WOLVOGS, PIGOONS AND CRAKERS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 167

posthuman species, the Crakers. As we will see, Wells had considered similar
hybrids over a century earlier in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). But where Wells
confined experiments to an island controlled by the eponymous doctor, beyond
which his creatures never really roam, Atwood's wolvogs and pigoons stalk
malevolently around the post-apocalyptic world she fashions. This fits our sense of
the contemporary Age of the Anthropocene, where human activity has massively
influenced ecosystems around the globe, so that there is no 'outside' from which
to invade. Everything is inside, including the invaders. The bodysplices in Oryx
and Crake in a sense have been 'homemade' by humans—and in a traumatised
environment where humans no longer dominate, some of these hybrid creatures
are intelligent, vicious and hungry.
Bill McKibben's 1990 highly influential topic on global warming, The End of
Nature , is unforgiving of humans: 'we are no longer able to think of ourselves as a
species tossed around by larger forces—now we are those larger forces. Hurricanes
and thunderstorms and tornados become not acts of God but acts of man'
(McKibben, 1990: xviii). It is a grim and slightly hyperbolic warning, for as recent
tsunamis and earthquakes have shown so harrowingly, massive natural forces are
sometimes just that—natural, immense and entirely uninfluenced by humans. That
said, it is also apparent that human exploitation of the planet's resources has had a
powerful, ongoing—and probably accelerating—impact on nature. Carolyn
Merchant, in Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (1992), has written of
the 'confluence of technical and commercial orders' at work in this exploitative
process (Merchant, 1992: 68). These orders impose what Graham Huggan and
Helen Tiffen in Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2010) see
as the 'technocratic view of nature', as something to be 'suitably retooled to match
the latest global-corporate interests'. Atwood explores this retooling and its effects,
intended and otherwise, in Oryx and Crake . The technocratic view produces a
paradox, as Huggan and Tiffen note:
Conventional environmentalist valorisations of nature run up against the
obvious obstacle that much of what passes for the 'natural world' is a product
of human activity and, once that truism is accepted, the 'nature' one is seeking
to promote and protect isn't 'natural' in any autonomous sense.
(2010: 153)
The unnatural scare quotes around 'nature' and its cognates suggest a breakdown
of the definitional borders surrounding that term, to the point where the dividing
line between the natural and the unnatural is constantly being redrawn and
disputed, often as the result of technological advances generated by global-
corporate interests. Again, we see this breakdown of borders (in several senses) in
Oryx and Crake . That those interests do not take account fully of the social
implications of activities that often transcend national or even continental borders
dissolves the efficacy, if not indeed the reality, of borders, further undermining clear
notions of what constitutes outside and inside.