The Climate of Extinction: Resistant Multispecies Communities in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Richard Powers’s The Overstory

Abstract

In a 2018 special report on the impacts of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) observed that one half of local extinctions during the twentieth century could be attributed to climate change. The report notes that insect and plant species unable to escape or withstand extreme weather events are particularly threatened by anthropogenic climate disturbance. While the IPCC report clarifies the cause and effect relationship of climate change and species loss, it does not propose strategies for limiting this violence. Searching for ways to resist species loss caused or exacerbated by climate change, this chapter turns to the projects of resistance plotted by contemporary U.S. climate fiction. Taken together, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012) and Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) fictionalize historical attempts to mitigate the threat of extinction posed by climate change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The novels describe a diverse cast of characters (human and nonhuman) who come together to protect two species threatened by climate disturbance: the monarch butterfly in Tennessee and the coast redwood in the Pacific littoral region. In both instances, conservation science provides a site from which researchers, environmental activists, and other beings forge multispecies coalitions that defy climate-induced extinction by supporting mutual well-being.To study how multispecies communities practice care for one another and resist species death, this chapter reads Flight Behavior and The Overstory through the critical frameworks developed by the emerging field of extinction studies. This approach shifts attention away from popular accounts that dramatize the loss of a final remaining organism as a singular event occurring within the lifespan of modernity to, instead, the networks of ecological embeddedness developed through deep time that become compromised when a species ceases to exist. In Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (2014), the Australian multispecies scholar Thom van Dooren coins the phrase “the dull edge of extinction” to describe the entangled evolutionary histories lost when a species goes extinct. Extinction, in this framework, is a collective death that implicates groups of humans and nonhumans in multiple, and always unfolding, ways. In the follow-up volume Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (2017) inspired by this multispecies approach, Deborah Bird Rose, van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew argue that by rethinking extinction as a cascade of multispecies losses, people can cultivate care for vulnerable others. By foregrounding multigenerational and overlapping lifeways threatened by climate change, Flight Behavior and The Overstory recognize species loss as a problem of entanglement and tell narratives of multispecies communities that emerge at the dull edge of extinction to practice care for insect and plant species acutely experiencing climate violence. Describing how a scientific team seeks to protect millions of monarchs whose annual southern migration is disrupted by unseasonal temperatures and how a botanist who studies the impacts of climate change on tree species ultimately inspires eco-activists to fight for redwoods, these cli-fi narratives imagine multispecies communities that challenge the entangled violence of climate disruption and extinction.