Parable of the Sower and Climate Futures

The day after the 2024 presidential election, I packed up my car in Philadelphia and drove to the edge of the ocean. There, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, I linked up with friends and colleagues for an annual education conference. I hugged people I’d only ever seen on Zoom screens and met hundreds more teachers of conscience. It was a lovely way to spend a dreadful week. As the election results sank in, a page from Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower made the rounds of in-person and online conversations. Parable is set in California from 2024 to 2027, as ecological collapse engulfs the hometown of teenage protagonist Lauren Olamina. She speaks to readers directly through a series of journal entries. The page, or journal entry, in circulation was dated Nov. 6, 2024 — the day after a fictional election where an authoritarian candidate emerged victorious. This fictional president-elect promised to “suspend ‘overly restrictive’ minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws.” His successor would run in the book’s sequel, Parable of the Talents, with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” The parallels were striking. Was the dystopian future Butler imagined 30 years ago upon us? Some people called her a prophet. More on this later.

At the conference, I presented a workshop on teaching the history of the climate crisis. The week before, we crossed 12 years since superstorm Sandy made landfall and tore through New Jersey. We reflected on this anniversary, then cast our lens back to the hundreds of years of colonial extraction and fossil capitalism that cut a path to the climate crisis of the 21st century. I introduced participants to the Zinn Education Project’s interactive Climate Crisis Timeline, a resource designed to help historicize the climate emergency in more classrooms and curricula. There is much to learn from this past, like who to be mad at and who to draw inspiration from. One thing I underscored in the workshop is that “history” invokes today, tomorrow, and every day after. We are historical actors capable of following and furthering the work of those who resisted injustice before us. 

In the second half of the workshop, I asked participants to mull over the idea of critical “choice points”: moments when things might have gone — or could still go — in a different direction, depending on people’s actions. Then we looked ahead, some of us wincing with the knowledge that political forces were set to intensify all sorts of crises. Participants brainstormed activities teachers and students might do, including plant community gardens, host environmental justice fairs, rally for fossil fuel divestment, and petition elected officials. We analyzed popular warming models that simply cast calamitous scenarios into the bitter end of this century — as if there are no meaningful actions to take, and the climate crisis has no authors to confront. As if lurching into defeatism is proper and pragmatic, rather than misguided and dangerous. One participant asked, “Now that the election is over, where would the tipping point be?” In other words, when can we expect to cross a threshold of irreversible, accelerated damage to the Earth? I appreciated the question. It was earnest, understandable, and impossible to answer matter-of-factly. Decades of unabated climate change may not be undone in our lifetimes; some effects are literally baked in. But the future is not set in stone; every molecule of CO₂ prevented from entering the atmosphere will help us carve out something more survivable.

As climate anxiety and feelings of hopelessness soar among young people, there are deeper reasons for high schoolers to engage with Parable — lessons that don’t lead them further into dens of despair, but invite them into action.

In January, as fires raged through Los Angeles, Butler’s Parable of the Sower again appeared in the discourse. The winter of 2025 — in the book’s world and ours — saw flames decimating Black communities in Southern California. Lauren’s Robledo is a fictional version of Altadena, where Butler lived and was laid to rest decades before the Eaton Fire. People again called Butler a seer of sorts. Here was another astonishing parallel, at least on the surface. 

To be sure, Butler brought the ravages of climate change into clear view. Parable is cited in the Climate Crisis Timeline’s final “event,” which asks students to consider alternative outcomes depending on what actions we take. There are obvious tie-ins to Butler’s work, as the climate collapse and authoritarian ascendence in her speculative fiction mirror these troubling times in the world young people are inheriting. Yet these symmetries, eerie as they may seem, are not mere coincidences. And as climate anxiety and feelings of hopelessness soar among young people, there are deeper reasons for high schoolers to engage with Parable — lessons that don’t lead them further into dens of despair, but invite them into action.

In 2000, Butler penned the essay “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” in which she recounted an interaction with a student after a book talk. There she described Parable as a novel that takes place “in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.” This student asked if she really believed the dystopian futures in her books would come to pass. Butler told him that she didn’t dream up these troubles; she observed existing neglected problems and considered what might happen if they grew. The conversation continued — the student asked for a solution, and Butler answered that there wasn’t one. “You mean we’re just doomed?” he said, and “smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.” 

Often stripped of its context, Butler’s reply to this question has become a well-known quote: “No. I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.” It’s a hopeful response, and true as it ever was. But this vignette ends with the student misrepresenting Butler in a column for his school newspaper. He wrote about the book talk and part of their exchange on dystopian futures, but cut out her words of encouragement. “It was frustrating because the one thing that I and my main characters never do when contemplating the future is give up hope,” Butler recalled. “In fact, the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.” Parable delivers these messages through Lauren, born in 2009 — making her the same age as high schoolers of the mid-2020s. And she has important things to tell them.

One of the most salient warnings in Parable is around the politics of disposability. What happens when people are taught to treat the Earth, each other, and even their own minds as expendable? The world Lauren lives in is mired in violent chaos, ravaged by greed, poverty, and climate disaster. There is not enough food or drinkable water. There are rising sea levels, measles outbreaks, and a government that has rolled back the resources people need to survive, in favor of privatization. There is an addictive drug called “Pyro” that gives its users a feeling of euphoria when they light fires and watch other people’s lives go up in flames. It is horrific. 

Thankfully, Pyro is not an actual drug in our world, though there are metaphors we might draw from it. We are certainly contending with a politics of disposability. As I write, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is rounding up students of color for voicing opposition to the genocide in Gaza. The Department of Education is “investigating” schools where trans youth are free to be kids who play sports. The president’s regime threatens to slash funds for education programs that offer clear-eyed accounts of U.S. history. And yes, they’re gutting even the most basic environmental protections. Every day, the richest people on Earth tell us that caring about each other is a fool’s errand. I don’t think so. Neither did Butler. 

At the start of Parable, Lauren’s family lives in a neighborhood walled off from the worst of dystopia. Residents occupy themselves with various tasks — cooking, gardening, teaching — that sustain their community in the short term. Lauren learns at an early age that they would not endure without working together. But most adults in her life are entrenched in a mix of fear and denial, as they await the return of the “good old days” that never come. Before long, desperate people break in and torch Lauren’s village, and she escapes on foot. Unlike most residents, Lauren had made preparations — she studied which plants are edible or medicinal, learned self-defense, and assembled a survival pack. She developed a belief system called “Earthseed,” which holds that change is constant and humanity can shape it. When the changes no one can prepare for sweep through her neighborhood, she knows she must adapt. 

Lauren and two other survivors stumble upon each other and set out on a journey up the California coast to find a new safe haven. Swarms of people are headed in the same direction; most seem untrustworthy at best, dangerous at worst. But as Lauren and her companions learn to trust and protect each other, they begin to take chances on new people. They innovate. They make each other braver. And their little community grows. 

All the while, Lauren quietly manages a rare, lifelong affliction. She is a “sharer,” which means she feels other people’s acute pain and pleasure, as if she herself were experiencing them. In Parable’s harrowing universe, this hyper-empathy can be a liability. Early on, Lauren wavers on whether to tell her fellow travelers. Is this a weakness they would exploit? Or are they all in it together for the long haul? “It’s no small thing to commit yourself to other people,” she writes in her journal. Lauren eventually reveals to her companions that she is a sharer, and it ultimately brings them closer. Through this journey, readers Lauren’s age can glimpse the possibilities she discerned — of connection, of community, of building something new and beautiful in the rubble of a world on fire. That’s no small thing either.

It is no wonder that the oligarchs among us want to quell empathy. This is an important step on their path to crushing dissent. Some will now say the quiet part out loud, as Elon Musk did when he called empathy “a bug in Western civilization.” Theirs is a time-tested strategy of divide and conquer. The easiest way to plunder the Earth is to alienate people from each other — to sever our sense of connectedness and sink us into despair. These are grim times. But ours is a time-tested strategy of solidarity and hope. Solidarity asks, day after day: What do I have to offer that someone else might need? And hope, to borrow language from activist Rebecca Solnit, “is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.” In reflecting on Parable as a coming-of-age story, Butler once said that Lauren “never develops a ‘things will work themselves out somehow’ attitude. She learns to be an activist.” It is this orientation that ultimately moves Lauren’s band of travelers through Parable. And it can move the young people in our world too. These are the parallels I hold on to. There is no magic bullet, as Butler said 25 years ago. But there are thousands of answers. Students and educators of the 2020s can be among them, if we choose to be.