. In the forest, Patricia both enjoys the beauty of nature and takes in everything she sees. Solnit argues that, in the country, one’s solitude promotes a “communion with the nonhuman”, as one is outside society (186). Urban solitude, in contrast, leads to an “observer’s state” with the senses sharpened (Solnit 186). In the above quote, there is both a communion with the nonhuman, as Patricia feels connected to the trees, and an observational reflection on the situation. This suggests that Solnit’s distinction between rural and urban walking may be too rigid. Throughout its narrative, The Overstory emphasizes that the effects of climate change can be sensed everywhere; in the city, on a farm and in nature. However, there is a difference in the way climate change is perceived in the different spatial settings of this novel. In rural and urban areas, the human characters focus mostly on weather changes that affect and are felt by humans, as for example the abovementioned snowstorm and the newest

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15 hottest year. In nature, most attention is given by the human characters to the effects on nonhumans.

The main signs of climate change that are noticed by the human characters in the novels, as all three novels share an anthropocentric perspective, concern changes in regular weather patterns. The uncommon or unseasonable nature of the weather is emphasized in all three novels and visible across different spaces. In Flight Behaviour the effects of climate change on humans, plants and animals are all perceived by Dellarobia around her and her family’s farm. In 10:04 the effects of climate change are experienced and described by Ben, most notably during his walks through the city. In The Overstory the effects on both humans and nonhumans are perceived by the human characters in urban and rural settings, but most prominently in the forest.

Thus, with regard to noticing the signs of climate change, the novels suggest that anyone can see them, at any location. However, both Flight Behaviour and The Overstory suggest that it is particularly scientists who understand the signs’ severity and feel an urgent need to do something about climate change. Dr Byron and Patricia both exhibit a strong sense of crisis, whereas the other characters remain more passive. These different responses can be related to Ulrich Beck’s concept of metamorphosis. He argues that the world is transforming in a new way through climate change. Because it will not be rescued by progress or perish through apocalypse, we need something other than a belief in progress or an attitude that nothing can be done to save the world (Beck 75). Instead of focusing on the question whether climate change is real, or whether we can stop it, we should accept that it will change – and has already changed – our world drastically (Beck 76). In this way, we can think from a new paradigm to adapt to the new world. The three fictional narrations under discussion show that climate change is indeed an urgent problem. However, by staging characters that notice the signs of climate change yet mostly remain inert, these novels envision the metamorphosis proposed by Beck as remaining elusive. The characters seem to adhere to the responses that Beck describes as ineffective instead of proposing a new paradigm. In the next section I will elaborate on how the novels engage the question whether climate change is real, and show how the way the characters perceive climate change can be connected to their (lack of) belief in climate change. This will make clear how a sense of place may indeed be connected to a sense of planet, but also how this is not always enough to develop a global ecological awareness.

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16 Urban Characters as the Catalyst for Ecological Awareness

In Flight Behaviour, the issue of global warming is explicitly addressed when a group of scientists – Dr Byron and his colleagues – comes to Feathertown to conduct research on the monarch butterflies. Although it seems clear that the sudden presence of the butterflies is a consequence of climate change, the people in Feathertown do not want to believe this – they prefer to see the emergence of the butterflies as something positive, an act of God. Religious language is used by several characters to make sense of the signs of climate change – the beauty of the butterflies is considered as a positive reward from God and the endless rains are associated with Biblical flooding (I will elaborate on this in Chapter Three). Overall, the novel does not present climate change as an unequivocal fact, but as a disputed notion. In this way, it reflects on the fact that only 59% of the people in the United States believe in global warming (Smith Jr 101).

The discussion about believing in climate change is also part of the narrative in Flight

Behaviour. One instance where climate change is discussed is when Dellarobia thinks about the

differences between ‘yuppies’ and people like herself. When watching tv, she sees comedians make fun of people living in rural places. This evokes resentment in her and makes her reflect on the differences between her group and others:

The very word Tennessee made those audiences burst into laughter, she’d heard it. They would never come to see what Tennessee was like, any more than she would get a degree in science and figure out the climate things Dr. Byron described. (Kingsolver 228) This quote is in a paragraph that focuses on the way people obtain information and form their opinion. According to Dellarobia, everyone depends on someone else, and nobody “truly decide[s] for themselves” (Kingsolver 228). Dellarobia argues that in the case of climate change, too, people do not think for themselves, but depend on authorities: “What they actually did was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a wide array on topics” (Kingsolver 228). In the overflow of information, this suggests, it is easier to follow someone else instead of finding and assessing the information yourself. Although Dellarobia initially considers that all people depend on certain authorities to form their own opinion, she also focuses on the differences between these authorities and the ways certain groups in the US develop their opinion. In the above quote, an analogy is drawn between a ‘they’ who will never get to know the real Tennessee, and Dellarobia, who will apparently never be able to get a degree in science. Figuring out ‘climate things’ is also opposed to being someone from Tennessee, as if the two rule each other out.

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17 The quote therefore highlights a divide between ‘yuppies’ – who can be seen as urban citizens – and rural citizens like Dellarobia. The novel’s narrative suggests that rural citizens will never figure out what climate change is, partly because their authorities or other people in their clan do not provide information about it. This is visible in a discussion between Dellarobia and her husband Cub, when Dellarobia tries to explain why the butterflies emerged on their land:

“He says it’s due to climate change, basically.” “What’s that?” She hesitated. “Global warming.” Cub snorted. He kicked up a cloud of dusty frost. “Al Gore can come toast his buns on this.” It was Johnny Midgeon’s line on the radio, every time a winter storm came through. […] “Why would we believe Johnny Midgeon about something scientific, and not the scientists?” “Johnny Midgeon gives the weather report”. (Kingsolver 360-361)

The majority of the rural citizens in the novel are portrayed as not wanting to understand science and global warming, and as only believing their local radio station or other local authorities. People in rural areas do not recognize the signs of climate change as such, and therefore it is not something they care about, or even believe in. According to Robert Wuthnow, American farmers often see “the effects of climate change on their own farms” (104). However, despite this, some farmers also think the existence of climate change has not been scientifically proven, is not caused by humans or will not affect them (Arbuckle et al. 944). Although phenomena like crop failures happen more often in rural areas and climate change is thus more ‘present’ here, climate change is more often believed in in the city where it is visible in less dramatic ways. With regard to this, Mehnert argues that the attachments of the characters in Flight

Behaviour to their land do not come from a “pre-existing natural connection to a land” or an

environmental awareness (64). On the contrary, the selling of land for logging, for example, shows how “‘working the land’ may also go along with exploiting the land and thus may have nothing to do with environmental consciousness” (Mehnert 64).

The two quotes above illustrate that the rural is not associated with climate change by the people living in rural areas themselves. Although Dellarobia comes to believe in global warming and ends up wanting to become a scientist, as I will discuss in the next section, she also starts to change her lifestyle and moves to a bigger town. Thus, she becomes more ‘urban’ than her former neighbors and her former self, keeping the opposition established between rural and urban areas in the quotes intact. The difference between urban and rural attitudes toward climate change can be related to Heise’s concepts of a sense of place, knowing “the details of

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18 the ecosystems that immediately surround [one]” (Heise 2008: 28), and a sense of planet, “a sense of how political, economic, technological, social, cultural, and ecological networks shape daily routines” (Heise 2008: 55). The inhabitants of Feathertown do not connect the emergence of the butterflies to a larger picture of climate change. Such global awareness is only brought to them from the outside by the scientists. Whereas Cristopher Lloyd and Jessica Rapson argue that there is both a sense of planet and of place in Flight Behaviour, with the sense of planet being stronger (Lloyd and Rapson 917), it is important to note that the global ecological awareness that appears in the narrative comes from the city and is not present at the beginning of the novel.

The idea of a rigid distinction between rural and urban in terms of the (dis)belief in climate change is also reflected upon in 10:04. There, too, thinking and worrying about climate change is connected to being in the city. At the beginning of the novel, Ben is visiting the hospital with his best friend Alex, who has recently proposed to “impregnate[e] herself with [his] sperm” (Lerner 7). In recalling the proposal at the Metropolitan Museum, Ben states that their talks often take place during walks or in museums, when their gazes are parallel instead of directed at each other. This results in him considering his walks through the city and almost effortlessly connecting his habit of walking with the concept of global warming: “Six years of these walks on a warming planet, although walking wasn’t all we did, had rendered Alex’s presence inseparable from my sense of moving through the city, so that I intuited her beside me when she wasn’t” (Lerner 7). This quote shows how closely the city and the perception of climate change are intertwined for Ben. However, in the novel, the city is not necessarily associated with the causes of global warming. Although climate change and its effects are explicitly perceived as man-made, the narrative remains vague about which human behavior is causing the changes and where this is happening – only the fact that the government should play a role in resolving climate change is undisputed in the novel. This reinforces the novel’s foregrounding of the idea of the impasse – the narrative implies that individuals cannot do much against climate change.

In 10:04 the question of believing in global warming is also thematized, albeit in a different way than in Flight Behaviour. Ricardo, an eight-year-old boy tutored by Ben, is afraid of a new ice age in which all the skyscrapers will freeze and collapse. When Ben tries to comfort Ricardo by playing down the effects of global warming, Ricardo asks: “You don’t believe in global warming?” (Lerner 13). The fact that Ricardo asks the question with a negation suggests that, in contrast to what happens in the rural setting of Flight Behaviour, not believing in global warming is an exception in the urban context of New York. Instead of distrusting science, in

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19

10:04 even children seem to assume climate change is an established fact. From the way the

novels narrate climate change belief and denial, it is clear that a rigid opposition between urban and rural areas is part of the climate change novel chronotope’s spatiality. In the following section I will analyze how, regardless of whether they believe in it, climate change has effects on the modes of living of the characters in the novels, which again vary between rural and urban areas. Specifically, I will detail how the effects of climate change disrupt the minor chronotopes these areas are governed by.

Climate Change as Chronotopic Disturbance

In 10:04 the sensible consequences of climate change disrupt the metropolitan chronotope of New York, introducing a sense of predominantly temporal confusion. This is made clear in the following quote:“The unusual heat felt summery, but the light was distinctly autumnal, and the confusion of seasons was reflected in the clothing around them: some people were dressed in T-shirts and shorts, while others wore winter coats” (Lerner 63). The weather and the season do not match anymore; the weather urges people to behave as if it is summer, but the light makes clear that it is a time of the year where the days are shortening and the sun has less impact. In this quote it seems as if two temporalities mix, which makes people confused; they forget how they should behave and what they are supposed to wear. This is also described by De Bruyn, who discusses how the tropical weather in 10:04 “confuses the protagonist’s sense of place and identity” (965). The temporal constellation of the chronotope is changing and patterns like the coming and going of the seasons and their distinctiveness are no longer holding up. This affects the mode of living and routines of the people in the novel, disturbing their idea of what can happen within their world. On a walk, Ben locates this confusion in nature: “I thought I could smell the light, syrupy scent of cottonwoods blooming prematurely, confused by a warmth too early in the year even to be described as a false spring” (Lerner 108). Even nature behaves differently from how it is expected to behave under the influence of climate change.

This chronotope-disturbing effect of climate change is not only present in urban spaces, but also in the rural. Almost all the action of Flight Behaviour takes place in Feathertown, a small town with a few shops, restaurants and a church. Dellarobia and Cub have lived there since they were born. Cub’s parents live there, too, and he will probably stay there until he dies. This attachment to one place can be connected to Bakhtin’s description of the chronotope of the idyll. He argues that the idyll features a specific combination of temporality and spatiality in which there is “an organic fastening down, a grafting of life and its events to a place, to a

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20 familiar territory” (Bakhtin 225). In this “little spatially limited world” of the idyll, there is “a sequence of generations localized that is potentially without limit” (Bakhtin 225). Cub’s parents, grandparents, Cub himself and his children have all spent their lives in Feathertown, and there are no signs that this will change. The house has been in the family for a long time and the furniture too: “Dellarobia sat at the table preparing skeins for dyeing, with Cordelia close by in the wooden high chair that had once held her father and maybe her grandfather” (Kingsolver 104). According to Bakhtin, the unity of place in the idyll blurs the temporal boundaries as childhood and old age are brought together: “the life of the various generations who had also lived in that same place, under the same conditions, and who had seen the same things” (Bakhtin 225). This blurring of generations is apparent in Flight Behaviour, too, as the lives and living conditions of the main characters stay mostly the same over generations.

Another aspect that evokes the idyll in Flight Behaviour is the cyclical structure of time. According to Bakhtin, the blurring of temporal boundaries contributes to “the creation of the cyclic rhythmicalness of time so characteristic of the idyll” (Bakhtin 225). In Flight Behaviour the year is structured according to the rhythm of the sheep. Two times a year, in spring and in autumn, the sheep are sheared. These are important days for the sheep farmers in town; all the neighbors help each other when it is someone else’s shearing day: “Neighbours always came on shearing day. […] the Norwoods’ farm abutted the Turnbow’s on the other side of the ridge, going back several generations, and they were also sheep farmers, so this help would be returned at their own shearing” (Kingsolver 36-37). This quote points to both the blurring of temporal boundaries through the description of the several generations of sheep farmers, and to the cyclical structure of doing certain things on shearing day, which is a day that always returns. The lives of the farmers are also structured by being conjoined with the lives of the sheep, something which is again exemplary of the idyll: in the “conjoining of human life with the life of nature” there is a unity of rhythm (Bakhtin 226).

The world in Flight Behaviour is thus, at first, an idyllic world, where all action happens in the same place and time is cyclical and without event: “time here has no advancing historical movement; it moves rather in narrow circles: the circle of the day, of the week, of the month, of a person’s entire life” (Bakhtin 247-248). However, with the arrival of the monarch butterflies this idyll is disrupted. As Bracke argues, in some versions of the pastoral, such disruption also occurs (Bracke 52). This usually happens through the emergence of a machine or through death. However, here the idyll or pastoral is disrupted by the effects of climate change.

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21 The emergence of the monarch butterfly disrupts normal rural life in various ways. The presence of the butterflies puts the logging plans of the family on hold, which causes them to worry about the money they expected to earn for logging the trees on their land. Moreover, when the church community and media find out about this phenomenon of the butterflies, people in town start talking about Dellarobia and the reason the butterflies have arrived on the Turnbows’ land. People start trespassing to go to the mountain to watch the butterflies, and Dellarobia appears on television in an interview about the butterflies, exacerbating the gossip. The mere arrival of the butterflies thus already shakes life up for the family and the wider community.

Furthermore, when Dellarobia becomes interested in the butterflies and the reason why they are not in Mexico anymore, she is offered a job as a lab assistant by Dr Byron. Although her community does not support her going to work, as women are supposed to stay home and look after their children, she accepts the offer and starts working five days a week. By giving up her traditional routine of looking after her children, the patriarchal structure of the idyll is disrupted. Through the confrontation with the sensible effects of global warming and the information the characters receive from the scientists, Dellarobia and her family’s lives cannot be the same anymore. At the end of the narrative, Dellarobia moves to another town, leaving her family and their idyllic rural way of life behind.

In The Overstory, finally, the disturbance of the chronotope by climate change is also visible. The first chapter of the novel is set a few hundred years in the past and shows the changes Nick Hoel’s family farm has gone through until the novel’s present in the 21st century.

This makes clear how climate change has impacted the environment, as a contrast is drawn between the historical pre-climate change chronotope and the contemporary chronotope of which climate change is part. The chapter shows an idyllic chronotope, where the farm has been passed on from father to son for generations and where time is cyclical, with the same things happening every year. However, in the novel’s present this has changed. Significantly, Nick’s parents and grandparents are killed when there is a severe snowstorm, and the farm is sold. At this point, the idyllic pre-climate change chronotope, which had already been disrupted, completely disappears. In all three novels, then, climate change produces a chronotopic disruption, which takes different forms depending on the minor chronotope – the idyll or the metropole – with which the major climate change novel chronotope interacts.

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22 Conclusion

In this chapter I have shown how in all three novels the signs of climate change are perceived locally by human characters that occupy a particular spatial position in relation to it. In 10:04, the minor chronotope of walking facilitates the perception of climate change. Significantly, this minor chronotope accommodates only characters who are not directly affected by climate change themselves and have the luxury of taking leisurely walks through the city. These characters’ perception of the signs of climate change, however, induces no concrete action against climate change, but has them linger in an impasse. In Flight Behaviour, similarly, there is often a distance between the characters and the perceived signs of climate change in their environment. In all three novels, moreover, the effects of climate change on humans and nonhumans are perceived and described from an anthropocentric perspective. In the end, even though the novels feature characters that have both a sense of place and a sense of planet, the distance they are able to take from the signs of climate change results in a lack of action.

Furthermore, I have shown how in all three novels climate change acts as a chronotopic disruption. It disrupts the minor chronotopes of the idyll and the metropole, which results in changes in the characters’ ways of life. How the characters respond to this is determined by the specificities of the minor chronotope. Significantly, the climate change novel chronotope highlights a division between rural and urban areas, which are associated, respectively, with non-belief and belief in climate change. This shows that a sense of place does not necessarily lead to a global ecological awareness, but that the attitudes of one’s peers and lacking access to certain information may impede such a sense of planet. My analysis has underlined the dynamic interaction between the major climate change novel chronotope and the minor urban and rural chronotopes; all three novels narrate climate change as a radical chronotopic disruption, both spatially and temporally, but the narratives also unfold differently, particularly in terms of the characters’ reactions to signs of climate change, because of the specific minor chronotopes involved.

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23 Chapter 2: The Temporal and Spatial Mismatch between Climate Change and Its Protests In this chapter I will discuss the protest as the second main plot element produced by the climate change novel chronotope. In all three novels, there are climate change-related protests, including ones against deforestation and capitalism as contributing factors to climate change. I will analyze the way the novels portray these protests, focusing in particular on the spaces where they take place. As I showed in the previous chapter, the three novels under discussion suggest that an awareness of one’s own environment can bring about a global ecological awareness that entails grasping climate change as not a local problem, but an all-encompassing crisis of the whole earth. It is, however, difficult to protest climate change on this planetary spatial scale, a difficulty on which all three novels reflect.

In The Overstory as well as in Flight Behaviour logging trees plays a major role. In the first section of this chapter, I will describe how the novels engage with deforestation as impacting the environment and influencing climate change. What the novels show is that, because the temporal dimension of climate change vastly exceeds the timeframe of human lives, it is tempting for the characters to look for short-term solutions without thinking about long-term consequences. In the second section I will analyze the climate change-related protests and anti-capitalism protests staged in the three novels, which unfold in different settings: rural areas, urban spaces and nature. Here, I focus again on the way the novels thematize the mismatch between the spatio-temporal dimensions of climate change and those of the protests.

The Clashing Time Scales of Climate Change and Human Lives

In The Overstory, all of the nine human main characters have a special connection to a certain tree or trees in general. These trees bring back memories, have saved their lives, almost caused them to die, or give them certain messages. Six of the characters spend a large part of their lives protecting trees and nature, learning about how important trees are for ecosystems and how much is still unknown about them. The characters also try to prevent contractors from cutting down trees, pleading for a ban on deforestation. This happens, for example, in a courthouse in Portland, where Patricia Westerford acts as an expert witness in a case concerning an injunction to halt logging on federal land.

Patricia is testifying against the logging practices because, as a scientist, she knows the differences between old and young trees and can comment on how their presence or absence impacts the ecosystem that a forest is. When asked if a “young, managed, fast-growing, consistent stand is better than an old, anarchic forest” (Powers 281), she answers that people indeed believed this twenty years ago. The judge asks:

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24 “Is twenty years a long time, in these matters?” “It’s nothing, for a tree.” […] But for people – relentless, ingenious, hardworking people – twenty years is time enough to kill whole ecosystems. Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together. Twice as much carbon in the falling forests than in all the atmosphere. (Powers 281)

In this passage, the narrator emphasizes the role of deforestation in climate change. Although climate change debates often revolve around the role of planes and cars, logging trees is a much bigger contributor, as deforestation releases carbon that is stored in living plants and soils into the atmosphere, causing the earth to warm up (Bala et al. 6550). In addition, it alters the “physical properties of the planetary surface”, which affects the global climate (Bala et al. 6550). These effects are felt on both local and global scales. The Overstory, in the scene of Patricia testifying, underlines the importance of trees and other plants for absorbing carbon dioxide, as well as the fact that human behavior is a catalyst for climate change.

The quotation above makes clear what type of time characterizes the climate change novel chronotope by indicating that there is an enormous difference between the temporal scale on which climate change takes place and the timespan of a human life, which is also much shorter than that of a tree. Thus, the climate change novel chronotope brings together temporalities of the human and the natural that do not match up. Birgit Spengler explicitly discusses the two timescales juxtaposed in The Overstory; geological time or tree time, and human time (Spengler 78). These are visible in the above quotation, where Patricia first describes human time by pointing out how, in twenty years, science has developed, so that there is now more information about the impact of forests on the environment. One of the new insights is that old and dead trees are necessary for the forest ecosystem, because they provide, for example, nutrients for other species. The narrator adds that humans can also do a lot of damage in twenty years, such as killing whole ecosystems. In only six decades, American farmers, for example, have cleared around 190 million acres of forests in the US – more than was cleared in the previous 250 years of settlement (Smith et al. 8). On the other hand, the passage suggests, twenty years is not that much for a tree, since they can live for up to a few thousand years. The climate change novel chronotope is thus governed by a type of time in which these different temporalities coexist.

With regard to the interaction between these temporalities – the capacity of human time to intervene positively in geological or tree time – The Overstory paints a pessimistic picture. Not only does the above quotation suggest that although climate change takes place on a much

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25 larger scale, humans can accelerate it even in their own short lifespan, but the novel also implies that the measures humans take to compensate deforestation are sometimes even worse than deforestation itself. In The Overstory, Douglas Pavlicek has been planting seedlings for four years, to replace trees that were cut down. After planting his fifty thousandth tree, he is celebrating this fact in a bar. However, his happiness is disturbed when he finds out that the trees he has just planted will be cut down in a few years. For every seedling that is planted, the logging companies can raise their annual allowable cut. However, the seedlings will never yield the qualities that an old forest has, but will produce vulnerable monocrop areas: “when your seedlings grow out, they’ll be monocrop blights, man. Drive-through diners for happy insect pests” (Powers 186). Turning old forests into cultivated land will thus increase climate change, instead of slowing it down.

These fragments highlight how the climate change novel chronotope privileges human time, producing an anthropocentric perspective that ensures that the needs and actions of human characters are the most impactful. As Spengler argues, “long-term consequences and short-sighted benefits of current ways of dealing with our environment” are juxtaposed in The

Overstory (Spengler 78). What I have emphasized here is how, in the climate change novel

chronotope of this novel, the human timescale triumphs over that of climate change, as the human characters only think about the short term, including when it comes to combating climate change.

Local Protests versus Global Climate Change

In The Overstory, five of the main characters are involved with protests, mostly related to logging activities. They try to keep companies from cutting down trees – both to protect the trees and to protect the climate. The protests demonstrate an awareness on the part of the characters of the different time scales involved and an urge to look beyond short-term human needs. As such, they indicate that the characters have a sense of place and of planet. As I showed in Chapter One, according to Heise the connection of a sense of place to a sense of planet is necessary for environmental activism (Heise 2008: 33). In what follows, I will ask what kind of environmental activism emerges from three moments in the plot involving climate change protests.

The characters Mimi and Douglas participate in several protest marches against logging. These marches are often held near Forest Service roads or in small towns. In these marches, people sing, yell slogans and hold up signs saying things like “Respect your elders. We need our lungs” (Powers 239) and “Stop illegal harvesting. No more death on public lands” (Powers

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26 296). These slogans directly address the logging company and articulate the plea of stopping deforestation. Furthermore, the essential role of trees in the circulation of healthy air is indicated, as well as a demand to respect one’s elders and give them the air they need. This shows on the one hand a concern for the nonhuman in the emphasis on not wanting trees to be killed. On the other hand, however, the slogans highlight the use trees have for humans by referring to how trees provide oxygen.

A similar protest is undertaken by the characters Nick and Olivia, who participate in a sit-in protest in a tree. In a forest where trees are marked for cutting, they climb one of the highest, which is called ‘Mimas’. Nick and Olivia stay in the tree for two years, successfully slowing down the logging plans for the area. However, at a certain point almost all the trees around them have been cut down and it becomes too dangerous to stay in the tree. There is a risk that other trees will fall on Mimas and kill Nick and Olivia, and the police wants them to leave. Eventually, they are removed from the tree with a police helicopter. This local protest effectively only protects one tree, but is symbolically targeted at the act of deforestation in general. The novel leaves it open whether this local protest will do more than slow down deforestation locally, again making visible a mismatch between scales related to climate change, only this time spatially, between the local – one forest or even one tree – and the global – deforestation on a planetary scale.

At a certain moment, the protests are no longer just acts of civil disobedience, but the protesters start using violence towards other people’s property. The nonviolent protests were not effective, and the characters feel a strong resentment against the logging companies and the government system that does not protect the trees. Furthermore, they are angry at the police who have used violence against them at the protests, disfiguring Mimi’s face and causing Douglas to become half blind. This frustration causes a group of five protesters to set the buildings of logging companies on fire. They start with a machine shed filled with vehicles in the Willamette National forest, and after this “they target a sawmill near Solace, California, operating for months under a revoked license and paying the nuisance fine with a week’s worth of profit” (Powers 343). The arson is to them a last resort, but it proves to be more effective than their earlier non-violent protests:

“All the protests. All the letters. Getting beat up. Shouting at the top of our lungs, and no one hearing.” “We accomplished more in two nights than we did with years of effort.” […] “We destroy a small amount of equipment, or that equipment destroys a

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