Environmental Collapse and Ecology

Introduction

Environmental collapse is not a peripheral theme in the Malazan Book of the Fallen; it is a substrate. Every major civilisation in the ten-volume series either inherits or produces a depleted landscape, and the trajectory across the books — from Raraku as a holy desert that was once a sea, through the Letherii mosaic civilisation stripping its hinterland for debt-denominated wealth, to Dust of Dreams' Wastelands and The Crippled God's Glass Desert — traces an increasingly explicit meditation on the relationship between civilisation and the ecologies it consumes. In the series' sequel cycle (the Witness trilogy, beginning with The God Is Not Willing), the meditation has become explicit framing: the narrative premise is that the protagonists are operating in a world in which, thematically, it is too late.

This essay reconstructs the environmental argument of the Malazan series under six headings: Erikson's biographical encounter with mass insect decline and extreme-weather events in Manitoba; the distinction he draws between politics and climate as epistemic categories; the archaeological precedent for civilisational collapse and his refusal to treat it as speculative; Raraku and the Wastelands as landscapes indifferent to human desire; the Samar Dev / Karsa Orlong dialectic on the measurement of progress; and the premise of The God Is Not Willing as the first Malazan volume to abandon the hope of prevention in favour of the ethics of survival after the fact.

Biographical Witness: The Manitoba Drive

The most arresting source for Erikson's environmental thinking is a personal anecdote he shared in the Conversation with Steven Erikson on The Bonehunters, recorded after a drive back to his childhood region of Manitoba:

"I recently drove back to Winnipeg and one of the first things I noticed when I got through the mountains — first of all, the mountains were on fire, I mean there's fires everywhere so a lot of wood smoke — when we got through the mountains and rolled onto the plains, you know, Alberta and Saskatchewan, we left the Trans-Canada, the main highway, and took some smaller highways. There was no — the only insect life you ran into, and literally ran into, was grasshoppers. No dragonflies, very few butterflies, no mosquitoes. I've never been in Saskatchewan and Manitoba in the summer where you can literally sit outside at midnight to look at the stars and not have a single mosquito. It was, and of course without the mosquitoes you don't get the dragonflies because that's what they eat, and things like swallows and swifts — far fewer. So it's very, very noticeable that this was a major catastrophe sort of in the making." (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

The passage is worth quoting at length because of the specific texture of its observation. Erikson is not citing statistics or reading scientific reports; he is reporting the first-person sensory experience of an ecosystem whose lower trophic level has collapsed. The cascade he describes — mosquitoes gone, therefore dragonflies gone, therefore swallows and swifts gone — is the textbook pattern of ecosystem trophic collapse, but what gives the observation its weight is that Erikson has remembered the ecosystem from his childhood in the same region. The comparison is diachronic: the same place, decades apart, no longer holds the life it once held. This is the irreplaceable form of environmental testimony that only long lives in specific places can produce, and Erikson's willingness to offer it in an interview about his novels is a clue to how he thinks about his own fiction's relationship to the world it was written in.

The anecdote extends to a specific traumatic event — the destruction of the Hunt Lake trail in southeastern Manitoba, a trail Erikson had walked since childhood, by a single extreme rainfall event following an extended drought:

"There had been 47 days without rain, and we arrived there and within three days they had the heaviest rainfall that they've had in those 48, 47 days... and it's always one of my favourite trails, it's called the Hunt Lake trail, and because it just had this massive rain... not only had the lake risen about four inches from one rain, all of the humus was completely washed away, so basically it felt like you were walking on human bones — that's what it felt like because the roots were all exposed and the entire trail was basically destroyed. And that's a trail I've walked since I was a kid, and it's gone, it's pretty much gone." (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

The phrase "walking on human bones" is the involuntary prose of a writer registering ecological death in the register of mourning. The rhetorical move from "roots" to "bones" is the same move the Malazan Book of the Fallen makes at large: it takes the conventional language of landscape description and replaces it with the language of grief. Erikson's fiction is often praised for its evocation of worn, haunted landscapes — the ancient battlefields, the T'lan Imass hunting grounds, the buried civilisations under Raraku — and the rhetoric of those landscapes has now been retroactively exposed as the same rhetoric the author uses for the real Manitoba of his own lifetime. The fictional and the actual share a single grammar of loss.

Climate as Reality, Not Ideology

A critical feature of Erikson's environmental position — and one that distinguishes him from many contemporary writers who treat the subject — is his refusal to classify climate change as a political opinion. He has stated the position explicitly:

"Climate change is not a political opinion, it's not an ideology, it's a reality. Anthropocentric climate change is also, I think, a reality, and anthropology and archaeology has countless examples, you know, that we've actually dug up and revealed. So there's nothing new in any of that — that's been going on since before the industrial age." (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

The epistemic move here is subtle but important. Erikson is not merely insisting that climate change is real; he is insisting that it belongs to the category of observed facts rather than the category of contested beliefs. His authority for this claim is not climate science but archaeology — the discipline in which he was professionally trained. Archaeology, as Erikson practises it, studies the material traces of civilisations that exhausted their own landscapes and collapsed as a result. The pattern is neither rare nor speculative; it is "countless examples... that we've actually dug up and revealed." The claim being made is therefore genealogical: anthropogenic environmental collapse is an observable feature of the human species' relationship with the biosphere, documented at sites across every continent, long before any industrial process existed. The only thing industrialisation did was accelerate a process that was already underway in every agricultural civilisation that preceded it.

The consequence is that Erikson's treatment of environmental themes in the novels does not have the tone of contemporary environmentalist advocacy. It has the tone of an archaeologist who has seen what the dirt at abandoned city sites looks like after a civilisation ends. The Malazan Book of the Fallen's repeated motif of the ruined landscape — the glass deserts, the salted fields, the abandoned cities under drifting sand — is not a fantasy trope borrowed from Tolkien's Mordor or from post-apocalyptic science fiction. It is a disciplined extrapolation from the archaeological record of what happens to places where people have lived too long and too rapaciously.

The Archaeological Precedent: Civilisations Exhaust Their Landscapes

Erikson has been explicit that this archaeological frame is the sub-textual premise of the entire Malazan series:

"One of the subtextual aspects of the entire storyline is about environmental destruction and degradation and civilizations that exhaust their own landscapes. I mean that shouldn't surprise any of you — that's kind of all there, isn't it? It's been present all the way through." (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

The casual phrasing — "that shouldn't surprise any of you... it's been present all the way through" — is revealing because it suggests that the theme has been so pervasive in the novels that the author assumes readers have registered it. Many readers have not. The reason, probably, is that Erikson's environmental theme is not foregrounded through the conventional techniques of environmentalist fiction — there is no green hero, no corporate villain, no polemical set-piece denouncing exploitation. Instead, the theme is embedded in the geography of the world. Raraku is a desert that was once a sea. The Seven Cities subcontinent has been progressively desertified by millennia of over-cultivation. The T'lan Imass inhabit a world whose Ice Age megafauna have been hunted to local extinction. The Wastelands of Dust of Dreams are a former sea-bed rendered uninhabitable by the collapse of the civilisation that once lived at its margins. Each of these landscapes is offered without commentary, as a simple geographic fact, and the reader is left to notice that the series' world is, consistently, a world in the aftermath of ecological collapse rather than in the midst of an untouched wilderness.

This pattern has a direct archaeological analogue. Every major Bronze Age civilisation in the actual historical record — Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Minoan, Harappan, Anasazi, Classic Maya — ended in some combination of soil exhaustion, salination, deforestation, or climatic stress. The pattern is so consistent that it can reasonably be described as the default outcome of settled complex society over a sufficient time horizon. Erikson, whose professional training taught him to recognise this pattern in the material record, has built a fictional world in which the pattern is visible everywhere if the reader knows how to look for it. The theme is not stated because it does not need to be stated; it is the ground the characters walk on.

Raraku and the Wastelands: Landscapes Indifferent to Desire

The clearest single case of Erikson's environmental dramaturgy is Raraku, the "holy desert" of Deadhouse Gates in which the Whirlwind rebellion begins and the Chain of Dogs concludes. Raraku is introduced as a sacred place, home to Sha'ik's uprising and the site of prophetic visions, but the book's foreshadowing gradually reveals that the desert was once a sea and will become one again:

"Two fountains of raging blood, face to face. The blood is the same, the two are the same, and salty waves shall wash the shores of Raraku. The holy desert remembers its past." (DG, cited in Deadhouse Gates: A Chat with Steven Erikson transcript)

The prophecy works at two levels. At the plot level, it anticipates the transformation at the end of House of Chains, in which the buried waters of Raraku return and the desert becomes a sea again. At the thematic level, it makes explicit the geological timescale on which the Malazan world operates: deserts were seas, seas were deserts, and the humans walking across them at any given moment are walking across the temporary surface of a landscape whose own history is uninterested in their presence. The foreshadowing insists on this indifference. Raraku will return to being a sea whether or not the rebellion succeeds, whether or not Coltaine dies, whether or not Felisin becomes Sha'ik — the geological event is independent of the human drama overlaid on it. This is the formal move by which Erikson subordinates human story to ecological time, and it is deliberately borrowed from the real-world template of the Sahara, a desert whose own past contained extensive wetlands and whose own future may contain them again.

The lesson is that landscapes in the Malazan series are not stage sets. They are active agents whose priorities and durations exceed those of any civilisation that occupies them. The repeated experience of the novels' characters — an experience Erikson dramatises most vividly through the marches across the Seven Cities, the Wastelands, and the Glass Desert — is that the land does not care. The land is not hostile; hostility would imply it had registered the marchers. The land is indifferent, which is a worse ontological status because it cannot be negotiated with. The marchers must walk through it on the land's terms, and those terms do not include any concession to human suffering. This is the disciplined form of nature-writing that the Malazan novels specialise in, and it is continuous with the archaeological observation that the past is full of civilisations whose landscapes absorbed them without remembering them.

The Samar Dev / Karsa Orlong Dialectic: How Do We Measure Progress?

A particularly sharp articulation of the environmental theme occurs through the dialectical relationship between Samar Dev and Karsa Orlong across the later volumes. Erikson has framed their relationship as the embodiment of two incompatible theories of progress:

"[Samar Dev and Karsa represent] one devoted to technological progress at all costs and at any cost, and so these are sort of the two main forces that through Samar and Karsa are clashing. And that allows a lot of interplay between the two to actually ask those questions of, you know, well, is there an inherent value to progress, and how do you measure progress? Do we measure it in terms of material gain alone? Do we measure it in terms of — I don't know — population, political will, the ability to dismantle the environment? Or do we measure in terms of how well do you live within a given environment?" (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

The formulation is philosophically striking. Erikson is identifying two fundamentally different metrics for "progress": the extractive metric (population, wealth, technology, power-over-environment) and the integrative metric (quality of life within sustainable relationship to environment). The first metric treats the environment as a resource base to be consumed; the second treats the environment as a partner whose continued functioning is a prerequisite for any meaningful human flourishing. Karsa, for all his barbarism, is associated with the integrative metric — he carries with him the Teblor mountain culture's sense that a people's proper measure is how well they live on their land, not how much land they can conquer. Samar Dev, an intellectual of the Letherii tradition, embodies the extractive metric: curiosity that must be satisfied, technology that must be developed, problems that must be solved by applying more knowledge to them. The novels do not resolve the dialectic. They let it play out, and the reader is invited to notice which metric has historically produced environmental collapse and which has not.

Erikson extends the observation to an explicit diagnosis of contemporary capitalism:

"Capitalism requires an infinite supply of resources, and we are plowing through our planetary resources faster than it can rejuvenate itself... As a species, we're on reserve air and we're nowhere near the surface." (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

The reserve-air metaphor is worth unpacking. Erikson has been a scuba diver, and the metaphor comes from that practical experience: the reserve air on a dive tank is the small emergency supply you pull open when your main supply has run out, intended to get you back to the surface alive. To be on reserve air "nowhere near the surface" is to be in a condition where the emergency margin is insufficient for the distance that remains to be travelled. The rhetorical force of the metaphor is that it names a specific technical condition — not a vague anxiety — and locates the speaker at a precise position within it. Erikson is not saying we are running out of time; he is saying the reserve has already been broken into and the surface is too far away for the reserve to reach.

The God Is Not Willing: The Ethics of Too Late

The culmination of Erikson's environmental trajectory is the framing premise of The God Is Not Willing (2021), the first novel in the Witness trilogy that serves as sequel to the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Erikson has described the thematic shift directly:

"With The God Is Not Willing, we're ten years after the end of your series that you're reading, okay, and thematically it's too late — so that's a change, that's the difference." (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

The phrase "thematically it's too late" is the most direct statement Erikson has made about the environmental framing of his fiction. The Malazan Book of the Fallen operated within a (largely implicit) hope structure: the assumption that even the most devastating choices could still, in principle, be preceded by better ones, and that the argument for compassion could land because the world in which compassion was being argued was a world that still had something to save. The Witness trilogy abandons that assumption. Its characters are operating in a world in which the collapse the original series warned about has already begun in irreversible form, and the question the new books are designed to ask is not "how can we prevent this?" but "how do we conduct ourselves now that prevention is no longer available?"

The shift is philosophically significant. It moves the fiction from the register of prophecy to the register of elegy, and it places on the characters (and by extension on the reader) the burden of articulating an ethics of survival that does not require the fiction of a future restoration. Erikson has been clear that the new novels are not therefore nihilistic — he has said he hopes The God Is Not Willing "actually offers up some hope" — but the hope it offers is of a different kind from the hope that animated the original series. It is the hope available to people who know the world has already ended and who must nonetheless decide how to live in its aftermath. The model is less Tolkien and more The Road: the goodness one can manifest after the catastrophe has become the central moral fact, because the catastrophe is no longer in question.

The shift has a specific external referent. Erikson has recommended Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (2020) as a guide to the kind of thinking the Witness trilogy is attempting:

"Kim Stanley Robinson's latest book I recommend on that one — Ministry for the Future. There's a lot of good writing." (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

Robinson's novel is set in the immediate future and depicts a world grappling with the political, economic, and humanitarian consequences of climate change that has already become irreversible. The hope the book offers is procedural rather than restorative — the hope that institutions can be built and decisions made that mitigate suffering even when the underlying damage cannot be undone. Erikson's endorsement positions the Witness trilogy within a specific contemporary subgenre of climate fiction: the fiction of after rather than before, of adjustment rather than prevention. The Malazan series, in this reading, has ended not because Erikson has run out of material but because the historical moment has moved past the point at which the original series' question ("can we still imagine compassion?") is the right question. The new question is "what do we do now that the environment has stopped being negotiable?", and the new novels are the author's attempt to answer it.

Conclusion: The Context Is the Work

Erikson has been explicit that every novel is in conversation with the present in which it is written, and that the author's biographical context is inseparable from the fiction that emerges from it:

"You cannot help but write about all of these things if you're going to address the human condition in some fashion or another. And all literature does, all art does." (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

The environmental argument of the Malazan Book of the Fallen is therefore not a theme the author chose to insert for thematic depth. It is the precondition of the series' having been writable at all — the observable fact that the author lived through and which made certain kinds of meditation possible and certain others impossible. A writer who had not walked the Hunt Lake trail as a child and returned to find it destroyed by a single extreme rainfall event might have written the same Malazan characters and plot, but would not have written the same Raraku, the same Wastelands, the same Glass Desert. The landscapes of the fiction are the landscapes of the author's real environmental mourning, transposed into fantasy geography and given the weight of planetary time.

The ten volumes of the Malazan Book of the Fallen are therefore also, in a way the author has made explicit, a ten-volume record of a species losing its margin. The characters march through landscapes whose own histories contain the signs of their predecessors' similar marches. Civilisations rise and fall, and their falls are always partially ecological. The compassion argument — central to the series as Erikson has elsewhere framed it — is addressed to readers who live in a world where compassion must be extended not only to individual sufferers but to the biosphere whose continued functioning is the ground condition of any future ethical action. The Witness trilogy's "too late" is not a repudiation of that argument. It is the logical continuation: once prevention is no longer available, compassion must be practised in the ruins, because the ruins are where the surviving people and creatures now live.

Conclusion: The Observed Pattern

Erikson's environmental thinking converges on a single epistemological claim: that civilisational collapse under environmental stress is an observed pattern, documented archaeologically, confirmed by direct sensory experience in the present, and therefore not an object of legitimate political debate. The claim is stronger than the conventional environmentalist position, which typically argues for climate action on the basis of projected future harms. Erikson's position is that the harms have already occurred, repeatedly, in every major civilisation whose traces have been excavated, and that the only question contemporary observers face is whether the present instance will be recognised in time to make the few differences that remain available. The Malazan Book of the Fallen was written from within this frame. The Witness trilogy is being written from inside the same frame with the added condition that the window for prevention has now closed, and the fiction must therefore address what ethical life looks like after prevention is no longer the question.

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