barbara kingsolver book about butterflies

Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour is a successful realist example of Cli-fi that confronts climate change directly. It’s hard to convince oneself that climate change due to globalization is an abstract future, rather than a threat and reality. The human animals have a fundamental trust in certain kinds of continuity. Therefore it’s hard for one to believe that the world under ones feet could ever be different than how it’s always been. One does not see the melting sea ice, the depletion of Ozone layer, the increase of carbon in the atmosphere. Of course it’s very hard for one to believe in things one does not see. Blindness to environmental change, referred to as “looking without seeing” (FB 52). The major issue in the novel is the ignorance of climate change and the eco critical vision. These are the people she says are mostly affected by climate change, and strikingly they are least prepared to understand and believe in climate change and its causes. The novel is set in the Appalachian Tennessee sheep farm, which is surrounded by the rural conservative farmers. In Flight Behavior drawing both on her Appalachian roots and her back ground in biology, Kingsolver delivers a passionate novel on the effects of global warming. Many flourishing authors of literary fiction, such as Margaret Atwood, Ian Mc Ewan, Amitav Ghosh, Barbara Kingsolver, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, Nathaniel Rich, Kim Stanley Robinson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marcel Theroux…, have contributed to this new genre’s efforts to imagine the causes, effects, and feeling of global warming. Its popularity in fiction has given rise to the term Cli – fi, or climate change fiction and speculation that this constitutes a distinctive literary genre. In the twenty first century, climate change has emerged as a dominant theme in literature and, correspondingly in literary studies. Key words: Eco criticism, climate change, migration, global warming, Cli-fi fiction. Consequently they migrated to Feather town to overwinter. The monarchs made a typical flight due to floods and landslides which led to the falling of trees everywhere in their usual roosting place in Mexico. In this story, the survival techniques of Monarch butterflies and that of a young woman Dellarobia are inextricably intertwined and analogous.

Her ability to put the silent, breathtakingly beautiful butterflies, at the center of this calamitous and noisy debate is exceptionally brilliant. In Flight Behavior Kingsolver creates a mesmerizing comparison between the life trajectory of Dellarobia Turnbow, an unhappy house wife on the verge of cheating, and the migration of the Monarch butterfly, a hypnotic yet earth-altering effect of climactic change.

Flight Behavior her esteemed novel is a clear cut example of her extreme concern for the natural world.

Barbara kingsolver book about butterflies