Small Wonder (2002)
Barbara Kingsolver (1955)
269 pages
Traumatic events have a way of focusing the mind, revealing to a person what really matters to them. For author Barbara Kingsolver, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 appear to have had just such a clarifying impact. Asked the following day “to write a response” to them, she ended up producing several essays that together helped her process the horror of what happened by examining connections to the larger challenges and complexities of our present day, global civilization. The resulting pieces, along with others that followed and some earlier essays that touched on the same issues, eventually came together in the book Small Wonder.
Kingsolver reveals the themes that tie together the broad range of topics in this collection, and her goal in addressing them, in the eponymous opening essay:
Political urgencies come and go, but it’s a fair enough vocation to strike one match after another against the dark isolation, when spectacular arrogance rules the day and tries to force hope into hiding. (21)
The intersection of the environment and agri-business takes center stage in A Fist in the Eye of God, in which Kingsolver explores the dangers of genetically modified seeds. She dismisses as short-sighted the typical arguments made in their support: their supposed importance for feeding the world’s growing population, and the claim that they pose no health concerns; such assertions, she argues, fail to acknowledge the dangers of the loss of genetic diversity caused by the shift to manufactured seeds. Over millennia, plants have developed a built-in robustness to changing conditions – in years that are cooler or hotter, calmer or windier than others, the genetic variation in natural seeds will mean that some percentage will grow into plants that can survive in such conditions. By contrast, while GMO seeds may have greater productivity in a normal year, they will be less capable of adapting to the vagaries of the climate over the long run.
Compounding this lack of robustness to varying conditions, some producers of such seeds have maneuvered to protect their investment by adding genetic modifications that don’t allow the resulting plant to create viable seeds. She points out that farmers using such seed cannot follow the ancient practice of holding back a portion of their harvest for the next year’s planting; instead, they need to buy new seeds each year. Thus, farmers must earn sufficient money from the current crop to afford the next year’s, leading to another kind of lack of robustness for farmers, as a bad crop year or falling harvest prices can leave them unable to pay for the new seed. This tension between the profit focus of seed manufacturers and its impacts on farmers is part of a larger dynamic succinctly captured by Colin Tudge, in his book The Time Before History: 5 Million Years of Human Impact: “... the agricultural systems of the [modern] world are not actually designed to feed people.”
For Kingsolver, the bottom line is that, given the bountiful outcome provided by nature after millennia of evolution, humankind should take care “to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer’s whip and chair, but with … reverence.” (108)
In the essay Marking a Passage, Kingsolver turns to her hometown and her vocation as a writer, lamenting the closing of a local, beloved, independent bookstore, one that she notes was important in the success of her first novel. Her description of “those sad last weeks of its closing sale” (221) reminded me of my own feelings at the loss of such a bookstore I had long frequented, Shaman Drum. Right up to the end, I was, as Kingsolver writes, “banking on a miracle” (221) that it remain open; I recall asking the cashier almost pleadingly, as I paid closing sale prices for some books, If I pay full price will it enable you to stay in business?.
Linking the shuttering of her favored local bookstore to broader societal implications, Kingsolver makes a plea to put “an extra dollar or two back into our hometown’s economy, rather than sending it off to a distant, faceless conglomerate.” (220) It can feel quixotic to fight back against the rise of such “conglomerates,” but her arguments resonated with me. I have my own small way of pushing back on them: using the Amazon search engine to look up information about a book, but then jumping over to my local bookstore’s website to order the book from them – really, how often does one need next day delivery on a book?
Across the essays collected in Small Wonder, Kingsolver touches on environmental, political, and social topics that continue to roil the world today, two decades after these essays first appeared. Generally, she begins locally, setting the stage by describing a very personal scene or moment around or outside her home, or on a trip she has taken into nature, before pivoting to explore the global concerns it implicates. Thus, her daughter’s discovery on a vacation trip to the beach that a beautiful shell she had hoped to add to her collection still has its hermit crab occupant becomes a mediation on the too often willful neglect of concern for animals; and, visits to the Yucatan peninsula and to the wild Pacific coast of Costa Rica become jumping off points to describe the loss of wilderness forest and critical animal habitat, respectively.
As a trained biologist, Kingsolver brings a strong, technical training to accompany her wonderful abilities as a writer. This combination enables her essays to be persuasive clarion calls for change in how we treat both the natural world and one another, presented within engaging prose at once demanding and compassionate. In more than one essay she acknowledges her own challenges and imperfections in fully abiding by the way of life she calls us to.
Our religious and cultural heritage is to deny, for all we’re worth, that we’re in any way connected with the rest of life on earth. We don’t come from it, we’re not part of it; we own it and were put down here to run the place. It’s deeply threatening to our ideology, at the corporate and theological levels, to admit that we’re constrained by the laws of biology. (226)
Ultimately, however, she returns consistently to her key message: we must all constantly strive to treat our world as a gift that requires our care, not a personal play pen for us to exploit.
Other notes and information:
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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