Cli-Fi and Human Approaches to Ecology

Cli-Fi and Human Approaches to Ecology

Some contemporary monstrous cli-fi films embrace human approaches to ecology. The human ecology movement grew out of the work of Ellen Swallow Richards, who translated Haeckel’s work from its original German and, according to Robert Clarke, introduced the concept of ecology in the United States. Richards, an MIT chemist, defined human ecology as "the study of the surroundings of human beings and the effects they produce on the lives of men" (1910). Since she viewed humans as part of nature, she considered urban problems like air and water pollution as products of human activity imposed on the environment and, subsequently, best resolved by humans.

Although they also highlight a masculine action hero, both The Road (2009) and The Book of Eli stress recovery from Anthropocene apocalypses and the cannibalism at first associated with survival. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, Noah (2014) continues the human focus found in films such as No Blade of Grass. In this rewriting of the Biblical Genesis story, Noah (Russell Crowe) gains the trust of God and his “Watchers” by contesting the environmental disasters caused by Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), a descendent of Cain. According to the film’s opening, Cain and his offspring “build a great industrial civilization” that “devoured the world.” Instead of exploiting the earth’s resources, Noah teaches his family to live sustainably, protecting nature as a steward rather than a figurative rapist. As a descendent of Seth, he “defend[s] and protect[s] what is left of creation,” according to the opening narration.

But Noah also serves as a super-masculine action hero protecting his family and the Earth at any cost. In this reboot of the Biblical story, Noah decisively revises God’s plan to rebuild all life, including humans, by eliminating wives and children from the Ark. In this version, Noah believes that because “everything that was beautiful, everything that was good we shattered, mankind must end.” After the flood ends, Noah tells his family, when his adopted infertile daughter Ila (Emma Watson) and the last of his sons Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll) die, so will humanity. In Noah’s mind, humans will only repeat their mistakes and destroy creation if given the chance.

Instead, Noah’s grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) has miraculously restored Ila’s fertility. When she gives birth to twins girls, Noah cannot kill his granddaughters, so human ecology prevails. In Noah as in the Bible, however, it is a higher power that intervenes to cleanse the world and provide the space for a new beginning after the great flood. As the narrator explains, Noah and his family must “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth.” Most of humanity is destroyed, but the remaining extended family serves as a curious genesis for the rise of human populations around the world.

Winter's Bone and EcoRegionalism

Winter's Bone and EcoRegionalism

Ecoregionalism Themes in Winter’s Bone

According to Chester Foster at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, “there is a growing trend to approach land use, natural resources and environmental problems on a regional basis. Since existing government agencies often lack broad authority, local and environmental leaders are increasingly taking the initiative to address the social, economic and environmental issues of a particular place by reaching across conventional political and jurisdictional boundaries, sectors and disciplines.”

As Foster notes, “At the turn of the twenty-first century, prompted by dissatisfaction with the growing numbers, scale and complexity of governmental functions, and coincident with the public commitment to civic forms of environmentalism, the stage was set for the current revival of interest in regionalism.”

Foster notes multiple characteristics of a region that could range in size from a neighborhood to a larger multi-state area like the Midwest or Appalachia. Foster outlines seven attributes associated with a “region” that inform approaches to environmental concerns:

·       a special place that people care about and identify with;

·       a named area that "stirs the blood and arouses passion";

·       a place with a unity or homogeneity of some sort;

·       an area defined by common system functions;

·       a place with a similar context and culture;

·       an area with a psychic identity (a "region of the mind"); and/or

·       a place with a history ("story") around which people can convene, organize and plan for what they want and need (C. Foster 2002a).

Winter’s Bone as both novel and film adaptation fulfills all of these criteria, illustrating the power of place as both identity marker and source of conflict. The environmental connections serve as both positive and negative markers of the Ozark Mountain place identity.

Group I’s presentation notes ways the novel addresses many of these concerns, noting several connected with unity and common system functions:

“There is the acknowledgement of outsiders, the law that demands Jessup from the community despite the community having ‘taken care of’ Jessup. 

“There is the internal power structure of the Ozark valleys that have been settled by the original families, which state law does not recognize but by which Ree and her kin must abide. 

“The resolution at the end of the novel involves Ree appeasing the community’s internal system of justice and the external system of state law.  The ending hints that Ree may become a go-between for the state and county law officers and her community, as she ponders a possible future with the bond office in the way of making peace between them and her own people.”

The novel and film also broach environmental concerns specific to the region that highlight a people’s connections with their ecology. The obvious one noted in the PPT are the family trees Ree refuses to sell:

“The sun was taller though light had not yet broken through to the ground. The path was narrow and iced on the north slope. These rough acres were Bromont acres and they’d never been razed for timber, so the biggest old trees in the area stood on this ground. Magically fat and towering oak trees with limbs grown into pleasingly akimbo swirls were common. Hickory, sycamore, and all the rest prospered as well. The last stretch of native pine in the county grew up the way, and all the old-growth timber was much coveted by sneaking men with saws. If sold, the timber could fetch a fair pile of dollars, probably, but it was understood by the first Bromont and passed down to the rest that the true price of such a sale would be the ruination of home, and despite lean years of hardship no generation yet wanted to be the one who wrought that upon the family land. Grandad Bromont had famously chased timber-snakers away at gunpoint many, many times, and though Dad had never been eager to wave his gun about in defense of trees, he’d loaded up and done it whenever required.” Woodrell, Daniel. Winter's Bone (p. 104). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

One could also argue that environmental injustices contribute to the meth epidemic afflicting the interconnected Ozark families. Although missing from the plot of either novel or film, lead and zinc mining have negatively affected resources including water and soil, on which rural families rely.

The novel especially highlights the conflicting relationships with the natural environment shared by characters in the work.  Their survival relies on resources like the potatoes they grow and the venison and squirrel they “harvest.” But Ree also battles the elements in the winter setting of the novel, especially because in the novel’s context, she stomps through snow with bare legs below cotton dresses and a shared winter coat. The film glosses over some of this but still emphasizes this dual relationship with the natural world with Ree’s march across the hills and search for help, in small ways via shared supplies and boarding for a horse, as well as the central search for her father’s bones.

Jennifer Phang's Cli-Fi Genre and Gender Bender Half-Life (2008)

One of the few cli-fi films directed by a woman, Jennifer Phang’s Half-Life (2008), focuses less on monstrous nature than family drama. But by connecting eco-disasters caused by climate change with the destruction of the family unit, the film provides a way to personalize these issues, adding relevance to destruction caused by Anthropogenic climate change.

The film centers on the coming-of-age stories of a precocious boy Timothy (Alexander Agate) and his jaded sister Saura (Julia Nickson).  Timothy’s drawings and Saura’s imaginative powers provide them with an escape from a confining home-life. Together they save their self-destructive mother (Sanoe Lake) from her charmingly manipulative boyfriend (Leonardo Nam) and finally reinvent their world in a spectacular conclusion.

Half-Life draws on multiple genres to fulfill this challenging conclusion, integrating animation and supernatural elements with generic expectations of the typical family melodrama. This story, however, literally parallels the troubling consequences of climate change surrounding them, amplifying global cataclysms from species extinction to tsunamis by associating them with their personal traumas in the home. In many scenes, a television in the background shows these scenes of destruction, clearly associating coastal flooding with global warming as the tension in the household “warms up.”

In Half-Life, the destruction of the natural world is in direct relationship with the destruction of the family. The only escape is the creation of a new world that hybridizes approaches, a point illustrated by the ethnically ambiguous family members and their friends.

Environmental Regionalism Then and Now

After reading and watching Winter’s Bone for perhaps the fifth time, I’m struck by the works’ connections with early 20^th Century American women regionalist literature. In Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground, for example, the protagonist Dorinda first chooses what Gayatri Spivak calls "soul making" over "child bearing" and desire for land over desire for man in order to gain an individuality, a role which at first seems to implicate her in the "imperialistic project" she seeks to evade. Yet by cultivating land in order to make it more fertile, I contend that Dorinda transcends the exploitative potential of the Victorian patriarchal family and the implications of an "individualism" that exists only in conflict with an "other."

Dorinda transcends the imperialism of the patriarchal family and of an individualism that subjugates others only when she sees the land not as an enemy but as a provider with which she has a symbiotic relationship: "Only when she saw victory in terms of crops, not battles, could she feel that she was part of it That men should destroy one another appeared to her less incredible than that they should deliberately destroy the resources which made life endurable" (357). Dorinda's acknowledgment of the land's gifts and her willingness to receive them at first seem to align her with Spivak's "subject" who acts as "recipient." But Dorinda not only receives from but gives back to the land she eventually joins. When scanning Old Farm's acres, Dorinda acknowledges the interdependent relationship she shares with the land: She "felt the quickening of that sympathy which was deeper than all other emotions of her heart, which love had overcome only for an hour and life had been powerless to conquer in the end,—the living communion with the earth under her feet" (Barren 408).

Ultimately, because she blurs the boundaries between herself and the land she seeks to cultivate, Dorinda joins "the whole movement of life" (Barren xii) and redeems herself without exploiting others: "Tut your heart in the land,' old Matthew had said to her. "The land is the only thing that will stay by you'.... While the soil endured, while the seasons bloomed and dropped, while the ancient, beneficent ritual of sowing and reaping moved in the fields, she knew that she could never despair of contentment" (408). By putting her heart into the land, Dorinda does not disembody or eviscerate herself. She is not consumed by the property she owns. Instead, by blurring boundaries between herself and the land, she obfuscates mind/body and reason/emotion distinctions her apparent adherence to Calvinism and Cartesian mathematics would uphold, because for her the heart ultimately serves not only as the center of emotion but also of reason, life, and the soul. By putting a heart that contains thought, the reason to which the land as metaphorical seat of emotion is traditionally opposed, Dorinda narrows the separation between herself, nature and her land. So, by putting her heart into the land, Dorinda gains a "serenity of mind" (408) that surpasses any romantic love she may once have felt.

The heart Dorinda puts into the land combines thought, emotion, and the spirit. Even though Dorinda does first participate in a project that oppresses "others," her choice to offer her heart to the land and accept its heart in return, allows her to fully recover "her girlhood capacity to experience joy and beauty" (Winniford 151), her own soul and emotions. "She saw the rim of the harvest moon shining orangeyellow through the boughs of the harp-shaped pine. Though she remembered the time when loveliness was like a sword in her heart, she knew that where beauty exists the understanding soul can never remain desolate" (Barren 409).

Instead of child-bearing, Dorinda first chooses soul-making, but she declines participation in much of the social mission associated with making souls when she rejects racism and heterosexism through her relationship with Fluvanna and spurns traditions that make the ground and its "owners" barren rather than fertile. Finally, Dorinda becomes more than what Spivak calls "the feminine subject rather than the female individualist" (811). When Dorinda acts as recipient to the contentment the land provides, while providing the land with "Endurance [and] Fortitude" {Barren 408), she transcends "the irreducible recipient-function" (Spivak 811).7 By giving her heart away to that which so willingly gives its own, Dorinda re-covers thought, spirit, and emotion, all that her heart represents.