1In 2015, in a series of lectures adapted into the book Face à Gaïa, Bruno Latour brought to his readers' attention the scientific conception of the Earth as an organism first posited by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in 1974. A few years before Bruno Latour, ecofeminists and ecocritics had previously discussed Margulis's and Lovelock's theory. Outside of academia, the conception of Earth as an organism in which humans are a part interconnected to the whole as well as to the other parts was already established in "pre-modern" conceptions of nature found in other cultures and in several ecological movements.
2Yet Bruno Latour's analysis differs from these precedents in that he advocates a secularized perception of Gaïa, whereas the ecological movements and non-European civilizations imagining Earth as an organism more often than not sacralize the Earth in a spiritualist fashion. Such is the case for the Wicca movement, which started reclaiming the neo-Pagan cult of nature from the beginning of the 20th century onward. As part of the counter-cultural movements of the 1970s, the Wicca sacralized the Earth through the veneration of the Earth Goddess, an entity symbolizing the planet, nature, and women's sacred energy. 1970s Wiccas, including feminist and environmental activist Starhawk, reclaimed Pagan beliefs inherited from pre-modern European cultures and borrowed from the Native and AfroAmerican cultures. In her 1993 novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, Starhawk condenses her philosophical and spiritual views in a fictional representation of a utopian community living according to the Wicca principles.
3Outside of the Western culture, Earth-as-organism and interdependence are guiding principles in the Native American ontologies of nature described by Philippe Descola in Par Delà Nature et Culture. The Laguna Pueblo, to whom Leslie Marmon Silko belongs, believe that humans are part of nature, a paradigm which Paula Gunn Allen summarizes in her study of Native American spiritualism and gynocratic culture: "The American Indian sees all creatures as relatives (and in tribal systems relationship is central), as offspring of the Great Mystery, as cocreators, as children of our mother, and as necessary parts of an ordered, balanced, and living whole" (The Sacred Hoop, 59).
4In 1977 Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko represented this conception of nature through the story of a World War II veteran coming home to his Laguna Pueblo reservation with battle fatigue, while the land he returns to is suffering the plight of drought. The character's healing process, portrayed in symbiosis with the land's through the intervention of magic and the renewal of spiritual bonds between humans and the environment, emulates the belief system of the Laguna Pueblo. The physical dimension and mythical dimension of the world are but layers of the same reality. A connection with the land as well as a spiritual understanding of nature are essential components of the Laguna Pueblo identity according to Silko's novel, in which she portrays the protagonist's healing as the result of his rebonding with his identity and environment.
5Although different in terms of narrative lines and cultural backgrounds, Ceremony and The Fifth Sacred Thing both portray a drought described in relation with environmental degradation, and rely on the apocalyptic mode to tackle the issue. As they also portray a spiritual perception of nature which participates in its (re-)enchantment, their apocalyptic dimension seems at odds with the non-Christian belief systems they fictionalize. In that instance, they exemplify a trend in environmental discourses which concomitantly departs from Christian perceptions of the environment—which were criticized by Lynn White as positing nature as a godly creation meant to be exploited by humans (The Ecocriticism Reader, 1-14)—yet that rely on apocalyptic structures inherited from the New Testament.
6This migration of the apocalyptic rhetoric from one belief system to another and between secular and spiritual belief systems raises a pressing question regarding climate change: is there a need to sanctify nature in order to counteract environmental degradation? While Bruno Latour answers with the negative in Face à Gaïa, Leslie Marmon Silko and Starhawk propose different paradigms, which mirror cultural practices long established in the Americas and pre-modern Europe. This analysis attempts to demonstrate how their two novels exemplify a double movement in terms of spiritual environmentalism—the secularization of the apocalyptic mode coupled with the (re-)enchantment of nature for non-Native American readers—which results in a hybrid discourse entangling problems regarding the epistemology of climate change and environmental degradation.
7As Latour shows in We Have Never Been Modern, the paradigm of the modern Western world could be defined as a quasi-religious faith in science, and a clear-cut separation between nature and culture. In their novels, Silko and Starhawk offer an alternative to this paradigm which allows them to express the suffering of the land faced with drought. The presence of fictional elements that would appear as supernatural to Euro-American conceptions of the world offer an alternative epistemology to measure environmental degradation. On the other hand, I argue that the hybridism in question provides an alternative epistemology which finds an ideal milieu in the novel as a literary form, and as such represents an important tool for environmental politics.
8Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony posits the interconnection between humans and their environment in the Laguna Pueblo culture. Coming back to the reservation lands after World War II, the main character, Tayo, suffers from battle fatigue. Devastated by the death of his cousin Rocky during the Bataan Death March of 1942, Tayo is constantly subject to fever and nausea. Self-medicating with alcohol, Tayo shares nights drinking with other veterans, Harley, Leroy, Emo and Pinkie. Far from relieving his depression, alcohol brings out Tayo's violence and resentment at Anglo society and its responsibility for the discrimination against Native Americans.
9To cure his disease, Tayo is sent to Ku'oosh, a Laguna Pueblo medicine man. As he fails to suppress his symptoms, Ku'oosh sends Tayo to a half-Native half-white medicine man, Betonie, as Tayo is also of mixed origins. Together they invent a ceremony which starts to cure him, but has to be followed by several other ceremonies Tayo has to accomplish on his own. Betonie explains to Tayo the myth of Pa'caya'nyi, who used C'koyo magic to make water flow from a rock. Displeased at this wrongful use of magic, Nau'ts'ity's, Thought Woman who created the world in the Laguna Pueblo mythology, condemns the land to drought. Betonie also recounts the creation of White people by malevolent witches aiming to destroy the world. In the course of the novel, the mythical timeline merges with Tayo's to express the reenactment of the myth in his life.
10After coming home to care for his uncle Josiah's cattle, Tayo encounters Ts'eh, the spirit of the mountain. She gives him instructions to avoid the police, who are looking for him, and Emo, who has been spreading rumors about Tayo. Leaving Ts'eh, Tayo finds himself in an abandoned mine, from which was extracted the uranium that served to create nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, where he fought during the war. The discovery of the mine helps Tayo to the revelation that everything is interconnected and that he must care for his scarred land to accomplish healing. After having witnessed Emo, Leroy and Pinkie torture Harley to death when he was hidden and deciding not to become a murderer by killing Emo, Tayo goes to accomplish a rain ceremony by planting seeds.
11According to Helen May Dennis, the text "educates the reader about Pueblo culture" (41). She explains that Ceremony is "based on the traditional story of Tayo, a boy who brought rain back" (47). The interdependence between humans and their environment, as well as the agency of nature, are reflected in the story. Tayo feels he is responsible for the six-year drought plaguing the reservation lands. During the Bataan Death March on the Eastern front, where he had to stride through mud, Tayo cursed the rain: "So he had prayed the rain away, and for the sixth year it was dry […] Tayo could see the consequences of his praying" (13). As part of his healing, Tayo performs ceremonies meant to stop the drought. The union with the land entailed in the ceremonies notably involves lovemaking with Ts'eh, the spirit of the mountain, materialized in the shape of a woman whose depiction invigorates the connection between earth and humans: "he felt her body, and it was as warm as the sand, and he couldn't feel where her body ended and the sand began" (206). In turn, Tayo's healing also appears to prolong the land's healing:
The terror of the dreaming he had done on this bed was gone, uprooted from his belly; and the woman had filled the hollow spaces with new dreams. […] The dreams had been terror at loss, at something lost forever; but nothing was lost; all was retained between the sky and the earth, and within himself. […] The snow-covered mountain remained, without regard to titles of ownership or the white ranchers who thought they possessed it. They logged the trees, they killed the deer, bear, and mountain lions, they built their fences high; but the mountain was far greater than any or all of these things. The mountain outdistanced their destruction, just as love had outdistanced death. The mountain could not be lost to them, because it was in their bones. (204)
12The use of the words "uprooted" to describe the vanishing of pain, and the binary rhythm moving back and forth between the land's resistance to exploitation, and Tayo's resistance to disease, expresses the reciprocity of the healing process.
13The connection between Tayo's inner world and the outer world on the reservation is further extended in the treatment of drought in spiritual and mythical terms. In the poem which flows through the novel, wrongful use of magic leads to drought as a punishment from the spirits. The climatic unbalance is thus presented as the result of a disturbance in the physical and spiritual world. As Paula Gunn Allen explains in The Sacred Hoop: "Sacred often means taboo; that is, what is empowered in a ritual sense is not to be touched or approached by any who are weaker than the power itself, lest they suffer negative consequences from contact (28). Such is the case with the story of Pa'caya'nyi, who usurps the power of a stronger spirit by using C'koyo magic to make water flow.
14The intertwining of the mythical story and Tayo's story intimates both the spiritual dimension of his relationship with the land, and the idiosyncratic nature of the Laguna Pueblo literature. As Paula Gunn Allen explains:
The tribes seek—through song, ceremony, legend, sacred stories (myths), and tales—to embody, articulate, and share reality, to bring the isolated, private self into harmony and balance with this reality, to verbalize the sense of the majesty and reverent mystery of all things, and to actualize, in language, those truths that give to humanity its greatest significance and dignity. To a large extent, ceremonial literature serves to redirect private emotion and integrate the energy generated by emotion within a cosmic framework. (55)
15Tayo's ceremonial healing is embedded in the Ck'o'yo magic story, revealing the spiritual dimension of the protagonist's quest as well as the (re)enactment of the myth.
16Another aspect which sets Ceremony's world as a counterpart to the Euro-American value system is the circular and transient nature of the universe, interconnecting all of its parts. Murielle Cayouette describes Tayo's epiphany in the uranium mine as a revelation that he is part of "an ecological system that transcends the human species. By reconnecting with nature, Tayo is able to recognize other humans as parts of the environment and to accept the role of nature as an all-encompassing entity" (Cayouette 52). This absence of boundaries ironically recalls the overwhelming presence of boundaries in the European value system that pits culture against nature, science against religion, and man against woman. Shauna Thorp underlines the key notion of circularity in the novel, representing an alternative conception to the linearity which infuses Western ideologies of progress and conquest:
Characters are the same as their mythic predecessors, but they are also part of a story which has been unfolding and is still unfolding. […] The key here is to discard the notion of progress. Life is not progress; it is enactment. It is specifically enactment rather than re-enactment because the latter implies the notion of progress, but as Tayo comes to understand, 'This night is a single night; and there has never been any other' (192). The stories remain the same; what changes, what causes an unfolding, are the decisions individuals make about their actions. Both the 'real' person and the mythic figure can make mistakes but those mistakes can in turn be rectified, and must be if people are to remain in harmony with the earth. Because the world is cyclical, all things must be enacted repeatedly. There can be no one-time commitment to the earth from which people move continually forward; that commitment must be continually renewed as part of the responsibility humans have to the natural world. (157-158)
17Hence, the intertwining of the novel's storyline with the poem, like that of the spiritual and the physical worlds—a difference which however bears little relevance tin the Native American context—come to symbolize such circularity.
18Like Ceremony, Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing establishes a belief system discarding eurocentric values. Starhawk infuses her novel with the Neo-pagan beliefs which have shaped her struggle as a feminist and environmental activist. The story takes place in 2048, two decades after an environmental collapse. Twenty years earlier, an earthquake has allowed a group of religious fanatics to take control of California and set up a dictatorship. But there remains a free enclave in the bay area. Starhawk's futuristic San Francisco stands out as a rebellious city which has thrived despite the ecological disorders. San Franciscans have endured drought thanks to permaculture and sustainable use of technology. They identify as witches, referring to pre-modern European belief systems which predate the nature-culture split. These practices allow San Franciscans to live in relative abundance and peace, while the rest of the state suffers from restrictions under the yoke of a military group. The novel imagines how this community tries to resist the attack of the southern army while remaining true to their ideals of nonviolence and reverence for the earth's sacredness.
19To the community, there are five sacred things that cannot be appropriated or wasted and are thus sacred: the four natural elements and spirit. Starhawk's ecological utopia relies on a veneration of the earth which parallels Lovelock and Margulis's Gaïa hypothesis. The earth is described as "Mother Earth," an organism nurturing life through its interconnected parts, and an ecosystem in which humans stand as natural parts. The author imagines a community practicing the religion of the Goddess. In The Spiral Dance, Starhawk explains that the worship of the Goddess originates from witchcraft, which is "closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to the shamanism of the Arctic" (27). The three principles of this religion are immanence, interconnection, and community (22). These ideals stand close to the spiritual principles invoked in Ceremony. The cyclical view of reality (226) which Starhawk proposes as a major feature of witchcraft also parallels Silko's depiction.
20The suffering and healing of the land are represented in connection with that of the characters. One scene especially resonates with Silko's text. In Ceremony, Tayo rejoins the land through his lovemaking with Ts'eh. In Starhawk's novel, a similar depiction is found as the characters of Madrone and Bird are reunited after 10 years during which Bird was incarcerated in the south. Their reunion closes a period of drought. The scene starts with Bird seeing Madrone, "her hair sprawling on the grass, her skin ruddy as true madrone bark" (117-118), and continues: "he had been dying of thirst and she was a sweet well of water. […] Bird brought the rain with him" (124125). The love uniting characters and the land in The Fifth Sacred Thing parallels that which allows Tayo to reconnect with the land.
21The connection between land and humans operating in both novels allows them to propose both an alternative to the Western value system and a different epistemological way to perceive the suffering of the environment. In both novels, elements which can be perceived through a eurocentric lens as supernatural, such as the ceremonies and witchery, overcome the boundary lines drawn between nature and culture, and re-link humans and their environment.
22In Ceremony, one scene presents the conflict between European and Native values by commenting on the alienation ensuing from the revering of science. In this analeptic scene, Tayo's cousin Rocky discusses the drought and the associated difficulties in raising cattle:
'[Scientists] know everything there is to know about beef cattle. That's the trouble with how people around here have always done things— they never knew what they were doing.' He went back to reading his book. He did not hesitate to speak like that, to his father and his uncle, because the subject was books and scientific knowledge—those things that Rocky had learned to believe in. (69-70)
23In contrast with Rocky, Tayo defends the Laguna Pueblo way, which does not separate matter and spirit. The novel also insinuates that Rocky's death might be the result of his allegiance to American values, which led him to join the army. In contrast, Tayo learns to reconnect with others when after being haunted by a vision of his uncle's face on a Japanese soldier's body he realizes in the mine that he was in fact fighting brothers.
24A similar discussion of the value of science is found in The Fifth Sacred Thing. While practicing magic and spiritualism, San Franciscans also rely on renewable energy. The main character, Madrone, is both a doctor trained in medical practice and a healer initiated into witchcraft. Starhawk contends with David Abram that magic is "the ability or power to alter one's consciousness at will" (Spell of the Sensuous, 9), also illustrating in her novel Abram's theses that a more sound relationship with the environment depends on a corporeal retaking of matter and on spiritual practices bounding humans to nature. As far as science is concerned, Starhawk discusses scientific epistemology in The Spiral Dance, writing that "spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow" (220). She points out the fact that science is not altogether unable to grasp magic and spiritual realities, but sometimes needs more time to reach new concepts, and following intuitions sometimes reveals the veracity of religious beliefs. The Gaïa hypothesis stands as an example of this leap from intuition to science, as Margulis and Lovelock developed this idea after contemplating a picture of Earth from space. Starhawk suggests the proximity between the Gaïa theory and the religion of the Goddess by writing in The Spiral Dance: "in future or contemporary Goddess religion, a photograph of the earth as seen from space might be our mandala" (220).
25Regarding matters of environmental protection, the question of the epistemological measuring of climatic disorders relates to this spiritual approach to knowledge. Ecopsychology, in the works of Roszak for example, has been concerned with the invisible bonds between environmental degradation and the human psyche. In Ceremony, Tayo would be described by Western psychology as the victim of post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet the textual links that Silko traces between the weather and Tayo's state of mind do not appear as instances of pathetic fallacy. Silko writes: "The drought years had returned again, as they had after the First World War and in the twenties" (9). The trauma undergone by humans in times of war, the novel suggests, is accompanied by a trauma for the environment. The land is equally polluted by the material violence of the atomic bomb tested at Trinity, not far from Tayo's reservation, and the psychological violence of war, which has forced Tayo to see the Japanese as enemies, while they are his next of kin. Silko underlines this interdependent suffering when describing Tayo's revelation:
There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices […] the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery's final ceremonial sand painting. (228)
26In this passage, Tayo understands that the alienation from his land is also an alienation from other human beings, and that violence is but the feat of witches. In the novel, Silko invents a mythology to articulate the conflict between Western and Native cultures. Rather than positing white imperialism as an outside evil, the myth she creates brings it home to the Laguna Pueblos in affirming that Native witches created Europeans in order to destroy the world.
27Commenting on this reversal of the traditional opposition between European and Native American cultures, Greg Garrard argues that Silko "forfeits the subtle discrimination needed to respond to environmental justice issues in favor of a one-off drama that can only issue in disaster or utopia [by] reducing social, national and ecological conflicts to a dualistic spiritual confrontation of 'witchery' and 'ceremony', or 'natives' and 'destroyers'" (139). However, it seems to me that the narrative does not increase but undermines the spiritual confrontation. Blaming witches can be read as undermining the symbolic power of white imperialism. Presenting white people as the playthings of witches hence reverses the hierarchy that places them as empowered subjects while racial and cultural others and nonhumans alike are the objects, according to the eurocentric narrative of colonialism.
28Garrard explains that Silko "sets the possibility of hybrid ceremonies combining old and new, Pueblo and Euro-American elements designed to confront the 'witchery'" (138). Here, Garrard points to a hybridism which contradicts his subsequent debunking of the novel as pitting cultures against each other. This cultural hybridism, which is at the heart of both novels, comes out through a second major feature, that of the apocalyptic motif. Garrard notes that Ceremony has "thoroughly imbibed Judeo-Christian apocalyptic motifs" (139). The "end of times" are indeed referred to by characters and in the chant to describe the witches' purpose. Yet Garrard's analysis suffers from its obliviousness to the very hybridism he points out. As Paula Gunn Allen explains in The Sacred Hoop: "Every tribe has a responsibility to the workings of the universe; today as yesterday, human beings play an intrinsic role in the ongoing creation" (73). In the novel, this concept is exemplified by Tayo's role in the ceremony. As he meets with the mountain spirit, she presents him with a bleak vision of his fate, betrayed by Emo and the other veterans and chased by the police as a madman. But through his actions against the evil spirits, Tayo inverts the process and reestablishes order.
29The end of times in Judeo-Christian mythology implies a linear vision of time. Yet the cyclical nature of reality which is part of Tayo's realization comes to contradict the eschatological reading of the novel. In the text, the end of times materializes in the destruction of nature and the threat of global annihilation posed by nuclear bombs. Criticizing this apocalyptic mode of narration on the basis that it evokes a Judeo-Christian conceptions is problematic, as it undermines tangible threats. On the opposite, both novels rely on a secularized apocalyptic motif which is later circumscribed by an alternative form of spirituality.
30In accordance with Garrard, we can however recognize some problems with apocalypticism in environmental discourses. Such rhetorical outlines can conceivably imply that the environmental destruction of the world is the result of a divine scheme, a view which thereby relieves humans of their responsibility. One could also argue that apocalypticism can constitute a form of escapism, allowing humans to look away from the crime scene because it is too late to react. Yet Tayo's agency in Ceremony and that of San Franciscans in The Fifth Sacred Thing contradict this criticism.
31More generally, we may wonder if there exists a mode to represent large-scale environmental destruction which could entirely avoid even the remotest hints at apocalyptic motifs or tones. Similarly, we might wonder if there is a way of representing the future of environmental issues through a different lens than dystopic and utopic, the two modes that Starhawk explores in The Fifth Sacred Thing. In her novel she opposes two social, spiritual, and cultural systems: in Southern California, Los Angeles relies on an authoritarian model maintaining terror through propaganda, religious dictates, and rationing. In Northern California, a true Neo-pagan, environmentalist, and democratic community flourishes in a utopian San Francisco.
32If Starhawk's futuristic map of California can suffer from Manichaeism, she nevertheless tries to imagine a possible solution to environmental degradation. In my research on climate fiction, I have read many novels imagining the future of climate change and its consequences on humans. It seems that no matter the tone and ideological views presented in these novels, they always meet with critics, including myself, who are ready to point out flaws. It is as if we were in need of a perfect literary piece to finally expose the fact that climate change is upon us and about to endanger the lives of many. This necessity may actually be justified, since neither political activism nor scientific warnings seem to push us to take strong collective actions against the predicted disasters induced by climate change.
33In fact, scientific discourses could themselves be contradicted by the very arguments which pointed to the nature-culture paradigm and its role in nature's exploitation. Bruno Latour addresses this point in the article "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam," admitting that his own research on scientific epistemology may have fueled climate change denial against his will and better intentions. There lies the crux of the problem: can spiritual reenchantment be invoked as a solution to a problem of mistrust in science, namely climate change denial? If we contend that spiritualism and premodern traditions in part reveal the issue of modern scientism, how can we summon spiritualism to back up the scientific theory of climate change? Turning to alternative epistemologies of climate change, for example ecopsychology, might provide a workable solution. Since they neither rely on hard science nor on spiritual beliefs, but stand at a crossroads to explain how environmental degradation is a threat to human sanity, they could represent an alternative to scientific and political discourses. The novel, both able to explore the human psyche and to romance any aspect of reality, could offer the best media to explore such a way of communicating about ecology.
34But there remains a larger issue, which I suspect every academic concerned with environmental humanities have to face on a daily basis: faced with the magnitude of the issue, and the fact that special interests defended by private companies and governments impede collective action, do individual concerns such as those entailed in ecopsychology and fictional renderings of climate change even matter anymore. Given the emergency of the situation, can books, spiritual practices, and philosophical debates contribute to help us, and more importantly, is the individual and philosophical scale even worth studying in a context where 80 percent of CO2 emissions are produced by the industry? I am myself torn by these questions, and in times of despair turn to Cornelius Castoriadis, who suggested very convincingly that not only power structures, but imaginary constructions form the concrete holding societies together. That is true of course for religions, but also for secular principles in societies like ours. As oil companies continue extracting when the return on investment is getting lower and lower and environmental drawbacks become harder and harder to ignore, who could claim that we are not witnessing religious fanatism for the gods of growth and production? Climate change and the Anthropocene are revolutionary concepts because they question everything from human ontology to religious beliefs, natural ontologies to scientific epistemologies, and so on and so forth, asking us to problematize and redefine everything. Even though it might be already too late, nothing that would lead to fundamental changes can nor will be done without such questionings.