“Which is worse: if we all die, or if only some of us die?” – Kish
Many of the stories we have read over the past couple weeks have dealt with humanity living in a post-climate change world and depict how that world changes them. One of the most compelling aspects of these stories is how the characters deal with ethics and morals. I think The Weatherman by Holly Howitt is a perfect depiction of how humanity will be forced to make very tough and seemingly unethical decisions in order to keep the population alive. One of my favorite quotes that deals with this dilemma is said by Kish, the narrator’s boss, when he explains, “You know that we control the weather here because if we didn’t, we would starve…we control the weather because we have to, else we’d have no food, no chance of survival…Which is worse: if we all die, or if only some of us die?
So which IS worse? If we all die, or if only some of us die? Unfortunately, this is a question that many leaders and scientists around the world will have to address in the near future. Garrett Hardin, an admired ecologist, once wrote about this ethical dilemma in his essay “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against “Aid” That Harms.” He uses the metaphor of a lifeboat to describe the complex ethics and implications surrounding resource allocation. The metaphor describes a lifeboat holding 50 people with only room for 10 more. The lifeboat is in an ocean surrounded by thousands of people. If the lifeboat brings on more than 10 people, then the boat will sink and everyone will die. The weather machine is an example of the lifeboat ethics model, as it represents the lifeboat. The Green people are the passengers aboard the lifeboat. The sandtowns are the oceans and its inhabitants are those people drowning. Sending rain to the sandtowns would lead to overpopulation and an increase in consumption of precious resources, which would ultimately kill off the Green people and the sandtown people. By using the weather machine (sometimes unethically) to keep the socio-economic balance, the Green people assure the survival of both parties, whether they are equal or not.
This is the exact same dilemma many world leaders will face in the next coming decades as fossil fuels and natural resources begin to dry up. As Kish describes in The Weatherman, storms are created because they diminish the populations of the sandtowns, which in turn allows them to allocate more resources to the survival and growth of the Green population. The narrator originally shared the same perspective as his wife Marly—equality for everyone—but eventually sees how the weather machine is doing more than simply creating weather; it is keeping everything and everyone in place so humanity as a whole can survive. This idea of “the greater good” is not an easy thing for most people to understand or agree with given the implications surrounding both sides.
So my question is: Was the narrator’s decision to destroy the weather machine the right thing to do?
The way I see it, equality works only if you have enough resources so that everyone has a relatively comfortable life. But in a situation like it is in “The Weatherman”, there just isn’t enough resources for everyone to be happy. Perhaps the society could have come up with a better solution in order to allocate and govern everything, but the system the society had did keep everything stable, even if some people suffered because of it. That’s why I believe the narrator’s decision to destroy the weather machine was NOT the right thing to do. Because in the end, he just screwed things over for everyone else. And what good is equality to the dead?
Interesting post, particularly the connections you draw between the short story “The Weatherman” and Garrett Hardin’s famous essay on lifeboat ethics. One question I have about the story: why should we trust Kish? That is, why should we assume that the only two options are either that the Sandtowners are oppressed and die or that everyone dies? Similarly, with Hardin’s essay, why should we accept his metaphor of the lifeboat as being the truth? (In fact, as you might know, since Hardin first published that essay, there have been many responses showing how illogical his arguments are, and Hardin himself went back and revised some of his ideas — just Google “critiques of Hardin’s Lifeboat Ethics”).
In the case of climate change, one also has to consider why the situation exists in the first place. For instance, why, in the short story “The Weatherman,” did the weather become so unpredictable that the green people had to start controlling it? Why aren’t there many resources? Perhaps the green people had something to do with creating the situation in the first place? Also, is the weather machine about “survival” or is it about (as you put it) “maintaining the socio-economic balance”? I pose this question because perhaps those two things are not the same.
My own take on your question is yes, the narrator did the right thing. Another question to ask, however, and perhaps a more difficult one to answer: why did the short story itself (or the author) choose to have the narrator destroy the weather machine as the climax to the story?
Thanks for this great post and for grappling with such difficult questions!
The connection between the lifeboat and the weather station is an interesting, and very true, connection. It reminded me of the Titanic, when there weren’t enough lifeboats to save everyone so they decided to save women and children first and pack the lifeboats as full as they could go. Dealing with the morality of one life versus every life is tough, but I think the narrator did the right thing by destroying the weather station. For me, it comes down to the fact that this weather station was being used in an unethical way, creating storms when storms weren’t needed, just to keep the sand towns down.
I your connection between the Lifeboat essay and the Weatherman is very thought provoking. I hope that the world in fact does not end up this way but there is a very strong potential that it might. If this ever happens in the future the point I would like to bring up is how do we decide who is worth saving and who is not? How does one come to live as a Green person rather than in the Sand towns? I can understand why this weather machine was used but I don’t think it was ethical. I believe if we were put in this situation and were living among the Green people we would want the weather machine to keep being used because we were the ones being saved.
This is an extremely interesting point, I wrote about something similar and because these futuristic stories depict this moral dilemma between “if we die or we all die” it could possibly be a sign of our future. Which is an even more frightening idea. We live in a world where to some extent we all want to protect each other, but I can’t even begin to imagine a world where I have to take someone else’s life to save my own.
I see this as correlating with the dilemma of adaptation v.s. mitigation. If humanity decides to go with adaptation, the lifeboat situation would probably arise in our future. I personally think the narrator made the right decision in destroying the machine, as the cost of that adaptation compared to the advantages it brought was so high. I hope mitigation is taken more seriously in the future, so that we can avoid having to make these high stakes decisions.
This is a very interesting post and sparks a lot of debate. The lifeboat analogy vividly displays a scenario where only a small handful of the population can survive. In relation to the Titanic, the women and the children were the first to be rescued and put on the lifeboats, this is a great example of “not everyone dying” but still a tragedy. In response to your question, I think the weatherman felt that he was doing the right thing, however, only for a short time. Scientists can always create a new machine to bring them right back where they were. I believe that education is the only effective solution in the weatherman’s world as well as ours.
Yes, I agree it was the right thing to do. I wrote our close reading assignment on equality within this short story and I came to the conclusion it was the right thing to do. He was giving everyone a chance and not just the wealthy. One man having control over another and if they will die or not is wrong and is what creates a corrupt society.
This quote stuck out to me a lot also. I like how you related it to the idea of the lifeboat. I don’t know if there is a right answer to this question. If people survived at first, would they be able to survive for a significant amount of time and rebuild the population after a certain point? Probably not. I still think that the narrator had the right idea with breaking the weather machine and hopefully that benefitted the sandtown people.