Earth Party by George Marshall

Earth Party Reviews

• 
  T.O. Munro

  I was guided to this book by seeing it referenced in Adam Trexler's Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in the time of climate change
  
  Trexler affords the book quite a detailed criticism, not quite so much perhaps as other cli-fi Novels like Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour or T.C.Boyle's A Friend of the Earth, but still enough to afford it a certain significance in his argument. Possibly Trexler's interest is because this is a rare book where the environmentalists - represented by the radical wing of the eponymous Earth Party - have seized control of the state are refashioning society in response to the environmental crisis. In this case that means a kind of soviet appropriation of land and resources and re-distribution of the populace to isolated and supposedly self-sufficient cells which are occasionally visited by members of the elite who have access to such luxuries as petrol.
  
  The story follows two main protagonists, Elizabeth and James as society falls apart in the literal wake of the North Sea flooding Cambridgeshire and overtopping the Thames barrier. Much as Hitler took over the Munich NDSAP and turned it into the Nazi Party, the gently amateur environmentalism of James' Earth Party has been supplanted by a much more militant brand of activism. Their repudiation of government incompetence quickly spills over into a civil war that the activists somehow win and can then impose their vision of a new national organisation on a subdued populace. A green version of Attwood's Gilead, or of District 11 in Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games.
  
  James and Elizabeth navigate their paths through the political and practical problems of this new world. The Earth Party do meet resistance from rebels, and also internal divisions within their leadership as to how much freedom to give to each subsistence cell. There are seeds of interesting ideas in here, but the writing is a bit clunky, prone to info-dumping, and the narrative arc appears to be a progression by all parties (pun intended) towards a political, social and personal compromise.
  
  To be honest, as can be seen from its Goodreads profile, this is a very obscure book whose prominence in Trexler's analysis is quite hard to fathom. The writing is rather ordinary, the nature essentially self-published through a now defunct publishing house. Now, don't get me wrong I know there are some excellent examples of self-published books admittedly within a very broad range that goes from excellent all the way down to dire. I have nothing against self-published books per se, although Trexler appears to have dismissing them disparagingly in his introduction "There were unfocussed novels by literary giants (Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake) and self-published e-books I couldn't ask anyone to read." Which only deepens the mystery of why he lavished such analytical attention on a rather journeyman narrative where neither the protagonist nor the world offer a deep or compelling vision of a climate changed future.
  Possibly, Trexler (like me) thought this might be the work of George Marshall the climate activist, seeking a fictional outlet through which to express his non-fiction findings? However, I did check and climategeorge kindly confirmed by email that the names being the same is just a coincidence, and that he has never met nor communicated with the author of The Earth Party.
  
  Alternatively, Trexler may have lavished attention on the book because it provided a balancing point to help suggest that neither climate activism nor capitalism had the answer to the climate crisis. While Trexler admits the reality of climate change he is reluctant to attribute the totality of blame to capitalism, nor to abandon the view that capitalism may have some part to play in resolving the crisis. One can accept the complexity of the wicked problem of climate change and eschew the binary simplicity of Kim Stanley-Robinson's view that capitalism and Climate Change are two sides of the same coin - cause and effect respectively. However, it would be wrong to downplay the significance of capitalism as the major contributor to the climate crisis and to try to claim it is just one of many equivalent factors, rather than the pre-eminent cause of the crisis and obstruction of the solution.