Toxic Pasts and Green Futures: Resilience and Environmental Imagination in Marrow Island

This research article explores Alexis M. Smith's novel Marrow Island (2016) as a work of ecological dystopia and utopia, rooting its inquiry into how the text contemplates environmental crisis, trauma, and community resilience. The representation of a Pacific Northwest shaped by post-earthquake struggle crystallizes a dialectical relationship between memory and experience as they play out within the context of environmental crisis. The paper reviews the novel through ecocritical, trauma, and, resilience lenses to examine how Smith recreates an imagined performance of environmental hope that challenges boundary notions of ecological optimism and pessimism. The Marrow Colony's mycoremediation pilot project is used as the site to study the relationship between environmental recovery and human exploitation, thus exploring ethical quandaries surrounding environmental utopia. The paper makes a critical contribution to the scholarship of literature and environmental catastrophe by providing a close reading of the significance of memory as both a wound (trauma) and a resource (ecological recovery and resilience) in Marrow Island, and it emphasizes the way fictional work can explore alternatives for ecological and community resilience. The conclusion of the paper argues that Marrow Island ends with Smith's critique of utopian environmental idealism rooted in a recognition of the radical hope and imagination needed to navigate the destruction of ecological systems.