The New Realism is Biorealism
Forward to the Eco-Fiction Anthology Stories of Sand and Water, edited by Radovan Cizmar, Veronika Majerova, and Beata Takacova
In Turkmenistan, where I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the early years of the 21st Century, most people, even young people, had one or several gold teeth. Some—especially young mothers—had a full golden smile, the upper and lower rows of their teeth capped in precious metal.
What I eventually came to understand was that gold teeth were much more than a local status symbol. They had globe-spanning connections to war, colonialism, and an unprecedented human-made disaster: the disappearance of Central Asia’s Aral Sea.
That ecological disaster’s connection to the golden smiles of Turkmenistan’s young mothers, demonstrates a concept my personal experience living and working in places where the ambitions of empire and human aspirations have collided with the limits of fragile ecosystems has led me to. It is a concept I call biorealism.
Put simply, biorealism is the recognition that human culture and human consciousness are inseparable from the ecological systems which sustain all life. Our human world is woven within the ecosystems of the biosphere, and the consequences of our human actions resonate throughout those ecosystems.
The gleaming smiles I encountered in Turkmenistan demonstrate this resonance. They are in fact connected to events which occurred halfway around the world, and over a hundred and fifty years into the past, in the American Civil War.
The U.S. naval blockade of Confederate shipping during the Civil War damaged the South’s slavery-based economy and created a global cotton shortage in the early 1860s, threatening the Russian Empire’s emerging textile industry and prompting the Russian imperial government to expand cotton cultivation in Central Asia.
After the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, national movements across the Empire declared independence. But the Bolsheviks reconquered most former imperial territories and rebranded the restored empire as the USSR. And despite its communist ideology, The USSR remained an authoritarian colonial power and land empire. But now the autocratic regime of the tsar—distant, bureaucratic, often lacking power at its periphery—was replaced with a regime driven to remake society through centralized planning, collectivized agriculture, and the wholesale reordering of social life, treating populations as raw material for it ideological and material goals.
This had catastrophic consequences. The colonized Central Asian communities were subjected to terror and forced collectivization. The 1930s famine—driven by disastrous agricultural schemes and intensified through punitive grain requisitions and the denial of seed reserves—killed forty percent of the nomadic Kazakh population alone. And while Soviet populations starved to death, Moscow held vast grain reserves and continued to export wheat to the world.
Once they were victorious in their collectivization efforts, Bolshevik technocrats vastly expanded Tsarist-era cotton production in Central Asia. But the crop’s heavy water demands in an arid region required massive canal construction to divert water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. Among these projects was the environmentally disastrous, unlined 1,375-kilometer Kara Kum Canal, which removes up to 45% of the Amu Darya’s flow each year, most of which is lost to evaporation and seepage.
The Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake, home to a rich ecosystem and a major fishing industry, depended on these rivers. But by 1987, water level declines had split the lake into the North and South Aral Sea. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the lake had lost over 90% of its volume. And by 2014, with the now independent republics still economically reliant on cotton, river diversion had turned the Aral Sea’s Eastern Basin into the Aralkum, a desert where former fishing towns like Moynaq stood amid rusting boats stranded eighty kilometers from the shrunken, hypersaline remnants of the lake.
But how do we get from an imperial cotton policy shaped by a U.S. naval blockade to the present placetime of young Turkmen mothers with gold teeth? To understand, we have to understand cotton’s demands on the environment. Cotton is not only thirsty: it is also highly vulnerable to pests—bollworms, leafhoppers, aphids, thrips, and whiteflies. Fighting these pests means massive pesticide use, and the residues of this pesticide use were carried down the rivers and deposited on the Aral Sea’s bed.
As cotton exhausted Central Asia’s fragile soils, fertilizer had to replace its minerals. But these fertilizers contain heavy metals: cadmium, uranium, arsenic, vanadium, accumulating in the soil and entering the rivers and the sea. When the sea began to dry, dust storms laden with heavy metals and chemical residues swept across Central Asia.
Heavy-metal exposure, by competing with iron for absorption and causing many other problems in the bloodstream and organs, produced widespread health problems, including iron-deficiency anemia. Anemia is a major contributing factor to tooth decay. Pregnancy exacerbates tooth decay, placing strain on the mother’s system. Especially when nutrition is poor, and the pregnant woman is also vitamin deficient. So, pregnancy in post-colonial Turkmenistan often results in cavities and tooth loss. Combine this dental decay with the long tradition in Central Asia of gold as a status symbol, and the result is young mothers with golden smiles.
This complex series of events illustrates the entanglements between empire, war, colonial extractivist policies, and efforts to harness and control the environment. These entanglements are a demonstration of biorealism: they cannot be separated into cultural, environmental, or technological elements; like a fungal rhizome, they spread, binding together ecologies, human culture, governance, and technology.
Here we see the devastation of colonialism and extractive agricultural policies written not only on the landscape, in the salt-flats of the Aralkum and the rusting hulks of fishing boats stranded in the desert miles from water, but also scrawled in the bodies and bloodstreams of the Central Asian peoples. The physical traces of colonization’s exploitation are in the dust now spread by the wind, poisoning the bloodstreams of colonialism’s survivors, haunting populations with anemias, birth defects, and infant mortality.
These physical traces resonate with the cultural hauntings of empire, from the imposed colonial language which reduced vocabularies and hindered the development of local tongues to the invented national identities of the Soviet Union: manufactured categories imposed by Soviet ethnographers that have mutated into “real” national identities and lethal national conflicts.
Human action has real consequences because it occurs in the real world. This is biorealism.
Biorealism is a critique of and a counterargument against this kind of colonial exploitation, and equally against the profit-seeking models and “free market” arguments that ignore responsibility for damage to human life and to the biosphere. Biorealism intentionally contains the word “realism.” The use of the word “realism” in English is always a strategy: it implies that those opposed to its (false) concepts are “not realistic.” That their ideas are naïve, or impractical.
“Realism,” is in fact the naïve concept. It is a manufactured illusion, a willful forgetting of reality. “Realism” pretends that there is a world in which success is the domination of resources and the accrual of power, without regard for others or the environment.
Biorealism argues against this. None of this division of the world into clearly defined selves, nations, or other self-contained entities is “realist” or even “realistic.” Our interdependence is total. Our actions, and the actions of human society, have impact on larger ecosystems and the totality of the biosphere.
As the fiction contained within this anthology demonstrates, speculative fiction’s capacity for worldbuilding makes it particularly well suited to tracing the rhizomatic, interdependent relationships among cultures, technologies, and ecosystems, mapping the branching pathways that link our lived experiences to larger, often imperceptible structures—such as the structure that links Turkmenistan’s gold teeth to a Civil War distant both in space and time, via a labyrinth of causalities. Here in this anthology, speculative writers push back against a false sense of human separation from nature and the “realist” refusal to acknowledge our interdependence with the ecosystems of which we are a part. They present, instead, worlds of interdependence, entanglement, and possibility. Worlds that do not provide answers, but that build architectures within which we can ask complex questions about what it means to be human in the entangled ecosystems of the biosphere.
Never have those questions been more necessary than in this present, fragile moment in which we find ourselves: We are on the brink of understanding our true, biorealist relationships to everything else in the biosphere. But we are also at another turning point, at which false, authoritarian “realism” fills the world with lies, battling against progress and continuing to damage the fragile biosphere on which our human life—and all life—depend.