Spoiler alert!
Last month we read Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Flight Behaviour’, an easy to get into novel about an ecological disaster that changes the lives of every member of the Turnbow family. I most enjoyed this book as it brings an internationally significant issue – climate change – down to a human level and deals with the vital concern of effective climate science communication.
The main character, Dellarobia Turnbow, discovers that a colony of breeding Monarch butterflies has relocated from its usual home in Mexico to her small town in the Appalachian Mountains. Though beautiful to behold, the relocation is Very Bad News for the butterflies. Their new home lacks the food supply and weather protection they need to survive the winter and complete their usual migrations, ultimately risking species collapse.
While using this opportunity to educate us about the impacts of human-caused climate change on the natural world around us, Kingsolver keeps bringing this back to a personal level. Although it attracts international attention from the scientific community, climate change activists and the media, for example, the novel’s central event is only initially discovered while Dellarobia is in the process of fleeing her family to start an affair.
This is one of the few modern books that any member of our book group has ever read that features people living in poverty who are not criminals. Dellarobia’s family shops in second hand stores for everything from clothes to kitchen ware, makes every stick of furniture pay its full dues in service and eats and uses every last part of the sheep they rear on their own farm. As well as giving an insight into how the people in this community might react to scientific outsiders suggesting climate change is the biggest challenge they face today, one of my favourite episodes in the book is when a climate activist attempts to tell Dellarobia how to live more sustainably. The family already has an incredibly small environmental footprint (albeit unwittingly) and no doubt has much they could teach him.
The plot picks up with the arrival of Ovid Byron and his small team of researchers, intent on recording the disaster but powerless to stop it. It’s the conversations between Ovid and Dellarobia that I think demonstrate the importance of what this book itself sets out to achieve – communicating in accurate, easily understandable and relevant terms the significance of climate change to all of us. This is not easy reading all the way through, however, particularly for anyone with young children or wanting to start a family; it gives you a lot to think about in terms of the world we are leaving for those who come after us.
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2013, this book describes well the daily lives of several women in Dellarobia’s community, including in particular how their lives have been shaped as a consequence of decisions they made years ago. In Dellarobia’s case, the butterflies’ presence – hailed as a miracle by local church-goers – initially drives her to abandon her own flight and return to her family. However, realising she needs more from life, including to give her children a better and happier future, she ultimately does move out. It’s quite a positive ending as she makes a break from the past to start a college course and escape the control of her in-laws. Perhaps, we similarly attempt to cling too much to what we know in the face of the threats that climate change brings, where really we need to be brave to make a change and enable a better future for everyone?
Clear scientific communication is vital, particularly given the seriousness of the issues we face. It is only really the degree of uncertainty that science is unclear about, not the likely outcomes of climate change. There should be many more books like this out there. Our next book group book is ‘The Shock of the Fall’ by Nathan Filer; more on that later. Separately, though, I’m going to read a book I got for Christmas that has been appealing to me from the book shelves all year and which I think will be a good follow up to Flight Behaviour, not least because it was written by a key science communicator from the last fifty years – Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’. Watch this space.
wisestisshe 