Thinking Forests in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow

Abstract

IntroductionHow might a forest think?This is a question Ursula K. Le Guin explores in "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971) and The Word for World is Forest (1972), two stories set in strange forests on imaginary, alien worlds.Le Guin's forests are no mere settings, however, but complex, agential, sensitive, and sentient entities.Part of the Hainish series, the plots of these two novellas occur in the same universe at different points in an alternative history, in which an antecedent species of human from the planet Hain has colonised various worldsincluding Earthresulting in divergent species of human across what is known as the League of Known Worlds.In "Vaster than Empires" a team of scientists explore beyond the reaches of the League and discover the vast, vegetal consciousness of World 4470, whose biospheric sentience is an emergent property of the brain-like interconnectivity of its plant communities.In Word, the forest's interconnectivity includes the Athsheans, a species of human evolved to live in Athshe's forests, but who now face an existential threat from Terran (Earth-human) colonisation and deforestation.Le Guin's stories were written during an "ecological revolution" -a "real turning point," according to historian Joachim Radkau, in the development of the modern environmentalist movement in the United States and indeed the world, demonstrated by the celebration of the first Earth Day on 22 nd April 1970 (90).The "ecological revolution" was also what Radkau calls a "'Copernican turn' in reverse" in which a vision of Earth from space, such as from the photograph Earthrise (1969), expanded ecological consciousness of a world both "beautiful and vulnerable" (93).Le Guin's planetary perspective on ecological concerns were expressed during the 1960s and 1970s in Barbara Ward's Spaceship Earth (1966) and James Lovelock's and Lynn Margulis's Gaia hypothesis (c.1972) published in the popular book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979).Concurrently, leading figures in U.S. environmentalism, such as David Brower, who broke away from the Sierra Club to launch Friends of the Earth in 1969, and microbiologist-turned-political spokesperson Barry Commoner, who featured on the cover of Time on 7 th February 1970, represented a new form of environmentalism in which the science of ecology became increasingly popularised and politicised.Inextricable to the rise of the environmentalist movement were the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement in the New Left in the late 1960s, whose causes began to converge over the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (Rome 546).Anthropogenic ecological devastation or "ecocide" (coined in 1970 to describe the effects of the defoliant Agent Orange) was increasingly linked to the corporate profiteering of chemical warfare, the logic of technocratic "progress," and the histories and continuations of racism, colonialism and genocide (Zierler 15; Rome 547).Le Guin, reflecting on how her participation in anti-war protests were internalised in Word, explains how it became: clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and grainlands and the murder of non-combatants in the name of 'peace' was only a