In the southwestern United States, you don't have to look far to find the damage done to the environment during the Anthropocene. It is evident in droughts, dams and heat that becomes more extreme every year. Some contemporary writers have found unique ways to shed light on the environmental crisis, going beyond science and humanizing the topic in novels. So Far from God by Ana Castillo and Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko focus on the lives of female characters, but both novels are also very much about the environment. The bodies of these women, through the experience of trauma, become the medium used by Castillo and Silko to show the violent nature of the environmental crisis. Both authors intertwine feminism and environmentalism and illustrate the importance each has for the other. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayBoth Silko and Castillo begin their novels by showing women and nature as interconnected, preparing the reader for further connections between the two later. Silko's Gardens in the Dunes opens by introducing a family of women from the sand lizard tribe: Indigo, Sister Salt, their mother and grandmother. They live in a paradise among the sand dunes, teeming with amaranth, pumpkins and sunflowers that their grandmother teaches the girls to grow. He gives them gardening advice rooted in an ancient legend: “Don't be greedy. The first ripe fruit of each harvest belongs to the spirits of our beloved ancestors, who come to us like rain; the second… to birds and wild beasts (17).” Indigo and Sister Salt receive an all-female education in the gardens, their grandmother an archetype of the wise old woman. Castillo also writes about the female members of a family, in her case a Chicana family living in New Mexico. So Far from God also has its archetypal wise old woman. The character of Caridad receives healing lessons from a curandera, do?a Felicia, who advises chewing a sprig of sage to cure the empacus, or using an egg to get rid of the evil eye (66-68). At one point, Felicia muses aloud about women's connection to nature, wondering why while giving birth to eight children she never cried like she saw men do on the battlefield during the Mexican Revolution, telling Caridad, "I think that it has something to do with the unnaturalness of killing compared to the naturalness of giving birth (55).” Another female character notable for her connection to nature is La Loca, who is herself a bit of a wise old woman from the age of three. This is the age she rises from the grave and claims to have returned from a Divine Comedy-style journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven to return and pray for everyone in her city (24) She later becomes a recluse, more inclined to befriend animals than others, and has too a natural passion in taking care of his sisters when they are unwell. The most disturbing part of what makes La Loca seem so connected to nature is her fear of humans. After her resurrection, she finds the smell of other humans unbearable, claiming that they carry "a similar smell." to what she had smelled in the places she had passed through when she died (23)". This smell that La Loca is so disgusted by seems to suggest a sort of contamination, a permeation, caused by humans, just like a bad smell. So Far from God goes on to recount many horrors that this smell portends. Throughout the novel, the women in the family experience physically painful things such as miscarriage, rape, breast mutilation, and cancer. Their bodies are dominated bythings outside of their control, just like the environment is. Men in the novel are often depicted as greedy and taking advantage of women. Sofia's husband, for example, gambles away everything he owns, and another woman, Doña Dolores, suffers from "twelve years" of marriage, eleven children who did not survive and, to top it off, her husband drank everything he owned (20).” Women are consumed as resources until they run out. In one of the novel's most horrific scenes, Caridad is found abandoned on the side of the road and nearly dies. The subsequent description of her body is vivid: “[her] nipples had been bitten off. She had also been flogged with something, branded like cattle. Worse, a tracheotomy was performed because she had also been stabbed in the throat (33).” The other citizens assume that her mutilation was the work of men, and it certainly appears so. Humans brand livestock and the fact that their injuries are compared to those of an animal bred for a food source to the point of being harmful to our environment is significant. However, Castillo later writes that two people other than Caridad know the truth about what happened to her, through visions, and those two people appear to be the two women most connected to nature in the novel: La Loca and doña Felicia. After all, he was not a man who “had attacked and left Caridad mangled like a battered rabbit” – once again, his injuries are likened to those of an animal, a part of nature. It was “a thing, at once tangible and amorphous. A thing that could be described as made of sharp metal and splintered wood, of limestone, gold and fragile parchment… it was pure strength (77).” This is one of the most mysterious parts of the book. Reading it at first you might wonder what Castillo's purpose is in including some kind of monster instead of a human rapist-murderer. His description is crucial, though. Its industrial appearance, with its sharp metal and splintered wood, and the fact that it is a dark cloud, could represent pollution. By transforming it into a destructive monster, Castillo shows not only the effects that pollution has on the climate, but also on the people who inhabit it. Rape and domination of both women and the land are also present in Silko's novel. In Gardens in the Dunes, Silko writes about Western expansion into the United States in the 19th century, a time when settlers discovered indigenous plants and people and left their mark on both. Indigo is kidnapped and sent to an "Indian school" where she is forced to assimilate into white American culture. As Silko writes of the other girls at the school: “... only their skin looked Indian. Their eyes, their hair, and, of course, their shoes, stockings, and long dresses were no different from those of the [white] matron (69).” Indigenous girls have transformed their bodies, so much so that even their eyes look different. This is happening at the same time that settlers are also transforming the land, with dams, railways, etc. Greed is the catalyst for these transformations. What is important to the survival and culture of native peoples is not important to them. In her essay “Seeking the Corn Mother,” Joni Adamson writes about how Silko uses the story of these sand lizard girls to highlight the concept of “food sovereignty,” a concept that “calls attention to the ideologies and external forces that have threatened indigenous food systems for hundreds of years (233).” Adamson points out that the farming lessons taught by their grandmother to the girls call to mind "indigenous agroecological knowledge...evolving across generations in the Americas (236)." Knowledge like this is ignored by the novel's colonizers, who., 1999.