A FRIEND OF THE EARTH
By T. Coraghessan Boyle
Viking, 271 pages, $24.95
In an era when environmental issues register barely a blip on the public’s radar and gas-guzzling SUVs hog the road, T. Coraghessan Boyle’s ecological-cataclysm novel, “A Friend of the Earth,” might be seriously overestimating readers’ interest in a book about a world polluted beyond the darkest visions of ecological Cassandras.
Yet for all its grim prognostications about the future of the Earth, the novel contains an abundance of the trademark high jinks and passion of Boyle’s work. It makes going to hell in a handbasket sound, if not fun, definitely riveting.
The year is 2025 and global warming, deforestation and overpopulation have done such a number on the biosphere that the mosquito that carries dengue fever has found U.S. weather to its liking, and cold-weather burgs like Greater Nome, Alaska, (whose current population is about 4,000) and Reykjavik, Iceland, (about 105,000) each contain more people than New York City.
“The greenhouse effect, they called it. And what are greenhouses but pleasant, warm, nurturing places? … But that’s not how it is at all. No, it’s like leaving your car in the parking lot in the sun all day with the windows rolled up and then climbing in and discovering they’ve been sealed shut–and the doors too. The hotter it is, the more evaporation; the more evaporation, the hotter it gets. … Global warming. It’s a fact.”
But the rainy season is pummeling California when the book opens. Our hero is 75-year-old Ty Tierwater, a cooled-down firebrand out of the Edward Abbey monkey-wrench school of ecological activism. He lives on a rock star’s ranch in California and cares for one of the last handfuls of wild animals left in the world. This caged brood is paid for by Maclovio Pulchris, who, with his “drum major’s jacket … [and] his face swallowed up in fedora, shades and mask” sounds a lot like Michael Jackson.
“I occupy a two-room guesthouse … it’s a cozy-enough place but for the fact that the winds have long since torn off the gutters and three-quarters of the shingles … and I’m field marshal over an army of old pots and paint cans that catch at least half the rain at least half the time.”
Into Ty’s life comes Andrea, his ex-wife “of a thousand years ago” and the impetus and backbone of his ecological activism. She was the brains and the heart behind Earth Forever!, the group Ty worked for until his frequent, dunderheaded brushes with the law and subsequent time in prison forced it to sever any link to him. Andrea’s arrival triggers the other half of the story, a recounting of Ty’s past life on the front lines of ecological terrorism.
Ty and his EF! pals take their ecotage seriously. They go way beyond pouring silicon carbide into the crankcases of trucks and bulldozers of the corporate entities they view as polluters.
When we first see Ty in action it is 1989, and he is cemented feet-first with his wife, daughter and fellow ecoterrorist Teo Van Sparks in a trench dug in the middle of a road that a lumber company’s trucks and bulldozers must take to a logging site. They are wearing adult diapers because they expect to be there awhile. They understand the consequences of their actions; they know they aren’t going to win many converts, because “to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.”
And their attitude is far from heartwarming: “I had agreed a hundred times that if a baby and an anteater fell in a drainage ditch at the same time the baby would have to be sacrificed. …”
Their commitment makes others uncomfortable, which is the whole point. “Eight years ago [Van Sparks] was standing out on Rodeo Drive, in front of Sterling’s Fur Emporium, with a slab of calf’s liver sutured to his shaved head. He’d let the liver get ripe–three or four days or so, flies like a crown of thorns, maggots beginning to trail down his nose–and then he’d tear it off his head and lay it at the feet of a silvery old crone in chinchilla or a starlet parading through the door in white fox.”
This book, both entertaining and informative, hits like a warning shot from 25 years in the future. Boyle, raised in upstate New York, now lives in Santa Barbara, and he loves his adopted state.
An earlier novel, “The Tortilla Curtain,” touched on the ecological damage inflicted by overbuilding and overpopulation while examining immigration issues that bedevil the state. “A Friend of the Earth” takes these concerns with the environment to grim, and not utterly outlandish, lengths. With the Kyoto Protocols allowing 12 years to elapse before steps to control greenhouse gas emissions must be in place, Boyle may have described our planet’s future right down to the last drop of lifeless sea water.
Boyle inserts one mystery into his story. It centers on Ty and Andrea’s daughter, Sierra, the “martyr to the cause of the trees” who made a name for herself in environmentalist circles by living in a tree for three years. Her story is similar to that of Julia “Butterfly” Hill, who has just published a book about her own two-year stay aloft. Hill’s support organization is called Earth First! and she named her tree Luna. Sierra calls her tree Artemis. In 2025 she has been dead more than 20 years, and the book is a long examination of how her parents’ choices shaped and ultimately cost her her life.
Ty does not deny his own culpability in the Earth’s condition:
“I drank wine, spent money, spoiled my daughter and watched her accumulate things in her turn. And just like you–if you live in the Western world …–I caused approximately two hundred fifty times the damage to the environment of this tattered, bleeding planet as a Bangladeshi or Balinese, and they do their share, believe me. Or did. But I don’t want to get into that.”
And he is dead certain of the outcome of our present way of life:
“[W]e’re at the very end of the sixth great extinction to hit this planet, caused by us, by man, by progress, and … speciation will occur after we’re gone, an explosion of new forms springing up to fill all the vacated niches, a transformation like nothing we’ve known since the Cambrian explosion of five hundred seventy million years ago. …”
But against this dismal backdrop, the book is not entirely lacking in hope. Even Ty, who has seen the abiding passion of his life prove to be largely a waste of time, ends the novel with a backhanded epiphany that, while not promising a brighter tomorrow, at least hints at a possible peace taking root in his old, polluted heart.
