Introduction
This paper presents an analysis of two works written in 2003. It seeks to contextualise them both as important contributions to the unfolding discourse surrounding the Anthropocene. Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic Oryx and Crake, a gripping work of speculative fiction, sits boldly alongside How Long have we been in the Anthropocene Age? A seminal paper outlining humanity’s impact on the earth system, written by Paul Crutzen and Will Steffen, published in the journal Climatic Change. In order to arrange the profusion of issues brought forth by the juxtaposition of these two works, I frame my response through the lens of two material tropes: fire and metal. Seen through the lens of these two materialities the scientific and cultural concerns of that time weave together in such a way that the boundaries between fiction and reality become less defined.
The concept of the Anthropocene was brought to the fore in 2000, by Paul Crutzen an atmospheric chemist from the Netherlands. Will Steffen, an American chemist, was also an instrumental voice in early Anthropocene discourse. While initially the idea of a new geologic epoch was confined to the annals of science, the issue of climate change was already centre stage in media discourse. The year of 2000 saw a spike in climate related articles across the globe , and during the subsequent three years, the conversation around climate change began to include the Anthropocene. Crutzen and Steffen’s work, as documented in this paper, was ground breaking. They outline the impact of humanity on Earth by articulating the multitude of changes taking place in all areas of the earth system, declaring that humans have gone from ‘influencing’ the system, to ‘dominating’ it .
Oryx and Crake, written by Margaret Atwood, Canadian environmentalist and author of over 40 books, is an important work that illuminates a prescience of contemporary issues. Contextualised by their historicity, they are all the more poignant 15 years on. The novel is set in a dystopian near future where human life has been obliterated by a virus, JUVE (Jetspeed Ultra Virus Extraordinary). Its creator, the bioengineer, Crake, a childhood friend of the story’s protagonist, Snowman, intended to wipe out humanity in order to create a peaceable and pliable race that would inhabit his new Utopia. Crake’s vision for the new world is predicated on an awareness of the untenable nature of human consumption. The decline of natural resources, and the unconstrained onset of climate change, exist as a backdrop to a world in which capitalist power structures control all forms of life. Crake is a visionary, his desire to create a better world acknowledges the destructive juggernaught of capitalism and imagines an alternative, in which science formulates, from scratch, a more sustainable future.
Two Material Tropes
I begin with fire, under which we find the climate ravaged land that Snowman attempts to survive on in the blistering heat. Fire also provides a frame through which to view the concerns of climate scientists in 2003. The reader will then be directed to metal, the element that lies at the core of industrialisation and the new technologies that weave through Atwood’s dystopia. Through an analysis of fire and metal we find a rupture between fantasy and reality, and a world in which genetically engineered entities, in the shape of Pigoons, Wolvogs, and a new race of transgenic humanoids called Crakers, are starkly juxtaposed with the stirrings of scholarship on what we now understand to be the sixth mass extinction.
Fire
Fire is both a symbolic and poignant material through which to view the Anthropocene. The path of the Anthropocene can be followed back to the advent of our ancestral mastery of fire. It was a “powerful monopolistic tool” that played a critical role in the cultural and intellectual evolution of humans argues Steffan . In How Long have we been in the Anthropocene Age? Crutzen and Steffen outline 12 global-scale indicators by which the relations between humans “and their life support system” can be measured . Due to human activity, the global temperature has risen by 0.6°C. And, worse, warn Crutzen and Steffan, temperatures will rise another 1.4-5.8°C during the current century. They cite increasing consumption of fossil fuels, intensive agricultural practices, deforestation, increase in animal husbandry, industrial processes and the desecration of land and species as drivers of the complete transformation of the earth system as we know it.
The sheer number of deaths was unprecedented. During the heatwave of 2003, more than 30,000 people across Europe perished. Sir David King, chief scientific advisor to British Prime minister Tony Blair, described it as the European continents largest natural disaster on record , and, that its occurrence was a direct result of climate change. Fifteen years on from the perilous heatwave, and the date of Crutzen and Steffen’s paper, the state of our climate looks all the more bleak. The proposal to curtail global warming to below 2°C above ‘pre-industrial temperature’ , is predicated on a technology named BECCS that has yet to be created, and according to many represents a dangerously false hypothesis .
Much as the research in 2003 attested, in Oryx and Crake, climate change is reshaping not just biological life but the structures and systems of earth itself: “the northern permafrost had melted and the vast tundra bubbled with methane, and the drought in the midcontinental plains regions went on and on, and the Asian steppes turned to sand dunes…” . Snowman’s ravaged world is one of forest fires that burn for “three weeks straight” , rising sea levels, desertification, and drought. He has never known such heat and he detests it. By 12 noon he is unable to move and he is seen to retreat to some shady place where he languishes in a sweaty heap until the sun is obscured, by either the rotation of the earth, or an impending storm. The seasons have changed, and greenhouse gasses have caused the global temperature to rise. In addition, the ozone layer has been destroyed to such an extent that should Snowman spend any extended period of time uncovered, his skin would break out in large pustules.
Oryx and Crake presents a climate that is not difficult to comprehend. Snowman’s world is not punctuated by the extremes of climate change, rather, the undulations of his life revolve around the burning sun and the unpredictable onslaught of extreme weather conditions. In 2003 it was beginning to be understood that many peoples on this planet would suffer similar. Writing in early 2004 for the journal Science, David King warns again of the catastrophic issue presented by climate change and argues that it is the most severe problem being faced by governments, “greater even than terrorism” . Fifteen years later, Kings call for the UK and US to lead the way for cuts in emissions has gone unheeded. The climate presented in Oryx and Crake is nearer to reality than ever before.
Metal
In How Long have we been in the Anthropocene Age? Crutzen and Steffen famously declared the earth to be “operating in a no-analogue state” . In ecology this points to a novel state, the future of which is uncertain. It also, I argue, implicates the digital. Technologies have altered the systems of earth to such an extent that there is no longer wilderness . And, in addition, the grandeur of the technological systems that uphold modern life are viewed by some as an independent earth system, the Technosphere, in which humans are “numbered among its parts” . In the following section I briefly touch on the entanglements between metals and the Anthropocene, and describe how technologies are at the heart of the dystopian world of Crake and Oryx.
Technology of course would not exist without metal. Therefore, metals and the Anthropocene are inexhaustibly entwined. In the ‘imaginary’ of the Anthropocene metal is a geopolitical actor, whose value has in mankind elicited a fervour responsible for the deaths of millions, the writing and rewriting of borders and the continued persecution of Indigenous populations. it is the conduit for immeasurable flows of information, across telegraph poles and electricity pylons, through copper wires, and cladding around fibre optics, under deep land and ocean. It is the material that carries the weight of human politics deep into Earth’s crust, and thanks to the thousands of aluminium satellites floating around Earth orbit, enables the projection of political ideologies into space. It represents the movement of people by air travel, and motor vehicles, and, as Crutzen noted in 2006, the iconic forerunner of Anthropogenic change, the steam engine .
Isaac Marcosson notes in his Metal Magic, that mankind’s drive for health, wealth and happiness is embodied of a wealth of stories involving frustrations and hopes. Yet, none of them enable “such romantic adventure or such manifestation of the vagaries of the goddess of chance as there is in the hunt for treasure embedded in the bosom of mother earth” . Hidden behind Marcosson’s words lie a morbidity that speaks of gendered histories, colonial plunder, patriarchal and capitalist systems of oppression. Metals lie at the core of all industrialised processes, and are used in all digital technologies. During the late 1700’s it was the mass production of iron into steel that enabled industrial growth Moreover, the mined extraction of metals and the subsequent mounting of e-waste resulting from planned obsolescence and the consumer drive for the latest version, are directly implicated as drivers of the Anthropocene .
As in the age of the Anthropcene, in Atwood’s world, metal represents the nexus of human relationships with technology and planetary resources. Central to the work is Crake’s argument for the dissolution of humanity. It revolves around metal. “Let’s suppose… that civilization as we know it gets destroyed… once its flattened it can never be rebuilt”. He goes on to argue that as all surface metals have already been mined, crucial stages of human-technology evolution would be impossible. With no surface metals left there would be “no iron age, no bronze age, no age of steel” . The technology needed to extract deep earth metals, continues Crake, would be defunct without the lineage of relations between humanity and their technologies.
The world in which Snowman lives was subject to the destructive forces of technologies in the wrong hands. Crake, like many others, lived in the walled compounds of one of the big Biotechnology pharmaceutical companies. Guarded by the armed CorpSeCorps, the compounds were kept disease free and safe from the lower echelons of society who lived in the grime and germ ridden Pleeblands. The compounds, the air of which was particulate free “due to the many solar whirlpool purifying towers, discreetly placed and disguised as modern art” , provided the setting for corporations to follow, without regulation, their profit driven fantasies.
The world as Snowman knew it ceased when ‘BlyssPluss’, orchestrated by Crake as a birth control pill, killed off the human race. Snowman had been unknowingly injected with an antidote in order for him to act as minder for the Craker’s. These amiable creatures, programmed to drop dead age 30, and needing nothing save for a few leaves for sustenance, were genetically spliced so as to live peaceably alongside the other transgenic animals that roamed free, such as the vicious Woolvogs, Snats ‘rats with long green scaly tails and rattlesnake fangs’ , and Pigoons, human organ transplant carriers gone feral. Back in the real world, concern about the state of Earth’s biodiversity was emerging through the 1980’s and 1990’s, however, even in 2011 the reality of a sixth mass extinction was still emerging as a new concept . Atwood’s creation of such species is all the more poignant when juxtaposed with the emerging scholarship on Earth’s sixth mass extinction.
Conclusion
This paper is a work in progress. I had originally thought to critique Oryx and Crake through the lens of four material tropes: fire, metal, flesh and stone. However, due to the limitations of word count, this was not possible. I aim to elaborate on the paper, including the last two materials, and also more of an in analysis of power structures and how they are played out in both the novel and scientific research on the Anthropocene in 2003. Much as Crutzen and Steffen, in 2003, declared Earth to be operating in a no analogue state, so Atwood’s creation is that of a world in which the interplay between Earth and technologies is unknown. “The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment … and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate” cautions Snowman. It would seem that climate scientists agree.
I include an insightful interview with Margaret Atwood talking about the book, aired in 2003. For some reason I can’t get the film itself to embed in this page – can anyone help?
https://tvo.org/video/archive/imprint/margaret-atwoods-oryx-and-crake
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