I was reading a dystopian novel the other day (which doesn’t particularly matter), one that took place against the backdrop of global drought and environmental cataclysm, and I had to quit halfway through—not because it was scary, but cause it was hopeless. It was a novel clearly not written to, say, raise a warning voice in the wilderness, not to impel people to action, but simply to wallow in its own cynicism. I’ve seen a lot of chatter online lately about how pessimism is a tool of power and patriarchy (for of course the novel in question was written by a white, male, middle-class American—that is, someone who has the luxury of indulging in cynicism, since he will always be shielded from society’s worst effects), and this novel I think was a prime example of the same.

It also got me thinking of just how over I am with dystopian literature, like, just in general! George Orwell’s 1984 came out literally 75 years ago this year (back when the year 1984 was a quarter-century into the future), yet still authors keep cranking them out as though there were something cutting-edge or brave or subversive about them. And Orwell at least was trying to raise a warning voice! But so many of today’s dystopians can’t even be bothered to do that.

But this naturally got me thinking about what does impel people to action; and it just so happened that I have also lately been reading Devotions (2017), the greatest-hits collection of the late, Pulitzer-prize winning poet Mary Oliver.

At least until Claudia Rankine came along, Oliver at one point in the 2000s held the hyper-rare distinction of being the best-selling poet in America—not just in comparison to other poets, but actually a best-seller. And it’s not hard to see why: her poetry is very simple, elegant, clear—that dreaded word accessible—in sincere, unironic, and unabashed praise of nature. This is poetry for early Spring and bird-watching, for sunrises and blue skies, for forest walks and seasides. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life” is probably her most quoted line.

But hers is no naive praise: “If God exists he isn’t just churches and mathematics/He’s the forest, He’s the desert/He’s the ice caps, that are dying,” she wrote in 2009. That is, nature writing for Oliver isn’t just a form of devotion, but of protest, a reminder of what we stand to lose if we don’t repent. For she did indeed desire for us all to repent; she for example concludes her 2005 poem “Lead,” about a flock of geese that died of some mysterious ailment one winter, by insisting: “I tell you this/to break your heart,/by which I mean only/that it break open and never close again/to the rest of the world”—for she (accurately) surmised that most of humanity does not have a heart open to the world.

Indeed, so much of her poetry can be read as a compendium of strategies for resistance. Consider also her 2010 poem “Don’t Hesitate”:

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”

Again, nature and beauty and joy for Oliver aren’t just aesthetically pleasing, not just spiritually rejuvenating, but potential avenues for resistance, for “fighting back”. Not to mention for critique and complaint; consider as well her scathing 2008 poem “Of The Empire”:

“We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.”

This is the voice of one not just speaking for the wilderness, but out of it, like Enoch or John the Baptist, to our condemnation. But what’s more, I dare say that this is the kind of literature that is most likely to impel the reader to action, to at least try to save what we got while we still have it.

Orwell, incidentally (since I’ve already brought him up), has a 1946 essay called “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” wherein he indulges in the simple pleasures of observing early Spring—the toads croaking, the flowers blooming, the weather warming. But like Oliver, he isn’t just trying to cheer himself up for once; he is preemptively responding against the common revolutionist argument that “any pleasure in the actual process of life encourages a sort of political quietism,” that people “ought to be discontented” so as to provoke concrete political action.

Yet even conceding that “Certainly we ought to be discontented”, Orwell also asks quite simply, “If a man cannot enjoy the return of Spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia?” Orwell is not generally known for his nature writing; but still he understood, as Oliver does, how important appreciating natural beauty is to spur people to action as well. Indeed, given just how ugly everything is in 1984–the gray, the grime, the constant state of disrepair, all of it even more oppressive than the omnipresent surveillance state—I think it’s safe to say that Orwell understood how ugliness is also a tool of the powerful to keep us constantly worn out, tired, and complacent. Conversely then, natural beauty can be genuinely energizing, resistant, even politically subversive—or at a bare minimum, can make you feel like this world is worth fighting for.

As Jane Bennet once wrote, “One must be enamored with existence to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others….You have to love life before you can care about anything.” I would offer that both Oliver and Orwell, though so utterly different in religious attitudes and literary style, nevertheless still intuited the same basic fact: people are best motivated to save the world not by pessimism and cynicism, but through the simple pleasure of being enchanted by life itself. Or, as Mary Oliver also once wrote: “I ask you again: if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—your life—what would do for you?”