Green Planets (26 page)

Obviously, that “care” is the answer to rampant scientism and ecological crisis is not a new idea and is certainly not restricted to the contemporary novel.
Indeed, it seems so apparently plain that a concept such as “earthcare,” put forward by Carolyn Merchant in the 1990s, seems hardly to need explanation. Merchant states her position unequivocally: “Humans, who have the power to destroy nonhuman nature and potentially themselves through science and technology, must exercise care and restraint by allowing nature's beings the freedom to continue to exist.”
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Yet Merchant's seemingly commonsense assumptions about how we should care more and destroy less skim over some difficult territory, and the same could be said for countless other environmentalist calls to care. Questions need to be asked—questions about who does the caring and who or what is cared for; about who gets to make these decisions; about what models of human-to-human care might be invoked in the process (friendship, kinship, marriage, parenthood, and so on); about the gender dynamics of our models of care; and, finally, about the efficacy of care in and of itself as an ethical, psychological, and political position. Such questions need to be asked, then, of the contemporary climate change dystopian novel.

The context for this chapter is the emergence of care in the climate change dystopia as an appropriate response to technologically driven ecological crisis. I first interrogate the notion that care per se represents a useful environmentalist ethic and then investigate the vexed gender dynamics of care. This discussion provides a basis for reading Gee's novel as a rare example of a climate change dystopia that actively evaluates the environmentalist ethic of care and its use as a counterpoint to a debased notion of techno-scientism. Ultimately, my contention is that the now ubiquitous celebration of care is deceptively simple, and that—in a time of ecological crisis—it warrants a close reading.

WHY CARE? WHO CARES?

By “care” I mean a feeling—translated into an ethos—of concern for and consideration of the needs of others, whether human or nonhuman. I certainly do not intend to suggest that an attitude of care is an inherently immoral or unethical stance to take, but I do wish to encourage a cautious approach to care, particularly when it is taken for granted as an ideal environmentalist outlook and its relationship to prior models of care insufficiently attended to. Perhaps another way to put this is that there is a need to complement care with thoughtfulness in both senses of the word, as a considerate and a considered response. This complicates any simple idea of care as pure or “natural” feeling versus science and technology as the product of ratiocinative reasoning.

Being thoughtful about environmentalist care means attending not just to what is said but to what is not said about it. What is often effaced is any distinction between what it means to care for humans and what it means to care for the nonhuman environment, even as it would seem that an admirable ethos of reciprocity and empathy is being celebrated. Such an elision occurs, for example, when Merchant defines earthcare as a “partnership ethic” that “means that both women and men can enter into mutual relationships with each other and the planet independently of gender.”
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When examined closely, the human other and the (nonhuman?) planet sit uneasily together on this list of potential partners. To what extent can one's relationship with another human be compared to, aligned with, perhaps mapped onto, one's relationship with the planet, homogeneously invoked? While generally positive, environmentalist relationship ethics such as Merchant's are more than a little presumptuous about speaking for “the planet” and all it betokens. The moment the planet (or the environment, or nature) is construed as a subject, it is subjectified, whether we like it or not.
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Further, such discursive constructions as the planet or the environment conjure up suitably vague subjects, connoting a vast nonhuman and human collective. While appealingly inclusive on the one hand, the lack of specificity in these constructions render them all the more appropriable by the (human) initiator of that construction on the other. Needless to say, nature cannot speak for itself. The same may be said for rhetorical moves to equate care for the planet with care for tomorrow: what is concealed is the unevenness of the power dynamic between present and future, in addition to that between human and nonhuman. Worth considering here is political scientist John Barry's suggestion that constitutional democracies establish an ecological contract between citizens and state to safeguard the welfare of “both non-humans and future human descendants.” In a parenthetical but utterly pivotal remark, Barry qualifies his conceptualization of these “moral subjects”; they are, he notes, “worthy of moral consideration but not morally responsible agents.”
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The imbalance that allocates responsibility, voice, initiative, and, of course,
care
to one side and not the other is all-important: it is an imbalance of power.

Perhaps care always conceals power imbalance. Care must always be contextualized, the circumstances of both agent and object of care always attended to. For relationships of care risk exploiting either or both carer and cared-for; the role of carer is often maintained within the norms of self-sacrifice, and, equally, that of cared-for easily defined by powerlessness. As Chris J. Cuomo reminds
us, “Caring can be damaging to the carer if she neglects other responsibilities, including those she has to herself, by caring for another,” while “caring for someone can be damaging to the object of care, who might be better off, or a better person, if she cares for herself.”
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Further, the narrow focus that care places on the dynamic of carer and cared-for has a distorting effect not only within this relationship but between this relationship and others. For Joan C. Tronto, parochialism ranks alongside paternalism as the “two primary dangers of care as a political ideal”: “Those who are enmeshed in ongoing, continuing, relationships of care are likely to see the caring relationships that they are engaged in, and which they know best, as the most important.”
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What is often forgotten, then, is the way in which relations of care are imbricated within complex power plays, which need to be interrogated before promoting these as a model for political action.

These problems intensify when, as so often happens in environmentalist discourse, the caring relationship is intentionally aligned with gender roles. The deliberate gendering of the environmentalist ethic of care is best expressed as “ecomaternalism,” that is, the biologically deterministic construction of women as mothers and the subsequent alignment of them with the nonhuman environment under the signs of fertility and nurture.
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In the wide-ranging discourse of ecomaternalism, “nature” and “woman” share everything from caring responsibilities for all species, to the status of victimhood at the hands of apparently masculinist technologies, to an exclusive relationship akin to a mother-daughter bond.
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The climate change dystopias I have briefly considered all invoke this commonplace of public and environmentalist discourse: motherhood confers a sense of environmentalist wisdom (for Lessing's Mara), becomes a nostalgic sign of what the world has lost (for Winterson's Billie), or is denied by
man
kind's exploitative impulse (for Atwood's Toby).

Ecomaternalism's assumption that core characteristics of womanhood parallel the core characteristics of “nature” is really a long-standing tenet of ecofeminism.
¹⁶
In the earliest “spiritual” manifestos of the ecofeminist movement, women are exhorted to celebrate a special relationship with nature, usually based on descriptions of early matriarchal religions. This relationship is underpinned by a shared capacity for connectedness—ecological interrelatedness and women's apparently natural and ancient empathy for others are somehow the same thing.
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Meanwhile, later ecofeminist writing, which tends to couch the discussion not in spiritual terms but in political or cultural contexts, insists on a structural link between women and nature, the product of patriarchal
degradation.
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The focus is thus on “standpoints.”
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As Mary Mellor explains, “Women, because of their structural disadvantage, can see the dynamics of the relationship between humanity and nature more clearly than can (relatively) privileged men.”
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Despite differences across the ecofeminist spectrum, then, the movement has tended to be united in its emphasis on a woman-nature affinity. This affinity is grounded in the notion of care, whether as a “natural” compassion or a sociopolitical effect of exploitation. Thus heavily invested in the enduring cultural-feminist notion of an “ethic of care,” the critical wisdom of ecofeminism and ecomaternalism is that women are continually psychologically conditioned to care, as girls, as wives, and, most of all, as mothers; this is what makes them more environmentally conscientious.
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The idea of a woman-nature affinity is deeply problematic, and its problems must be considered in any evaluation of ecomaternalist care as both the ground and the manifestation of this affinity. For one thing, the idea reiterates a centuries-old version of the link between women and nature as a stereotype of the female as less-than-human.
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In a not entirely straightforward tactic of reappropriation, ecofeminism attempts to combat what it sees as the blanket domination of women and nature with the very logic of that domination. For another thing, the insistence on an unmediated woman-nature link has opened ecofeminism up to the dreaded charge of essentialism, or—to use Cuomo's more accurate phrase—“false universalization,” that is, a simplistically unified construction of femaleness and female experience.
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Certainly, it is easy to poke holes in the spiritual ecofeminist version of the woman-nature affinity, given that this relationship is never rigorously analyzed. Yet even the more stringent “standpoint” arguments of ecofeminism display a relatively unnuanced identity politics. Where an informed or learned understanding of the environment is seen as a fundamental part of the female standpoint, this can in turn be troped as an empathetic trait automatically shared by all women. Ariel Salleh, for example, posits that “the actuality of caring for the concrete needs of others gives rise to a morality of relatedness among ordinary women, and this sense of kinship seems to extend to the natural world.” Although Salleh insists that her brand of ecofeminism “does not set up a static ontological prioritization of ‘woman,'” she presents a vision of “women's exploitation,” “women's oppression,” and “women's lives,” all monolithically conceptualized. In other words, political ecofeminism does not always evade the risk of falsely universalizing female experience as environmental care. One might say that sociological, rather than biological, essentialism is essentialism nonetheless.
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Sweeping remarks about immanent states of being or universal standpoints tend to distract from a more useful understanding of the ecofeminist construction of the woman-nature affinity as a set of political choices. Indeed, not just the logical inconsistencies of the ecofeminist position but the fact that these are often concealed or brushed aside in ecofeminist writing should alert us to the extent to which this has been a tactical move (and, it must be said, a reasonably successful one at that). Rather than an ontological fait accompli brought about by women's natural or material conditions, the ecomaternalist ethic of care is worth considering as an ideological decision made in response to global society's prevailing narrative of technological progress. Such an idea informs the critique of ecomaternalist care mounted by Catriona Sandilands. Attacking what she sees as the identity politics of care at the heart of “motherhood environmentalism,” Sandilands proposes as an alternative “a recognition of the impossibility of identity.”
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That is, identity, particularly in a political sense, is only ever forged in the ironic gap between the idea of identity and the knowledge of the contingency of that idea. Sandilands goes as far as to advocate a “strategic essentialism” for ecofeminism, based on the knowledge that neither “woman” nor “nature” possesses any stability as a concept.
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In suggesting that identity is partial and provisional, and that much is to be gained from an ironic assumption of identity (or identities), Sandilands builds on Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism and its celebration of technology for enabling an identity-less world.
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Sandilands, however, is concerned with ironic play not just as liberating but as politically productive of action and change. An ironic ecofeminism enables the assumption of ecomaternalist identity in order to elicit sympathy from others, say, or to inspire them to action, but always with the awareness that such a performance is equivalent to—not expressive of—identity.

A critical—or, one should say, thoughtful—perspective on ecomaternalism, described here in the terms provided by Sandilands, resituates care from being a fundamental element of female “identity” to a portable and contestable component of an ideological stance. Such a perspective enhances a reading of Maggie Gee's
The Ice People
and, particularly, its departure from the ecomaternalist ethos that underpins so many other eco-dystopian novels. In her fictional account of gender politics in a climate-changing, technologically driven world, Gee destabilizes the ethic of care, not just as a female prerogative in the face of masculinist scientism but as an ideal environmentalist response in and of itself.

MAGGIE GEE'S
THE ICE PEOPLE

Gee's first novel,
Dying, in Other Words
, appeared in 1981, and was followed by eleven more novels and, most recently, an autobiography. Critically acclaimed from the outset, Gee nevertheless remained relatively underrated until the 2002 publication of
The White Family
, a searching narrative about racial prejudice in contemporary England. Described by one scholar as a “compassionate humanist feminist,” Gee displays in her work an interest in the tenuousness of middle-class life, investigating the impact on individuals—usually networks of family and friends—when what is taken for granted in political, social, or environmental terms is somehow lost.
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Disaster is often enacted stylistically and structurally too: catastrophes occur as interruptions to Gee's normally realist style, for example, in the black pages and bird-shaped visual poetry that represent nuclear holocaust in
The Burning Book
(1983) and in the montage of disconnected paragraphs after London is deluged in
The Flood
(2005).
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Gee's oeuvre is also characterized by its interrogations of gender inequity beyond simple equations of masculinist oppression and female triumph. In 1995, around the time of writing
The Ice People
, Gee remarked on the “black and white” tendency of “women's fiction”: “I think it's too obvious to be a woman, and a feminist woman, writing about nice women and horrid men, which is a lot of what's going on, isn't it?”
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The Ice People
, then, is characteristic of Gee's fiction in its exploration of “average” family life devastated by environmental, social, and political change. In other ways, however, it is a one-off. It is so far the only one of Gee's books definable as
SF
, set in a future world whose technologies are described in detail.
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Moreover, it departs, quite intentionally, from her regular cast of characters, the intricate network of people that radiates outward from the White family and that tends to recur in her novels.
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The Ice People
thus focuses tightly on a single nuclear family unit, its psychological dramas serving as cause, effect, and even microcosm of national and global crisis.