Not everyone has the stomach to watch an extinction
Dellarobia Turnbow does not like her name, her mother-in-law or the fact she is an orphan. She is even less impressed with where she has fetched up in life - not yet thirty and trapped in a loveless marriage thanks to a shotgun wedding that followed an unplanned teenage pregnancy that never even went to term.
Already, I like her. A lot.
We first meet Dellarobia as she heads up the dirt track in her charity shop cowboy boots for an ill-advised and illicit rendez-vous with a most unsuitable young man. The fact that nothing comes of this intended adultery is by-the-by because what stops Dellarobia, literally, in her tracks is a miracle; a beacon of hope she believes has been sent by God to show her he has not forgotten her or her struggling family: A thing that she finds deeply touching and beautiful beyond words.
If Dellarobia were just a little older - say forty or even fifty, then she would know that what might look like a miracle to one person, may look very different to another - and thus Barbara Kingsolver's new story unfolds.
Without spoiling what is a rollicking good read, albeit with quite a few underlying barbs, Dellorobia's miracle turns out to be the unexpected and unprecedented arrival of the golden orange Monarch butterflies which have swarmed the trees behind the failing farm in the Applachians where Dellarobia and her family struggle to make any ends meet. (The cover image gives this away so I am not spoiling anything by naming the species).
As word of this miracle/tragedy spreads (including to and through a very blinkered and celebrity-obsessed media) along comes our intriguing and handsome scientist - a Monarch butterfly specialist who opens Dellarobia's eyes to an impoverishment of the natural world that dwarfs her own feelings of poverty and to the terrible reality of the trigger for the butterflies (also) landing so off course - namely climate change.
Beneath the unfolding story of what to do - if anything - about this disaster, Kingsolver pricks at the complacency of a Green movement so good at talking about the issues but, perhaps, less good at working together for change or at addressing those issues in any way relevant to the unconverted (like Dellorobia and everyone she knows).
Not everyone has the stomach to watch an extinction
"Worries about the environment are not for people like us," Dellorobia tells the scientist who lies awake at night fretting about climate change. "Everyone chooses," he replies. "A person can face up to a difficult truth or run away from it."
It is a response that makes the scientist look stupid. We are now two thirds through our story and so we know that if there is one thing Delloribia and her kinsfolk are not, it is cowardly, profligate or uncaring. In fact when a climate change protestor camped outside her home invites Dellorobia to sign a "pledge' to help save the planet by changing her consumer choices, he soon realises that poverty will make your choices for you and because of this, her carbon footprint is probably a fraction of his own. Happily, he quickly shuts up.
It is the cry I hear, over and over, from the fragmented Greens. "How do we get people to care?" I have even heard people who care so much about the planet they think it a good idea to simply terrify others into caring too!
The most haunting line in the whole book is terrifying too. It comes when the already erratic weather (climate change) turns; threatening to decimate what is left of Dellarobia's butterfly population.
"Not everyone has the stomach to watch an extinction," the scientist tells her.
"So, you're one of the people that can?" she asks him.
"If someone you loved was dying, what would you do?"
As the nature of the loss - his loss, her loss, your loss and mine - hits her fully, Dellarobia's response shows you don't need any of the things you can buy to make a difference. And it doesn't matter if you are rich or poor or in between. You just need to care enough.
"You do everything you can," she says. "And then, I guess, everything you can't. You keep doing, so your heart won't stop."
And there speaks someone who cares. More than enough.
Susan Clark is associate editor of Resurgence & Ecologist and Managing Editor of the Ecologist
Follow her: @suzresurgence
Buy Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver at Faber and Faber (UK publication) 2012. ISBN: 9780571290802
