The overlooked lesson of Octavia Butler's "The Parable of the Sower"

@cfabbro, @myketfirvirrad, my apologies for dumping another taxonomy quandary on you - LMK if this belongs in ~enviro instead.

From the essay:

What is the point of talking about botanical beauty or mystery in times like these? How can anyone let their eyes linger on the way the light is hitting a bowl of persimmons? Who could be thinking about flowers at a moment like this?

Fair questions. Let me try to answer them. Fair warning: It’s going to be a bit of a roundabout journey, and it begins, as so many journeys in these times do, with Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

Published in 1993, the novel opens 21 years in the future—that is to say, 2024—in a degraded Los Angeles suburb. Lauren Olamina is a teenage girl from a family just up from the bottom rung of a society that is collapsing on itself. On November 6, 2024, a presidential candidate wins with the slogan, Make America Great Again. “He hopes to … suspend ‘overly restrictive’ minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws for those employers willing to take on homeless employees and provide them with training and adequate room and board,” Olamina writes in her journal. In practice, this means bringing back slavery. That president, Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner, is pretty much what you expect.

The narrator Olamina, on the other hand, is not. She has very little and soon loses even that. Her response to her circumstances is to imagine this new religion called Earthseed. Bits of Earthseed lore are included throughout The Parable. For times like these, the basic tenets have always felt like a balm to me (and many others). For example:

All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God Is Change.

Once that concept got into my mind, I have thought about it pretty much every day for 10 years.

Or consider this bit of wisdom:

Earthseed
Cast on new ground
Must first perceive
That it knows nothing.

Undoubtedly, you will see this book and Earthseed more in the coming months, as we did when Trump was first elected. There’s something so eerie and uncanny about this work. We should be stunned by Butler’s prescience, and scour the text for what it might offer about the cultural and political dynamics of our time.

But that’s not all that’s going on. Earthseed is not mere folk wisdom or sci-fi guide to the future. There is a key dictum of Earthseed that almost everyone ignores, and which names the purpose of humanity:

We are all Godseed, but no more or less so than any other aspect of the universe, Godseed is all there is—all that Changes. Earthseed is all that spreads Earthlife to new earths. The universe is Godseed. Only we are Earthseed. And the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.

“The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.” Olamina means this literally. In her religion, humans have a special purpose, and it is to spread our biosphere (“Earthlife”) to other planets.

There are fascinating passages in the book where she tries to tell people about her vision for Earthseed. They do not really believe her. Space travel? Lady, slavery is back! Refugees are streaming up I-5! Drugs and gangs and guns are everywhere! Society has collapsed! Space travel?!?

Sometimes the characters, like many people in our real world, choose to see Earthseed as mere prescription for an addled world. But Olamina is clear: “Fixing the world is not what Earthseed is about.” It is bigger than that. She said what she said: “And the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.”

When I first read the book, I struggled with Olamina’s insistence. In fact, it makes recruiting people to Earthseed more difficult. There is something inexplicable about it. Why did she feel this way? Because she did. It came from the part of her that did not need any kind of instrumental justification.

Over time, I came to understand it differently. Butler is saying: people need a transcendent goal, a way of tapping into the awe and wonder of the universe. The impossibility of travel to the stars in the Parable is neither here nor there. The power of Earthseed is that it demonstrates that anyone in any circumstances can hold an audacious and global dream for humanity in their heart. The existence of a nearly impossible vision inside Lauren Olamina is, itself, a form for power; it says, you cannot kill off the spirit through brute force and immiseration.

Does the specific dream matter? I’m not sure it does. And I would suggest a journey inwards into life, rather than outwards into space.

To me, our destiny is to be the part of the biosphere that comes to understand what it is to be alive. Life, in its many forms, remains fundamentally mysterious. Life does things that the rest of the universe does not. As physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker puts it, “Life is the only physics that can generate complex objects." Life has agency, and yet is made of the same things as the rest of the universe. How? It has something to do with information and energy, something down near the fundamentals of the universe, but how the parts are connected remains unclear.

Read the whole thing, please. As a grand dream, the Earth's biosphere is worth preserving, whatever you may believe about the value of various humane goals.