SCHOLARLY ARTICLE REBECCA MCWILLIAMS OJALA BALLARD,COL ROCHE AND ELENA WELSH Collectivism as Adaptation in Climate Fiction In the latter part of Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, teenage protagonist Lauren Olamina, accompanied by a small but growing group of other migrants, makes an arduous trek north through a near-future California beset by climate change and sociopo- litical collapse. Lauren begins to share with her companions the reli- gion she has been developing in secret since before her gated hometown was attacked and she was forced onto the road. Earthseed, she explains, understands God not as a deity, but as change itself; as such, God must be shaped, molded by Earthseed communities working together toward the shared Destiny, which is “to take root among the stars” (222). In other words, Earthseed is both a way of organizing life on Earth—a collectivist, adaptation-centered set of values and practi- ces—and a way of building toward leaving the decimated planet behind and setting up colonies on new worlds, where openness to radi- cal adaptation and communitarianism will be paramount to survival. With cautious pride, she tells her journal of Earthseed’s first converts (223). Their responses, however, are rather more nuanced than Lauren seems to want to admit. As Zahra says, “I don’t care about no outer space. You can keep that part of it. But if you want to put together some kind of community where people look out for each other and don’t have to take being pushed around, I’m with you” (223). This friction between Earthseed’s local goals and its larger ambitions continues to reverberate throughout the novel and its 1998 sequel, Parable of the ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 00.0 (2023), pp. 1–21 https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isad046 V C The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article/doi/10.1093/isle/isad046/7227288 by guest on 07 September 2023