ABSTRACT
This essay explores how Paolo Bacigalupi’s Drowned Cities trilogy challenges anthropocentric models of environmental stewardship. Rather than affirming the power of human agency to save the Earth, Bacigalupi’s novels suggest that other animal and plant species will ascend because humans’ over-predation of the Earth is not sustainable. The Earth will, in effect, steward itself as natural cycles rebalance ecosystems and organisms with unsustainable ways of life shrink from natural selection. For Bacigalupi, human stewardship may be vital for the survival of our own species, but the Earth will succeed in rejuvenating itself without us if we cannot pivot towards a more sustainable relationship with the world around us.
