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Jessica Johnson
Dr. Otto
Hum 2395 80307
15 November 2013
An Eco-critical Analysis of Pop Squad through the Eyes of a Socialist Ecofeminist
Up out of the jungle like a bat out of hell, climbing out of Rhinehurst
Superclusters holdout suburban sprawl and then rising trough jungle overstory.
Blasting across the causeway toward Angel Spire and the sea. Monkeys diving off
the edge ahead of my cruiser, disappearing into the wet bowels of the greenery
tangle. [] My hat, my raincoat, my clothes into hazmat bags, and then out again
on the other side, rushing to pull on a tux before catching a masslift up 188
stories, rising into the high clear air over the jungle fur of carbon sequestration
project N22. (139)
Welcome to the futuristic society of Paolo Bacigalupis Pop Squad, where there are
technological wonders which people living anywhere in our current day and age could not
imagine. Even though most of it is completely cut off from nature, this place contains cities filled
with buildings of incredible architecture that are full of people of high intellect and great wealth.
There is also Rejoo, an annual booster shot that gives you the ability to be forever young. Here
in this place though, if you wish to live the kind of life described above, you must give up one
thing: having children. If not, you will have to live at the very bottom of this world, a prisoner in
your own home, hiding your babies from neighbors and the outside world for all of your life.
Eventually, chances are the Pop Squad will find you and send you away to a single-sex work
camp to live out the rest of your days in misery. Even worse, they will whip their guns out and
kill each and every one of your children. The importance of socialist ecofeministic values is

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shown through Pop Squad because it displays the kind of horrible world that can be produced
when a society premises itself on the values of capitalism rather than socialism, placing the
category of production higher than reproduction of life.
In Carolyn Merchants Radical Ecology, socialist ecofeminism is defined as A feminist
transformation of socialist ecology that makes the category of reproduction, rather than
production, central to the concept of a just, sustainable world.(Merchant, 208) In other words, a
socialist ecofeminist believes that in order for a world to not be unjust and morally wrong, its
people must put the value of reproduction over the value of production. Socialist ecofeminists
also conclude, Because capitalism is premised on economic growth and competition in which
nature and waste are both externalities in profit maximization, its logic precludes sustainability.
The logic of socialism on the other hand is based on peoples needs, not peoples greed. (210)
In example, Pop Squad represents a capitalist society because it places greed over things that
are actually important in maintaining a sustainable, just world like upholding the importance of
having and raising children. But in this society, production of all forms of life has lost its value
due to greed and also due to its complete cut off from nature because of its capitalist values.
Looking from a socialist ecofeminists perspective, one can blame the immorality of Pop
Squads society on how it puts the value of reproduction way below its value of production by
highly criminalizing the birth of children. The main character is a man who works with the Pop
Squad, a group of officers that circulate the suburban area to find women hiding children so that
they can send the mother to a work camp and kill the offspring. On one of his calls he stands in
the kitchen of a woman they have detained and whose child they have shot, and ponders why
women would go through all of the trouble of having children.

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The whole breeding think is anachronism--- twenty-first-century ritual torture we

dont need anymore. But these girls keep trying to turn back the clock and pop out
the pups, little lizard-brains compelled to pass on some DNA. And theres a new
batch every year, little burps of offspring cropping up here and there. (150)
This man of this society talks about continuing on generations like its no big deal because it has
no immediate benefit to him in his life, and could keep him from the kind of convenient and
untroublesome life that he lives. He doesnt believe evolution (his way of putting the
continuation of generations) is necessary because he and so many others can live forever, so in
his mind creating new life is not important. What a socialist ecofeminist can pull from this is that
his society values reproduction so minimally (to the point where his job is to be a baby-killer)
that he does not have a basic, nurturing understanding of the significance and beauty of having
children that most people today, however, have. He also does not realize that what he is doing is
wrong because he cannot comprehend the value of life other than his own. At one point his job
starts to bother him; he is bothered by looking at a dinosaur that looks the same as the one that
was in the hands of a toddler he killed, but he really cannot understand why:
Last night she put the dinosaur on the bedside table, right in with her collection of
little jeweled music boxes, and the damn thing looked at me all night long. Finally
at 4 A.M., I couldnt stand it anymore and I shoved it under the bed. But in the
morning, she found it and put it back, and its been looking at me ever since.
(145)
A socialist ecofeminist could also see through this story that, because of this societys capitalist
values, it puts nature way down at the bottom of its concerns, and cuts itself off from a natural
environment. People live in superclusters of buildings that are severed from any part of the

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natural environment. This causes the societys people to be blinded further of the importance of
life in all forms. From the high tops of the mansions, one can see the old city, full of nature, but it
is not viewed as being wonderful in any way, it represents life before they no longer needed
reproduction in their world.
From the far side of the Curve, you can see beyond the incandescent cores of the
superclusters to the old city sprawl, dark except along where the maglines radiate.
A strange mangle of wreckage and scavenge and disrepair. In the day it looks like
some kind of dry red fungal collapse, a weave of jungle canopy and old suburban
understory, but at night, all thats visible is the skeleton of growing
infrastructure[] (142)
It does not seem like a coincidence that the natural jungle canopy surrounds the area in which
mothers live and hide away their children. This is all related to the societys capitalist values, and
represents how these people place their valuing of nature and the reproduction of life at the very
bottom of their world, literally, while placing production of technology and wealthy living at the
top.
In summation, Pop Squad stand as a warning of the kind of awful world that can result
from a society where there are mainly capitalist, rather than socialist, values and the category of
production is placed above reproduction of life. In this kind of world, innocent childrens lives
are stolen because they are not considered valuable to the life forms that are already created and
have the ability to live un-troublesomely and wealthily forever. Natural wonders are
unrecognized and unvalued by the majority of this kind of societys people, and those who long
for the indescribable happiness that comes from creating life instead of greedily sustaining their
own are subjected to a life of imprisonment, loneliness and misery. It is an extreme

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representation of the kind of world created by going completely against the values of socialist
ecofeminism.