“A cancer on the planet”: Mountaintop Removal and Environmental Crime in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

Abstract

The American novelist Jonathan Franzen has always shown a great interest for the environmental problems, mainly in his masterpiece Freedom (2011) and in the essay “My Bird Problem” (2005). Freedom, which recounts three decades of the Berglund family, sees its main character dealing with the environmental themes for his work. Walter is a lawyer who is actively engaged in environmental causes, but the one that occupies most of the novel, is the support of an organization called “Cerulean Mountain Trust”, which aims at saving the cerulean warblers, a small species of songbird, creating a “birds’ sanctuary” in West Virginia. The honorable cause is actually moved by Vin Haven, a Texan millionaire tycoon who wants to implement an extractive coal strip mining operation and afterwards build the birds’ sanctuary as a remedial move. The aim of this paper is to analyze the novel to extract Franzen’s fictional depiction of actual environmental crimes in order to shed light on harmful practices such as the mountaintop removal.