As I finished our section from The
Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, I found myself being
drawn back to one of Ghosh’s points on page six: “I do believe it to be true
that the land here is demonstrably alive; that it does not exist solely, or
even incidentally, as a stage for the enactment of human history; that it is
[itself] a protagonist.” I believe that we as humans—especially those who
identify as writers and artists, because we too are just as guilty—tend to
place the natural world and the land as a secondary thought when we are
creating. Ghosh’s language of “protagonist” advocates that the land should be a
leading character while most humans (again, writers and visual artists included)
would categorize the land as the “setting” for a human or a person-like figure’s
narrative. This appears to be just another example of one of the negative
byproducts of our hierarchical relationship with nature.
Throughout the text, Ghosh does an excellent job of highlighting why climate change causes issues for writers, and he states, “when novelists do choose to write about climate change it is almost always outside of fiction” (8). After reading this section, I tried to think of all the fiction writing and digital media I have consumed where the land plays the protagonist role, and off the top of my head, it was difficult to think of many (and when I did think of an example, it could be argued that the land was not entirely the protagonist but necessary to the human protagonist’s plotline: for example, Disney’s Moana or the classic film The Wizard of Oz). However, one of my favorite examples of the land acting as a protagonist is the Pixar short Lava. Lava is a short film that centers around two underwater volcanos that eventually find each other and fall in love, and the director of the film actually based his animations for the protagonist Uku after the coast of Kauaʻi’s Nā Pali and the northern cliffs of Molokai. It is a charming little film; however, the volcanos are highly anthropomorphized, which could be attributed to the fact that the film’s intended audience would be children. However, it seems like anthropomorphism takes away from the natural world and is just a substitute for another human story. Finally, I believe it is important to highlight the author’s point that a “great number of natural appearances … are regarded as prodigies” and connected to moral phenomena, such as the lava erupting due to love in the Disney short, but in actuality, these are natural occurring events in the environment (20). Hence, if we only care or find value in the land when it mimics humanity (whether that be in fiction or reality), we ought to be ashamed of our narcissism and reevaluate our connection to the land.
Watch Lava here:
Learn more about the geology that inspired Lava here: https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-real-geology-behind-pixars-short-film-lava-1713976956