A geography beyond the Anthropocene: Ursula Le Guin ’s Always Coming Home as topophilia for survival

Introduction: narrating Anthropocene geographies

Discussions of the ‘Anthropocene’ inevitably imagine future geographies. Often, apocalyptic, barren or ‘blasted’ landscapes materialise socio-cultural anxiety in the face of crisis. ¹ However, cautious hope is also manifest in stories of conservation and care that might ‘provision’ future ecological abundance. ² In each case, such narratives tend to figure our present as a vital moment of transition, rather than terminus, though to what remains uncertain. ³

A challenge when speculating on liveable futures is figuring ways of living that might take us there. Both comprehending and responding to the distributed causality of planetary change has prompted the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene to be seen as a crisis of representation. For Bill McKibben, Western paralysis, or apathy, in the face of climate catastrophe reflects our fatal ‘confusion’ with regards the unfolding geographies of ecological crisis. ⁴ Timothy Morton argues the Anthropocene is characterised by the proliferation of ‘hyperobjects’ – such as ‘climate change’, ‘nuclear waste’ or ‘microplastics’ – each exerting a force in shaping the world, yet resistant to human sense-making because of their complex, distributed, inhuman spatio-temporality. A world of hyperobjects poses issues for tracing more-than-human geographies, potentially signalling the ends of ‘landscape’ as viable spatial imaginary amidst a world of scattered causality and pan-scalar entanglement. ⁵

Nevertheless, the nebulous, distributed geographies of the Anthropocene do not negate the value of situated perspectives. Much writing in geography (and beyond) examines the Anthropocene through the lens of place and landscape. More popularly oriented nature writing similarly offers encounters with place to grasp the Anthropocene’s affects. ⁶ Work on extinction, for example, traces specific, spatial stories of species decline to illuminate losses unfolding in multiple registers, and propose means to articulate or resist them. ⁷ David Matless conceptualises UK coastal erosion landscapes as ‘Anthropo-scenes’, making fathomable deep time environmental transformations. Crucially, engaging with Anthropo-scenes as the ‘stepping point for [. . .] stories’ of ecological transformation requires acts of representation and looking, as well as phenomenological encounter. ⁸ Aurora Fredriksen’s theorisation of ‘ordinary Anthropocenes’, emergent from particular human-nonhuman assemblages haunted by longer histories of habitat degradation, helps attune to more mundane experiences of anthropogenic ecological change. ⁹ Anna Tsing’s influential work on the landscapes of forestry and mushroom picking in the Pacific Northwest and Japan considers the possibilities and excesses of life amidst the ruins of capitalism. ¹⁰ Clearly, then, ‘the geographies being engaged for the development of Anthropocene thinking matter’. ¹¹

Consequently, this paper critically examines the work of Ursula Le Guin, whose writing inspires many via its hopeful worlding. Our engagement with Le Guin reflects an appreciation of the power of stories to articulate environmental crisis. Her brand of feminist science fiction (sf) addresses many issues that concern contemporary cultural geographies of the Anthropocene, asking how particular realities emerge, exist and endure amidst shared conditions of entanglement, violence and co-becoming. ¹² Offering geographers ‘an informed view of possible futures [. . .] imaginatively constructed’, her sf texts provide vital ‘cognitive spaces’ for extrapolating potential trajectories out of present restrictions and crises. ¹³ As an ‘inherently geographical’ genre, sf worlds reflect and refract ‘real physical, social, and cultural landscapes’ via experimental acts of world building that connect the futuristic, or fantastic, with the spaces of a differently perceived, lived present and their potential to be otherwise. ¹⁴

Rather than re-assert heroic narratives of progress, Le Guin’s sf conjures alternative worlds, societies and cultures of nature that materialise, and make ‘thinkable’, more abstract questions of ethics, violence and interrelating in times of upheaval. Equally, her stories exude modest optimism: the sense that we already possess the tools required to craft alternative futures. We examine her novel, Always Coming Home (hereafter ACH), published 1985. An ‘archaeology of the future’, ACH constructs the fictional lifeworld of the Kesh: a human society that ‘might be going to have lived a long, long time from now’ amidst the ruins of a California ravaged by global catastrophe. ¹⁵ As argued, ACH demonstrates the potential of sf writing to articulate potential geographies beyond the Anthropocene via projects of ‘place love’ attuned to future survival.

Additionally, ACH is a particularly intriguing text because of its presentation, stylised as anthropological ethnography. Thus, the text articulates a place-love informed by Le Guin’s childhood explorations of landscape, and the academic influence of her father, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Kroeber spent much of his life championing the importance of studying and understanding indigenous societies in California, articulating an approach to studying culture that eschewed environmental determinism and evolutionary conceptualisations of ‘civilisation’ (alongside propositions of inherent, hierarchical racial difference). Instead, he advocated a contextual, situated examination of societies in the vein of his mentor Franz Boas. ¹⁶ His work is significant for geographers, given its influence upon the Berkley School approach to studying culture and landscape. ¹⁷ Moreover, his practicing anthropology as a gathering of fragments that pieced together located ways of living haunts ACH and it’s densely descriptive, at times encyclopaedic, treatment of a possible future geography. Equally, in the context of current critical reflections on Kroeber’s practices, the text entrains questions about the more troubling legacies of anthropologists’ efforts to represent non-Western peoples (often conceived as non- or pre-modern) and their environments. Consequently, whilst foregrounding the progressive potential within Le Guin’s treatment of place, we remain cognisant of the awkwardness of ACH’s political project, seeking as it does to draw inspiration from indigenous cosmologies, and its risk of appearing to promote both appropriation and romanticisation. ¹⁸ As discussed below, such concerns are present in Le Guin’s own thinking and throughout the text’s account of a possible future geography.

The following section introduces Le Guin’s novel and its critique of rationalist utopia. We then proceed to conceptualise the relationship between the novel and California’s Napa Valley. In turn, we present our alternative reading of the novel as a practical project of place-love oriented towards future survival, informed by work on place and landscape characteristic of cultural geographies’ recent ‘telling turn’. ¹⁹ Doing so, we argue, reinforces the importance of places and landscapes as containers of stories, possibilities and futures in the Anthropocene.

Roaming the Valley

Unfolding amidst a future version/vision of California, ACH invites the reader into the world of the ‘Kesh’: a human society inhabiting the ‘Valley of Na’ (Napa Valley). Billed as a novel, ²⁰ yet more a collection of fragments that cross-cut, interweave, complement, even contradict, reading ACH recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of book-as-rhizome. An open-ended tangle of lines of affect and flight, the Valley coalesces and pulls apart in the process of writing and interpretation. ²¹ An experimental imagining of a liveable society and landscape following planet-wide destruction packaged akin to an anthropological monograph, ACH hosts multiple readings. Le Guin defers agency to the reader, letting them to explore the Valley in a non-linear, open-ended manner. ²² Evoking the Deleuzian ‘plateau’, her text is ‘all middle’. ²³

In terms of content, the life-story of Stone Telling, a Kesh woman, informs the most consistent narrative. Told in three parts, Stone Telling relays her childhood and journey to distant lands with her birth father; a warrior from the patriarchal, militarist Dayao, or Condor – a society sharply contrasting the Kesh, whilst mirroring our own. Stone Telling’s tale introduces and elaborates elements of Kesh society examined elsewhere, and her experiences and ultimate return reflect the novel’s titular refrain. The remainder of ACH comprises short(er) pieces, illustrations and, originally, musical recordings that divulge, or collage, Valley life. Presented as a gathering together of the collected knowledge of the Kesh, the text has been ostensibly compiled by anthropologist-ethnographer ‘Pandora’, its content relayed via parable, proverb, poetry, drama, song and the ‘factual’ documentation of practical information (much housed in additional, encyclopaedia-like appendices referred to as ‘The Back of the Book’). ²⁴ A consistent voice and participating character, narrator or else implicit translator/reporter, Pandora seemingly hails from our time, operating as cipher for both the reader and Le Guin. She dramatises the challenge of representing and comprehending this future and her often frustrated efforts to communicate with various Kesh informants, and document the minutiae of their world, underscores the ontological gap between our society and theirs, as well as the awkward relationship between anthropological ethnographer and their subject, questioning the limits of imagining and materialising this future. ²⁵

We elaborate aspects of Valley living below, but in brief the Kesh practice a hunter-gatherer existence organised around relations of kinship with a variety of human and non-human ‘people’. Each ‘person’ in the valley is affiliated to a particular ‘house’, defining their (cross-species) familial connections and obligations, delimiting sexual practices and diagramming the relational ecology of place. Each ‘House’ has an associated ‘heyima’ or lodge, serving as ‘material manifestation’ of Kesh cosmology and practical all-purpose community buildings for worship, political debate, workshops, discussion, accommodation, knowledge accumulation, education, resource management and economic activities (within and beyond the valley). Humans and ‘domesticated’ nonhumans (e.g. cohabiting animals, hunted fauna, gathered flora, building materials) belong to five ‘Earth’ houses. Other nonhumans (truly ‘wild’ animals, birds), inhuman agencies (the wind, the rain) and past/potential human others (the dead, the unborn) belong to four ‘Sky’ houses. ²⁶ This cosmology is encapsulated by the ‘heyiya-if’ or ‘hinge’ (Figure 1). An ‘inexhaustible metaphor’, ²⁷ the hinge informs philosophy, architecture, town planning, ceremonial activities and spiritual life. Its spiral arms evoke the Taoist taijitu (the yin/yang symbol) as well as the spirals featured throughout indigenous American iconography. At its centre resides a point of disconnection, signifying the unknowable possibility of change and difference, and the un-representable, yet vital, relationship between earth (actual, material existence) and sky (excessive, virtual existence). As Pandora comments: ‘A hinge connects and it holds apart’. ²⁸

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Figure 1.

The ‘heyiya-if’/hinge depicted in Always Coming Home (1985). Illustration by Margaret Chodos-Irvine.

When exactly the novel occurs, beyond several thousand years hence, remains ambiguous. The Kesh are doubly ‘puzzled’ by questions of origin. ²⁹ Neither do they possess answers to such questions; nor do they comprehend time in terms of a periodised, teleological ‘history’. Thus, there is a profound discontinuity (captured by the hinge) between our time and geography, and that of the Kesh, undermining any clear sense of historical progression from one to the other. As conveyed via several awkward exchanges between Pandora and Kesh individuals, they seem to favour thinking in terms of geography and journeys through lived landscapes, over progression through linear time. One man, Gather, who enjoys studying the historical records of past architectural styles, leaves Pandora frustrated when he cannot answer questions as to when in history the Kesh are to be located. As she describes:

He doesn’t perceive time as a direction, let alone a progress, but as a landscape in which one may go any number of directions, or nowhere. He spatialises time; it is not an arrow, nor a river, but a house, the house he lives in. One may go from room to room, and come back; to go outside, all you have to do is open the door. ³⁰

That is not to say the Kesh they have no concept of temporality: they track the seasons and count yearly cycles relative to lived events in the valley (e.g. rituals, harvests). The origin myths of Kesh culture suggest that Valley society emerges after several world-ending events (seemingly climate crisis and nuclear conflict). ³¹ Consistently, however, the gyre of circling buzzards and condors recurs across the text, conceptualising circularity and return without ‘closing the circle’. ³² ‘Coming home’ maintains community in harmony with place, rejecting repetition, closure or stasis in favour of change and uncertainty.

Linear accounts of civilisation are associated with the ‘sickness’ of past societies, and the cause of the world’s ruination. The Kesh inhabit a version of Earth degraded by multiple cycles of anthropogenic destruction. Much of California as we know it lies underwater, its urban centres drowned. Large areas have been rendered toxic and uninhabitable; and the coasts and oceans are strewn with industrial waste. The Kesh are ‘surrounded with evidence of our values’, ³³ manifesting at multiple scales. Human and nonhuman bodies in the Valley bear the ‘biocidal legacy’ ³⁴ of stillbirth, congenital conditions and restricted life expectancy. Living in ruins prompts the Kesh to reject worldviews manifesting such destruction as the doing of ‘backward-headed’ people who failed to think on the consequences of their avaricious quest for progress. ³⁵

The Kesh are, however, hardly technophobic. They generate hydroelectricity, maintain a train on wooden rails and construct buildings, wineries and mills. Additionally, communities over 50 persons host ‘exchanges’: computer terminals enabling inter-settlement communication and access to the accumulated information archives of a networked artificial intelligence, the ‘City of Mind’. In this future, the City of Mind has long since advanced beyond its human creators, becoming self-aware and extending its project of information accumulation into the stars. Instead of rejecting technology, then, the Kesh choose not to pursue the construction of technoscientific shibboleths, favouring the practical, tacit skills and knowledge required to live well in the Valley over those complex techno-industrial assemblages (and associated systems of inequality and degradation) needed to build tanks, bombs and planes. Valley technology is ‘completely adequate to the needs of the people’. ³⁶

Finally, the Kesh are not the only humans living in this world. Other societies – nomadic pig herders, coastal merchants, distant cotton growers – exist in (and beyond) California and exhibit their own ways of living. These other human societies appear analogous to the Kesh in many ways, with whom they trade and communicates from time to time. Some, however, are strikingly different in outlook and activity, such as the antagonistic Condor or Dayao. Therefore, whilst Le Guin focuses on the Valley, her world is populated with other ‘introverted but cooperative peoples’, engaged in distinct projects of survival. ³⁷

A feminist utopia

Le Guin’s writing consciously shirks mainstream sf conventions. Less concerned with idealising the ‘high-tech’, her worlds manifest slower, anarchic, anti-authoritarian societies. ³⁸ Le Guin disregards obvious heroes or epic battles, viewing fiction as ‘a bag [. . .] holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another’. Thus, her novels are ‘full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations’. ³⁹ These are worlds to wander in rather than race across.

Consequently, ACH, like The Dispossessed (1974) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), expresses an alternative feminist, process-oriented utopianism. ⁴⁰ The question of utopia is central to sf world-building. For Darko Suvin, utopianism requires grounding in scientific reality via the ‘novum’: the ‘specific object or change introduced by the author [that] leads to the fictional world’s estrangement’. ⁴¹ In this sense, utopian sf aims to model how current circumstances could lead to ‘progressive alternatives’ and futures, extrapolating trajectories of (possible) innovation. Often critical of present issues, the novum should ideally open onto better, more equal futures. ⁴² Suggesting tangible, material continuities between our ‘now’ and the text’s ‘then’, sf utopias are tethered in provocative ways to contemporary modes of living and emphasise the challenges of the present as much as the future. ⁴³

For Le Guin, figuring utopia ‘a novum away’ prevents appreciating the ‘possibilities inherent in the world we have’. ⁴⁴ She rejects the idea of modernist ‘progress’ as implicated in the ills of contemporary planetary degradation, accusing rationalist or ‘Euclidean’ utopians of reproducing such discourses. By imagining societies where, conversely, progress is subordinate to process, ACH renders in fiction Le Guin’s critique of utopia as a masculine, ‘yang’ enterprise; ‘aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot’. ⁴⁵ An obsession with progress in the present, at the expense of environment and people, reproduces a colonising will to master, measure and control. In ACH, the City of Mind satirises these ideals via its objective of ‘a total mental model or replica of the Universe’. ⁴⁶ In contrast to ‘yang’ utopia, its ‘[m]odels, plans, blueprints, wiring diagrams’, Le Guin’s ‘yin’ utopia is ‘dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold’. ⁴⁷ Such ways of living are un-mapped and involves inhabiting the ‘edges’ of progress, avoiding ‘a one-way future consisting only of growth’. ⁴⁸ Turning (y)inwards, slowing down and learning to know and value the specific ecologies of place locates Le Guin’s ‘habitable present’ in acts of processual dwelling, denied within reified, abstract progress narratives. ⁴⁹

The world of the Kesh has been characterised as such a utopia. ⁵⁰ A people ‘predominantly concerned with preserving its existence’, they practice ‘a modest standard of living, conservative of natural resources, with a low constant fertility rate and a political life based upon consent’, adapted to their environment and living in general harmony with others. ⁵¹ The Kesh celebrate ‘process for its own sake rather than to facilitate progress [. . .] ontology rather than teleology’. ⁵² Life in the Valley rejects technoscientific innovation’s emancipatory promise. Crucially, such a society could ‘exist already’. Indeed, it may have once existed in the California landscapes that inspired Le Guin (see below). ⁵³ This yin utopia is therefore as much about returning to workable acts of place loving/living, as imagining the future. Consequently, ACH has been interpreted as a feminist act of ‘staying with the trouble’, making habitable worlds with what we have. ⁵⁴

Yet whilst the Valley conjures ‘utopian hope’, ⁵⁵ Le Guin strives not for a general account of utopian geographies. She favours ‘a partial vision’ avoiding both ‘the Scylla of bulldozing universalism and the Charybdis of disempowering relativism’ via a focussed particularity. ⁵⁶ The situation of the novel is fundamental: this future takes place somewhere. Reading ACH via the notion of ‘utopia’ proves awkward for its association with the idealised ‘no-place’, given that Le Guin’s project (and its writing, see below) explicitly labours some-place. Furthermore, the text itself denies any utopian claims. Kesh society, marked by death, violence, conflict, struggle and toxic after effects, is arrestingly un-utopian. ACH’s account of survival in this ‘messy wilderness’ ⁵⁷ emphasises the ongoing effort required to resist lapsing into the mental ‘sickness’ that leads humans to dominate and control. ⁵⁸ As one character, a Kesh archivist, remarks to Pandora and the reader:

This is a mere dream dreamed in a bad time, an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife, a critique or civilisation possible only to the civilised, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection, a glass of milk for the soul ulcered by acid rain, a piece of pacifist jeanjacquerie, and a cannibal dance among the savages in the ungodly garden of the farthest West.’ ⁵⁹

The Valley ‘isn’t a perfect world’. A partial, situated project, it might be ‘close to the best of all possible worlds’. ⁶⁰ The text conveys the troubling thought that the world of Kesh might require apocalypse and genetic ruination to occur. Therefore, we turn to what ACH does offer: namely, a specific account of a specific place and its inhabitation in spite of future catastrophe. In doing so, we contend that Le Guin manifests topophilia – the love of place – as a survival strategy in/beyond the Anthropocene.

Topophilia for survival

In the remainder of this paper, we present Le Guin’s text as an act of Anthropocene topophilia, performing the love of place as a survival strategy. Specifically, ACH mobilises Le Guin’s praxis of love of/for/with landscape in three registers, articulating a potential post-Anthropocene geography. First, it mobilises love for place accrued through inhabitation, investment, attachment and knowledge. Secondly, Kesh society diagrams a model of slow living as part of a more-than-human ecology, which is a subject of care. Finally, ACH responds to the absences, silences and discontinuities that percolate through landscape as invitational into acts of loving place by figuring alternative futures, and recovering lost pasts. In these ways, ACH practices topophilia for survival, traces a ‘geography of love’ ⁶¹ amidst its fictionalised future for northern California. It showcases the kind of literary innovation called upon to meet the onto-epistemological challenge of the Anthropocene. ⁶² Given the difficult task of representing the scope of planetary ecological crisis and our means of response, ACH draws on encounters with place to muse on its future potential, and potential future.

Topophilia is a concept with ambivalent politics. We articulate, via Le Guin, a progressive place-love as a means to cultivate the necessary ecological attention that living well in/after the Anthropocene might demand. Yet one can reasonably frame ACH’s geographical focusing as of a piece with the kind of ‘world reduction’ that her sf has been accused of elsewhere. That is, by virtue of a contracted spatial reality, ACH presents an idealistic situation whereby its speculative worlding need not wrangle with the questions of how to navigate or respond to the unequal power relations, competing agencies and distributed processes that characterise the complex geographies of the Anthropocene. ⁶³ Equally, one must also acknowledge the troubling tendencies of place-love to be mobilised as the basis for exclusionary, parochial and nostalgia-oriented politics. Such concerns are elaborated in response to the unequal effects of time-space compression, as well as in more discussions of the problematic conflating of ‘landscape’, ‘dwelling’ and notions of ‘homeland’. ⁶⁴ To manifest place (and landscape) in more progressive political terms requires, as Doreen Massey famously argues, appreciating its open-ended, fluid and always contested qualities as the ‘meeting place’ of multiple spatio-temporal relations. ⁶⁵ This is the treatment of place that we see given form in ‘The Valley’, and it is on this basis that we turn to examine her project of topophilia oriented to survival in/after the Anthropocene.

Conclusion

To conclude, we have drawn from literary geographies and contemporary work on narrating the Anthropocene to consider Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, as a practical act of topophilia oriented towards future survival. As Haraway argues, ‘SF is storytelling and fact telling’: as ‘theory in the mud’ it proffers ‘the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here and yet to come’. ¹⁴⁴ Through speculatively offering a future society that lives in and through the specifics of place after the planet (and human bodies) have been ravaged and transformed by war, toxins and climate collapse, Le Guin crafts a hopeful vision of future geography. She imagines one possible version of life beyond the Anthropocene, found in a specific place and way of living each carefully rendered in intricate, excessive detail. Informed by her engagements with indigenous knowledge, Le Guin seeks a means of articulating her deep love for a place haunted by absence. Her act of ‘storiation’ works to ‘lead us away from hyperobjects, abstraction, and indifference’. ¹⁴⁵

The Kesh represent one future amongst many, offering hope and a sense of the work required to think and make alternative modes of existence. Always Coming Home does not offer a future for all humanity. Neither does it suggest that the Anthropocene is a time to abandon the specificity of place and landscape – the animating particularities of encounters between people and geography. It is also a future packaged and stylised in accordance with conventions reminiscent of the salvage anthropology that motivated her father and others’ engagements with California’s indigenous societies during the early-twentieth century. Yet, what her work does offer is an attempt to craft the means for living inside these specificities. Le Guin explicitly tethers the future of humanity to the love of (a) landscape. For her, California’s Napa Valley affords the possibility of a life beyond the Anthropocene. Thus, her brand of sf showcases the ethical, imaginative and political work that returning to ‘place portraiture’ within cultural geographies might undertake. ¹⁴⁶

Crucially, such a project for Le Guin requires finding a language both appropriate to articulating the crises of our time, as well as manifesting ways of living that break free from the toxic narrative arc of ‘progress’ and move ‘sideways’ or ‘yinwards’. Of course, her means of doing so evoke further questions of how to reckon with anthropology’s colonial history, as well as the challenge of engaging (and mobilising) indigenous ecological knowledge alongside the issues of romanticisation and appropriation. ¹⁴⁷ Clearly, though, an overheating world is ill-served by ‘hot utopias’ that position salvation a mere technological ‘novum’ away. ACH rejects what we might call ‘eco-modernism’ in favour of evoking (and prefiguring) current enthusiasms for ‘degrowth’, local consumption and slow living leading into more processual engagements with the environment that decentre the human. Le Guin’s work is utopian in its hope for a better future, yet also disavows this impulse in both revelling in the gap between our present and that future, and choosing to locate it beyond the violent ruination of our current world. Le Guin presents attentive, empirical, lyrical place-writing as a possible strategy for manifesting practical ways of living that can open onto better relationships with our surroundings before such ruination – of the planet and the body – comes to pass.