E coterrorism in R ecent C limate F iction

Ecoterrorism is widely discussed – and sometimes practised – by environmental activists, but rarely represented in climate fiction. This essay explores three recent ‘cli-fi,’ novels which do in fact address the issue, one from Finland, one from the US, and one from Australia: Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer (2013), in Finnish Parantaja (2010), Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) and J.R. Burgmann’s Children of Tomorrow (2023).

At a seminar held at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, shortly after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, I proposed the following essentially Kantian denition of terrorism: [A]n action may be considered terrorist insofar as it involves the relatively indiscriminate use of violence against civilians for political purposes. It is irrelevant whether the act is committed by governments or by private individuals … It is irrelevant whether or not one agrees with the terrorists' motives … It does matter that the victims are civilians because a soldier wills himself into a position where he might be killed in battle and so violence directed against him is … compatible with the categorical imperative. It does matter that the violence is relatively indiscriminate because one cannot escape from indiscriminate violence, no matter what one chooses to do, and such violence is therefore incompatible with the categorical imperative 1 . I stand by this de nition, whilst noting nonetheless that the distinction between civilian and soldier seems less immediately relevant to civil con icts than to the Second World War bomber o ensives discussed then. Extending the de nition to the more speci c case of ecoterrorism, we can, rst, discount so-called 'violence' against property, which involves no obvious harm to persons, whether civilian or soldier. Second, we can de ne as 'soldiers' all those who consciously and knowingly attempt either to increase or prevent global heating or other think those murdered people were? … Even after they knew about the destruction they were causing, they kept doing it. ey kept murdering -by lying" 6 .
Tapani is a poet living in a near-future, climate-ruined Helsinki, whose journalist wife Johanna disappears two days before Christmas, and the novel tells of his three-day search for her. e city itself is near continuously rain-sodden, its Metro and seaside suburbs ooded, its railway station packed with climate refugees from the south. As Tapani wrily observes, "I passed whole countries and continents, crossed languages and dialects. Helsinki had nally become an international city" 7 . Tapani discovers that Johanna had been investigating a serial killer who styles himself 'the Healer', a killer who murders business executives and politicians he deems in some way responsible for climate change. DNA evidence suggests that Parantaja is in fact Pasi Tarkiainen, a one-time medical student who supposedly died ve years previously in a u epidemic. Tapani's computer searches reveal that Johanna and Pasi had once lived together and her old friend Elina Kallio explains that she, Johanna and Pasi had all as students been radical environmental activists. e crime narrative follows Tapani in his search for Johanna, for Tarkiainen and the latter's ruthless criminal accomplice Max Väntinen, a search that eventually leads to the railway station where the killers had planned to catch a train north. In the denouement Tapani and Police Chief Inspector Harri Jaatinen succeed in rescuing Johanna, but Tarkiainen nonetheless escapes. And in the climactic encounter between Tapani and Pasi, the poet and the terrorist, the latter insists that: "I'm on the side of good, Tapani. ere was a time when I strove for nothing less than saving the world. Now that the world can't be saved, I have to make sure that good continues to live for as long as evil and sel shness" 8 .
e key phrase here is "now that the world can't be saved". For, it is precisely this view of the planet as already inevitably and irreparably damaged, as much the stance of the novel itself as of Tarkiainen in particular, that turns it into a radically fatalistic classical dystopia. So, for example, Tapani ruefully observes of his and Johanna's apartment that "[t]hey weren't designed for continuous high winds and rain for half the year, and by the time people realized that the wind and rain were here to stay it was too late" 9 . So, the house in Kivinokka which Johanna had once shared with Pasi, generating its own energy, entirely recyclable, sustainable and non-polluting, was nonetheless "twenty years too late" because "the environment was already so changed by then that the innovations were meaningless" 10 . So, Tapani's old ame Professor Laura Vuola, re ecting on the failure of her own youthful activism, observes that "[t]he return to the old ways was echoed by the desire of a populace tired of monetary scarcity, of consuming less, to live like they had before: self-absorbed, greedy, and irresponsible -the way they'd always been taught to live" 11 . So, even the hope that oil supplies might run out had proven illusory: " e oil hadn't run out yet, although they'd been predicting it would for decades … When the world ended one day we would still have tankers full of oil, ports full of it, billions of barrels of black gold, ample fuel for a trip to eternity" 12 .

A M | ECOTERRORISM IN RECENT CLIMATE FICTION
ere is, nonetheless, evidence of would-be resistance throughout Parantaja. Pasi, Johanna, Elina and Laura have all been involved with environmental activism "when information about the severity of climate change temporarily united people and laid the framework for many ne and well-meaning organizations, associations, and political parties" 13 . But this has proven almost entirely futile, leaving only Tarkiainen's bloody search for 'Justice' 14 , which even he admits is too late to change anything. Bereft of social hope, the reader is left with individual sexual love as the only outstanding positive value in e Healer, as it is in many dystopias. For Tuomainen's Tapani and Johanna the one remaining consolation lies in their own romantic-erotic relationship. As Tapani re ects after reading an unrepentant email from Tarkianen the following Good Friday: Something happens when I touch Johanna. Something in my heart stirs, something says this is right -this is good. And it is good. I'm part of her, and she's part of me. We're as happy as two people can be in this world. Whatever happens, I will love Johanna 15 .
What will happen, we know, is that sooner rather than later their world will end.
Kim Stanley Robinson is famously both a declared socialist and a committed environmentalist. Unsurprisingly, then, his SF has become increasingly focussed on the promise of radical social change and the threat of runaway climate change. Indeed, there is a sense in which his ction can be read as a kind of extended comparative sociology of climate and social change. Just as Max Weber, the famous German sociologist, sought to compare the implications for economic activity of di erent world religions, so Robinson's novels compare the implications for climate change of di erent political strategies for social change. e Whatever the strategy, whether reformist or revolutionary, the outcome is invariably successful; but then this is ction after all.
Robinson's e Ministry for the Future is perhaps his most impressive climate ction to date and, once again, it depicts positive outcomes from climate crisis. But where New York 2140 had pursued a fundamentally constitutionalist political resolution and Red Moon a quasi-revolutionary option, e Ministry for the Future attempts an interesting combination of both. e constitutional option revolves around the eponymous Ministry located in Zurich, which is established in 2025 as a Subsidiary Body for Implementation of the Paris Agreement in conjunction with the IPCC and the UN. e Ministry's role is "to advocate for the world's future generations of citizens … all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves" 16 . And its Irish head, Mary Murphy, is the nearest the novel has to a protagonist. e revolutionary terrorist option is represented by the Indian 'Children of Kali', who use drones to bring down sixty passenger jets in a matter of hours and, later, to infect millions of cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease 17 . e novel is organised into 106 chapters, which move backwards and forwards between personal narratives, factual summaries of climate science, and 'objective' slices of future history. It opens with an unprecedented heat wave in India which kills twenty million people, viscerally described from the point of view of an American aid worker, Frank May, who becomes the sole survivor of a mass death, subsequently su ers post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and later becomes a comparatively ine ectual ecoterrorist. Robinson's use of the word 'poached' in this chapter, to describe the deaths of people eeing the heat to shelter in a nearby lake, is powerfully disturbing 18 . Subliminally, however, the catastrophe changes everything: "Civilization had been killed but it kept walking the Earth ... e culture of the time was rife with fear and anger, denial and guilt, shame and regret, repression and the return of the repressed ... the Indian heat wave stayed a big part of it" 19 .
By comparison with Robinson's earlier ctions, e Ministry for the Future is much more sympathetic both to ecoterrorism and also, incidentally, to vegetarianism: "Of course many people were quick to point out that these Children of Kali were hypocrites and monsters, that Indians didn't eat cows and … that coal-red power plants in India had burned a signi cant proportion of the last decade's carbon burn … en again those same Indian power plants were being attacked on a regular basis" 20 . Robinson is clear, however, that ecoterrorism really works: "in the forties and ever after, less beef got eaten. Less milk was drunk. And fewer jet ights were made" 21 . As Robinson has May observe: "some things were just too dangerous to continue doing. When your veggie burger tasted just as good, while your beef package proclaimed Guaranteed Safe! with a liability waiver in small print at the bottom, you knew a di erent time had come" 22 . More signi cantly, Robinson also strongly implies that these Children of Kali might actually be an o shoot of the Ministry itself. Murphy's Indian chief of sta , Badim Bahadur, admits to having secretly established a 'black wing' and warns her that "there might be some people who deserve to be killed" 23 . Later an anonymous narrator, who might well be Bahadur himself, tells of an encounter with the Children, in which he announces: "I understand you. I've helped you, I've helped work like yours all over the world … I've done more to stop the next heat wave than anyone you have ever met. You've done your part, I've done mine … I am Kali" 24 . is combination of constitutionalism and terrorism leads directly to the novel's essentially positive outcome. But, as with New York 2140 and Red Moon, the price of success is bought too cheaply to be entirely credible: "Aircraft carriers? Sunk. Bombers? Blown out of the sky. An oil tanker, boom, sunk in ten minutes. One of America's eight hundred military bases around the world, shattered … e war on terror? It lost" 25 .
It is di cult not to sympathise with Robinson's determined insistence that there must be positive ways forward for our species and our planet. As he argued in an article published in the journal Utopian Studies: "It has become a case of utopia or catastrophe, and utopia has gone from being a somewhat minor literary problem to a necessary survival strategy" 26 . But utopianism is nonetheless always open to the criticism that it is utopian in the pejorative sense of being hopelessly impractical. Does anyone really believe that American military might be so easily dispensed with in any imaginable reality as in e Ministry for the Future? But then this is ction after all, isn't it? For Robinson, however, the antithesis between utopia and catastrophe operates in the real world as well as in his novels. Which leaves us with a deeply impressive novel and a less than persuasive political strategy. J.R. Burgmann's Children of Tomorrow is a debut novel, 27 which traces the progress of a group of Australian university-based friends from the real 2016 Tasmanian bush res through to widespread global climate collapse later in the century. e main protagonists, Arne Bakke and Evie Weatherall, meet in a Melbourne doctoral programme and are subsequently located at the centre of a network of a ected and concerned individuals. Centrally, the narrative is driven by the contradiction between precise and accurate scienti c understandings of climate collapse, on the one hand, and the complete incapacity of wider social structures to respond to that knowledge, on the other. Arne, Evie, their colleagues, friends and relatives, live through this contradiction, pursuing a series of politico-social alternatives, ecoterrorism included. Arne's elder brother Freddie is an activist rather than an academic, "a shredded poster boy for global environmental activism", who "mobilised people, garnered funding and support, and delivered far-reaching messages to media and government", but ultimately achieved nothing other than media notoriety 28 . A generation later Evie and Arne's son Raph repeats a very di erent version of this journey, moving to New York, abandoning the 'green grief ' of his youth and nding safety, "nestled in the backrooms and man caves of the reactionary, typing into oblivion" 29 . Years later, Freddie and Raph nd themselves in the seahood of Stanley, deep within the Paci c zone of the United Nations of Seasteads, "where millions of the dislanded struggle to stay a oat", and where Freddie himself contemplates "one nal, explosive hurrah" 30 . Freddie is scathing about Raph's job delivering to 'the towers' inhabited by the rich: "He would gladly rise up the towers and take a place amongst the exalted. I'm sure of it ... e ones who destroyed this planet! … e ones who took everything!" 31 So, Freddie uses Raph's delivery job as a means to attack the towers. He warns his partner Kim, and she in turn warns Raph, but with little time to escape the e ects of their unwitting ecoterrorism: en a distant series of low concussions brings them to a standstill, rattling through their skulls, ringing in their ears ... He takes his place beside her, the hammering still ringing out across the dark, quaking through the earth and ocean, tingling the soles of their tired feet. Together in terror, in step with one another, they move out slowly along a disused jetty-a walking plank, now. Out of that horrifying sound, drumming like war, comes a blinding light that sears the horizon. ey turn away instinctively. Shielding their eyes, they look