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Capitalism and the "Environmental Dystopia" Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, New York: Doubleday, 2003.
For radical science activists like me, the capitalist commodification of the dance of life is always advancing ominously; there is always evidence of nastier and nastier technoscience dominations.
- Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium
The literary genre of Utopia, or "the good place," has a long history of radical political connotation, beginning with its origins in the writing of Thomas More (1478-1535). Since the 19th century, when the ill effects of industrialization began to be felt on a mass scale, creative writers have used Utopian fiction to make political arguments about the interconnection between the economy and the natural environment. Think of William Morris's groundbreaking ecosocialism in News from Nowhere (1890), the publicly owned green spaces of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1897), or the localized organic agriculture of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915). More recently, in the work of science fiction writers like Ernest Callenbach, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ursula K. LeGuin, the environmental Utopia or "ecotopia" has emerged as a literary subgenre in its own right, often with an explicitly socialist flavor. Callenbach's aptly named Ecoptia (1975), for example, depicts a collectively owned Stable-State economy in addition to a pristine natural environment. If the vision of ecological Utopia has often carried a socialist politics, it is equally likely that Utopia's counterpart, the dystopia, or "bad place," would envisage capitalism as the ultimate cause for the degradation of the environment.
Enter Margaret Atwood's dark new novel, Oryx and Crake. Though few mainstream reviews will point this out, the novel is a clear representation of capitalist eco-dystopia if ever there was one. The narrative opens on a bleak, post-apocalyptic wasteland inhabited only by a narrator named Snowman (presumably the last living human), a gentle race of genetically altered humanoids called "the Crakers," and an abundance of strange mutant animals. As Snowman relates his attempts to survive and look after the Crakers, he intermittently lapses into flashbacks of his childhood as "Jimmy," during a pre-apocalyptic period sometime in the 21st century. The novel thus unravels like a mystery, as the past catches up with...