Mind Picker: The Opening Sky

"If a lot of people are responsible then nobody is responsible?" she says with sudden emotion. "Is that better? Is that easier? To think that nobody is responsible?"

This quote, to me, is the crux of The Opening Sky by Joan Thomas: whether talking about individual responsibilities within personal relationships -- who's at fault, who should bend, who should apologise -- or our collective responsibilities towards the Earth, it's a fact of humanity that despite our best intentions, there is often a gap between what we know is right and how we actually act.

The plot at the heart of The Opening Sky is wonderfully ironic: Sylvie, a fiercely independent, eco-conscious, 19-year-old student discovers she is pregnant by her ambitious, eco-conscious, student boyfriend Noah -- a young man who has signed the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement pledge to never reproduce, unwilling to add another carbon footprint to the Earth's burden. Sylvie is loath to tell her parents: her Dad, Aiden, is a therapist who believes he can talk any problem through (except, perhaps, problems with his own wife); and Mom, Liz, is the director of a Planned Parenthood office, for whom a pregnant daughter is a professional embarrassment. Sylvie is too far along in her pregnancy when she realises it to consider termination and she has a visceral dislike for the type of people who would spend ten years on an adoption waiting list; the type of people who want a healthy white newborn or no child at all; the type of people who would probably raise her daughter in a McMansion, dressing her up in princess clothes to drive around in their Hummer. As both Sylvie and Noah have big plans for their education and eventual careers saving the planet, no perfect solution presents itself.

This book is full of flawed and truly human characters; I might even say that none of them are completely likeable, but Thomas fleshes them out with enough backstory that the reader can understand their motivations even when their actions are frustrating. A subplot about a tragedy that Sylvie and Liz were witness to eight years earlier helps to highlight both the tensions between mother and daughter and the lingering effects of choices made and regretted. Dialogue is crisp and authentic, the settings are richly described, and the plot is completely modern -- even if the unwed teenage mother is one of the oldest stories of all. And yet, The Opening Sky was not without its flaws.

Ecofiction is such a hard genre to get right because no reader wants to be harangued. It's very interesting in The Opening Sky to witness how Sylvie and Noah -- who are smart and earnest and try to live what they believe -- struggle, for instance, with birth control: he doesn't want to use condoms because they're not biodegradable and she doesn't want to use the pill because of the effects of hormones on the watershed, but being pragmatic, they know they have to make compromises. Characters discussing environmental issues -- and especially when Sylvie makes snarky comments to what she perceives to be her consumerist mother -- can be organic and totally relevant to their characters; this doesn't bother me. What did bother me was the not infrequent moralising, like:

She hadn't thought about that moment in years. Not because she forgot it, no. Because she buried it deep, the way you bury radioactive waste.

Or:

Just before supper, a valve in the sky opened for about ten minutes and a ton of water was dumped on the city. Water that should rightly have fallen somewhere else, stolen from the poor and given to the rich.

Should I really feel guilty when it rains? And also annoying: several times characters define words as they think them (like albedo effect and mordant), which, not only would no one ever do while privately musing, offended my intelligence. If Thomas can't trust me to understand and follow her -- if she thinks I won't believe that Sylvie would think the word "uxurious" without explaining to herself that she read it in a book once -- then I won't follow her.

And yet, so much was done right in this book: the conflicts in the family dynamics were spot on and they did satisfactorily echo larger global issues. The notion of responsibility vs private desires is an interesting one to explore.

I feel like such a curmudgeon when I bristle at message books, but so much of this one was done well that it undermined itself with missteps that went too far. Some editor should have intervened (but what do I know about editors?)

This book reminded me of my own mother -- someone who thinks of herself as the crunchy granola type, though she and my father live in a huge house and consume way more than they require. Ma loves to shop and she prides herself on buying reusable shopping bags at every store she goes to, gasping in horror when I choose to ask for plastic bags when I run out of my small supply -- the bags I use as garbage can liners. I am capable of making choices that might buck the "received wisdom", but which don't feel inconsistent with what I think of as living a conscientious life; why wouldn't I reuse plastic shopping bags instead of buying packages of them for one use? What creates more impact -- manufacturing and eventually disposing of a reusable bag or a plastic one? What about piles of reusable bags? Here's a couple of stories about my well-meaning mother:

My parents live on an acreage in the woods, but they do have garbage pickup and need to sort everything at home into waste, recycling, and compost. After driving her garbage to the bins one day, she watched in horror as the garbageman emptied the waste and compost into one truck. When she asked him why he didn't have separate compartments for each, he replied that it was determined that it wasn't environmentally efficient to send two or three trucks out that far to be able to hold things separately. Naturally, she hit the roof and called whoever to ensure that at least two different trucks would indeed be sent out that far, to guarantee that her compost remained separated. I asked her why, if that was a concern for her, and since they own 12 or whatever acres, she doesn't just have her own compost pile, and she replied that she didn't want the stink or to attract scavengers. I'm sure there are fixes for both of those concerns, but I'm thinking it's easier to just believe that "I'm composting" = "I'm doing my part", no matter how much diesel needs to be burned to collect it.

My second story: Ma called me a couple of weeks ago and said, "I suppose you heard what happened on Saturday?" I said I hadn't, so she replied:

I saw on facebook on Friday that Delight mentioned that she was going to go to the environmental rally the next day, so I messaged her to ask if I could come, too. She said "sure", and I was certain that on Delight's page it said that the rally started at 10, so I drove into town and got to the Dairy Queen at quarter to 10, and no one was there. I sat around forever, I went into the Dairy Queen to see if that's where everyone was waiting, but when no one ever showed up, I ended up leaving to go home at quarter after 11. Well, when I got home, I went on facebook and saw on Delight's wall that the rally actually started at 12, but by then it was too late for me to go back. I messaged her later to say I was sorry and she said it was funny because when she got there, people were handing out signs and banners and Delight said, "Oh, I'll have a banner because I'm meeting a friend here", but when I didn't show up, she had to carry it by herself. I felt so stupid, but what could I do? I'm glad Delight understood. I couldn't even tell your father what I was going to do because he just wouldn't understand. When he saw me leaving I just said, "I'm going into town to meet Krista's friend for brunch".

I just have to shake my head: my mother drove her 8 passenger SUV, 45 minutes into town and then 45 minutes back again, in order to protest environmental issues. She sees no irony in this. And the worst part about this story: