Humanity’s Great Project <em>On Deb Olin Unferth’s Earth 7</em>

There are so many reasons why we call Earth “mother.” The planet we live on gave us life, incrementally, over millions of years of evolution. It gave life to all the other living things that nourish us, to all the materials from which we’ve built our cultures, our homes, our works of art. In an era of climate change, microplastics, and water-guzzling data centers, it’s worth remembering that even the worst things that we’ve created come in some way from the natural resources we found, manipulated, and bent to our will. Human beings and our creations are part of nature, not separate from it; when we work to save or preserve environments, habitats, weather patterns, we are working to preserve ourselves, our own continued survival. 

Human beings, like children, often forget that Mother Earth had a full life for eons before we showed up on the scene. We know some of the highlights—dinosaurs being a perennial favorite—but many of us have a hard time really conceptualizing a planet without us. Similarly, for our species, the natural order of things is that a parent should always die before their child, and so it is very difficult to fully grasp the fact that Mother Earth will very likely survive long after our species goes the way of millions of others.  

These tensions are at the center of Earth 7, Deb Olin Unferth’s excellent new novel.

Set in the not-too-distant future, it begins with a mother, Rosemary, leaving the surface of the Earth with her toddler daughter, Dylan. They don’t flee to space—though some humans have done so during “depop,” as the book calls the decades of declining of Earth’s population—but rather to the ocean, to settle in an isolated pod that’s part of a new development, Sea Garden. It’s not a great place to raise a small child, and Rosemary isn’t a particularly attentive mother; she’s too concerned with her research: “The great project. Life, artificial and otherwise. Her so-called preservation project: selecting animals, or rather subanimals, or their molecular representatives (DNA), and inserting them into cages, where they’d remain for all time.” 

Dylan has little patience for this project, what with feeling like a caged specimen herself, and spends her teenage years figuring out how she can get the hell out. After a dramatic failed attempt involving a young Martian scientist (humans have sort of colonized Mars by this point), she does manage to rise to Earth’s surface through the age-old tradition of parents getting their bosses to give their kid an internship. (Among the many enjoyable aspects of Earth 7 is Unferth’s sly situational humor.)  

It isn’t quite what Dylan imagined it to be. The outside is overwhelming in its sheer size, at first, and then there’s all the people: 

Unpredictable, unmanageable, whizzing by her room in no discernible pattern, with their loud footsteps, their unceasing conversations, their sudden shouts that could signal hilarity or alarm… She tried to hide her dismay at how off-putting she found them. Up close, the researchers, their skin and pores, their shiny foreheads. Their human mouths that could be disgusting in fourteen different ways.

It may not be surprising, then, that Dylan ends up falling for a woman who is often mistaken for a robot. 

Before that, though, Dylan begins her love affair with sand, which acts so differently from other substances. When it’s dry, she realizes, it moves like water; when it’s wet, it’s more like a solid. It too has a great project, “of sweeping around Earth with the wind and tides.” She becomes enraptured with its non-humanness, and she begins to study it, learning about all the different elements in it, the skeletons in it, and finally, the tardigrades—the cutest microscopic animal you’ve ever seen, also known as water bears—that live and thrive in the sand.

Dylan’s fascination with the sand and its creatures leads her, eventually, to her own great project. But while Earth 7 is ostensibly about this and other attempts to preserve life on our planet, it is also about the inevitability of change. Some change looks like death. Some change looks like eternal life. Which is to say, it’s really all about perspective, and Unferth demonstrates this beautifully throughout the book by shifting the scale of both small and large moments, such as when Dylan confirms (although she had a feeling, really) that Melanie, the woman she’s fallen in love with, is most definitely not a robot, because one of her toes is crooked: 

Oh, Dylan. Oh, Melanie. You fakers both. You cannot hide every flaw. You cannot hide flaws that are not flaws but are mere signs that you are part of this world, a place where terrible and wonderful beauties are coming to pieces at every moment and others are constructing themselves out of the remains—a place, in other words, of flux, of history forever destroyed underfoot, forever rising anew from the ashes with the aid of air and water and physics and time. We exist in and as part of that destruction, that rebirth. In fact, some beings say the flaw is not of the flesh at all, but is instead the belief that you can isolate a ‘you’ in this mad flicker. The idea that we think we can divide out and hold apart an unstable collection of atoms long enough to know it—that is the error.

This zooming inward and outward is evident in the structure of Earth 7 as a whole, too. We begin with a mother and toddler living a small life in a small underwater pod; we zoom ahead in their lives, then further to the death of one and the maybe-eternal life of the other; we time travel back to the moment that decided the fate of that mother when she herself was a child, and then again to a far-flung future in which some humans get really excited about bugs. Unferth’s great project here—to use her novel’s own phrase—is to connect it all, to remind us that what seems so far away as to be inaccessible is just a reconfiguration of everything we see right in front of us, right now. A mother and daughter’s relationship is as profound and complex as that of the human species and the planet we call home, or maybe it’s that our relationship to Earth is as small and personal as the one we have with our parents, with one another. It’s all, ultimately, a matter of perspective, and perspective, Unferth shows us again and again, is as mutable, as changeable, as everything else.