Cultivating Utopias: Dwelling and Fugitive Animal Husbandry in Ursula K. Le Guin

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Why is it important?

Agrilogistics, as coined by literary scholar Timothy Morton, conceives of modern day agriculture as a system for system's sake. To agrilogistics, Earth is a blank resource, an slate that can be filled and then wiped clean at will. No harm is irreversible. Agriculture and animal husbandry in the modern era, argues Morton, require of us that we be numb to the exploitation and suffering of plants and animals occurring at a scale that isn't fully conceivable, and as such reproduce the logic of agrilogistics: a system that exists because it does, even if it is entirely unsustainable. This chapter argues, through an analysis of some texts from Ursula Le Guin's science fiction collection "The Hainish Cycle," how imagining other modes of agriculture and animal husbandry might in fact resist rather than replicate agrilogistics. Instead of being numbed by these practices, texts like "Solitude", "Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways" show that agriculture and animal husbandry can also draw people to a greater awareness of the ecological networks they are a part of. Central to this awareness is an emphasis on dwelling (seeing existence not as a passive state but as an active process that requires our constant engagement with the world), as well as fugitivity (the rejection of ownership and control).