Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Defehr, Steven
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Eco Critic Greg Garrard hits the nail on the head when he comments in “Conciliation and Consilience: Climate Change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior” that “[i]t is not facts that people primarily believe… but other people [and] Dellarobia is swayed [to the anthropogenic climate change position] as much by Byron’s charisma as by anything he tells her” (306). With Garrard’s comment in mind, I argue that Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is a key example of how a work of climate fiction is better equipped at portraying relationships between people and nonhuman animals than depicting environmental disasters or making scientific facts accessible to readers. Moreover, in terms of cultural work, the psychological elements in Kingsolver’s writing and her melodramatic style bring a type of realism to the text not common to climate fiction since the genre’s origins are founded in science fiction. Kingsolver shows the role of conversation and influence in understanding climate change and acting in response to it. Her attention to human relationships, how arguments evolve, and their consequences is more convincing and more useful in promoting climate change than simply depicting catastrophes.
“LET’S HAVE THE CONVERSATION”: CLIMATE CHANGE, RELIGION, AND BELIEF FORMATION IN BARBARA KINGSOLVER’S FLIGHT BEHAVIOR by Steven Defehr B.A., St. Mary’s University, 2017 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) December 2020 © Steven Defehr, 2020 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: “LET’S HAVE THE CONVERSATION”: CLIMATE CHANGE, RELIGION, AND BELIEF FORMATION IN BARBARA KINGSOLVER’S FLIGHT BEHAVIOR submitted by Steven Defehr in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in English. Bryce Traister, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisor George Grinnell, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Paul Milton, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Liane Gabora, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University Examiner Jannik Eikenaar, School of Engineering External Examiner iii Abstract Eco Critic Greg Garrard hits the nail on the head when he comments in “Conciliation and Consilience: Climate Change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior” that “[i]t is not facts that people primarily believe… but other people [and] Dellarobia is swayed [to the anthropogenic climate change position] as much by Byron’s charisma as by anything he tells her” (306). With Garrard’s comment in mind, I argue that Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is a key example of how a work of climate fiction is better equipped at portraying relationships between people and nonhuman animals than depicting environmental disasters or making scientific facts accessible to readers. Moreover, in terms of cultural work, the psychological elements in Kingsolver’s writing and her melodramatic style bring a type of realism to the text not common to climate fiction since the genre’s origins are founded in science fiction. Kingsolver shows the role of conversation and influence in understanding climate change and acting in response to it. Her attention to human relationships, how arguments evolve, and their consequences is more convincing and more useful in promoting climate change than simply depicting catastrophes. iv Lay Summary I argue that Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is a key example of how a work of climate fiction is better equipped at portraying relationships between people and nonhuman animals than depicting environmental disasters or making scientific facts accessible to readers. Moreover, in terms of cultural work, the psychological elements in Kingsolver’s writing and her melodramatic style bring a type of realism to the text not common to climate fiction since the genre’s origins are founded in science fiction. Kingsolver shows the role of conversation and influence in understanding climate change and acting in response to it. Her attention to human relationships, how arguments evolve, and their consequences is more convincing and more useful in promoting climate change than simply depicting catastrophes. v Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………iii Lay Summary…………………………………………………………………………………... iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………...v Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………...vi Dedication……………………………………………………………………………….............vii Chapter 1: Introduction ……………………………………………………………………1 to 9 Chapter 2: Dellarobia’s Conversion ……………………………………………............10 to 21 Chapter 3: Eco-Evangelism…………………………………………………...................22 to 31 Chapter 4: The Academy Versus Mainstream Media………………………………....32 to 43 Chapter 5: Conclusion...…………………………………………………….…………...44 to 55 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………...…........56 to 59 vi Acknowledgements I thank Bryce Traister and Luke Bresky for their guidance and support during my academic career. vii Dedication This paper is dedicated to: Maria and Richard Defehr, Chelsea Defehr, and Kingston Defehr and Brooklyn Defehr. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Eco Critic Greg Garrard hits the nail on the head when he comments in “Conciliation and Consilience: Climate Change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior” that “[i]t is not facts that people primarily believe… but other people [and] Dellarobia is swayed [to the anthropogenic climate change position] as much by Byron’s charisma as by anything he tells her” (306). With Garrard’s comment in mind, I argue that Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is a key example of how a work of climate fiction is better equipped at portraying relationships between people and nonhuman animals than depicting environmental disasters or making scientific facts accessible to readers. Moreover, in terms of cultural work, the psychological elements in Kingsolver’s writing and her melodramatic style bring a type of realism to the text not common to climate fiction since the genre’s origins are founded in science fiction (Raipola 7). Kingsolver shows the role of conversation and influence in understanding climate change and acting in response to it. Her attention to human relationships, how arguments evolve, and their consequences is more convincing and more useful in promoting climate change than simply depicting catastrophes. There are many examples in Flight Behavior of conversations in which one person questions another person’s beliefs and then asks them to change their beliefs. Kingsolver’s stereotypical characters show that belief formation about climate change and animal rights intersects at four points: religious beliefs, knowledge of anthropogenic climate change, personal relationships with the butterflies, and behaviors. Hence, my method is to examine scenes in which one character attempts to persuade another to change their point of view regarding climate change and note how people moderate fundamental belief decisions with spirituality and faith. I treat Kingsolver’s novel not just as a work of fiction, therefore, but as a means of understanding 2 the human dynamics that surround belief formation and climate change and how those can be mediated by narration, dialogue, and utterance in the novel. With uncanny stylized precision Flight Behavior encapsulates a very specific and potent moment and movement in American history in which we collectively address the inevitability of climate changes. Scholar Juha Raipola states that “climate fiction is a timely cultural reaction to the growing societal awareness of human impact upon the planet and its climate system” (7). Flight Behavior pushes the boundaries of Raipola’s statement since the existential threats to the environment like those found in traditional cli-fi novels are not necessarily Kingsolver’s main focus. Instead, she focuses on human interaction and shows how climate change science mixes with “people of faith” like the Turnbows and depicts a scenario in which religious faith mitigates the gap between science and its facts on climate change, as well as popular culture’s apparent lack of interest in the subject. Flight Behavior goes a step further beyond simply discussing humanity’s impact on the environment like traditional climate fiction. Kingsolver details how climate change science enters the public and popular sphere and also how it plays out in everyday conversations with stereotypical characters. Moreover, Kingsolver shows that when climate science uses narratives to explain its facts and imbue its knowledge, this approach is highly compatible with religious ideology. Adam Drexler points out that climate “fiction creates ‘representations’ of science, and these choices have implications for the status of fiction, science in contemporary culture, and perhaps the basic tools we use to understand this contemporary moment” (Trexler 20). Hence, I argue that the text reveals how individuals mitigate their faith, or lack thereof, in regard to humanity’s uncertain future. Existing interpretations of the novel are concerned with climate science, and leave out not only the religious framework Kingsolver employs but her adhesion to 3 attributive statements which, textually, are a product of free indirect discourse and closely resemble a stream of consciousness narrative and they are defined by moments of inner dialogue or utterances by a single character, which represent one or more of the principles pertaining to the cognitive process of making attributions. At the beginning of the narrative when Dellarobia finds the butterflies, she is unhappy with her life and she considers having sex with someone outside her marriage. Reminiscent of Moses with the burning bush, she receives what she thinks is a biblical sign after she sees a mass of roosting Monarchs while she is not wearing her prescription eyeglasses. She ponders if the “burning tree were put [t]here to save her life” and she wonders if she “was important enough for God to conjure signs and wonders” (Kingsolver 16). However, that is where the similarities with Exodus end. Instead of the intended effect, which for Moses is renewed faith in the Judeo-Christian lord, Dellarobia is in fact embraced by her congregation with all the hallmarks of a public induction. She turns to another equally powerful archetypical figure, the scientist, for understanding. “A lake of fire had brought her back to something”, but it was certainly not faith in Christ (17). In this case, she turns to Dr. Ovid Byron, a biologist from “Devary University in New Mexico” (120). Climate fiction’s popularity and prevalence is a testament to its relevance in 21st century culture (Schieder-Mayerson 474). Flight Behavior depicts a scenario common in today’s society and especially in the American bible belt of the southern United States. Faced with a changing climate, the consequences of which are constantly framed negatively, religious minded people are forced to re/consider their faith. Furthermore, the novel is as much a fiction about climate change science as it is about climate change arguments and the personal drama between the characters as they seek to assimilate new ideology into the Judeo-Christian framework of the 4 Southern United States. Kingsolver’s novel criticizes the “scientific” climate change perspective in several ways, not least its sanctimonious privileging of the scientific mind over the religious mind. Although religion and science seem to be at odds in the text, mirrored by the relationship of Dellarobia and Hester, the novel discerns that religious ideology and science are highly compatible and there is a way to resolve perceived tension between religion and climate science. Dellarobia is the proof of that and her way is best described psychologically. Critics like Goodbody and Garrard frame their interpretation of the novel psychologically. Goodbody suggests that “[c]limate change is a ‘superwicked’ problem… [and that] psychological work [is needed] to promote a more appropriate response which must accompany the pursuit of technical solutions” (2). Similarly, Garrard suggests that “the limitations of our evolved psychological capabilities” is one reason for our inability to fully comprehend the present climate change emergency (297). Following suit, I sparingly employ the psychological theories of attribution and the cognitive processes they map, in order to highlight the cultural work done by Kingsolver. Two cognitive tendencies of attribution, specifically, the priming effect and the belief in a just world, coupled with reflexive behaviour analyses, and mentorship allows Dellarobia to shift her belief system laterally. This is important because while, cli-fi asks its reader to believe in climate change as well, it does not always reflect upon how that might take place (Schneider-Mayerson 475). Cognitively speaking, there are basically two ways to explain any event. One is external and one is internal. This cognitive dichotomy is extremely valuable to analysis of belief formation for a couple of reasons. It is very easy to externalize global level phenomena like climate change. Likewise, it is very easy to internalize personal failures. What the 5 external/internal dichotomy shows then is that when this trend is reversed and people start to internalize large issues like climate change, they are able assume a level of responsibility which enables them to change their perceived negative behaviors. Conversely, externalizing perceived personal failures allows people to overcome the heart break and negative emotions these conditions foster. Narrativizing these psychological tendencies permits Kingsolver to blend “both naive scientific realism and strong versions of social constructivism, allowing critics to identify things like genes, places, local climates, findings, and anthropogenic climate change itself as hybrids emerging from natural and human agency” (Trexler 21,22). Kingsolver’s title indicates that she is deeply concerned with behavior. Not only is she interested in how behavior is categorized internally but also in how behavior is influenced by reflexive and attributive thought. Hence, Flight Behavior is a metaphor for the Monarch’s altered migratory trajectory, and it is also a metaphor for Dellarobia’s shift from perceived religious dogma and her consequent scientific enlightenment. Demonstrably, Kingsolver’s characters, both religious and secular, throw off the yoke of reason in favor of ritualistic faith-based systems of belief. Characters like Dellarobia, Cub, Ovid, and Tina, while admittedly stereotypical, should be as Jane Tompkins puts it, “studied not because they manage to escape the limitations of their particular time and place, but because they offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment” (Tompkins xi). Hence Dellarobia, Cub, Ovid, and Tina are important not for their ability to defy social norms or challenge assumptions, but simply for their inherent stereotypical qualities which arguably reflect the beliefs of the widest possible audience. 6 Moreover, each of these characters has a unique belief system supported by faith, “bad” or otherwise. Since Dellarobia is the most pronounced character, I begin by analysing her character arc and her relationships with Cub, Hester and Ovid, as she metamorphizes from caterpillar to butterfly. I track Dellarobia’s shift in beliefs quite closely since she is one driving the narrative through her activism. This move reveals not only how her beliefs change, but also why they change. In addition, in an initial attempt at eco-evangelism Dellarobia tries to persuade both Hester and Cub on climate change. After that in a particularly relevant scene she grills Ovid on why he does not think human conservation will help the monarchs. Climate fiction is concerned with a certain degree of activism and the genre aims to articulate climate change science in such a way that readers change their views and behaviors (Trexler 9). Therefore, understanding why someone would choose a new belief system is paramount for writers and critics of climate fiction. Ovid is Dellarobia’s mentor, and an archetypal figure in the novel, hence examining how his scientific mind and personal motivations shape his ideological view point in regard to climate change and nonhuman animal rights offers an example of a character whose beliefs are not changed by interaction with the opposing view point. Ovid’s beliefs remain static throughout the text and his rigid adherence to his belief system limits his ability to communicate with others, most notably Tina Ultner. Tina has a relatively small role by comparison to Dellarobia but her view point, on the other hand, represents not only the mainstream media but the essence of popular culture and consumerism in the twenty-first century. Close reading of Ovid’s interaction with Tina and the subsequent coaching he receives from Dellarobia following the interview highlights the importance of narratives to the scientific community and the power they exercise 7 in conveying ideas to the general public. Ovid’s television interview with Tina is also important because it epitomises climate fiction’s biggest question; how do we make climate change popular? One way is to sensationalise environmental destruction. Kingsolver’s way, on the other hand, is quite different. She chooses to embellish and dramatize human behavior and interaction. The novel’s position on climate change is that everyone has played a role in creating climate change and that we will all have a role to play in what we as a society do about climate change. While Kingsolver does exploit the tension between climate change believers and skeptics her aim is not to increase the divide but instead to mediate the conflict. One way that she does so is by insisting on the importance of thinking about nonhuman animal life alongside human life. Kingsolver complicates the human predicament by showing that we have an ethical responsibility to nonhuman animals (Johns-Putra 155,156). Nonhuman animals need to be considered when thinking about issues involving a changing climate, the novel contends when it asks readers to consider how should we, as a society, respond ethically to environmental phenomenon that involves sentient creatures like nonhuman animals. Analysis of Kingsolver’s climate fiction in Flight Behavior requires attention to narrative as well as psychology, as I have noted. Now, it is clear that it likewise requires an attention to Ecocriticism and Critical Animal Studies because each of the aforementioned schools of thought offer a different and distinct, but also unique and useful, angle from which to analyse the tensions that structure Flight Behavior. My method is defined by these tensions. The interpersonal tensions structure how individual characters exist in the novel. My attention to psychology is demanded by the novel’s attention to the tensions that structure internal and external beliefs regarding climate change. And finally, my attention to the question of the animal 8 is a recognition of the primary importance that the novel places upon thinking through the tension between the human and the non-human animal as a feature of social life at present. This research contributes to human knowledge and expands the frontier of what we currently know by showing how a work of art is able to promote dialogue between religious practitioners and climate change advocates who sometimes seem at odds. Kingsolver takes contentious issues and voices them through sympathetic characters making both the religious and scientific language palatable for the reader. While studying the prevalence of religious minded people, Todd M. Johnson and Brian J. Grim found that 88.2 percent of the Earth’s population believes in a religion (12). Hence, in order to discern how to best explain climate science to religious minded people understanding why a person would alter their belief system is important. Conversion narratives are a central feature for many religions including Christianity. Therefore, a conversion narrative that has been secularized offers a new way to explain why climate is essential to belief systems and belief formation. Flight Behavior has many commonalities with conversion narratives like Paul’s in The New Testament, or James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Essentially, for Dellarobia, like the apostle Paul in the Gospels, an unexplained event acts as a catalyst causing her to alter her belief system. After meeting Jesus, or his representation, on the road to Damascus (Syria), Paul stops persecuting Christians, takes up Christ’s cause, and becomes a Christian (Galatian 1, Acts 9, 22, 26). Although Kingsolver’s text flirts with extinction, courting the apocalyptic narrative peckishly, ultimately the lack of zeal shown by the anthropocentric climate change soothsayers and their unwillingness to take action against climate change or nonhuman animal oppression undermines the sense of severity in regard to climate change that the extinction narrative endorses. Therefore, when Kingsolver deploys the extinction narrative, she does so in order to 9 show how these stories influence an individual’s behaviour and personal relationships, rather than convincing climate skeptics on climate science. 10 Chapter 2: Dellarobia’s Conversion Kingsolver’s novel drives right to the heart of how people form beliefs. She shows how individual cognition is influenced by the behaviours of others. Kingsolver begins her novel in this way, A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture. Or so it seemed for now, to a woman with flame colored hair who marched up hill to meet her demise. Innocence was no part of this. She knew her own recklessness and marvelled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could out-weigh the pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long distance. (1) How does this passage show how an individual’s thoughts are influenced by the behaviours of others? Each subjective idea presented by the narrator, “your good life,” “her demise,” “her own recklessness,” represents an attributive cognition manifested from the postulation of how other people will react were Dellarobia to commit adultery and be caught (1). Initially she categorizes her current living situation as the “good life”, which we find out is untrue since she is on her way to commit adultery which often signifies an unhappy marriage (1). Next, she laments “march[ing] up hill to meet her demise” (1). Is she headed into battle? It seems a bit dramatic to compare committing adultery to meeting one’s demise, which is a synonym for death. She marvels at her “recklessness”, although she suggests in the next line that the lust she feels, that “one hard little flint of thrill”, is causing her to neglect her internal warning signs about her intended behaviour (1). But why is her behaviour reckless? And, why does she state that she is headed for her demise? Dellarobia attributes all the feelings/thoughts she is experiencing to her presumptions as to how the people in her life will react if her actions are revealed. Her demise in this case means a drastic alteration of her living circumstance and a 11 healthy dose of shame. Nothing will threaten her life if she is caught at this particular moment in the text. She will probably lose Cub and her kids to divorce, but that will not cause her death. Moreover, in the end she leaves Cub anyway, so she seems to be just delaying the inevitable. The statements in the passage above seek to explain Dellarobia’s “flight behavior”. Dellarobia’s behaviour is attributed to lust and she measures this desire against her past experiences, that “pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long distance” (1). Lust, however, is only one possible explanation for her behaviour. Inferring truths about reality based on the perception of other people’s behaviour and the singling out of lust as the deciding factor for her behaviour are both examples of attributive cognitions. Just because Dellarobia thinks that committing adultery will cause her harm, or her demise as she puts it, does not necessarily mean that it will. Cub and the other Turnbows could react positively to the situation and might consider her actions a blessing in disguise, to use a colloquial turn of phrase. She might even come to accept her decision as being essential to her happiness and not responsible for her demise. While Flight Behavior is obviously fiction, it nonetheless invites readers into a conversation regarding human psychology and interpreting the preoccupations of the novel likewise involves treating characters as promising objects of interpretation that might reveal features of human psychology. Dellarobia’s story is what is known as a “lateral conversion” narrative, which Romney Moseley defines as a “change of content without a structural change” to one’s personal belief system (Strieb and Keller 186). Moreover, scholars like Strieb and Keller differentiate between cognitive and practical conversions. For the purpose of analyzing Dellarobia’s trajectory, however, the key concepts to understand are that she never loses her faith (in this case there is a distinction drawn by researchers between faith in Christ and faith in general terms) and she does not change her structural rituals (Strieb and Keller 186,187). While 12 at the outset of the novel she may not be a devout Christian like Hester, Dellarobia has, by her own admission, been brought up within the Christian faith and bears, cognitively, the ideological weight of its dogma. Dellarobia’s lateral conversion, then, is not from Christianity to some other world religion; rather it is from religion to science and more specifically to, climate change science. Kingsolver develops a unique perspective on lateral conversion, because it exceeds religion in the case of Dellarobia. At the beginning of the narrative Dellarobia is living in a Christian home and community. Most of her friends are Christians and she attends church regularly, albeit reluctantly. Her husband Cub is a devout Christian and he makes a public announcement in church about his wife’s experience and the Monarch discovery. The Monarchs arrival attracts a host of people including Ovid and the other scientists who introduce Dellarobia to the field of science. The subsequent conversations she has with Ovid influence and inspire her to not only learn more about science but also to shift her core beliefs laterally. After her interactions with the scientist Dellarobia is enthralled with science and disenchanted with religion. She leaves Cub, moves to a different town, and returns to school to pursue a career in science. There are many factors at work in a lateral conversion narrative which, as Richter and Francis put it, affect “the decision to leave [a] church [and they are] structured partially along familiar lines: social change, change of values, critical life events, childhood socialization” (Strieb & Keller 187). That is not necessarily to say that Dellarobia becomes an atheist, but she is surely indoctrinated into secularism and is no longer a faithful Christian. Here secularism is used to describe the apprehension and disbelief of religious doctrines and not necessarily a rejection of the concept of faith. Moreover, her lateral conversion occurs organically in the narrative. She 13 does not necessarily go looking for a new ideology, rather she simply begins working for Ovid and becomes habituated to the new way of life. When Dellarobia loses her faith in Christ she is left without a meaningful belief-system. Science, with Ovid acting as authority, helps her bring new purpose to her life. During this process Dellarobia swaps her church’s corridors for the hallowed halls of academia, and she trades the word of Billy Ogle for a life among the King Billies1 and the word of Ovid Bryon. But why? Because a few million butterflies landed on her property? Because science enlightens her? Because of Ovid Bryon’s charisma, as Garrard suggests? (Garrard 305). Although Dellarobia attributes her lateral conversion to a host of causes, all of them an attempt to justify to herself her life choices, what has occurred, in terms of her belief system, is that she has merely swapped one set of ritualistic set of behaviors, for another. In addition, this move seems less like an enlightenment of the mind and more like a substitution of archetypes. Dellarobia has a negative view of her life and she attributes her disappointing situation primarily to her marriage to Cub. Consequently, Bear and Hester are accused of “roping two dumbstruck teenagers into a shotgun wedding and then taking off with a laugh, leaving them stranded” (Kingsolver 10). Often, in Flight Behavior, a character’s actions are attributed to some arbitrary quality, usually God-given, that is intrinsic to the individual. Equally as often, a character’s actions are attributed to some external force, for example, Dellarobia's in-laws. Moreover, Kingsolver toys with the polarity of internal and external explanations for actions. In the case of Dellarobia’s and Cub’s “shotgun wedding”, Dellarobia uses her young age, “dumbstruck teenagers”, and the Turnbow’s roping skills, please excuse the figure of speech, to explain why she married Cub. Both explanations work to locate the source of her unhappiness in 1 King Billies is a “pet-name” for the Monarchs used by the locals in Flight Behaviour 14 an external or uncontrollable force. Dellarobia’s age is situational and Hester and Bear are external. Hence, Kingsolver’s treatment of Dellarobia’s thinking is that her attributions indemnified her, cognitively at least, of any responsibility for her own choices. Revealing these thought patterns to the reader provides an interpretive context for understanding why characters make the choices they do. In a particularly relevant scene, Dellarobia asks Cub why they got married in the first place and then suggests that they only got married because she became pregnant (Kingsolver 381, 382). While Dellarobia internalizes and accepts a small portion of the “responsibility”, she assigns culpability for her decision to marry Cub to two forces, both external phenomena—her pregnancy, which ends in a miscarriage, and the social pressure from her in-laws to be wed before the child is born. Hester and Bear are viewed as selfish, which accounts for their desire to see a marriage, and Dellarobia and Cub are simply the victims of biological constancies and not careless teenagers who made an impulsive choice. For Dellarobia it is cognitively easier to identify an external source for a perceived negative situation than to accept responsibility for her own actions. Therefore, rather than attributing her situation to herself, Dellarobia finds an outlet which absolves her of her guilty feelings. Guilt is one emotion tethering Dellarobia to Cub and in order to move on she works to reconcile her emotions with her behaviour via reflexive thought. While the tendency to use situational causes to explain one’s own behavior allows Dellarobia to externalize troubling cognitions and overcome their paralyzing power, it also alienates her from her partner and their children. Dellarobia struggles to communicate with Cub about her miscarriage until she has adequately accounted for her own behavior and decided she does not define herself by her situation. While this thought process seems like a positive in the short-term, because Dellarobia’s anxiety is diffused, the consequences of shifting the blame from 15 one’s own behaviour to another can be negative and disruptive in the long run. For example, Dellarobia ends her relationship with Cub, which for Cub, their children, and for Hester, is not desirable. Nevertheless, the important thing to appreciate in this instance is that when Dellarobia externalizes her perceived past indiscretions, she can free herself of the debilitating hold they have on her. There is another subtle dimension which spurs Dellarobia to move her belief system laterally and that is the Turnbow family belief system. Cub, Hester, and Bear are devout Christians, so when Dellarobia attributes perceived negative events to them—such as the pressure from Hester and Bear to marry Cub— she is also creating a negative view of Christianity in her mind. One reason why Dellarobia finds Christianity objectionable is because Hester, and those she “covenants” with at church, believe the butterflies are sent by God. Hester and Dellarobia are trying to decipher truth and create meaning for themselves in a world they see as chaotic and troubling. Both women find stability, although they find it in very different places. Not only does Dellarobia find cognitive stability in science, but she attributes Cub’s lack of interest in science to his Christian faith, for example, “referring transient events to stable underlying factors” (321). Cub’s, Bear’s, and Hester’s belief in Christianity is the underlying factor which is used by Dellarobia to account for why her thinking is different from the other Turnbows. Dellarobia’s thought pattern protects, at any expense, her self-esteem. Evidently, Dellarobia does the mental math, to use a crude metaphor, on how deeply Christianity is entrenched in the Turnbows, and decides that the external forces acting on them are so great that the task of educating Cub and her in-laws is too great and, therefore, futile. Dellarobia decides her intrinsic force is not strong enough to enlighten her family. 16 Dellarobia’s lateral conversion is ultimately facilitated by Ovid. While Dellarobia and Ovid converse many times in the text there is one moment when the scales tip, if you will, for Dellarobia and her faith shifts from religious faith to secular. In the pages leading up to Dellarobia’s first meeting with Ovid, Kingsolver portrays her relationship with religion as a tumultuous one. It is not necessarily the biblical stories or the theology she finds unappealing she, quotes the Bible often but, it is the religious community that Dellarobia finds disagreeable. She envies Bear because he gets to skip Pastor Ogle’s service and sit in the lounge, and she is irritated by the parishioners’ practice of “covenanting” together (Kingsolver 63, 69). Kingsolver puts it rather eloquently when she defines Dellarobia’s relationship with the religious community in Feathertown. The narrator comments that “Dellarobia felt the stab of envy, as if everyone here was getting a regular paycheck and only hers bounced” (61). By her own admission, “she was not outside the believer realm entirely” (60). Nevertheless, Dellarobia is feeling disenfranchised by the congregation. Hence, she is highly motivated to leave the religious community. The second feature of Dellarobia’s story that must be understood before examining the moment when her belief system shifts is that she becomes habituated to the mores of the scientific discipline before her beliefs change. Typically, individuals working in research assistant positions, like Dellarobia, go to university first or have some previous experience and interest in science. Dellarobia’s initiation into science begins mundanely; she learns to count, weigh, and identify the sex of the butterflies. Over time Dellarobia builds a routine, “[e]ach morning by daylight she crossed the same distance from her kitchen door to Ovid’s camper, pausing there on her way to record the previous day’s high and low temperatures” (Kingsolver 247). In addition, Dellarobia “listen[s] to Ovid and Pete speaking hopelessly about so many things” including climate change (246). Both behaviours, listening and recording, become 17 routine but more importantly, since Dellarobia is religiously minded, these behaviours become ritualized for her through repetition. At this point in the text she has little knowledge of science or climate change, rather she is simply performing scientific tasks. She already has ritualistic behaviours. She attends church regularly and has maternal responsibilities; she merely trades these behaviours for the scientific ones recognised above. Instead of attending church and caring for her children, she now attends Ovid’s sermons on the mount and cares for volunteers studying the monarchs. Philip Nord, in his “Introduction” to Formations of Belief suggests that there are “moments when ritual change, bubbling up from below, prompt… theologians to readjust [their] doctrine” (5). Although she is not a theologian, she is a participating member of a Christian congregation, a position that carries certain dogmatic expectations. Hence, the same can also be said about Dellarobia as she mends her new tribe’s clothing and brings them soup, duplicating her familiar ritualized behaviors in her new setting (Kingsolver 153). Dellarobia’s change in behavior is the catalyst for her change in beliefs. Not only does she ritualize her behavior, but essentially, Dellarobia is primed, in the psychological sense, her conversion into secularism. Dellarobia’s day-to-day behaviour changes when she begins the practice of recording temperatures for Ovid, which gives Dellarobia a direct connection with changing weather patterns and the fluctuations in temperature that she would not have previously noticed. Additionally, in this new ritual, Dellarobia connects specifically and routinely to the mundane world, not the spiritual world. Her new ritual turns her outward, rather than inward, which is the typical cognitive disposition of religious interiority. Consequently, because Dellarobia is recording daily temperatures she is more likely to believe climate change science since it centers around rising mercury. 18 Therefore, when Dellarobia first learns how to do science she is not taught the theory first, as one would assume. Priming effects are why she is so eager to learn science. Dellarobia gets a taste of the discipline, which gives her agency, and she is hungry for more. Because of this move from stay-at-home mom to research assistant, she gains financial agency but she also believes everything she is being told by Ovid, Pete and the rest of the scientists rather than scrutinizing each new piece of information or ideology they teach her. She does lob some weak points of resistance at Ovid, Pete, and Molly when they outline the anthropogenic climate change point of view, but for the most part she is receptive and unquestioning. Besides, any counter arguments she does makes are the half-hearted, half-baked, and stereotypical responses she thinks that Bear and Cub would make. Dellarobia is more concerned with “fitting in”, pleasing the researchers, and getting paid, than challenging their thinking and authority (Kingsolver 153). Although Dellarobia and Ovid have many conversations throughout the novel, there is one instance that is a tipping point for Dellarobia. In true Freudian style, and considering the opening page of the novel’s theme of lust, one might argue that Dellarobia is sexually attracted to Ovid and his “charisma”, as Garrard calls it, which influences her to change her belief system. She admires his ability “to talk to kids” and his fatherly qualities when he interacts with her son Preston. Dellarobia also sees him naked, “[n]ot [just] his face, it was from armpits to thighs”, in an overtly sexualized scene (Kingsolver (119, 249). This argument though does not take into account the group dynamics of Dellarobia’s new occupation, nor does it consider her faith, Christian or otherwise. Now that she has heard both arguments for climate change, Dellarrobia has decided that she agrees with Ovid, and now questions him about what can be done to rectify the situation. Ovid’s response is interesting and relevant to how his point of view influences Dellarobia’s lateral conversion. He says, “[i]t’s too late for that”, implying that there is no hope 19 for the butterflies’ survival. One might categorize this point of view as fatalistic. Ovid believes that the extinction of all life on Earth is imminent and unavoidable Kingsolver shows how climate change, or animal rights debate, either builds up or breaks down personal relationships. Dellarobia learns about the possible extinction of the Monarchs from Ovid Byron, the story’s main scientist, who, as Meyer points out, “explains the greenhouse effect to Dellarobia by comparing global warming to a child’s fever that is, ultimately, “unstoppable” (219). Not only is Ovid’s view fatalistic, but it is also nihilistic in the sense that he lacks any faith in humanity which manifests itself in his defeatist attitude. Early on in their interactions Ovid tells Dellarobia that his goal is to describe what is happening to the butterflies, not why this event has occurred or what should be done about it (Kingsolver 244). Kingsolver’s reliance on metaphor when staging climate change, or nonhuman animal rights debates, shows that these issues are not necessarily the central feature of the text. Kingsolver plays loose and fast with the cli-fi hegemony. The attention to ecology that Meyer refers to as makers of climate fiction, takes a back seat in the novel and what moves to the forefront is a discourse about how large scale political, economic, and environmental issues effect families and disrupt people’s lives. Moreover, Kingsolver’s ending contradicts the catastrophe convention which is a defining feature of cli-fi’s apocalyptic, and ultimately tragic, endings. How though does Ovid’s statement influence Dellarobia, one might ask? Instead of explaining how carbon dioxide interacts with the atmosphere, he uses a fatalistic narrative to prime her and put her on edge, psychologists stress human arousal in these instances as effecting behavior, then asks her to “[b]elieve [him]” (321). Dellarobia is asked by Ovid to make a leap of faith. He does not say “consider the facts and choose for yourself”, rather he asks her to submit to his authority as a scientist and believe him on faith alone. Ovid breaks down her cognitive 20 defenses by invoking the concept of impending doom. Then, when her guard is lowered and she is under cognitive duress, he asks her to make a life changing decision. In this instance, Ovid’s intention may be pure, but his methods are unquestionably predatory. He uses Dellarobia’s fear of death to trigger her flight response and influence her thinking on the issue of climate change. Consequently, from this moment on, Dellarobia is an anthropogenic climate change believer. She does not know the “facts” or the science of climate change, but she now feels confident enough in her new belief system to explain it to Hester. One could certainly argue that there is a categorical difference between scientific authority and religious authority, since the Bible’s authority depends on its reader’s willingness to accept it as the revealed Word of God. However, the climate science taught by Ovid in the novel is not empirical. While his method of operation regarding the study of the monarchs may depend upon experiment, observation and rational inferences from those observations, his method of explaining climate change is reliant on narrative techniques and is not based upon replicable results. Although there is empirical evidence for climate change there is no experiment Ovid can teach to Dellarobia that she can replicate herself, that proves the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, much of the climate science Ovid alludes to is based on computer models and not empirical data (Buis 1). While this characterization of science is admittedly cartoon-like it is rather hard to avoid given that this construal stems from how it is characterized in Flight Behavior. Trexler rightly identifies the issues when trying to discuss science in the novel and he calls Kingsolver approach to the problem “scientist realism” and I play on that terminology in this instance (21,22). Hence, Kingsolver gives the reader a Plato like reflection of science that is somewhat reductive but nonetheless stringent. 21 Christian faith is dependent upon two acts of faith: the act of accepting the existence of God and the act of accepting that this text is God’s work. Likewise, faith in climate science depends on a personal commitment to scientists that cannot be demonstrated through scientific method. Cognitively speaking, Dellarobia’s leap of faith follows the same cognitive pattern regardless of what authority is invoked. Irrespective whether one is arguing for climate change or for nonhuman animal rights, or for religious faith there are certain psychological tendencies, for example, cognitive priming, which Kingsolver exposes that permeate these discourses. One point that needs to be stated before examining how Dellarobia explains climate change to Hester is that Hester has had her own priming experiences prior to going looking for flowers with Dellarobia. One example is her previous conversations with Dellarobia, and another is her contact with the Monarchs. Yet another example is her religious experiences in church which Dellarobia describes early in the text. That being said, her conversation with Dellarobia about climate change is central to understanding how conversion conversations are structured by Kingsolver. Furthermore, unlike Cub, Dellarobia persuades Hester to her point of view. 22 Chapter 3: Eco-Evangelism Gregers Andersen claims that “contemporary research on cli-fi is [not] dominated by consensus” (8). Nevertheless, criticism of Flight Behavior thus far has been surprisingly unbalanced in favour of reading the novel as cli-fi. Unquestioningly, Kingsolver’s novel is about an environmental catastrophe, which as Sylvia Mayer tells us, concentrate[s] on envisioning a future fictional world in which the risk has manifested in catastrophe, in which what used to be a climate risk scenario in the late twentieth century has materialized in global climate collapse spawning ever new risks. They explore a world in which climate change has caused devastating changes in the ecological, socioeconomic, political, and cultural orders. Life in these narratives is marked by dramatic experiences of displacement, toxic pollution, and species extinction (212). Yet, arguably Kingsolver does not make “devastating changes in the ecological, socioeconomic, political, and cultural orders” a central issue in Flight Behavior (212). Her text is uniquely personal and largely dedicated to religious interiority as I have mentioned. Using the Monarchs as a metaphor for Dellarobia’s life changes is her main goal. That being said, the residue of Dellarobia’s Christian faith from her physiological transformation is arguably more relevant to contemporary climate change conversations if the goal is persuasion on climate science. On the other hand, Dellarobia is without question a symbol for the butterflies and vice-versa but peppering a text with symbols is quite different in practice and effect than creating an explicit discourse on critical issues like climate change. Climate change is always explained in one of two ways, with a metaphor, or by highlighting examples of extreme weather. While Ovid does explain to Dellarobia how burning fossil fuels fill the atmosphere with carbon, he uses instances of extreme weather events, like “hurricanes reaching a hundred miles inland… deserts 23 on fire, etc.”, as evidence to support his argument (Kingsolver 278). Since Kingsolver uses metaphor and sensational stories to voice the climate change argument it is logical to assume that the character dialogue, the personal relationships, and the tension between ideological factions are Kingsolver’s focus rather than the Monarchs’ possible extinction. Hester, like Dellarobia, chooses to believe in anthropogenic climate change because of her personal relationships with others: not because of her understanding of scientific facts. Initially, she asks Hester if she has ever thought about the sun, but “[i]t was not a Hester kind of question, so she didn’t expect an answer” (337). Dellarobia thinks that because Hester is a farmer, a redneck, but most of all a conservative; she will not be receptive to a discussion about climate change. Dellarobia is actually the one with preconceived notions and she admits early in the narrative that “she knew to be wary of climate change” and projects this biased attitude onto Hester (147). This notion about Hester and her rigid personality, however, could not be further from the truth. Hester is not standoffish; in fact, she is receptive and eager to learn about the climate and its shifts. Dellarobia, on the other hand, is very opinionated and she also has a negative view of Hester’s personality. She does not think her mother-in-law will understand the science of anthropogenic climate change, not that Dellarobia actually knows the science, so, she explains it in biblical apocalyptic style—fire and floods (337). Not only does Dellarobia not know the science supporting anthropogenic climate change, but she thinks that Hester is too “set in her ways,” to use the colloquial phrase, to want to understand the scientific explanations. So, how does Dellarobia proceed? First, she evokes an authority, “[s]cientists say that,” then “[she comes] up with a reliable word” or term she thinks Hester will understand, “pollution” in order to persuade her (337). In order to back up her argument, Dellarobia, like Christians invoking the New Testament and “The Gospels”, uses the term “scientists” as an authoritative 24 voice. She does not name a specific person or study or fact, she simply says “scientists”, as if all scientists are one big homogenous group. While it is rather easy to argue against one person it is impossible to argue against “scientists”. The two methods of argumentation conflict since the scientists are an undefined, hypothetical, and open-ended category, and Hester is a physically present tangible entity. Therefore, in the face of “scientists”, Hester has no choice but to submit to their collective power as invoked by Dellarobia. In her conversation with Hester, Dellarobia attributes changing global weather patterns to pollution. While it is a fact that pollution is responsible for destroying species and habitat globally, and that it may contribute to the changing climate, it is not a fact that perceived extreme weather is directly caused by pollution (Climate Models par 12). In fact, Ovid does not name pollution as a culprit in the butterflies’ situation at any point in his conversations with Dellarobia. He paints a much more complex picture of nature. Dellarobia, on the other hand, leaves this information out of the conversation because she thinks Hester will reject Ovid’s perspective. Extreme weather can be the result of solar flares, cosmic winds, or slight changes in Earth’s ionosphere, and while rising amounts of air pollution may be a factor for rising temperatures, that does not necessarily mean that air pollution is causing, what humans deem to be, extreme weather. This is the difference between cause and correlation. While there is a correlation between air pollution and extreme weather, one thing is not directly causing the other. Ovid explains the difference between cause and correlation to Dellarobia by using a metaphor. He points out that “[f]amilies that take more vacations also tend to own more television sets than those that do not” (Kingsolver 243). He then asks her if the “second television is causing families to be more adventurous...”, to which he rhetorically replies, “[n]o, that would be the cash flow” (243). Why does Kingsolver make this point, though (243)? Cause 25 and correlation, in practice, are messy to sort out. Hester and Dellarobia see the causes of events rather then the correlation between elements. In doing so the two characters derive personal meaning from global phenomenon. The science Dellarobia is trying to explain is not in play in the conversation. Hester understands and accepts the metaphorical or narrativized explanation of climate science. Moreover, she does not believe Dellarobia because she knows or agrees with scientific facts. Rather, she just wants the butterflies to survive and not be killed by loggers, so she changes her mind about climate change. Hester is willing to alter her status in the Turnbow family because she is highly motivated to retain a relationship with her grandchildren. She wants to connect with her daughter-in-law because she suspects Dellarobia is about to jump ship, with their kids in tow, and leave Cub. Hester is personally invested in both the butterfly’s survival and Dellarobia’s future. Therefore, Hester can be said to be choosing to believe in climate change because she desires to gain favor with Dellarobia. Not only does she want to see her grandchildren, but she wants to save the butterflies from loggers as well, both of which are self-serving. Moreover, Hester has come to see Dellarobia in a new light since the Monarchs’ arrival. Hence, rather than disagree with Dellarobia about her new beliefs and cause a rift between them, Hester is persuaded to her daughter-in-law’s viewpoint. Hester and Dellarobia have been at odds for much of the text; nevertheless, the two women now team up to find the butterflies’ food source, winter flowers (341). They now share a common interest and are finally part of the same group, and group membership, rather than factual knowledge, seems to be a factor when characters in the novel choose a belief system. Initially after being converted by Ovid, Dellarobia tries her hand at convincing Hester to change her beliefs and she is successful. Later, she attempts the same project with Cub. Their 26 discussion begins when Cub tells Dellarobia that their neighbour is trying to lure butterflies onto his property because “[h]e wants a piece of the action” (255). Cub and many others in town see the altered migration pattern as a positive occurrence and they are making plans to profit from the Monarchs’ popularity. With her newfound belief system in hand, Dellarobia’s first instinct is to lash out at the opposing view in an act of relational aggression and she has to seek “some kinder word than stupid” to describe the notions that challenge her. Consequently, instead of explaining the science of climate change to Cub or encouraging him to seek the answers for himself, Dellarobia tries to scare Cub into agreeing with her. She tells him that “the butterflies are all going to die” because of climate change (225). She does not say “some” butterflies, or that they “might” die, instead she says without a doubt, for sure they are all going to die. She paints the bleakest scene possible, stating that “as soon as the temperature goes down into the teens” it is over for the Monarch as a species— a statement that could not be farther from the truth (225). Dellarobia is not a scientist, nor is she in control of the environment. Her claim, that the butterflies all will die, is based on nothing more than the word of Ovid Byron. However, she now repeats the doctrine she has learned from Ovid to Cub as if it were the unquestionable word of God. Undeniably, Dellarobia is entitled to her opinion, but she is asking Cub to leave behind his family history and belief system simply because she says so. In fact, the close reader already knows that there are other roosting sites in California, and that there are Monarchs that are not at the Turnbow ranch (Kingsolver 117, 122). These pocket populations are not large, but they are certainly relevant to whether the species will survive extinction. Historically, there are many species that have dwindled in numbers only to do a hundred-eighty degree turn and begin to flourish once again, most notably the panda bear (World Wild Life Fund 1). Nevertheless, Dellarobia, has internalized her new belief system and is now cognitively bound by it. 27 Cub’s and Dellarobia’s interactions are very similar to Hester’s and Dellarobia’s although the outcomes are opposite, since Hester is persuaded by Dellarobia to believe climate science and Cub is not. There are numerous instances in the text when Dellarobia suggests that Cub struggles intellectually, and she calls him names like “stupid”, “naïve”, and “dumb” because he does not agree with her (Kingsolver 165). Cub’s voice is limited by Kingsolver and he holds his cards close to the chest so to speak. In “Rewriting Genesis-Reading Barbara Kingsolver`s Flight Behavior in Ecocriticism” Jeong Seonyoung suggests that “the reason his status and importance in the novel are less pronounced than those of Dellarobia is that he does not show a masculine image or will and passion to change the world” (Seonyoung 74). Moreover, his lack of interest in science is interrupted by Dellarobia as a lack of cognitive ability, but it might be the case that Cub does not agree with Dellarobia of his own volition and that he may even know the science of anthropogenic climate change and not want to hurt his partner’s feelings by disagreeing. While my comments in this case are purely speculative, they serve a purpose. Dellarobia interrupts Cub’s silence negatively but silence can mean any number of things and does not necessarily mean Cub disagrees with Dellarobia. It simply means that he does not wish to voice an opinion at that time. Dellarobia construes Cub’s hesitation as resistance to her argument and she conflates his behaviour with a lack of cognitive power. Needless to say, this a very condescending view. Dellarobia’s new way of thinking has become threatened and rather than acknowledge her lack of understanding and listen to another’s point of view, she degrades her opponent. For example, she asks Cub if he will “quit being stupid” after he implies that she enjoys the attention she has received from the media (163). Conceded that Cub might be deflecting with his comment he still makes a valid point about Dellarobia’s motives. 28 Dellarobia cannot set aside her new belief system, even though Ovid has just recently taught her the difference between cause and correlation. Consequently, she and Cub struggle to communicate. She has a new belief system and instead of taking a moderate viewpoint and easing into her new digs, so to speak, she bounds head-long into her mission. Or her demise? Dellarobia’s new thought patterns are just that— “new”— so she does not want to be viewed by Cub as being on the fence since she is trying to convince him of her point of view; thus, in order to seem convincing to Cub, she claims all-out “belief” in anthropogenic climate change science. Dellarobia fears that if she does not take the ultimate faithful position in the conversation Cub will not be persuaded, so she fibs a little, and hits him with the old biblical apocalypse story. Dellarobia comments by saying “It’s Like the End of Days” (Kingsolver 172). She speaks in absolutes. She lays out a narrative so tragic that no rational person could disagree with her. Dellarobia goes from recently learning climate change indeed exists to teaching it without ever considering any of the scientific evidence. She merely accepts the word of scientists on faith, or bad faith, alone. But why does Cub hold onto his beliefs when confronted about them by Dellarobia? Cub values his family’s history and his relationship with his parents and children more then he values acceptance from the larger community. While shopping for Christmas gifts and closely following Hester’s and Dellarobia’s heart to heart about logging on their land in the kitchen, Cub comments on the butterflies’ situation, “‘I can’t go against my dad on that logging’, he said for the twentieth time” (Kingsolver 157). Dellarobia responds by saying “[y]ou can, but you won’t” (157). Dellarobia is questioning Cub’s character not his thinking. Cub’s beliefs are formed around his local community, his family and his allegiance to his father. For Cub, his personal belief system is deeply connected to who he is as a person and what he does do on a 29 day-to-day basis. Cub identifies with the land, farming, and his family’s history. He tells Ovid at their first meeting that their “property has been in [his] dad’s family for close to a hundred years” (Kingsolver 117). Dellarobia’s identity, on the other hand, is not based on her status in the Turnbow family. Her strongest identity marker before the lateral conversion is her role as a mother, hence when she alters her behaviour, her actions then influence her self image. This change allows her to form a new belief system built around a new self identity, that of a scientist, and born out of habituation. What Kingsolver shows us about belief formation with these different cognitive patterns—to choose one’s beliefs based on political and economic positioning, for example, being a farmer or a scientist—is that when confronted about our spiritual beliefs, humans have a tendency to make critical decisions based on perception and behavior rather than on factual knowledge. Cub spends his time farming his parents’ land, “repair[ing] the all-terrain vehicles”, or driving a gravel truck in Feathertown, so he has a tendency to align his belief system to fit his surroundings, per se (37, 47). Although he feigns ignorance, Cub may indeed understand the “facts” of anthropocentric climate change, but instead he chooses to believe in the opposing, more conservative, point of view (165). The same can be said for Dellarobia. She is working amongst the butterflies day after day; measuring them, weighing them, and identifying their sex. This change of behaviour helps her form a new identity and she alters her belief system to match her new behavior. Facts are easily ignored by individuals when they form beliefs because they are not necessarily personally relevant, hence they are readily dismissed. Behaviors, on other hand, are very hard for the person performing the action to ignore, thus, it is rather difficult to not align one’s views with one’s behaviour. Perhaps the most striking similarity between climate change behaviour and religious 30 behaviour is the individual’s need for an audience for the performance. Baptists require a public baptism, or they require that the person give their testimony to the congregation if they wish to join. Catholics require that one take the sacrament and confess their sins to a priest. Climate change ideology often follows the same pattern. As Kingsolver shows, many climate change moral prescriptions can be dependent on a performative element. The performance of the ritualistic behavior is a type of admission payment for the individual, and it galvanizes their beliefs and their place in the group. Mr. Atkins and his list of things you promise to do to lower your carbon footprint is perhaps the novel’s prime example of performative elements tethered to climate change activism (Kingsolver 326). Hence, climate change battles must be fought in the public eye, not behind closed doors and not in silence. But that has been the climate change activist’s strategy in practice and Kingsolver is keenly aware of this. The belief in a just world is a powerful cognitive force that influences how a person forms their beliefs on subjects like religion or climate change. Bernard Spilka, Phillip Shaver and Lee A. Kirkpatrick link the human need for purpose in one’s life to the attributive theory known as the “belief in a just world”. In their research they discovered that people with this cognitive tendency believe “that individuals get what they deserve in life” (Klassen and Fein 121). This thought pattern splits down conventional moral lines (good/evil dichotomy) and insists that “good things will happen to good people while bad things happen to bad people” (Kiral Ucar, 68). That is why when the protesters show up at Dellarobia’s house she is more than happy to send the over-enthusiastic students over to Bear’s and Hester’s place. She doesn’t mind if Hester is harassed by the protesters because she feels slighted and to a certain degree blames Hester for her life choices (Kingsolver 245). Therefore, anything negative that happens to Hester is justified in Dellarobia’s eyes. Not only is this view vindictive but it is also completely subjective. It is 31 easy to see how the belief in a just world fits with religious ideology. What is not easy, and this is because of the subversive nature of the secular ritualistic experience, is seeing how this same cognitive process is present in climate change science as it is depicted in the novel. The belief in the just world influences Dellarobia’s thinking when she marches uphill to her demise because cheaters always get caught, according to her. The exact same thought process is at work when she shifts her belief system. Dellarobia believes the world is just, hence she perceives the climate change position as having the moral high ground and, therefore, when she alters her beliefs, she once again has the moral high ground. But Ovid believes in anthropogenic climate change and, according to Critical Animal Studies’ moral prescriptions, his choice to kill butterflies certainly negates the thinking that he has the moral high ground. Ovid believes the world is just, and this belief reinforces his behavior of killing butterflies. He tells himself it is okay to kill if his intentions are “good”, for example, the more we know about the butterflies, the better humanity is equipped to reverse anthropogenic climate change. Evidently, Ovid does not care if a few thousand butterflies die in the process. From a CAS perspective this thinking is highly problematic. It seems that characters in the novel are selective with their belief choices. If the world were indeed just as Dellarobia and Ovid believe, the butterflies, who humans label as innocent, would not be on the Turnbow ranch in the first place. Unfortunately, events that are labelled negative happen to all species equally regardless of whether humans perceive them as innocent. The presumption of innocence is a cognitive construct wielded by humans who believe the world is just and moral. 32 Chapter 4: The Academy Versus Mainstream Media In “The Animal of Bad Faith”, Sanbonmatsu, while considering the exploitation of nonhuman animals, asks “why, in spite of all the facts, and in the face of strikingly better philosophical arguments, does the system of speciesism seem as entrenched as ever?” (29) Although Sanbonmatsu is contemplating speciesism, his question applies to the contemporary climate change conversation. According to scientists like Ovid, the evidence for the existence of anthropogenic climate change is clear, decisive, and overwhelming. So why then does Kingsolver design characters who choose to ignore the facts on climate change? Strangely enough, characters in the novel are not given many facts when climate change is discussed and instead Kingsolver uses apocalyptic narratives. Conversations on climate change and the survival of the Monarchs sound more like passages from “Revelation” then scientific discussions. As a result, Kingsolver highlights how an individuals’ cognitions are influenced by social situations rather than by logical arguments or the learning of facts. Likewise, most characters, Cub and Dellarobia being the prime examples, select a belief system based on their interpersonal relationships with other people. This chapter, which features Ovid’s contentious television interview with new reporter Tina Ultner, epitomises Sonbonmatsu’s question. Ovid struggles to keep his cool as Tina struggles to understand his position on both the Monarch’s situation and climate change. Both characters are skeptical of the other and the conversation ends with both sides asserting their will, rejecting the other person, and maintaining their viewpoint. Ovid is not religious, he professes to care for the butterflies, and he believes in anthropogenic climate change. On the other hand, he in unwilling to act on behalf of the butterflies to try and save them and he kills butterflies regularly. Conversely, Cub is religious, he does not care about the butterflies’ survival, he does not believe in climate change, and he does 33 not want to save the butterflies. However, he does not kill butterflies purposely. Cub’s and Ovid’s behaviors, when viewed from a CAS perspective like Singer’s, are reversals of their belief system. One would think, given Ovid’s passion for butterflies and his belief in climate change, that he would align his thinking with scholars like Peter Singer who calls for the total liberation of all species globally (Singer 1). That is not the case for Ovid though. He is willing to destroy as many butterflies as he deems necessary for his research and he is unwilling to offer solutions for the butterflies. On the other hand, Dellarobia is religious, she cares about the butterflies, she believes in climate change, and while she kills butterflies, she also wants to save the butterflies from extinction. Considering Cub’s conservative viewpoint, one would assume he would be killing butterflies, or would be indifferent to their deaths, but this is not the case. Rather he expresses a willingness to support Dellarobia against his father should it come to that and he never kills any butterflies. Although Cub is willing to take his wife’s side against his father, he is not willing to take the scientists’ side against his family. That is where he draws the line and asserts his beliefs. For Cub, his family is more important that any global issue one might raise with him. How can Ovid, on the other hand, claim to care for the butterflies and yet kill so many? Garrard has an answer. He suggests, in reference to Ovid’s predicament, that [o]pen-minded impartiality is fundamental to the phenomenal success of Western scientific methods, in all their diversity, but it is ensured by processes, centrally the institutions of double-blind peer-review and public and charitable funding of research, independent of political and commercial interests. Byron, like many within and without the scientific academy, confuses institutional safeguards of impartiality with the rhetoric of dispassionate impersonality, which is by no means essential to it. As a result, he is 34 caught in an excruciating double-bind: deeply committed to the survival and flourishing of the monarch butterflies, and at the same time feeling himself bound by scientific protocols only to “read,” not to “save” (306) Garrard goes on to suggest that the “double-bind”, or the bad faith, that Ovid is experiencing is a result of the historically gendered divisiveness between reason and emotion and he invokes Descartes to support his thinking. Clearly Ovid is not deeply committed to the survival of the monarch butterflies. Otherwise, he would not be killing so many butterflies and he would eagerly advocate on their behalf to the media and the larger community. In light of the notion of total animal liberation argued by scholars like Peter Singer, this is an odd attitudinal paradox. Singer notes that “[m]any philosophers and other writers have proposed the principle of equal consideration of interests, in some form or other, as a basic principle; but not many of them have recognized that this principle applies to members of other species as well as to our own” (Singer par 4,16). Ovid’s has the most education in the novel and is therefore the authority on climate change. Hence, one would assume that his point of view would be the closest to the CAS view. This is not the case, however. He suggests, when questioned by Dellarobia about how he subjectively feels about the butterflies being on her land, that it is not humanity’s call to intervene in these matters, and that his job as a scientist “is only to describe what exists” (Kingsolver 148). He goes on to say he “likes” the butterflies and that what scientists see happening to the them is worrisome (148). If he is indeed as worried about the butterflies and the species’ survival as he professes, why is he unwilling to try to save the species from erasure and why does he not consider his job practices “murder”? Ovid, like Cub, sides with his tribal group rather than consider his behaviour’s impact on the larger community. 35 Examining Ovid’s interaction with the media, specifically Tina, a television news reporter in Flight Behavior, offers insights as to why Ovid is not willing to act on the butterflies’ behalf. Ovid, like Christians who believe in original sin and believe they live in a fallen world, thinks that there is an irreversible “problem with the environment” and that “pervasive environmental damage” is evidence that “[t]his is a biological system falling apart along its seams” (365). Ovid’s comments are problematic. He sees the environment as being in a static state of perfection, when in fact the earth’s geological history, glaciation cycle, and tectonic plate movements indicate that the global environment is in a state of constant flux, always shifting and changing (Kingsolver 147). Furthermore, the butterflies’ “downfall” gives rise to a parasite bloom but Ovid leaves this out of his conversation with Tina. Why is a butterfly’s life more important than a parasite’s? Both creatures are unique sentient beings as CAS scholars call them. The idea of perfection is a human construct and completely subjective. Therefore, Ovid’s idea of the environment is based on his point of view and his conceptualized and constructed perfect Monarch. The environment, on the other hand, is never truly “perfect” or balanced or in a state of equilibrium, or whatever symbol human minds construct to represent the qualities we project onto the natural world. In addition, these qualities are often the traits that we as humans perceive we lack and, therefore, desire. Humans, as a species, see balance in nature because that is what we desire to see, but that does not mean that the environment is balanced. Ecosystems, according to ecologist A. Townsend Peterson, work through niches (Peterson 16). When one species is in population decline another species is rising in numbers, so the system seems to be balanced (19). However, what humans call “balance” is never present; it is simply a cognitive construct. Just because Ovid says it is so does not necessarily mean the ecosystem is being destroyed. Rather, it 36 is changing, in relation to Ovid’s cognitive construction of the natural world. Species, like the parasites overwhelming the Monarchs, that can adapt to the changes in climate will survive and those lacking the needed traits will perish. The Honeybee is an example. Honeybees are in decline in the western hemisphere and scientists like Elizabeth Grossman are worried that there would be a lack of pollinators for angiosperms, thus putting the ecosystem at risk and possibly affecting human agriculture (1). What the scientific community eventually has discovered, though, is that species like butterflies, moths, wasps, and even ants are now filling the gap left by the Honeybee as pollinators (Fultz 1). Therefore, while humans, like Ovid, perceive a balanced and unbalanced ecosystem representation, the hegemonic scientific viewpoint is that the environment operates on the principle of “environmental variability” and any order derived from nature is purely cognitive on the part of humans (Peterson 10). The same thing can be said for extinction narratives like the ones used by Ovid and Dellarobia when explaining anthropogenic climate change and their positions regarding nonhuman animals’ rights. Ovid fears extinction because he is inundated with catastrophic and fatalistic climate change rhetoric and he thinks about it regularly. Conversely, Tina does not spend her days thinking about the climate and she must ask Ovid if they are “talking about global warming” (Kingsolver 365). Climate change facts are not as readily available to Tina as to Ovid, so she is less likely to think about climate change and she is less likely to be persuaded to the climate change point of view. Dellarobia, on the other hand, as has been shown here, is largely persuaded by Ovid because of her heuristic tendencies built up by habituation. Ovid admits that scientists “can’t predict the exact effects of global warming”, but he is unwilling to back down from his fatalistic position, and Dellarobia believes him anyway. Like Dellarobia when she is hesitant to 37 seem unconvincing while explaining climate change to Cub, Ovid thinks that if he shows any “weaknesses”, “gaps” or “holes” in his argument that his ideas will be dismissed by the listener. Pretending that one knows everything, when that is by definition impossible, puts the other person on their guard and it makes them feel as if they are banging their head against a brick wall, to invoke Dostoyevsky’s metaphor in Notes From the Underground. According to Tina, Ovid’s inability to soften his ridged and fatalistic view of climate change, and admit the ideological and factual short comings, leads to rigid divisiveness between points of view. She tells Ovid that he is losing his audience when he tells her that belief in anthropogenic climate change takes imagination (Kingsolver 367). Evidently Tina is unwilling to make the same leap of faith that Dellarobia and Hester make when they believe Ovid about climate change; the interview ends with him trying to stomp off, getting tangled with microphone cord, and then shouting into it, “[h]ere is my full statement” (369). Ovid’s statement, which causes Tina to leave and end their discussion immediately, is that the media are all a bunch of “damned liars” (369). Again, Ovid lashes out in anger because Tina is not receptive to his opinions and he attributes her reluctance to agree with him about the changing climate to her position as a reporter. Just like Dellarobia when she infers about Hester’s and Cub’s personality and their Christian faith, Ovid uses Tina’s occupation as a way to negate her point of view. He uses the word “prevaricators”, but he is basically calling her “fake news” (369). Ovid’s attitude is overweening and he is asking Tina to ignore her superiors and instead report what he wants. His belief system causes him to see Tina as a puppet, which is certainly understood as derogatory in the context of the novel. Instead of seeing her as being caught in the “double-bind” position Garrard describes, Ovid views her as lacking the moral fortitude that he thinks he possesses. In reality, Tina likely has little say over what ultimately gets aired on 38 television. Ovid actually commends her for letting public relations firms write her scripts (Kingsolver 368). Tina is caught between wanting to please her bosses and earn a pay check and reporting accurate news stories. Ovid know she is just doing her job, but because she is the face of the network Ovid thinks that Tina has the power to tell the truth on air and report what she wants, but what he is in fact asking her to do is to put her career in jeopardy and be insubordinate at her job. Ovid’s behavior indicates that he has faith in science but not in the media. Ovid’s lack of faith in the media foreshadows a deeper lack of faith in humanity. Why is Ovid not willing to alter his beliefs? Ovid assumes he has the moral high ground in every situation. When Ovid and Tina discuss climate change in Flight Behavior, as the conversation unfolds, the facts of the matter drift to the background of the dialogue and their political, cultural, and personal affiliations move to the forefront. Dellarobia identifies this tendency early on in the novel when she comments that “[s]he could see this [discussion] was going the way of all their arguments, poised to step from the ground of true complaints into the quicksand of trivial nonsense” (Kingsolver 46). Either the person being asked to question their beliefs is receptive to the opposite point of view and genuinely listens or they feign interest until the person is done speaking and then they reassert and ossify their own position. Neither Tina nor Ovid can soften their position enough to communicate successfully with the other. When Tina, not so subtly, suggests that Ovid alter his narrative for explaining the Monarch’s situation in order to reach a broader audience he is not only “genuinely startled”, but he is immediately put on the defensive in the emerging argument (Kingsolver 366). Tina has primed Ovid already by not so kindly asking him to rearrange his work space to look more appealing to the camera. So now her comments about his narrative put Ovid on his guard and also question his authority as a scientist. Ovid responds by asking Tina if she is suggesting that 39 he “change [his] answer to improve [her] ratings” (366). Ovid is offended by Tina’s comments which causes him to ignore her valid criticism. Flight Behavior shows that when science is converted into narrative form its facts are easily digested for the reader. Although Tina could have approached the topic more diplomatically with Ovid, she makes a valid point. Were Ovid to reframe his argument as he does when he explains climate change to Dellarobia, his message would be more palatable to more people. Adeline Johns-Putra points out that “the knowledge needed to meet present obligations to the humans and non-humans of the future is, in large part, granted by science, but for ethical guidance towards an explicitly better future one must look elsewhere” (Johns-Putra 139). Kingsolver shows that the popular sphere that the media is able to reach maybe be just the place Johns-Putra is referring to. Because she works in the television industry, Tina knows that when shooting 20-second television clips created for a channel-surfing consumer like Cub, narratives are paramount to conveying information effectively. Regardless of Ovid dismissive opinion of television reporters, Tina possesses a discrete body of knowledge regarding television recording that Ovid does not. However, since Ovid is now offended because Tina told him what he ought to do in regards to how to best explain climate change to her audience, he now rejects anything Tina says arbitrarily. I argue that the key moment which dictates the direction of this conversation and how Ovid responds occurs when the discourse changes from suggesting what he “should” do, to what he “ought” to do. Although, “should” and “ought” are very similar at first glance, and one might certainly argue that this is a semantic splitting of the hairs, if you will, but I contend that there is a crucial distinction between the two terms. That difference is that, the word “should” connotes a suggestion, where as, “ought” connotes an imperative. To a listener a suggestion is easier to assimilate cognitively then an imperative, which is a term that has a commanding quality that a 40 proposition is lacking. Although this is not a hard and fast rule, when the word “should” is used in Flight Behavior to promote anthropogenic climate change, it does not threaten another’s sense of free will, while “ought”, on the other hand, has a tendency to subject free will through duty. As a result, when the “ought” is used, another feels a sense of obligation. If one already agrees with the person this claim has no consequence. Yet if this is new information, or the listener has a different point of view, their defensiveness is triggered. If the individual who is being asked to question his or her belief feels that they are being imposed upon and that their self-esteem is threatened, they react by defending their position and, in many cases, they stop listening to the other person. After Tina questions Ovid’s authority by questioning his climate change narrative he browbeats Tina and demonize capitalism. He accuses her of “letting a public relations firm write her scripts”, and he wonders if “you people”, meaning people in the media, will ever learn (Kingsolver 368). Thus, instead of allowing her to have her own opinion and just arguing against it, Ovid undermines Tina’s character and credibility. Tina even questions him about the scientists who do not believe in anthropogenic climate change and he suggests that “some other outcome is written on the subject line of [their] paycheck”, implying that those scientists who do not believe in anthropogenic climate change are doing so because they have been paid to do so (336). Tearing down another person rather than their ideas is a common occurrence in climate change conversations in Flight Behavior. When faced with a conflicting argument, Ovid does not argue against the person’s facts or ideas, but instead he descends, quite quickly I might add, into ad hominem attacks that question the person’s motives and degrade their character. The tendency to argue against people rather than their ideas is one answer to Sanbonmatsu’s question in “The Animal of Bad Faith”. When people like Tina feel that they are 41 being personally attacked, they adopt the opposing viewpoint simply to spite the person who has been bullying them. Ovid may indeed be correct about climate change, but very few people are willing to listen to the facts when the speaker has just called them names and suggested that they lack integrity. These knee-jerk responses by both Tina and Ovid explain why ideologies like speciesism are so pervasive. Once an individual begins telling the person they are conversing with that they are “better”, or that they have “strikingly better philosophical arguments”, the other person’s guard comes up and they go on the defense. While they may agree that speciesism is detrimental for the environment, the condescending tone used by academics like Ovid automatically pushes the other person into the opposite point of view. Kingsolver offers readers a balanced account of the climate change debate by exploring the climate change denier position with as much seriousness, compassion, and open-mindedness as the opposing viewpoint. This skeptical viewpoint is important because in the novel, it is the climate skeptics, most of whom are religious, who wish to save the butterflies from extinction, whereas the believers of climate change are the ones who are killing the Monarchs. It is important to differentiate and split the ideological hairs, per se. Doing so reveals that the climate change proponents like Ovid and Pete are the ones who act out the speciesist ideology, whereas the Christians like Hester and Cub, while they may believe in speciesism, do not practice it by killing butterflies. These viewpoints appear to conflict. One would assume that the scientists who are studying the butterflies would be willing to act on the butterflies’ behalf and attempt to save them from extinction and that the Christians would take the fatalistic apocalyptic narrative route and chalk it up to God’s mysterious ways. Kingsolver’s use of climate change believer characters and opinions is well documented in criticism of Flight Behavior. Conversely, the climate skeptic point of view held by characters 42 like Cub and Bear and most of Feathertown has been largely ignored and dismissed by critics of the novel. This skeptical point of view has been largely attributed by critics like Meyer and Garrard to gender. With Bear and Cub identified as the Monarchs’ patriarchal foe in the text, Garrard suggests that Kingsolver “set[s] up Reason – identified with masculinity, freedom, activity, and human culture – as distinct from, and superior to, a feminized Nature, which was imagined as passive and mechanical” (306). Examining Kingsolver’s climate change and nonhuman animal rights debates muddies the clarity of this conventional assertion that gender, specifically masculinity, fosters the skeptical point of view. If Bear and Cub were as “hostile” and “unsympathetic” as some say, then the novel would presumably end in the mass execution of the Monarchs and the clear cutting of the Turnbow property (Garrard 304). The Monarchs survival undermines the citing of patriarchal oppression as a nefarious force in the novel. Notably, the only people Kingsolver depicts killing butterflies are the scientists. Regardless of the validity of the climate change skeptic position, it is important to explore this side since Kingsolver has many characters who hold such beliefs and she dedicates much of the second half of the text to this discourse in order to show how interpersonal relationships, political affiliations, and family economics not only create bad faith, but also to show how facts for issues like climate change and animal rights get subverted in the course of conversation and are replaced by more pragmatic points of view. Furthermore, many of these “more pragmatic viewpoints” are based on the individual’s perceptions of other people. While Climate fiction is interested in getting more people to believe in climate change, adopting the opposing view is categorically useful. The differences between a skeptic like Cub, a converter like Dellarobia, and a believer like Ovid, highlight not only the fact that opinions do change as in 43 Dellarobia’s case, but also that the skeptical view point may be an essential part of coaxing fence sitters to the fold, so to speak. 44 Chapter 5: Conclusion In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, Hofstadter calls the tendency to assume the moral high ground in any situation “assured moral victory” (85). According to Hofstadter, assured moral victory is a political phenomenon which affects both sides of the political spectrum equally and the theory holds that political paranoia, like the kind exhibited by Ovid and Dellarobia, and like the Christian ideology of salvation, provides the believer with a metaphorical and cognitive guarantee which then puts their mind at ease and diffuses their anxiety of events out of the person’s control (85). In the process, the scientific method is abandoned, a leap of faith is made, and factual objectivity is substituted by a faith-based account of truth. Like leaders of religious orders, climate change advocates like Ovid require that individuals use their imaginations in order to conceptualize and accept anthropogenic climate change without question. What Kingsolver is drawing attention to is that the “scientists” do end up asking for a kind of leap of faith when they concede (as they do) that science cannot explain everything fully. Where the climate change argument fails is in its failure to secure the emotional consent of those they are trying to persuade. Dividing the contemporary climate debate into “deniers” (people who are skeptical of climate science) and “believers” (people who promote climate change ideology) is clearly intended to elicit a sense of religious belief. Simply labelling those who do not share your views as “deniers” carries with it an embedded negative connotation which suggests that anthropogenic climate change is an irrefutable truth. On the other hand, the concept of “believers” has a positive connotation and a more powerful undefined nonquantifiable quality of believing in something larger than one’s self. Religion seems to be the defining factor when considering the desire to save the butterflies in the novel. Activism, in the form of evangelism, or spreading the word of Christ, is 45 already part of the ideology of most Christian sects. Therefore, when Dellarobia shifts her beliefs from religion to science, she retains the desire to save others from damnation. She applies this ideology to her new situation and the butterflies’ precarious position and she wants to save the butterflies from annihilation. She tells Ovid about some farmers who want to put Monarchs in a semitrailer and drive them to Florida where it is warm in order to preserve the species. Ovid, on the other hand, is unwilling to act because, as he describes it, “[h]aving a popular audience, [like Bobby Ogle], can get [scientists] pegged as second-rank scholars” (Kingsolver 325). Ovid’s comment indicates that he cares more about his career and pleasing the academy than he does about the survival of the butterflies and the rights of animals? It is likely that he is hesitant to act because he knows the pitfalls of anthropocentrism as revealed by CAS. Nevertheless, Ovid sets aside his belief in nonhuman animal rights in order to achieve what he perceives as the larger goal of reversing anthropogenic climate change. From the CAS perspective Ovid’s position is problematical. Human intervention and environmental conservation also strip the species of its agency. What is a more desirable outcome for Kingsolver’s butterflies, extinction or exploitation? Furthermore, how does humanity stop destroying and oppressing other species like Kingsolver’s butterflies? If we help them, we are acting out anthropocentrism and enforcing speciesism. Conversely, if we do nothing, many species may be lost due to changing environmental conditions. There are so many examples of this and so many different authors all saying the same thing— when a human being feels that they do not have free will they act counter to their best interests simply to prove that they do have free will. Dellarobia in her stand against Bear and Cub, Sonbonmatsu with Bad Faith, the Christian idea of original sin in Genesis, and Dostoyevsky’s in Notes from the Underground are all examples of interpretations of this same 46 principle pertaining to the cognitive understanding of free will. Now to answer Sonbonmatsu’s question “why, in spite of all the facts, and in the face of strikingly better philosophical arguments, does the system of speciesism seem as entrenched as ever?” (29). When personal beliefs are threatened some people reject facts and perpetuate speciesism, which leads to situations like the one described by Kingsolver in Flight Behavior, because when they are told that they must do a certain thing, or think a certain way, or that “this way of life is better”, they reject these proposals, not because of anything factual they disagree with but because they feel that they are not being given a choice and must exercise their free will, even if what follows is better described as petulance rather than freedom. Consequently, people turn to themselves for support. The habits they form by exercising their free will open the door for their new beliefs. Of course, there are underlying social norms and conventions shaping how free will functions; however, fundamental ideological change requires a different, more direct type, of pressure than social norms or convention offer. Therefore, in order to a prove to themselves and the other person that they have free will, they disagree with the person arbitrarily and act in bad faith. The bible says that thou shalt not kill, yet many people have been slaughtered in the name of Christ. When Dellarobia decides she wants to save the butterflies from Bear and his plans to log the mountain she does so in order to prove she has free will rather than because she genuinely cares about the survival of the species. She comments that “[t]hese butterflies had been hers [and that] she had made up her mind to throw her one hundred dinky pounds against the heft of her family’s men” (Kingsolver 149). Dellarobia has been told what she “ought” to do— she ought to act in her family’s best interest— but she does not do that. As an alternative, she asserts her free will in order to prove she has free will. She disagrees just for the sake of disagreeing because she 47 feels powerless and voiceless and she feels that Bear is giving her no choice. She does not say “it is morally right to protect the Monarchs”, instead she says “she found them, she’d showed them to her son..., [t]hey seemed to matter, like nothing she’d ever possessed”, all statements that have nothing to do with the butterflies’ well-being and which reinforce Dellarobia’s ego (149). Dellarobia’s comments indicate that she only opposes the logging in order to create a conflict with Bear and Cub and impose her will on them. The butterflies are just the tool she uses to justify her iconoclastic crusade against the people she holds responsible for her life choices. The question still remains, does Dellarobia’s behaviour, and the bad faith she shows her family and individual butterflies, save the Monarchs on the Turnbow ranch? Although Dellarobia disagrees with Cub and Bear out of spite, she is able to delay the logging long enough for the butterflies to survive the Tennessee winter and fly off “to a new earth” (Kingsolver 433). In this moment, the last lines of the novel, Kingsolver comes away from the fire and brimstone of Dellarobia’s and Ovid’s extinction narratives, showing, not only the absurdity of these stories but also the absurdity of anthropogenic climate change ideology itself. If, as Ovid claims, the metaphorical ship has sailed on anthropogenic climate change, and it is truly negative and irreversible, then why bother studying butterflies at all? Why not exploit them and enjoy them while they last? Ovid’s position is that “it’s too late” to reverse climate change, and that all the species on earth are doomed. Why is Ovid so fatalistic in his predictions of the future? And, how does one sort out these complex moral paradoxes, or examples of bad faith, as I have defined them? What I propose is that religious faith, whether one considers it bad or good, is the cognitive feature that Ovid and the other scientists need in order to have the compassion required to stop killing butterflies. 48 The fate of the butterflies on the Turnbow ranch is relevant to the climate change debate taking place in the novel because the desire to save the individual of a species clashes with the larger, global goal of reducing carbon emissions (Singer par 4). Compassion is hailed by some scholars Like Carol Adams as a key emotion that humans need to stop our oppression and poor treatment of nonhuman species (Adams 22). How does one learn compassion though? Adams does not specify. Secularists like Ovid, as depicted by Kingsolver, are no more moral than Christians like Bear, and they certainly do not have more compassion for nonhuman animals. Both characters are willing to kill butterflies to fulfill their personal desires and neither person is limiting their lifestyle or reducing their carbon footprint to help the environment. So, in terms of the moral treatment of the butterflies, neither side has the moral high ground. Contrarily, Hester, Dellarobia, and Cub are all willing to make personal sacrifices in order to save not only the monarch species, but individual insects as well. Dellarobia questions the need to kill so many butterflies in the name of science, and Cub and Hester are receptive to the idea of challenging Bear to save the Monarchs. Once more religious faith is the defining factor that separates Ovid and Bear from Cub, Dellarobia, and Hester in their belief formation. Hester’s religious upbringing has taught her compassion, whereas Ovid’s time in the academy has not. That is not to say that Ovid is not compassionate, but he compartmentalizes his morality and makes pragmatic decisions based on his perception of other people and he decides his research is more valuable than having compassion for butterflies. Kingsolver shows us that in order to develop the compassion needed to challenge the animal industrial complex, one also needs religion and faith. Science teaches objectivity and does not teach compassion. Whereas religions like Christianity teach love which leads to compassion. Dellarobia’s trajectory in the novel, her shift of beliefs, is evidence of this premise. She may leave Cub and the Church and 49 shift her belief system to the secular, but she never loses her strong sense of faith in humanity. For Dellarobia, compassion is created by religion and sustained by faith. Faith, more specifically faith in humanity, is the cognitive feature that Ovid lacks and the absence of faith in his thought processes is why he descends so quickly to fatalism, nihilism, and character defamation. Ovid does not even have bad faith; he has no faith. Therefore, if saving individual members of a species is the most immediate goal for humanity, morally speaking, then having bad faith is certainly better than having no faith at all. While ideology may guide the overall trajectory of an individual’s life in the narrative, it is their behaviour— their day-to-day movements, which are habituated and repeated until they reach the level of a ritual. By way of this process, habitual tendencies are internalized and, thus, are established cognitively as objective truth. I act as such, and therefore, I am as such is the thinking and all along the way heuristics reinforce the individual’s behaviours. Hence, if an individual is seeking attention and affiliation and also suffering from anomie because they no longer have a meaningful belief system, climate change directives, for example Mr Akins’ “sustainability pledge”, which are largely habitual and ritualistic in both nature and practice, fill the void let behind, and provide the recipient with the recognition and support they desire (Kingsolver 327). Repetitive behaviours, like knitting butterflies from recycled sweaters, ease the individual’s feelings of anomie, which consequently reinforce the validity of the ideology by way of habituation, which becomes ritualized and by extension sacred (339). Once something, whether it be an object or an idea, becomes sacred— not only in the individual’s mind but in the collective mind of humanity— it becomes pervasive in its ability to remain active in effecting human behaviour. 50 What Flight Behavior shows us is that understanding how climate change or animal rights arguments function may have more to do with narratives than with factual data. People use the cognitive practice of insert narrative here in order to ease their cognitive dissonance when faced with extremely problematic issues of “scale” (Clark 136). Hence, the human need to know the cause of an event is so great, and the Earth so large in comparison to an individual, that there is a turning inward— a cognitive shift from Holocene to Anthropocene— when our lack of control over our environment is perceived as so minute that we blame ourselves for phenomena like rising temperatures, parasitic blooms, and displaced species. This cognitive leap of “bad faith” is one thing that creates speciesism in the human mind. Events that we are unable to control, such as millions of roosting butterflies, force us to turn our attention inward. Faced with the unexplainable and with no one else to blame, we blame ourselves, or take responsibility for the entire earth, if that phrasing is more palatable. For example, Dellarobia assigns herself ownership of the butterflies because she initially thinks that they are a sign from God and that “she would like just one beautiful thing to her name, with no downside” (Kingsolver 117). Discussions, like the ones Kingsolver presents in Flight Behavior, about whether climate change is indeed anthropogenic and, subsequently, a negative phenomenon, have completely vanished from academic discourse. Kingsolver’s use of characters who are skeptics is not common for cli-fi. Climate consensus is so forceful that emphasizing the opposing view does not threaten its power. Ovid and Pete and the other scientist never self-reflexively question their beliefs as the Christians do in the narrative. Surprisingly the skeptical characters in the text provide a platform for climate science. Without the deniers there is no reason to create interesting narratives like Flight Behavior in order to explain climate change science. If all the characters simply agreed there would be no tension in the text. The tension between characters 51 and their opinions on climate change cause conversations and arguments to occur which gives Flight Behavior a realistic quality. Moreover, the realism created by Kingsolver’s use of dialogue expresses climate change in way that allows readers to connect with science on a personal level. Kingsolver’s conversations are believable because they end ambiguously. Sometimes the conversations lead to a softening or change in beliefs and sometimes they do not. While some readers may find it difficult to identify with an insect, and thus struggle to empathises with the Monarchs, it is rather easy to identify with Dellarobia and Cub. Nonetheless, critics of Flight Behavior have completely ignored the point of view of characters like Cub and Hester’s, deeming them trivial and irrelevant by way of omission. Climate fiction as a genre has become spiritualized as well and according to contemporary Eco Critics like Axel Goodbody, cli-fi’s impacts are clear, decisive, and far-reaching. He points out that telling and listening to, writing and reading such stories about environmental risks and our attitudes towards them can facilitate a change of attitudes and action, both by contributing to the public’s critical awareness of arguments about environmental risks, and by creating a sense of the feasibility of change and the need for it through the power of literary imagination (4,5) To put it succinctly, Goodbody suggests that reading climate change narratives that introduce scientific concepts influence thought patterns and change people’s opinions and behavior with regards to environmental phenomenon and policies. The key implication here is the idea of “impact”. Contemporary scholars note that Flight Behavior is simultaneously both (1) altering brain patterns through neuroplasticity or changing the way people think, and (2) impacting Earth 52 and human society on a global scale or changing the way we act in relationship to our environment as a species. Conversely, Christopher Lloyd and Jessica Rapson argue that “as a human faculty, memory may be ill-equipped to deal with planetary issues, yet the reconciliation [they] highlight… offers a glimpse of how personal memories and lived experiences, like those of the novel’s protagonist, may ‘unfol[d] into something larger to accommodate such scaled up issues and temporalities” (926). In light of these contradictory ways of thinking about how climate change narrative interacts with readers, I suggest that Kingsolver uses spiritual force and faith, the kind that can only be fostered in an individual by religion, to buttress her dialogue on philosophical and ethical paradoxes like the fate of the Monarchs. Kingsolver is able to blend a conversion narrative with a potent and popular, brand of climate fiction. Her mixture of religious, scientific, and political rhetoric coupled with sophisticated narrative dialogue on faith bridges the gap between our critical awareness of arguments about environmentalism and our inability to “deal with planetary issues” (926). Kingsolver avoids the utopian/dystopian tropic tendency ubiquitous in cli-fi novels. Her fictional world is speculative perhaps but her speculations, while shaded by the possible extinction of a species, are notably optimistic. Flight Behavior is undoubtedly cli-fi and is not an attempt at realism but it is not science fiction either. Kingsolver’s point is that the future will be the same as the present, not better or worse, utopian or dystopian. The difficult choices that Dellarobia, Hester, Ovid, Tina and Cub face are not resolved easily and will continue to be contentious as climate change intensifies. Optimism is not unique to Kingsolver’s cli-fi but her support of religious faith is. Christian faith is usual depicted in cli-fi as a coup de grace for people who are about the be annihilated by their environment. Kingsolver, however, positions 53 religious faith as an apriori feature of belief formation informing people’s decisions rather than simply being a reaction to and comfort for one’s impending doom. Climate fiction is interested in sensationalizing climate change by showing extreme violence and environmental destruction (Schneider-Mayerson 474). Schneider-Mayerson points out that due to the negative consequences of thinking about climate change, including anxiety, depression, and ontological insecurity (Norgaard), even concerned Americans tend to avoid detailed reflections on our potential climate futures. Thus, climate fiction can play a powerful role in influencing the frames that readers perceive, prioritize, adopt, and share with family, friends, coworkers, and others. The novel in particular has great potential to encourage and cultivate transnational empathy for the victims of climate change, due in part to the extended temporal engagement that the form requires. (Schneider-Mayerson 962) Kingsolver however, dramatizes both people who believe and promote climate change and climate change skeptics through melodramatic character dialogue and symbolism. She avoids environmental destruction and does not depict overt violence other then the deaths of some butterflies in Ovid’s lab. There is an allusion made to a mudslide in Mexico and also reference made about another farm in Feathertown that was clear cut for lumber and suffered erosion. Notwithstanding, the giant tsunamis, fires, earthquakes, and devasting loss of life intrinsic to cli-fi are strangely missing from Flight Behavior. In their place what we have is a story of success. Dellarobia successfully exits her failing marriage, the Monarchs warm up and fly away, the lumber is never logged, and the ending is very anti-climatic. In fact, the climax of the story occurs when Dellarobia and Cub team up to save a baby sheep from dying during birth. 54 Even though Sylvia Mayer argues that Flight Behavior can be read as a bildungsroman, she does not question the novel’s status as the epitome of a work of climate fiction. Garrard deems “the book as a ‘climate fiction masterpiece’” in his essay (301). Moreover, he “locat[es] its ‘genius’ in Kingsolver’s juxtaposition of ‘true facts’ (the unappealing reality of climate change) with markedly appealing, ‘attractive’ characters, whose conversations function as a humanised metanarrative that ‘complement[s] […] the necessary work of scientific investigation” (301). While the discourse on climate change is central to the plot of the story, this classification fails to acknowledge the attention Kingsolver pays to relationships between characters and the dynamics of how people form their beliefs in relation to others. From a religious perspective, like that of the conversion narrative, Flight Behavior seems more like a story about reconciling one’s faith and religious upbringing with an ever-changing climate, cultural, and public political discourse regarding unexplainable events. The theme of saving animals is common in the text but not pronounced. When the characters are discussing climate change the reader can readily understand that this is the topic of discussion. On the other hand, when they are discussing nonhuman animal rights, the narrative is far more subdued and the topic is far more opaque. That being said, the novel shows how introducing climate science to religious minded people can actually save individual species and protect habitats. Climate change arguments in the novel create tension and disrupt families values just as arguments about religion did for previous generations. Kingsolver highlights that not only are there consequences for humans from climate change but also consequences for individuals for discussing climate change with friends and family. Kingsolver’s climate fiction not only depicts a climate change event and the human responses, but it also illustrates how environmental phenomena and stories about societal 55 collapse become political then personal and ultimately, cause people to have to choose between their habitat and their community, their community and their family, and their family and their personal sense of morality. Dellarobia and Ovid are able to prioritize their values and place global issues over personal ones, whereas characters like Cub, Hester, and Bear consider threats to the family unit more important. What Kingsolver shows us is that religious minded people exhibit high levels of compassion, but that that compassion is restricted to their inner circle and not necessarily extended to rest of world. On the other hand, scientists like Ovid and Pete are able to think globally in regard to climate change but their lack of compassion and faith hinders them from seeing the value of the family ties and the moral agency of sentient beings like Kingsolver’s Monarchs. 56 Works Cited “Acts”. Holy Bible: Old and New Testaments. Thomas Nelson, Inc. 1976. pp. 1598. Adams, Carol J., and Ebooks Corporation. “The Carol J. Adams Reader: Writings and Conversations 1995-2015”. Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2016. Accessed 2020-02-23. Andersen. 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Garrard, Greg. "In-Flight Behaviour: Teaching Climate Change Literature in First-Year Intro English." Routledge, 2017. Goodbody, Axel. “Risk, Denial and Narrative Form in Climate Change Fiction: Barbara 57 Kingsolver's "Flight Behaviour" and Ilija Trojanow's "Melting Ice"”. The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture. Universitatsverlag Winter, Heidelberg, Germany. 2014. American Studies - A Monograph Series, vol. 247, pp. 39-58. “Giant Panda No Longer Endangered”. World Wild Life Fund. Worldwildlife.org/stories/. September, 2016. Accessed 2020-04-13. Grossman, Elizabeth. “Declining Honey Population Poses a Threat to Global Agriculture”. Yale Environment 360. Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. April, 30. 2013 Accessed 2020-02-23. Heiphetz, L., Spelke, E. S. & Banaji, M. R. “The Formation of Belief-based Social Preferences”. Social Cognition, vol. 32, no. 1, 2014, pp. 22-47. “Galatian”. Holy Bible: Old and New Testaments. 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Mayer, Sylvia. “Science in the World Risk Society: Risk, the Novel, and Global Climate 58 Change.” Zeitschrift Für Anglistik Und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 64, no. 2, 2016, pp. 207–221. Mayer, Sylvia. "From an Ethics of Proximity to an Ethics of Connectivity: Risk, Mobility, and Deterritorialization in Barbara Kingsolver's “Flight Behavior”. Amerikastudien. vol. 61, no. 4, 2016, pp. 489-505. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Climate Models”. Climate.gov, 2020. Accessed 2020-04-13. Nord and Guenther. “Formations of Belief. Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular”. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Web. Retrieved 5 Feb. 2020. Peterson, A. T., and Princeton University Press eBook Package Backlist 2000-2013. “Ecological Niches and Geographic Distributions”. Princeton University Press, Princeton, vol. 49, 2012. 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“Let’s have the conversation” : climate change, religion, and belief formation in Barbara Kingsolver’s flight behavior
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