Earth Abides
I don't often post here anymore, but I just reread an aging, yellowed paperback, Earth Abides, by George Stewart, who in his day was an English professor at U.C. Berkeley. The book was published in 1947. Stewart was a somewhat aloof academic who with some prescience in this novel postulated a great plague that wiped out nearly everyone on the planet. In Northern California, particularly Berkeley, only a few people survived.
This book is not the stuff of the movies Mad Max or I Am Legend. The post World War II years were kindly, gentle, almost naive times in comparison to the bloodshed and terror that surrounds us now. There is almost no violence in this book, but instead one finds an interesting case study over several generations of survivors of devolving civilization, evolving cultures, rotting infrastructures and changing ecosystems. The protagonist is an anthropology grad student at Cal, who in spite of himself records and ponders the changes. He particularly agonizes over the loss of reading and math and occasionally wanders in the great Bancroft Library, looking at the millions of books ignored by the illiterate, primitive offspring around him.
This book would be very different if written today. Pandemics are a real, everyday threat, almost unheard of in 1946. Now, survivors would likely think with their guns first rather than look at more complex and long-range solutions. Agriculture, described in this book as slowly going away, overrun by weeds, would today implode rapidly with the loss of water and our dependence on hybridized, genetically modified, monocultural crops. And the weeds themselves are more voracious than ever, with star thistle, Himalayan blackberry, and the like.
Having spent a lot of time in Berkeley in recent years, this book is more real to me than ever. In some ways, Stewart describes a sort of utopia. Now, more than 60 years after the book was written, we know such an aftermath would hardly be that. Yet, it is interesting to dream and wonder how our generation would handle things.
This book is not the stuff of the movies Mad Max or I Am Legend. The post World War II years were kindly, gentle, almost naive times in comparison to the bloodshed and terror that surrounds us now. There is almost no violence in this book, but instead one finds an interesting case study over several generations of survivors of devolving civilization, evolving cultures, rotting infrastructures and changing ecosystems. The protagonist is an anthropology grad student at Cal, who in spite of himself records and ponders the changes. He particularly agonizes over the loss of reading and math and occasionally wanders in the great Bancroft Library, looking at the millions of books ignored by the illiterate, primitive offspring around him.
This book would be very different if written today. Pandemics are a real, everyday threat, almost unheard of in 1946. Now, survivors would likely think with their guns first rather than look at more complex and long-range solutions. Agriculture, described in this book as slowly going away, overrun by weeds, would today implode rapidly with the loss of water and our dependence on hybridized, genetically modified, monocultural crops. And the weeds themselves are more voracious than ever, with star thistle, Himalayan blackberry, and the like.
Having spent a lot of time in Berkeley in recent years, this book is more real to me than ever. In some ways, Stewart describes a sort of utopia. Now, more than 60 years after the book was written, we know such an aftermath would hardly be that. Yet, it is interesting to dream and wonder how our generation would handle things.
posted by Betty at
8:47 PM
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