Lusa

Barbara Kingsolver goes ahead to elaborate on the importance of a complicated ecological system. It is visible when Lusa Maluf Landowski is separated from the Zebulon County after the untimely death of her young husband. It proves to her of what the environment relinquishes her from her relatives. Like Rachel Carson, Kingsolver also criticizes the use of insecticides through the story of Garnett Walker, an old man who attempts to revive the American chestnut. Kingsolver emphasizes that humans should play a real role as steward of the earth by giving rather than taking. There is always a sense of ownership where an individual who lives in an area is willing to add his efforts to reinstate an environment that is healthy. In the novel, Lusa declines to bring down her trees for the ultimate economic reasons because she has the knowledge of the value of retaining the original forest land. She states that the reason she loved the place was because of the trees, the moths, the foxes and all the animals that lived in the forest (p 123). Garnett, on the other hand, has a love for trees that he gets from the memory of the luxuriant landscape of the American chestnut trees. He is in constant trial of restoring the Appalachian chestnuts trees to the American landscape of Zebulon valley that reinforces this sense of place (p 129). The characters in this novel link their relations with similar concerns and interests in ecology.

In a similar occasion, Jewel a deserted woman is helped by Lusa to bring up her children. She then unexpectedly links her with the chestnut restorer, Jewel’s father in law Garnett. (p 156) Garnett joins hand with Lusa in her bid to reshape the regional economy where she links with Garnett, who is her role model who guides her in her goat breeding project. Garnett has a plan to breed chestnuts as a way of restoring the American chestnuts trees where he connects the genes with those of the Chinese chestnuts through cross planting. There is an issue about...