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Precisely twenty-five years later Marge Piercy published her novel He, She and It (1991), which has to be classified differently, as it clearly belongs to science fiction. In this work, the world is divided into three parts: first there are the masters, and then there are the people of the towns who still happen to be free. The larger part is dominated by some rich and powerful co-operations which are called the multis for short. There is a familiar Them-Us constellation between these two segments of the world, (3) and its third part, the so-called Glop, where men's living conditions are almost ghetto-like and therefore are extremely miserable. In between the two, the so-called free towns are located who possess a technological advance over the multis: they are compelled to sell their inventions to the multis in exchange for their freedom. This implies that there is a high degree of pressure on them for the permanent invention of new achievements, which makes their status very vulnerable. Thus a high amount of tension may be found in this work. However, Marge Piercy also deals in it with several environmental problems.
To begin with, the writer speaks of the polar caps melting and the oceans rising and rising (p. 34). Shira [the novel's protagonist] was borne "since the Famine, after the rising oceans had drowned much of the rice and bread baskets of the world, after the rising temperatures had shifted the ocean and air currents, leaving former farmlands as scrubland (= Buschland) or desert" (p. 37). Piercy's view anticipates today's situation on Earth, which includes global warming, the melting of Arctic ice, the sea levels rising, but she also describes the consequences for agriculture. Today we know that using pesticides and nitrogen oxides (=Stickstoff), fertilizers like phosphate and glyphosate in food production provide a kind of doubtful success which, at best, is partial and temporary. Of course, such chemical tools are meant to kill weeds, pest plants and small animals like insects which are thought to be harmful. However, by natural erosion, fertilizers get into lakes, rivers and oceans, i.e. ultimately they become an integral part of the food chain and thus contribute to deteriorating men's health and possibly to shortening their life expectancy.
It is true that people in Tikva [one of the free towns], still have real food as in the multi enclaves. In the Glop, people ate mostly vat-grown “foods made of algae … the world was always short on earth-grown food" (p. 153). From this it follows that people are not healthy: famines are frequent, and men's diet is permanently very poor. And it shows that the distance between poor and rich people continues growing. Poor people, that is, those who are the least responsible for climate change and environmental problems, suffer most from their consequences.(4) Probably earth has been exploited too much. As Aldous Huxley puts it: “Ignoring the obvious fact that his [man's] devastation of natural resources would, in the long run, result in the ruin of his civilization and even in the extinction of his species, modern man continued, generation after generation, to exploit the earth ...“.(5) There is nothing to add to this negative value judgment.
Piercy also mentions acid rain which killed the forests and which was responsible for its consequences to the ozone layer as well (p. 258). This problem was the first example of damage done to the forests, which, after all, was solved by using filters for factories and catalysts for engine-driven vehicles.(6) Today, then, the problems of the forests are of a different nature. Nowadays there are so many weather extremes that there is hardly any time left for regeneration: due to global warming, there occur more droughts, also more heavy rains, and these are often followed by very long cold spells. Because of increasing aridity, there are more forest fires, which imply a serious threat to human habitats and to the lives of plants, animals and human beings alike because it is getting more and more difficult to stop them.
The problematic description of the forests is supplemented by an analysis of the pollution of air and water. All these problems, according to Piercy, are intensified for men by a very high degree of radioactivity after a nuclear explosion, which is an enormous threat to the lives of all living beings. The consequence is that most birds have died and that people are overrun with insects (p. 122). Today people have to be worried by a different aspect: in the past few years an incredible number of bees have been said to have been dying so that many plants cannot be pollinated any longer so that human nourishment is endangered.
In other words, according to Piercy, "people had gone too far in destroying the earth, and now the earth was diminishing the number of people" (p. 116; cf. p. 132). Thus it may be traced in her text that “the lowering of the birth rate through pesticides, toxic waste accumulation and radiation stockpiled in the groundwater and the food chain also bears on the population drop” (p. 299). Piercy's statement, in a very concise and succinct manner, does not only foreshadow some of the most significant environmental problems of our time, but it also provides evidence of a considerable affinity with Huxley, as it may be found in his metaphor of parasitism. This can be traced in his novel Ape and Essence: “In the end this one-sided relationship proves fatal to both parties; for the death of the host cannot but result in the death of the parasite by which it has been killed. The relationship between modern man and the planet … has been that, not of symbiotic partners, but of tapeworm and infested dog, of fungus and blighted potato.”(7)
As one consequence, in Piercy's view, most people get infertile which means the death rate exceeds the birth rate, that is, the nation's survival is at stake. This is also a crucial theme in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), in which the servants, by their monthly mating duty, are abused as sexual objects in order to beget and to bear children who are taken away from them as soon as they are born.(8) The handmaids, then, are nothing but inferior surrogate mothers. In Tikva “families with more than one child were unusual” (p. 348). And Shira's mother points out “the places where the multis cut down the rain forest, deep and strip mined, drove the peasants off the land and raised cash crops [ ... ] till the soil gave out” [...] (p. 194). For this reason, the inhabitants of Tikva take a counter-measure: “Everybody in town put in an annual week planting trees in a deforested area. It was one of the only hopes in the world that the warming could be slowed down and eventually subside” (p. 384). It is doubtful, however, whether this behavior may completely compensate the huge damage caused by forest fires and whether it may be a successful antidote against deforestation. However, it represents a measure which shows people's willingness to resist the political power of the multis.
If forests are changed into deserts, the amount of CO2 emissions is increased, which implies that there is less oxygen in the air which men can breathe. As a result, there will be more allergies and more cases of asthma, which will be a danger to many people's lives. Air pollution is perhaps the most dangerously underestimated environmental problem for men's health.(9) Correspondingly, in Tikva "using poisons or allowing them in contact with the soil or the water table was an offense punishable by death" (p. 319). Such a harsh punishment shows that people in the free towns have developed a critical consciousness concerning their environmental problems.
It goes without saying that PIercy's list of environmental problems is not complete, but as it refers to water pollution, air pollution, to deforestation and to the poisoning of the ground, it is astonishingly both topical and rather systematical. Of course, different aspects may be listed in this context, e.g.
Yet it should be clear without any doubt that neither a perfect solution nor a complete catalog of measures for saving our planet exists. As to the free towns like Tikva, there is still some hope left for them, because they are keeping up the good fight.
(2) Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, p. 117 (In the following, page references to her novel He, She and It will be given in brackets in this text).
(3) Cf. Dirk Steffens/Franz Haberkuss, Über Leben. Zukunftsfrage Artensterben: Wie wir die Ökokrise überwinden (München: 5. Auflage, Penguin, 2020), p. 189.
(4) Eckhart von Hirschhausen, Mensch Erde! Wir könnten es so schön haben (München: DTV, 2021), p. [77] and p. 79.
(5) Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence (London: Vintage, 1948), p. 129.
(7) Huxley, Ape and Essence, p. 129.
(8) Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1985), pp. 120-121.
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