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Man and the Natural World
The natural world is a hot mess in 2021. We can practically hear Earth remembering the last Ice Age fondly, thinking to itself, "Aw, those were the days, weren't they?" Pristine snow, awesome woolly mammoths, those funny little walking apes with their spears … and now the natural world is a gray, desolate landscape with radioactive dust indiscriminately murdering whole species into extinction. Not exactly a Bob Ross picture we're dealing with here, people. The world as humans have always known it may be a distant memory, but that distance means that the novel can explore the complex, often contradictory, relationship between man and nature—one where humanity seems both outside the natural world and also part of it.
Rick found the electric toad in the supposedly human-free wasteland once called Oregon, meaning that the toad must have hopped there from someplace else—meaning that the natural world just might end up repopulated after all.
The radioactive dust degrades humans, such as Isidore, at the same time that it is destroying the natural world. Humanity isn't separate from the natural world; we're a part of it.
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