October 24, 2014 - 15:02
The book, all over creation, told an interesting story between human and seed. Yumi, the protagonist, ran away from home at 14 and came back 25 years later. When she came back with three children, Yumi met her sick parents, Lloyd and Momoko, best friend, Cass, the hippie activists, and even her middle school teacher who slept with her and then abandoned her, Elliot. Written with different perspectives, the book narrated a vivid story about a genetic engineering protest happened in Yumi’s house. The book dug deeply into the relationship between identify and environment, the balance between culture and nature.
The whole book used a lot of comparison about human and the nature. From the very beginning, in the first paragraph said “Imagine the planet like a split peach, whose pit form the core, whose flesh is mantle, and whose fuzzy skin is crust” (3). In the following content, the writer wrote about how Cass looked like potatoes when she was young. Further, the writer was talking about the promiscuity of squashes and when Yumi showed Momoko the cross-bred squash, “she pointed to Ocean and Phoenix” and said “Like them. All mixed up”(118). These are not simply personifications, all the metaphors revealing the similarity between human and nature suggested the writer’s attitude toward the relationship between human and nature: human and nature can equally represent each other. How should human being identify themselves in the environment? Human beings should be treated as equally as the other living beings in the environment. There is no so-called superiority of human.
As the writer further addressed the question in part four, “seeds contain the information necessary to perform the most essential of all alchemies, something that we cannot do: They know how to transform sunlight into food and oxygen so the rest of us can survive” (171). “Symbionts. We depend on plants. They depend on us. It’s called mutualism” (124). Absolutely, human can’t rule over other living being in the environment, subverting the subtle balance of nature. Human depends on plants to survive, and plants also need human’s help to flourish. Moreover, there’s also an inner emotional bond between plants and human. The seeds and plants in the little garden defended Momoko’s only memory and motivated Llord to live on and recover.
However, people are now developing genetic engineering, trying to control and design the gene of plant. In order to seek interests, producers even invented a kind of seed that kills its own embryos, Terminator, totally against the rule of nature. Just like how Yumi’s father treated her: treating her “like a potato”, trying to shape her into his ideal daughter instead of respecting her nature. So, respect is in need in the “contact zone” between father and daughter, between human and the environment, especially when one of the two sides is vulnerable. An oppressed daughter ran away from home and refused to come back in 25 years, then, what might a plant do? Whenever, the environment decided to fight back, it must be a deathblow.
“Our seeds contain our beliefs. That’s why we urge you to continue to save them and propagate them and pass them on to others to do the same, in accordance with god’s plan. In this way we chose to praise our Lord and to fulfill his design – of which mankind is just one small part.” (302). It is Lloyd’s belief that everything is created by the Lord and Lord is the only one who has the right to control and change the world. Besides the Lord in religion, everyone should have a “Lord” in their heart, a kind of reverence for life, for the nature, for the environment, reminding you of respecting all the living beings, including a plant, a fetus and an embryo. The only thing we should do is protect them, like Momoko striving to preserve the diversity of plants and Lloyd mentioning “Never taking out more than you gave back” (254).
Throughout the book, Ruth Ozeki demonstrated a sophisticated story regarding identity and environment. Momoko devoted to preserving seeds diversity through her life time, Lloyd hard to understand at the beginning but transformed into a man who respects nature, the radical activists, Cass and Will benefiting from genetic engineering, Elliot promoting genetic engineering and indifferent Yumi all represents different kinds of people in the real life. It’s really hard to define somebody completely wrong, like Will and Cass also have their own reasons and difficulties. How one identifies himself/herself in the environment, to what degree he/she preserve and support the environment may vary from person to person, but there’s something clear in the passage: everyone should revere the “Lord of nature” in their heart.