Climate change occupies my mind more and more, as I wonder what the future holds for my two not-so-little ones. Thus, this post will focus on two recent works of cli-fi, Louise Erdrich’s 2017 Future Home of the Living God and Lydia Millet’s 2020 A Children’s Bible, both of which feature young women in dystopian geographic and social landscapes caused by climate change. I’ve chosen to pair these two novels not only because both are interested in women’s plights and roles in the climate crisis but also because of striking parallels in their depiction of an emerging spirituality suited to the challenges of the environmental disaster. Despite heavy use of Christian allusions, evident even in the titles of the two texts, in both, the anthropocentricism and patriarchy of traditional Christianity ultimately give way to respect for the Earth and a feminist ethics of care. Motherhood, in particular, becomes a spiritual practice, representing the possibility of environmental regeneration and enacting the nurturance necessary to sustain humanity in uncertain times.
It’s no coincidence that the narrators of these novels are named for two of the most sacred mothers in the Christian tradition—Mary and Eve. In Future Home, Mary is revealed as the birth name of the narrator, who otherwise goes by Cedar, when Cedar meets her birth mother. She is pregnant and seeking understanding of her origins to someday share with her child. In fact, the novel itself is a record of Cedar’s experiences throughout her pregnancy, addressed to her unborn baby. Beyond meeting her Native American birth family and visiting the reservation for the first time, Cedar describes the dystopian circumstances of the world around her. Homo sapiens is experiencing devolution, as babies are born with characteristics of more primitive hominid species. Soon, authoritarian religious fundamentalists take over the government and imprison pregnant women in order to oversee all human births. When Cedar and other black and brown women are found to be able to produce fully evolved homo sapiens infants, they are forced into surrogacy for the continuation of the species.
The narrator of Children’s Bible is a white teenaged girl named Evie who is vacationing with her family and several other middle-class families near the coast. When a catastrophic hurricane and an outbreak of dengue fever destroy any semblance of normality, the unnamed parents—referred to in the text only as “the mothers and fathers”—are unable to cope. The children find food and shelter on a nearby farm, where they are soon invaded by a group of gun-toting bullies. Negotiations with the invading group eventually run aground, but the owner of the farm arrives, deus ex machina-style, to expel them from her property. Evie and the other children join up with their parents again and settle more permanently at another property. Ultimately, the teens’ competency with the harsh conditions of a post-apocalyptic world renders the parents unnecessary and the adults simply disappear, leaving the teens to raise their younger siblings.
As with other works of cli-fi that feature people of color or women, the gender and ethnic identities of the protagonists in Future Home and Children’s Bible reflect the fact that women and the indigenous are disproportionately affected by climate change. Cedar and Evie also represent the rising number of women and people of color who are stepping forward to lead in the battle against climate crisis. Indeed, the teens in Millet’s novel echo the voice of 19-year-old Greta Thunberg, who has expressed anger toward older generations for not acting quickly enough to stop climate change. At one point after the hurricane, one of the mothers in the novel says, “But what could we have done?” In response, Evie’s friend, Jenn, demands, “Did you ever fight or did you just do exactly what you wanted? . . . Always.”
In Future Home, it is the Native community that is depicted as most resilient to climate change. Cedar’s birth family’s tribe deliberately uses the upheaval of the times to seize land that had been lost over time through incremental treaties and the Dawes Act of 1862, which removed land from communal ownership. The tribe’s intention is to “gain back many of our urban brothers and sisters and enjoy the benefits of more teachers, . . ., doctors, lawyers, artists,. . .” as the social systems off the reservation are deteriorating. Eddie, Cedar’s birth mother’s husband, explains, “Indians have been adapting since before 1492 so I guess we’ll keep adapting.” The narrative seems to suggest that Native communities, experienced with adapting to undesirable environmental conditions and social challenges, may be well positioned to lead in the coming waves of climate crisis.
While the characterization in the two novels of young women and Native Americans as especially implicated within and also best equipped to handle the climate crisis reflects the real-life plights and roles of women and Natives already experiencing and fighting climate change, other aspects of the two novels seem less plausible. Critics of Children’s Bible have noted that it sometimes forces its biblical allegory beyond the bounds of narrative believability. Indeed, the plot includes a flood (complete with a saving-of-the-animals side story), a plague, a covenant, and commandments—all lifted directly from the lore of Genesis. Perhaps most contrived is the Garden of Eden subplot that plays out within the recounting of the children’s brief stay at the farmstead. The farm is a safe haven that Evie and the others, like the original Eve and Adam who are expelled from Eden, have to leave after the invading gang of men break the one rule that the owner, representative of God, has stipulated. The point of this episode is expressed even more explicitly in the following scene, with an allusion to yet another biblical story, that of the Hebrews wandering in the desert until God gives them a land of their own. As the group approaches the site of their next settlement, Evie jokes, “Look! See? The promised land!”, to which another of the other children responds, “We already had the promised land, Evie.” Heavy-handed, yes, but the biblical allegory is effective overall in conveying the idea that human actions have led to a squandering of the habitable environment that we once had. Reviews of Future Home have been similarly critical as those of Children’s Bible, particularly in calling out the murky and unlikely science that undergirds the devolution plot. But the idea that human reproduction is affected by climate change doesn’t seem too far-fetched, and state control of women’s reproductive rights is a recognizable theme in mainstream cli-fi, not to mention contemporary US news.
In fact, the social conditions depicted in both novels align with those depicted in the works of one of our most influential grandmothers of cli-fi, Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, among other dystopian novels. In various interviews, Atwood has explained that authoritarianism grows out of fear, an emotion that many of us will experience as the climate crisis continues to escalate. Atwood also notes that repression of women, and particularly the steamrolling of women’s reproductive rights, which we see in both Future Home and Handmaid’s Tale, is almost always a component of authoritarian governance. Authoritarianism also eschews collaboration or cooperation, instead depending entirely on strongman tactics, like those exhibited by the men who invade the farm in Children’s Bible. A defector from the invading group tells Evie that the men had previously captured the McDonald’s where he worked. When Evie asks him why he went along with the takeover, he says, “Because they had the keys.” In authoritarianism, those in power, oftentimes men, call the shots.
Atwood also explains that authoritarianism uses conservative religious ideology to achieve political ends. A fearful public is likely to flock to conservatism, as turning back to the norms of the past during times of stress might feel safer than forging ahead into new territory. In Future Home, extremist authorities rename streets for bible verses, attempting to impose order by figuratively reclaiming a landscape that otherwise eludes human control. The community accepts these changes just as it accepts the charge to turn pregnant women over to the authorities. In Children’s Bible, it is one of the mothers, a member of the older generation that has long ignored the climate crisis, who presents Evie’s little brother, Jack, with the text for which the novel is named. The simplistic rendering of what are actually complicated stories in a children’s bible reflects the childlike willingness of the older generation to go along with crude depictions of religious ideas.
Instead of reading the biblical stories literally, though, eight-year-old Jack explains to Evie that the characters of God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost are representative of nature, science, and art, respectively. And here is where we get into how the novels bridge from the authoritarian Christianity that we see in the likes of Handmaid’s Tale, for instance, to a planet-centered and feminist form of spirituality that the texts suggest might enable the continuation of human life on earth. Many aspects of the plot in Millet’s novel bear out the comparisons that Jack makes between biblical figures and forces in the real world. The weather conditions that the group experiences are caused by nature, just as the flood in the bible is caused by God. When the teens set up an educational system for the younger children, Evie tells us that all of them become “disciples” of science, just as New Testament figures become disciples of Christ. Readers are called to imagine the potential of science to mitigate the effects of climate change, just as Jesus mediates between the fury of the Old Testament god and humanity in the Christian New Testament. Art also becomes a part of the group’s everyday existence, as they connect and draw strength from each other through campfire songs, similar to how people are inspired and connected through the Holy Spirit in the Christian tradition.
Music is an especially important aspect of spirituality in both novels, in fact. In particular, characters enact connection, support, and solidarity through humming, especially in times of mourning. In Children’s Bible, the group of teens join in to a collective low hum at the makeshift funeral of a mother who has died in childbirth due to hemorrhaging that likely would have been stopped if medical intervention had been available. Contained in the humming is the teens’ acknowledgement that this death marks just the beginning of their trials in a post-apocalyptic world. At the same time, the humming also gives them the strength to face the future together.
Humming enacts solidarity between characters in Future Home as well. In the surrogacy home where Cedar ends up, the women hum whenever one of them goes into labor. Their humming enacts recognition that birthing a child in their present circumstances, like in Children’s Bible, often ends in the death of the mother or, because of the eagerness of the state to claim healthy homo sapiens offspring, the theft of a baby from its mother. About the humming, Cedar tells us, “It is a beautiful, powerful, all-knowing sound. . . . It is a wordless melody that only women sing.” Like in ancient times, the dirges in Future Home vocalize the grief of women, particularly mothers of lost children, but they also express resistance to state-sponsored violence and the control that men and governing bodies of men exert over women’s lives and bodies. The humming also reminds us of the wordless singing of the women in Toni Morrison’s Beloved who gather to drive the ghost of Sethe’s baby from her house. In that case, too, humming bears witness to and resists the forces that cause the particular grief of mothers. Later, Cedar remembers that she hears the humming again as she gives birth. She calls it “the woman’s song” and, addressing the child that is taken from her, “your baby song.” Belonging to mother and child, the song arises from the realm of the semiotic, a developmental stage in which language—structured according to the assumptions of patriarchy—is unnecessary in the perfect communion between mother and newborn infant. The wordlessness of this form of human expression also suggests its connection to a time before language, when hominids such as those being born in Future Home walked the earth.
Despite the dystopian circumstances of her life at the end of the novel, Cedar seems to embrace the idea of reverting the conditions of an earlier era. In a conversation with her adoptive mother, Cedar reframes devolution as “[t]urning around to the beginning,” which she postulates is “not the same as going backward.” Evie, named for the first woman to live on earth, according to the Christian tradition, is perhaps better positioned to realize the new beginning that Cedar imagines. Soon after the hurricane, she and the other teens marvel at how easy it was to abandon their electronics and focus, instead, on matters of survival. In pursuit of sustainable food sourcing, they set up a hydroponics system and plant fruit-bearing trees. They ensure shared responsibility for the maintenance of the household by rotating assigned tasks. This is a clear reversal of the division of labor that the parents enforced early in the novel, when the boys were asked to help board up windows to prepare for the storm and the girls to make snacks. Indeed, the disappearance of the mothers and fathers at the end of the novel mark the collapse of social hierarchy—and, specifically, the patriarchy of the traditional family. Even as Cedar remains in subjugation to authoritarian rule, Evie helps to found a community on the feminist ideals of cooperation and collaboration. The title of the novel becomes ironic, as it is children, not adults, who rewrite the story of human existence. No longer tied to anthropocentrism and patriarchy, this new story establishes sustainability.
The community that the teens develop also abides by an ethics of care that is best exemplified in their nurturance of their younger siblings. Three of the teens take on full-time mothering roles as the mothers and fathers slip into depression following the storm. In particular, Sukey takes responsibility for an infant sister who survives the childbirth that kills their mother. Sukey’s reluctance to accept help from the mothers in caring for her sister is justified when, the one time that Sukey gives in to their petition for “cute baby time” with her sister, they return her to Sukey with “a dumb-looking pink bow on her head.” This incident confirms what the teens had already decided, that the parents “couldn’t be trusted with child-rearing.”
The corollary to Sukey’s baby sister in Future Home is Cedar’s baby boy, taken from her arms after his birth. If Sukey’s sister will grow into a future free of gender roles, Cedar’s son represents hope for the future more generally. “He is the light of the world!”, Cedar exclaims at one point, and his birth on December 25th seems to cement the infant’s role as a Christ figure, perhaps representative of the sacredness of human life. It’s possible, even, that this baby is the “living God” referenced in the novel’s title, the one who will manage to build a “future home” on earth through methods like those employed by the teens in Children’s Bible. In both texts, the next generation is nurtured and loved in order to preserve humankind and protect humanity.
Just as Cedar sees her infant as a symbol of hope and salvation, she comes to see herself as a Mary-figure, connected to and exerting spiritual power through maternity. In her life before the complications of devolution, Cedar was the editor of a Catholic magazine, and she spends much of the novel contemplating the theme of the magazine’s final issue, incarnation. Even in her dread of the physical pain and death that may await her in birthing her child, Cedar writes in her last letter to subscribers, “I can’t help wishing for an epidural, but this is why I’m writing. This is Incarnation. . . . We’re only meat bundles, otherwise.” She sees childbirthing as an enactment of sacred love and power, indeed as the one act that defines us as human. Even after her infant is stolen, Cedar maintains her belief in the power of motherhood: “I know the Word. It is the oldest word in any language, first utterance. Ma, . . . mama. Mother. Not the word uttered by God to make life, but spoken by the baby who recognizes the being on whom life depends.” Ultimately, in Future Home, human relationships—particularly between mother and child—replace God as the source for maintaining human life in a climate crisis. Language is also reclaimed from the tradition of patriarchy here, as Cedar repurposes the divine “Word” to share a feminist message.
Looking to the mother instead of a patriarchal God for nurture and sustenance suggests the importance of an Earth-centered spirituality, as the planet is commonly understood as the greatest and most powerful mother of all, Mother Nature. This belief in nature as supremely powerful is spelled out in the most obvious of terms in Children’s Bible when, as I’ve already mentioned, Jack interprets God as nature. We get a similar correlation between nature and divine power in Future Home when Eddie tells Cedar, “We’re being flushed down the tubes. The fallopian tubes, that is.” This is the novel’s indication of Mother Nature’s power to destroy human life.
In both novels, recognition of the power of nature is represented in the positioning of mothers and mother-figures as central to human existence. Indeed, in Future Home of the Living God and A Children’s Bible, motherhood is equally sustaining spiritual practice and symbol of a new relationship between humans and the earth, one in which humans conserve and replenish the resources that will allow for future life on this planet. This is an approach that runs counter to the authoritarianism in both novels and in cli-fi more generally and that builds on the work of real-life women and people of color in the climate movement.
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