Portraying Environmental Catastrophe

We have talked about the problematics of portraying poverty. One major concern is how a novel could commodify poverty. Perhaps descriptions of poverty could become a sort of set pieces stripping the poor of depth and humanity. Worse is a morbid fascination with the horrors of poverty either as titillation or producing a false catharsis. Another pitfall seems to be portraying poverty ahistorically as permanent human reality. This leads to a fatalism absolving the privileged reader of responsibility. I think a lot of these pitfalls are a two way street that relies on the readers attitude. Also it is a lot easier to find these flaws than write without them. However while reading “Animal’s People”, I had to wonder how these same patterns might exist in relation to portrayals environmental catastrophe. I have read a lot of speculative works about environmental collapse from T.C. Boyle’s “Friends of the Earth” to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” to that movie Avatar. I think all of these works have some relationship to stale, indulgent, or fatalistic portrayals of environmental catastrophe. “Animal’s People” stands out because it isn’t far removed in some speculative world (or at least based on a real event). It also has a distinctly hyper or transhumanist message as we identify with “Animal”, a character that rejects the label of human. However that the novel never resolves its notion of nature in rebellion or “Mother Nature’s trying to take back the land”(31). The description of cobras and scorpions in the walls, the inside of the factory, even the forest that Animal hides in are morbidly grotesque and too brief. Most importantly the neatness of how the human problems are resolved while ignoring Animal’s experience in the woods redivorces us from any wider scope that considered life outside of human scope.