Advancing Towards a Cul-de-Sac:

Oryx and Crake and Environmental Protection

By Selen Kaptan

Imagine a future where dog genes are spliced with wolves so that they would be more aggressive rather than docile and if one tried to pat, they would rip the hand that is reaching towards them. Similarly, rabbit embryos are embedded with jellyfish genes so that they can glow in the dark, hence rather than being little cute creatures, they would look threatening with their massive teeth and almost translucent beings. Margaret Atwood in her novel Oryx and Crake (2003) assumes a possible future where humanity manipulates the natural world, raising the question of morality regarding bioengineering. The novel makes us question whether it is permissible to eliminate biological features of beings that they believe are the weak aspects of nature and make their environment fit better into their own needs. The actual weak aspect of nature in the novel turns out to be humanity itself since humanity’s interference with the natural world backfires and takes them to a cul-de-sac.

While bioengineering deploys the idea of amplifying the living beings by turning them into hybrid beings, there is also another phenomenon that is about to drastically change the earth’s order: global warming. The greenhouse gasses make the heat get so high to the point where the sun becomes able to swell the skin, causing large inflamed spots to appear on it. It also leads to fires that can last for three weeks straight. But rather than raising awareness about global warming, in this future, people choose to further manipulate the natural world by genetically engineering the pigs to make them wider and sturdier so that they can be used as vessels for growing several different human organs. Approaching these genetically modified pigs that are called “pigoons” not as living beings but as organ fields shows that humans use their power over the environment rather abusively to change it in order to satisfy their own needs. Gradually over time, as a result of these manipulations and the ignoring of global warming, the environment changes so much that it becomes completely unfamiliar with beaches getting washed away and lakes being shrunk into mud puddles.

This obsession with environmental manipulation, however, does not end with nature’s manipulation. While the scientists spend their time to be able to find cures to the diseases that make people suffer, they turn out to be the ones that produce the new viruses and release them to the population in the first place. For a cure to be sold, there needs to be a disease; acting with this premise, scientists manipulate both the environment and, humans as well. They devise a pill that is intended to eliminate sexual frustration, believing that overpopulation is the ultimate source that exhausts the earth’s sources. They secretly make people sterile and using the same pill, they spread a terrible virus to decrease the population of humanity but end up wiping all humans from the earth’s surface. Hence, humanity’s attempt to recreate the natural process leads them to a path that cannot be reverted. Through this reading experience, one can see that bending the law of nature to humanity’s whim can only lead to catastrophe.