Overall, Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Green Earth” left me feeling unsatisfied. I felt that while KSR mentioned some interesting solutions such as permaculture and carbon sinks, he didn’t detail these solutions enough. Instead of exploring these ideas, he chose to explore politics. As someone with a strong distaste for politics, I would rather have heard more about specific ways the people in “Green Earth” were hoping to implement sustainable solutions. I will say that especially in the time we are in now with our current political situation, KSR did provide some refreshing hope of a political system that would actually care about and work on environmental issues.
Even though the society painted in “Green Earth” has a large amount of obvious parallels to our current society, I found it harder to imagine the events in “Green Earth” than the events of a similar genre of book like Ecotopia. I think this was largely due to the development of the protagonists in the two books. I felt that Green Earth lacked the character development to make me, as the reader, connect to or care about any of the characters—leaving them entirely two dimensional. This, however, may be in part due to our selective reading of the book, so we might have lost the important character development in the pages we did not have to read. But regardless, without this, it was much harder to relate to the protagonists and imagine being in a similar situation as in “Green Earth”. Will Weston from Ecotopia felt much more like a believable person than Charlie from this novel.
