Damnation Spring

The lines dividing the community sharpen significantly here, due to Daniel holding a meeting of concerned community members. Colleen cannot stay away but remains on the fence about committing to Daniel’s crusade. She is willing to hand him the samples she took but unwilling to out herself as one of the small number of locals willing to take on Sanderson. Here, readers can see begin to see the price of activism and how it might lead someone otherwise in good standing with a community to be censured or ostracized by it. Many readers will identify with Colleen here. Her fear is recognizable, as she wrestles with the consequences of doing the right thing. In some ways, her hesitation is frustrating, but Colleen must overcome the same aversion to social exclusion that anyone might feel if faced with a similar dilemma.

On the home front, Rich is even more on the fence than Colleen. But his act of quietly installing the charcoal filter signals a moral complexity to him. Unlike, say, Eugene, he is not a nihilist. On some level, he acknowledges a queasiness about what Sanderson is doing; he wants to try and protect people. At first, the people he wants to protect may be limited to his family, and he still wants to do so discreetly while safeguarding their futures financially. But readers can see in Rich the greater community’s struggle: how to pay the bills, without destroying the things that are most dear.

For some, this appears to be no struggle at all—or perhaps they are externalizing their own fears by scapegoating others. Merle leads the way, retaliating against Carl. But the egg-throwers of the community are numerous, reminding the reader how often throughout history skeptics have persecuted the progressive. It is tempting here to again make the link to the present, and the derision, at least in some parts of the world, faced by advocates who call for cutting emissions, lest the entire world become as inhospitable as a clear-cut forest.