READ INSTRUCTION PART AND ANSWER THIS PROMPT IN 5 HOURS: For this week’s digital discussion, let’s think about the way Kingsolver presents the social elements of the climate change story in Flight Behavior. For her, themes like religion and science, poverty and wealth, and education and instinct, contribute to the way people think about climate change and how it affects them. Pick one of these themes and talk about its role in the novel. Then, find a passage from the novel that shows how Kingsolver uses the theme you’ve chosen in the narrative.

Our first two days of reading in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior present us with a new pattern for climate fiction. Much of the fiction we’ve read so far begins with a society that resembles our own, but with telling differences: more poverty, more social stratification, deeper divisions between those who have resources and those who don’t. After that, walls go up, weapons come out, and people try to hold on to the scraps of their former lives. But as I mentioned in my introduction to this week’s reading, Kingsolver doesn’t want her novel to bring us to the end of the world. Instead, Flight Behavior focuses on the local effects of climate change on a small town in Tennessee. Rather than thirst or famine, this Appalachian town is beset by… butterflies. Beauty. Mystery. Although the biological world is changing around them, their lives are not at stake, and they don’t feel a sense of crisis. In many ways, this makes Kingsolver’s novel a closer parallel to our own lives in modern America. Although we may know about climate change, and maybe even feel some social or moral responsibility to contribute to caring for the world, we, like the characters in Dellarobia’s town, also don’t feel a sense of crisis. PS: Make each comment productive, which for our purposes means adding depth to the conversation by asking a good question, referring to another passage from the week’s reading that relates to the discussion’s ideas, or connecting this week’s discussion to other ideas from the class.