Our Dance with Ursula LeGuin, Eco-Warrior
Ursula LeGuin was a well-known science fiction author who died in 2018. Two of her novels yielded profound environmentally related experiences for me. And I share this dance with the multitudes. Ursula wrote 21 novels, 11 volumes of short stories, and 12 children’s books.
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The World for World is Forest, by LeGuin, was originally published in 1972. Miners from Terra (Earth) are harvesting the planet Athshe’s forest and mineral resources. However, the local people are not okay with the idea. Sound familiar? It alludes to the ravaging of our indigenous lands and cultures. It is the same premise as the movie Avatar.
A small theater (26 seats) in Southern California decided to produce a play based on LeGuin’s novel. I took part in that effort. We actors played several parts. I played a prostitute, a lieutenant in the occupying army, and a medicine man named Coromina. Quite an experience for the fledgling engineer and budding environmentalist that I was at the time.
About seven years later I wrote to Ursula LeGuin, telling her of my theater experience. I thought she would be appreciative. However, her post card response was terse. We were wrong in making the production without her permission. She was right of course. And it helped me understand that she was more than a far-out story teller.
Sierra Magazine, in an article by Michael Barrey, honored LeGuin by offering a reading list for even the most seasoned environmentalists.
Back in 1975, she wrote “The New Atlantis”, a short story about a nation where “Manhattan Island is now under 11 feet of water at low tide, and [on the West Coast] there are oyster beds in Ghirardelli Square.”
Always Coming Home (1985) portrayed a people called the Kesh. Their stories, songs and culture respond to a landscape etched deeply by Climate Change and the chemical wastes of earlier inhabitants.
The Sierra piece also quoted Ursula LeGuin from her 2014 National Book Foundation speech. “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.”
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My friend Tal sent me LeGuin’s book The Dispossessed in the 1980’s. Published a decade earlier, it was about a group of anarchists who left Uras to set up a utopian society on Anarres. In essence, Uras was a future Earth made inhospitable by humans, and Anarres was our moon. It so happens I later read “The Day Before the Revolution” by LeGuin. This short story was a prequel to The Dispossessed, portraying Odo who led the revolution that sent her people to Anarres. Odo died the day before they left in a flurry of rockets.
Fast forward to 2010 or so. I was on a vision quest on a mountain in Southeastern Oregon. The night was clear. The full moon was my main visitor. I thought about the moon a lot. The orbit. The phases. The man in the moon my grandfather tried to show me. I still couldn’t see it. While all that was interesting, I didn’t find it very inspiring. Then I thought of LeGuin’s stories.
Suddenly I realized that she had written about going to the Promised Land and how the leader didn’t live to see it. I knew intuitively that this was a story I needed to take down from the mountain with me. The Moses Story.
However, the next day I asked myself, “Isn’t that a little egotistical to be taking the Moses Story as my vision?” The answer came as the wind blew waves into the high grass around me. “There are a million Moses.”
So far, I have published two books with that vision in mind: Our Environmental Handprints (2021) and Our Journey to Sustainability (2024).
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Now that I think about it, Ursula LeGuin was herself a Moses. She wove environmental truths into world-class fiction. She has influenced millions with her deep, insightful, provocative writing. Hers was – and is – a positive vision of what our human psyche can embrace.
Thank you Ursula for sharing your dance with us.
Bio: Jon Biemer is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and holds a certificate in Process Oriented Psychology. He is a Professional Mechanical Engineer registered in California.