C.G. Aubrey interviewed by E.C. Barrett
In C.G. Aubrey’s “A Predatory Transience,” mysterious text messages direct a kayaking eco-defender to a boat of booze-soaked white men who are shooting bonnethead sharks for fun. We spoke about the importance of individual action and systemic overhaul, and artificially drawn divisions between human and non-human nature.
Our conversation, which contains spoilers, has been edited for clarity and length.
E.C. Barrett: Identity is an integral part of your story. I’m thinking of the different ways your protagonist is conscious of where she exists in the social order in terms of how people perceive her and what that allows her to do or doesn’t allow her to do. What are some of the connections you make between identity and environmental justice?
C.G. Aubrey: My character and I are both middle aged, or close-to middle aged, white women. I don’t get into her economic background, but I grew up below the poverty line in the South Carolina Lowcountry and that creates a very specific sort of worldview.
Environmental injustice is absolutely tied to racism and other forms of human injustice. You wouldn’t have areas that were heavily polluted if wealthy white men—though white women have definitely benefited too—weren’t the ones choosing where their runoff goes, where their factories are going to pollute. Most of our pollution doesn’t happen in pristine, beautiful areas of untouched, unsettled land. The same areas that become undesirable through pollution tend to be populated by marginalized individuals.
In the United States, we have a culture of early conservation that was very much linked to wealthy white people–our national parks being a very good example. That land was taken from people—indigenous people in particular—and then set aside for privileged white use. I won’t say they’re kept wild or kept perfectly, but they don’t have fracking or other sorts of environmental awfulness occurring there. That happens in lower economic neighborhoods, downstream or on the other side of the tracks, or whatever euphemism you want to use for land that has traditionally belonged to people that the elite don’t value. I saw a lot of that firsthand, growing up, because I lived on the other side of the tracks.
It’s also people in the top 10% economically who are doing the most damage, and it’s important to acknowledge that.
ECB: Right. I think about Elon Musk and Taylor Swift hopping on their private jets to get across town and I know nothing I’m doing is actually contributing anywhere close to what they’re doing in a couple of flights.
CGA: One year of their life is more damaging than anything you’re going to do over the course of your entire life.
It’s easy to look out and see things snowballing in a terrible direction and say, “Well, I’m never going to do enough good. I’m never going to do enough to matter when Taylor Swift, or anyone, can fly back and forth across the globe, or across town, and undo any possible good I might have done.” But there are whole species that are rebounding because people have yelled enough to stop stacking rocks in streams. So it’s important to remember that our actions do matter.
ECB: Your story offers some catharsis for that sort of despair, as well as a call to action.
CGA: I think it’s important for us to encourage each other. We have to take direct action. We have to be prepared for not just the good parts of our actions leaving a better world—like saving the sharks in the story—but also how that kind of action will change us. It changes my protagonist. She could be viewed as a very morally upright, good human, but then does these very horrible things without any real sort of remorse. And that changes people. We have to grapple with how we will be changed by our actions to improve the world and that’s one of the roles of fiction, helping us imagine ourselves in other situations, having made other choices.
ECB: Are there any books or writers who have helped inform your thinking about these issues?
CGA: Coyote at the Kitchen Door is a great group of essays that talk about how the nonhuman natural world is now encroaching upon us. More recently, I read A Natural History of the Future by Robb Dunn, which is very good. The world will be around so much longer than we will and non-human nature will rebound and it will produce new, beautiful things and we will just be the tiniest blip on its timeline. I think there’s a little bit of optimism in that, but as a human I would like for us not to destroy ourselves. I love the idea that nature is reaching out, because we all belong in nature, there shouldn’t be such a division between human and nature.
ECB: There were dandelions in my yard this January, when there should be snow on the ground, not flowers. It briefly made me incredibly sad. Then I noticed there were bees out gathering pollen from them and it was wonderful, because the dandelions and bees were working in concert and it was strangely comforting to witness how the non-human world will find a way to survive us. More to your point, though, the dandelions and bees were also in the process of making food and medicine that humans could use in a climate-changed January.
CGA: Bees are a great example of humans and non-humans in community. Bees need us to harvest their honey. Without human intervention, bees will produce so much honey that they then have to build a new nest or they’ll end up with so much extra honey that they produce two queens, which can lead to hive wars. They have evolved to live as long as they have, and continue to do all the wonderful things bees do, because they have done that in conjunction with us.
ECB: Your story blurs the division between human and non-human nature, as it seems the bonnethead sharks are in cahoots with whatever entity is sending the texts that, in effect, use your protagonist as a survival tool. I have to say, it’s a bold move, having a heroine who kills humans to protect marine life.
CGA: Yeah, I’ve read through Reckoning Issue 7 and I think my story may be the most violent–which will be unsurprising to those who know me.
Not that I’m particularly violent, but I have a very strong sense of justice. There’s so much frustration about the injustices going on and it’s important for people to feel that individual action does matter. You can make a difference, especially at the local level, in your community.
Of course, I’m not saying go out and murder the bad guys. Even just going out and picking up trash when you kayak, like my main character does, makes an immediate, quantifiable impact. We’ll be so much better off if enough individuals feel like they can make a difference. That is really important to me.
ECB: I was thinking about the violence in your story and how one of the things it does is take seriously the rights and value of the marine life that these men were killing. When I say take it seriously, I mean, it begs the question: is this violence actually bad? What makes the human hunter’s lives more valuable than the marine lives that they were taking? Could you talk to me a bit about that, and how speculative fiction allows you to take that seriously in a way that you maybe can’t in real life?
CGA: Normal disclaimer: murder is bad. The violence in the story is real, but the murders themselves are a metaphor. And the reason I say it that way is I don’t think that we can affect the kind of change that’s necessary without it being perceived as violence. When you displace people who have that kind of power over other lives, it’s going to feel violent to the people being displaced or even to the people who are affecting that change. Because it’s not as simple as picking up garbage. It’s going to take real systemic overhauls and those overhauls are going to feel very violent, whether they reach the point of actual bloodshed or not.
We know that the choices of the villains in the story are very deliberate. Most of us have, in some way or form, encountered those affluent white men who have no regard for the lives around them. For people that exist on the marsh, and South Carolina Lowcountry in particular, we see those guys all the time. And we know that they’re killing for the thrill of killing–with marine life in particular. Those same types of people are highly likely to be violent with humans in their lives, especially those at a lower power status.
The people who have devalued the lives of others, whether it’s marine life or tree life or marginalized human lives, they’re not going to just do the right thing because we tell them they have to. I think one of the things that happens, once you understand that as an individual, is that you then feel powerless.
Speculative fiction gives us a place where we don’t feel as powerless, a place to explore that systemic upheaval and create the changes we would like to see in our world.
