Parable of the Sower narrates the story of Lauren Olamina, who grew 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 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. Lauren, while talking with her stepmother, compares how things are different now and then. She says, “Why couldn’t you see the stars?” both Lauren and her mother are unable to see stars because of the reason what the 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 excessive artificial light, and they cannot 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 do not have 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 Lauren’s world. Our resources are running out 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, such as wind and solar, as energy-efficient models. This will 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 a nutshell, climate change in Lauren’s world, like today’s modern world, is a sign that we are living in Lauren’s dystopia, but as Lauren pledges, “We’ll adapt. We’ll have to. God is Change.” (Butler, 2019)
Works Cited
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing, 2019.
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