Held on the first Thursday of the month, the Folger’s virtual book club is free and open to all. To spark discussion, speakers provide historical context, throw in trivia, and speak to relevant items from the library collection in a brief presentation to participants before small-group discussion begins.
Here, we revisit the presentation by Todd Andrew Borlik, incoming Teaching Professor at Purdue University–Indianapolis and author of Shakespeare Beyond the Green World, which examines how Shakespeare’s late plays intervene in environmental policy disputes at the Jacobean court. Discussion questions for the novel can be found here.
We would like to thank the Junior League of Washington for its generous support of this program.
For understandable reasons to do with boosting sales and avoiding spoilers, Eleanor Catton’s novel has been marketed as an “ecothriller” rather than an “ecotragedy.” But the latter label perhaps does greater justice to its achievement. A clue, of course, lurks in the title: Birnam Wood is an unmistakable nod to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. While there are several subtle parallels between Catton’s story set in New Zealand and Shakespeare’s Scottish play, which this blog post will delineate in due course, the primary function of the homage appears in retrospect to frame the novel as aspiring to the grandeur and sublime pathos of Shakespearean tragedy. And, for this reader at least, it reaches those heights.
Bardophiles who venture into Birnam Wood expecting a straightforward adaptation or obvious spin-off of Macbeth may be disoriented at first. But very few will be disappointed with the urgency and literary power of this phenomenal novel. It features a cast of vividly realized characters, many of whom–with notable exception of the Machiavellian billionaire Robert Lemoine–are highly relatable. At the heart of the book is the strained friendship of two women, Mira Bunting and Shelley Noakes, the leaders of an environmental collective known as Birnam Wood, which promotes organic horticulture in urban spaces but also engages in guerilla gardening activities of dubious legality. Mira is the founder, an idealist and outspoken radical; Shelley is her more down-to-earth roommate, who handles the nitty-gritty logistics of running the organization.
During a reconnaissance trip to the Korowai National Park on the South Island, Mira encounters Robert Lemoine, a tech billionaire and apparent doom-prepper purchasing real estate to construct an underground bunker, who surprisingly offers to sponsor Birnam Wood. Mira is wary but dazzled by his charisma and the prospect of bringing their ragtag organization into fiscal solvency and a position to exert some discernible change in the world. Predictably, Lemoine has an ulterior motive he wants to use the environmentalists as camouflage for his clandestine mining operation to smuggle precious rare earth elements vital for smart phone technology out of New Zealand.
Two other key characters are Sir Owen Darvish and his wife, who are selling their farmland to Lemoine, and devoting themselves to charitable causes such as wildlife conservation. Finally, there is Tony Gallo, a leftist, would-be journalist and former member of Birnam Wood who has returned from a stint abroad teaching English in Mexico just in time to hear Mira, with whom had been romantically entangled, pitch the partnership with Lemoine to the collective. Tony is appalled and denounces the plan as a betrayal of everything Birnam Wood stands for, but since he has just been mansplaining to the group about the pitfalls of wokeness, they side with Mira and he marches out in a huff, resolving to investigate Lemoine on his own.
As this synopsis indicates, Birnam Wood does not follow Shakespeare’s narrative closely, and one must squint to perceive the resemblances. Considering the novel’s setting on New Zealand’s South Island, the famous film location for Middle Earth, one might suggest that Lord of the Rings is as much an inter-text, especially when we recall that the famous episode in which the Tree Ents march on Isengard was inspired by Tolkien’s frustration with the anti-climactic fulfilment of the prophecy of Birnam Wood. The novel’s divergence from Macbeth could be attributed to Catton’s need to craft a story that speaks directly to the ecological predicament of the twenty-first century Anthropocene or Capitalocene or Cthulucene or Manthropocene (insert one’s preferred label here). That is of course an understandable and noble goal. However, I would like to suggest that Shakespeare’s tragedy speaks to environmental problems and debates in Jacobean England, and therefore had an environmental message for audiences in 1606. A survey of these may help readers of Birnam Wood appreciate that it is not such a drastic departure from its ostensible Shakespearean source; the acorn has not fallen too far from the oak.
First, Shakespeare’s tragedy begins in a haze of acrid smoke. Critics often gloss the “foul and filthy air” as an allusion to the Gunpowder Plot but it also glances at the polluted skies of 17th-century London, when rates of coal consumption skyrocketed, especially in the aftermath of the 1603 plague. The Macbeths engage in what we would now call climate engineering, conjuring darkness (as witches were accused of doing) to cloak their foul play. As I suggest in my forthcoming book, the six months of darkness that smothers Scotland in the aftermath of Duncan’s murder may have been inspired by an actual volcanic eruption in 10th-century Iceland. While it is unlikely Shakespeare knew of this, Macbeth does seem to ponder whether human tampering with subterranean, infernal forces–as we do when we extract mineral resources from the earth–might have unforeseen, potentially catastrophic consequences.
More broadly, Macbeth views humans as enmeshed in a struggle between the forces of fertility and sterility, subscribing to problematically dualistic thinking about the natural world. The childless Macbeths and the androgynous witches are associated with sterility, which explains why Shakespeare sets their initial encounter on a blasted heath. Due to a surge in human population, early modern Britain desperately needed to boost food production, which resulted in a campaign by agrarian improvers to enclose and destroy heathlands, usually by scorching or blasting them. As a result, Britain’s heaths are only about one-sixth the size they were in Shakespeare’s day. But heaths are not natural; they are chiefly a byproduct of deforestation by ancient humans in the Bronze Age. The ending of Shakespeare’s play, in which England invades Scotland, enacts the fantasy of regreening Scottish heathlands by English agrarian practices or perhaps even reforesting them at a time when Britain was panicked about its dearth of timber reserves. The mission of Mira and Birnam Wood to regreen New Zealand through their guerilla gardening in vacant lots has a precedent in early modern campaigns to regreen the heaths, but with a key difference: Birnam Wood is planting on private land for the public good, whereas 17th-century agrarian reformers were enclosing public commons chiefly for private gain.
Another point of intersection between Shakespeare’s tragedy and Catton’s novel is avian conservation. Today, Britain’s heathlands are subject to prescribed burns by wealthy landowners to create more nesting habitat for grouse, but in 1606 hunters – most notably Shakespeare’s patron King James – held the opposite view: that burning heath resulted in holocausts of ground-nesting game birds. Accordingly, in 1609 Parliament passed a law to forbid the burning the heathlands during nesting season. The Scottish King James was also deeply concerned about a crash in England’s avian species, which he blamed on overhunting with nets and on nest-robbing, practices which the King sought to criminalize. Macbeth repeatedly glances at these policies. When Macbeth wishes he could “trammel up the consequences” of the murder, Shakespeare portrays him as wielding one of the nets his patron had outlawed. Shakespeare associates the Macbeths and the witches with species early modern legislation classified as vermin: ravens, rooks, kites, which engage in nest-robbing, as well as snakes, wolves, and even hedgehogs. The need to divert more of the nation’s biomass resources to feed the surging human population prompted the passage of these vermin acts, which placed bounties on the heads of species who competed with humans for food. It is appropriate that the Darvish character in Birnam Wood made his fortune from a pest control company, as pest control or vermin killing informs the depiction of the environment in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Yet Darvish is also involved in conservation efforts to protect rare bird species in New Zealand, such as the orange-fronted parakeet. He donates money and creates an online newsletter to tout avian conservation campaigns, which resemble those of Shakespeare’s patron to which Macbeth pays tribute.
Some of the characters in Macbeth are even imagined as birdlike. Few readers are aware that in Shakespeare’s source the equivalent of the peace-loving Duncan is named Duff (a Scottish pronunciation of dove) and the name of his son Malcolm means dove worshipper. Nor has much attention been paid to the fact that the astrologer-physician Simon Forman, who saw the play performed at the Globe in 1610/11, spells Macduff “Mackdove” in his journal. As I argue in Shakespeare Beyond the Green World, Shakespeare imagines Macduff as a mourning dove and the assault on Macduff’s castle as a raid on a dovecote. This running pun explains why there are no fewer than eight references to flight in this scene and also accounts for one of the weirdest lines in all of Shakespeare. When the murderer barks “What you egg?” before stabbing Macduff’s young son, Shakespeare is recreating the crimes of nest-robbing in dovecotes.
Dovecotes were flashpoints for major legal battle in 17th-century Britain over who owned the earth. Dovecotes were precious repositories for the mining of saltpeter. The dung that accumulated inside them contained high levels of nitrates and comprised the key ingredient in the manufacture of gunpowder. Since maintaining vast reserves of gunpowder was considered vital to national defense, the English monarchy dispatched gangs of “salt petre” men who travelled around the country barging into dovecotes and commandeering the mineral wealth, often killing the doves and knocking down the dovecote in the process to the chagrin of their owners.
This brings us back to Catton’s novel and the real reason why the billionaire Lemoine is in New Zealand. His subterranean bunker is a “Trojan horse” (82) for his extraction of rare earth elements (REEs) essential for digital technologies, a plan he justifies to himself and his paramilitary security force by noting that these elements are vital for national security since most of the world’s reserves are controlled by China. In other words, REEs are to us now what saltpeter was to early modern Britain. Lemoine, however, is not acting out of patriotic motives; he is illegally mining in a national park and plans to corner the REEs market himself, catapulting himself from a billionaire to a trillionaire to become “by several orders of magnitude, the richest person who had ever lived” (80). As Catton’s book helpfully reminds us, the process of extracting these essential components found in smart phones, GPS, electric vehicles (to name but a few) generates huge amounts of toxic waste, contaminating water supplies and causing soil erosion (Lemoine’s mining has triggered the landslide at the start of the novel). Our modern paperless technologies are not as green as we would like to believe.
Collating Birnam Wood with its Shakespearean instigator, it is apparent that Lemoine is the Macbeth figure, who acts with the callous ruthlessness of an ecological tyrant over the natural world. In the early going, I had suspected that the trio of Mira, Shelley, and Tony might prove to be the Weird Sisters. In fact, however, Mira and Shelley become more like Lady Macbeth. Lemoine and Mira work together to conceal a crime of vehicular manslaughter, during which scene Catton describes Mira as having a “steely, vacant look, like a sleepwalker’s” (298) in a fleeting homage to Lady M. Owen Darvish has a passing resemblance to Banquo (in that he is knighted, betrayed by his ally, and killed outdoors at night). Yet Darvish’s widow assumes the part of Macduff, avenging the death of her spouse. In one of the brilliant touches in the book, Catton reassigns the role of the witches to the high-tech surveillance drones that Lemoine uses to gain a supernatural intelligence of the identities and movements of others. His cunning use of phone and drone technology to divine information about his victims sent a chill up my spine that must have been similar to the eerie frisson the witches’ prophecies induced in Jacobean audiences.
When reading Birnam Wood in continuum with Macbeth, we can see that the absolute sovereignty over nature that the tyrant Macbeth claims has descended to multi-national tech corporations, whose treatment of the earth often could be characterized as tyrannical. But Catton’s novel can also help sharpen our perception of an environmental sub-text in Macbeth, to see that its titular anti-hero behaves like an egomaniacal billionaire who cares only for himself. Macbeth allies himself with forces of sterility, interferes with the climate, butchers the young in an utterly unsustainable fashion, and then barricades himself in Dunsinane like a billionaire in his underground bunker. Just as Lemoine disregards any moral obligations in his pursuit of obscene wealth and power, Macbeth renounces any duty to other species or to futurity, regardless of whether it triggers an apocalypse:
Though you untie the winds and let them fight
Against the churches, though the yeasty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up,
Though bladed corn be lodged [felled] and trees blown down
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Though the treasure
Of Nature’s germen [seeds] tumble altogether,
Even till destruction sicken. (4.1.51–58)
If Macbeth is a parable about the fatal nature of ambition, Birnam Wood reminds us how it might spark resistance to the ecocidal ambition of the 1% to be lords of the earth.
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