Parable of the Sower narrates the story of Lauren Olamina who grows up in a nearby town of Los Angeles in the mid-1920s although the story was written in the late 1980s. Environmental catastrophes such as long droughts, earthquakes, and storms have wrecked Lauren’s world and climate change has taken all the shrewdness and every bit of kindness for Lauren to survive in the dystopian future. Climate change and pollution in both our world and Lauren’s world share the same devastating environmental consequences as Lauren while talking with her stepmother compares how things are different from now and then. She says “Why couldn’t you see at the stars?” as both Lauren and her mother are unable to see stars because of the reason what modern world calls “light pollution.” (Butler, 2019) It is presented in a landmark study that the United States and European populations are seriously affected by the excessive artificial light that they could not even see the stars at night. Moreover, big companies using fossil fuels and oils bring progress in Lauren’s world as well as ours but come with numerous daunting consequences such as deforestation, climate change, land pollution, light pollution, and polluted sea as Lauren’s stepmother states “light, progress, growth all those things we’re too hot and too poor to bother” (Butler, 2019) to reflect the power of big companies. Thus, like Lauren’s world in the “Parable of the Sower”, common citizens in our world have not enough power to stop these big companies from contaminating the world. I opine that the world can take effective measures to revitalize clean energy instead of focusing on fossil fuels for the sake of our planet, otherwise, it will become like that of Lauren’s world. Our resources are running due to rapid climate change and the world’s population has split into two groups; poor and rich. Therefore, we as a human race should shift to renewable sources of energy for instance wind and solar as energy-efficient models. This would also counterbalance our world’s carbon dioxide emissions if big companies adopt the usage of renewable energy along with planting trees to capture carbon and promote an oxygen-filled sustainable climate. In the nutshell, climate change in Lauren’s world like our today’s modern world is a sign that we are living in Lauren’s dystopia but as Lauren pledges “We’ll adept. We’ll have to. God is Change.” (Butler, 2019)
Works Cited
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing, 2019.
