The role of faith in the formation of Toby's character in Margaret Atwood's "The year of the flood"

Abstract

The global ecological crisis is among the most urgent problems of contemporary time. The Canadian author Margaret Atwood, for whom nature and environment have been among the major concerns in her oeuvre, draws people’s attention to the issue especially in her later works. In The Year of the Flood, Atwood contemplates on environmentalism and its forms in order to understand what kind of social activism might be a solution to the growing problem of environmental degradation. At the center of the novel are the God’s Gardeners, an eco-religious community of deep ecologists, who see the way of benevolence and care as the best way to teach the society to respect both nature and humans themselves. This thesis aims to establish the role of faith in the kind of environmental activism that the God’s Gardeners practice and whether it is suitable to replace the mainstream environmentalism that is thought to be ineffective by many scholars.