“Trees are better than stone”: Vital Commemoration in Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels

Abstract

“Trees are better than stone”Vital Commemoration in Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels Matt Burkhart (bio) The Anthropocene cannot dust itself clean from the inventory of which it was made: from the cut hands that bled the rubber, the slave children sold by weight of flesh, the sharp blades of sugar, all the lingering dislocation from geography, dusting through diasporic generations. —Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018) In this special edition of Western American Literature focusing on California climate change fiction (cli-fi), Octavia Butler’s Parable novels stand out as “cli-fi” avant la lettre. That is, Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998), and the never-completed “Parable of the Trickster,” which was to round out an envisioned trilogy, fall decisively into the category that coheres around the cli-fi label espoused by Dan Bloom in 2007 (Goodbody and Johns-Putra 1). Despite Butler’s impact as a writer of climate-inflected speculative fiction, her works suffer relative neglect in book-length efforts to establish early genealogies of climate fiction. While Butler’s fiction ranks just passing mention in Adam Trexler’s catalog-heavy Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, Butler’s Parable novels go completely unremarked in Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putro’s coedited Cli-Fi: A Companion. This is true not just of the collected essays—which reflect the sample of submitted materials—but also in the editors’ otherwise-expansive introductory materials that survey the emerging field, addressing novels like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, which are just two texts indebted to Butler.1 Indeed, Parable of the Sower is a novel central to the cli-fi seminars that I have been teaching for several years, [End Page 287] though I sometimes have to help undergraduate students trace details beyond the unceasing drought that help them apprehend how Parable comments holistically on climate change, including the sociopolitical climate in which politicians and corporations abetted the all but minimally mitigated generation of greenhouse gases for decades beyond the 1980s, when Butler was just one person visualizing the existential threat that climate change posed, especially to people already at the margins of a globalizing economy. That work of amplifying climate change’s concatenated effects in the Parable novels has been made even easier with the 2018 publication of Imagining the Future of Climate Change, in which Shelley Streeby conveys her prodigious research into the Butler archives. Distilling those findings, Streeby confirms many hunches I had shared with students about linkages that Butler was making between how California has been—and is—used, for better and worse, as a laboratory for the future at the level of economic and environmental policy. Specifically, Butler kept prodigious files of news clippings that chronicled rising awareness of climate change within corporate and political spheres, which the latter failed to act upon. Further, Butler had been closely tracking Ronald Reagan’s efforts as two-term California governor and then US president in news clippings that would resurface in her fiction. As most will recall, dating back to his gubernatorial years, Reagan had established an authoritarian stance in response to quashing student protest movements of the late 1960s—and as prelude to his harder line stances as president, Reagan had imposed neoliberal austerity measures on California state welfare recipients. Butler’s scorn for Reagan’s policies continued through his presidency, wherein he doubled down on efforts to dismantle social safety nets and environmental protections. In her annotations to archived materials, Butler reserved particular antipathy for his administration’s coziness with fossil fuel industries, anticipating her invocation of real and figurative cannibalism in Parable of the Sower, such as “‘they will sell our birthright for a quick profit,’” which Streeby contextualizes within “Reagan’s effort to roll back new, post-1970 environmental regulations while opening up lands [End Page 288] to oil, coal, and gas extraction [to] concerns over global warming” (Streeby 87–88). Consonant with later texts like Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization, which identifies “market fundamentalism” as exacerbating the climate crisis, Butler’s archived notes indicate how...