The Hunger Games and the dystopian nature-disconnect

We've spent a lot of time in my literacy class talking about The Hunger Games and how teachers can harness its popularity to make literacy connections across the curriculum. Here are few general thoughts on The Hunger Games to add to the multitude of voices out there.

The Hunger Games as social commentary
The Hunger Games suggests a variety of social issues without going into great depth on any of them. At its heart, it is an action-packed hero’s quest told through the eyes of a strong-but-flawed heroine fighting to survive in a dystopian future. As New Yorker critic David Denby put it, “the reason for its success is simple: it makes teens feel both victimized and important”.

Nevertheless, The Hunger Games is a great starting point for exploring a variety of current environmental and social justice issues. Panem is post-climate change North America, so The Hunger Games’ popularity may partly be due to young peoples’ very real concerns about climate change. And there are parallels with the Occupy movement: Panem’s “99%” live in a state of ongoing environmental strife, food insecurity and resource depletion while the remaining few live in the Capitol, where the nation’s wealth and power are concentrated. Though there may not be a cause-and-effect relationship between The Hunger Games and the Occupy movement, there is certainly an element of art-imitating-life-imitating-art that is worth exploring with students.

The Capitol itself is a leisure dystopia. Living in idle wealth, its residents are obsessed with style and engaged in a never-ending game of physical one-up-manship, going so far as to disfigure themselves to attract notice. Oblivious to the food shortages in the rest of the country, residents eat rich foods and engage in planned bingeing and purging. All this behaviour is only slightly more extreme than our current celebrity culture and standards of beauty, and is a clear metaphor for the world food supply and Western overconsumption (and Hollywood is too close to the Capitol’s geographic location to be a coincidence).

It would be interesting to investigate with students the trend for dystopian settings in young adult fiction over the last few years. Dystopian fiction has typically become more popular in times of social crisis. For example, the triumvirate of twentieth century dystopian fiction (A Brave New World, Farenheit 451 and 1984) was written during the World War II/Cold War years.

The dystopian nature-disconnect
Most fictional dystopias are set in highly urban environments or ravaged wastelands, and even those that are set in relatively healthy landscapes isolate their characters from contact with the natural world, as in Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, where the countryside is the domain of the exiles. The Hunger Games is no different: the land has been wasted, resources have been depleted, citizens are prohibited from wandering freely in the forest and gates surround the districts to separate humans from their natural environment. Wild landscapes and the animals that inhabit them are perceived as dangerous.

Why is this such a common element in dystopian fiction? I think it’s because the primal connection humans have with the land is fundamentally incompatible with dystopian power structures. Beyond providing sustenance, nature has a healing and revitalizing power and is intrinsically linked to human freedom and happiness. Seen through the lens of the Western dualistic nature/culture paradigm, a dystopian superpower cannot not effectively control its subjects if the people have healthy relationships with the land, which is by definition wild and uncontrollable. Excluding nature’s light and beauty excludes hope, which enables control. Separating people from the place in which they live is necessary in dystopian worlds, because a return to nature would lead to rebellion and independence. The staging of the final battle in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (in which the Rebel Alliance finally succeeds in overthrowing the Galactic Empire) on the lush forest moon of Endor can be seen as an example of this. In The Hunger Games, this is played out through the heroine, Katniss Everdeen.

Katniss has a deep connection to the land, which has been fundamental to her survival throughout her life. As a young girl, the sight of a single dandelion changed Katniss’ life, inspiring her to hunt and forage to keep her family from starving and to provide healing medicines. Because these acts are illegal  all resources belong to the state, and wandering in the woods is forbidden  Katniss’ relationship with the land defines her as a rebel before the story even begins. Beyond the resources the woods provide, Katniss also finds existential freedom and relief there. This bond with the natural world and the vitality it gives her is in stark contrast to the dreary hopelessness of the other residents of her community, who remain caged within the district fences, and to the shallow, overconsumptive urbanity of the Capitol residents, who do not realize they are imprisoned by their luxury.

Once she enters the Hunger Games arena, it is Katniss’ skill as a forager, hunter and herbalist that enable her to survive. But beyond these superficial skills, I think it’s Katniss’ lifelong immersion in nature that gives her the self-assurance and freedom of mind needed to defy the Capitol and ultimately spark a rebellion against its repressive regime. It would be interesting to do a comparative study of other dystopian novels to explore the links across the genre between nature, rebellion and freedom.

Related to Katniss’ connection with the land, The Hunger Games offers another type of literacy beyond the millions of books its fans have read. As an expert expert hunter and forager, Katniss knows how to read signs in nature as efficiently as readers of books can decode symbols on a page. It is this reading of the land that gives her access to the physical world and enables her survival, and gives educators an opportunity to forge a curricular connection with environmental stewardship and traditional Native ways of knowing. Done with care, the popularity of The Hunger Games could be harnessed as a tool to develop interest in and validation of indigenous culture amongst both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth.

Stay tuned for a lesson plan incorporating The Hunger Games into the phys ed curriculum!

That hopeless, tired feeling: Mitigating green fatigue in the classroom

A recurring theme in my biology class is how we can incorporate environmental education into our lessons. Today's "hook" was a TED video by Capt. Charles Moore on the seas of plastic garbage that are finding their way into our oceans and the bodies of marine animals everywhere.

This is an important message, and one that, as a former scuba instructor having dived in some of the world's most remarkable marine environments, is not only dear to my heart, but one that I once preached regularly.

However.

The problem with these types of messages isn't just that people don't want to hear them, though of course no one wants to hear (again and again) just how much we've raped and pillaged the planet (especially when they've paid thousands of dollars to be whisked off to a tropical island with sugary white beaches and gently swaying palm trees, surrounded by a blue pancake of an ocean as far as the eye can see, with someone to polish your sunglasses as you sip your second mojito on the balcony of your over-water villa. Not a good time to preach sustainability...). The problem is that we consistently expose youth to these messages as the prelude to and reason for the small environmental actions that we can take to supposedly mitigate the impact of all the negative things we're doing as a species to our home.

I'm not denying the value of taking whatever small steps we can to improve the state of our environment, but I think we're being dishonest if we try to convince ourselves, and especially our youth, that bringing reusable bags to the grocery store will have any measurable short- or medium-term effect on the growing plastic tide in our oceans when multinational corporations the world over are increasing, not decreasing, their production and use of entire documents worth of unpronounceable environmental pollutants. The only effect that these individual actions have is on increasing our overall environmental awareness (for whatever that's worth), and of automatizing positive environmental habits so that when the youth we're educating today finally find themselves at the heads of those same international conglomerates and in a position to take far-reaching decisions, they will do so in a way that is more sustainable for humans and the environment. Which is great, but that's a long time to ask a six-year-old to wait.

Meanwhile, youth are increasingly frustrated at their inability to do positive things now that are on the same scale as the negative things being done by others around them. They get tired of hearing the same old messages of loss and destruction. So they become increasingly despairing and begin to give up. Everyone else is still killing the planet, so what does it matter what they do? 

Perhaps the problem is simply the order in which we present the information. Instead of showing students how destructive we're being, show them how they can support our environment, and give them reasons to want to. This should form the bulk of our environmental education, at least until students are mature enough to be able to process the more negative environmental impacts our species is having in a way that won't completely shock, depress and paralyze them.
 
Environmental marketing agency Futerra released the video "Love, Not Loss" a few years ago along with it's report Branding Biodiversity: The New Nature Message. The report aims to "kill the extinction message" and challenges environmental communicators to pull back on negative messaging about environmental destruction and inspire people to act on conservation based on their love of nature, not their fear of loss. 

This video was recently relaunched at the IUCN World Summit in Korea in September, 2012 as part of the IUCN's "Love, Not Loss" campaign. This campaign aims to rekindle the love affair between humans and nature by getting us to remember what it is we loved about it in the first place. Though not aimed specifically at teachers, there are some funny videos about conservation mis-communication, which science and environment teachers could use to lead students into developing their own videos or other products aimed at reminding us of our love, awe and appreciation for the natural world.

On a related note, the Canadian Wildlife Federation provides information about how to make your own Hinterland Who's Who video — they will even provide the HWW logo, classic flute music and a sample script. It's a great multimedia activity that teachers can use as a sneaky way of getting students to learn about a species or habitat, all under the much more entertaining guise of making a video. The instructions are also available as a PDF at WILDEducation.ca, CWF's education division.

I expect that today's generation of youth will be the ones who will have have the critical mix of awareness, power and technology to make real progress on our environmental issues. If we do nothing but instill messages of despair rather than hope, they will suffer from activism fatigue before they even have the chance to be activists — and then what hope do we have?