Identity and Environment

 

With science’s increasing capability to control our crops and plants, it seems that human hands are all over creation, the hands of God or nature. Ozeki creates characters that passionately advocate for the protection of Earth’s natural state, as well as characters that would rather alter it’s natural state to better fit their ideas of a perfect crop or plant. We see genetic engineering be executed to the point where huge acres of land are filled with identical crops, a monoculture with no room for diversity or what can be perceived as errors. 

 

When we look at American culture today, we see immigrants assimilating in order to fit the vision that white supremacists have for what the American identity should be. We have people that strongly oppose immigrants for their differences, believing their cultures to be more violent or lazier, believing them to be a setback to our country. Our patriotic ways force immigrants to conform to standards and in doing so lose their culture. The same way huge corporations encourage farmers to use pesticides on their crops and create a monoculture of perfect products, America encourages us to take away immigrant’s unique identities to absorb the America one. 

 

Ozeki’s novel can be seen as an environmental book that does not separate the environment from the people living in it, but rather draws a picture of how the two may be more intersectional than they are perceived to be. 

 

The protagonist, Yumi, was an Asian American girl growing up in Idaho, and so she was no stranger to the feeling of being an outcast. Yumi stated that when growing up, it felt like she was “a random fruit in a field of genetically identical potatoes.” (Page 4.) Ozeki connected Yumi’s experience as a minority in a predominantly white town to an untouched plant that does not mirror the genetically modified plants, therefor standing out. Making people feel like they do not belong is the first step to making them change and conform to your pleasing. Yumi allowed her peers to call her “Yummy” and though this may seem like a harmless thing, it played a deeper role, her closest people were changing her identity without her permission. Even when she corrected Elliot pronunciation of her name, he brushed it off and continued to call her Yummy, a name that he was more comfortable with. That subtle difference of name pronunciation can go a long way and make you feel even slightly more distant to your culture. Yumi stated later in the text that she wanted to move her children to somewhere with a larger Asian presence to avoid “Phoenix growing up twisted.” This suggests that growing up in a predominantly white town damaged Yumi’s identity.  

 

Not everyone is okay with losing diversity, whether it be in the environmental or identity aspect. The Seeds of Resistance strongly advocated for preserving our nature’s spontaneity. Geek, being a passionate environmentalist, tried to explain the gravity of genetic engineering to Frankie by saying  “we’re trying to usurp the plant’s choice. To force alien words into the plant’s poem, but we got a problem. We barely know the root language. Genetic grammar’s mystery.” (Page 124.) In a very literal way, Geek is saying that we have no right to alter plants and crops to fit our preferences, and that in doing so we may cause bigger issues than we know, as our hands are not meant to be all over creation. Applying this to identity, we can understand that we are robbing immigrants of their culture even though we do not know what this means in the greater scheme of things, and in forcing them to conform and lose their culture, we could be doing more harm than good. The danger behind this is in what it means to lose diversity in both the natural world and human society. 

 

Diversity in the natural world is very important to sustain resilience and insurance, if disease breaks out on a field with a lack of diversity of crops, it is unlikely that anything will survive, as it is almost impossible that they are immune to it or able to adapt. However, if such was to happen in a richly diverse field, you can expect there to be a higher survival rate as different crops are able to manage different threats. The benefits of diversity in agriculture spill into many different areas including human health and earth sustainability. 

 

In human society, we have a plethora of cultures with different languages and customs and ideas that can be brought to the table; when embraced, these differences can help create a stronger and smarter culture of people that learn from one another. However, when neglected, you begin to observe people losing their mother language, no longer wearing their cultural clothes, losing touch with their religion or beliefs all to blend into this one culture that rejects the idea of diversity because they do not see that allowing diversity to bring different things to the table can mean beautiful things for their people and their country. 

 

Later in the novel, Geek told the children a fact that seemed overwhelmingly startling to him, “more than half of the soybeans planted in American are genetically engineered” but Phoenix quickly responded with an indifferent “so?” Geek retaliated by saying “That's over sixty million acres! Natures own varieties are slowly dying out. Soon all we'll have are genetically modified mutants.”(Page 173.) With this, Geek is saying that before we know it we’re going to know nothing of uniqueness or flawed beauty that comes with nature’s diversity, because all we will know is the same genetically modified plant and if one day we reach a point where we want to return to the ways things were, we will not be able to because we wiped out any diversity that was left.  That being said, Ozeki is trying to tell us that one day we may not have the beautiful diversity of races and cultures and customs that we see in America today. We will have a single image of what it is to be an American and our country will have to make do with it. 

 

This idea of creating a monoculture is far too similar to white supremacists’ ideas of purifying our country to the perfect image of “blonde haired, blue eyed” individual. Yes, a human being with bright blue eyes and silky blond hair is beautiful, but so is dark brown eyes with tight black curls, or hazel eyes with brown waves, or green eyes with a shaved head; all of these people have different stories and ideas about life that when shared can be very helpful to one another. In the same way, crops without any bumps or bruises are not the epitome of perfection, the differences in the other crops can be just as important to its farmer and this diversity is certainly important to the Earth and its inhabitants. Ozeki’s novel shows how interwoven identity and environment are, especially with diversity in the mix. Both have critics that claim they are better off without what gives them uniqueness, but they also have supporters who say diversity is the best thing that could happen for them.