How Ursula K. Le Guin Channeled Her Environmentalism Into Fiction

By Literary Hub | Created at 2026-08-19 12:22:24 | Updated at 2026-08-19 15:44:04 4 hours ago

Shelley Streeby on the Ecologies That Inspired the Science Fiction Author's Body of Work

In the 1960s and 1970s, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote speculative fiction shaped by her interests in environments and ecologies, her pacifist anarchist feminism, and her anti-Vietnam War activism. A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), one of the great fantasy novels and still a widely read classic of young adult literature that helped define the category, is about a young wizard coming of age, learning to control his powers, and trying to understand all his relations, including plants, animals, the earth, and other people.

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Just a year later came the great thought experiment The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) about the Gethenians’ unique sexual physiology, which involves a sexually active period called kemmer, the only time they are not androgynous and sexually inactive. Then, they can become either male or female, depending on the situation. Le Guin always insisted the environment was just as important as gender and sexuality in the novel. An investigator from another, peaceful world reports that “the dominant factor in Gethenian life is not sex or any other human thing: it is their environment, their cold world.” She adds, “I really don’t see how anyone could put much stock in victory or glory after he had spent a winter on Winter, and seen the face of the Ice.”

Climate change visions of transformed Oregon and California places and spaces show up in the worlds Le Guin imagines.

Furious about U.S. violence in Vietnam, Le Guin wrote The Word for World is Forest (1972), a source for James Cameron’s blockbuster film Avatar (2009), but with no white man saviors with whom to identify. Instead, colonists from Earth cut down trees that comprise the natives’ world, rape native women, and extract labor from native men, until they successfully revolt. Later, Le Guin wrote The Dispossessed (1974), another classic exploring pacifist anarchist ideas through two worlds with very different environments and relations to state power and capitalism. This brief list does not begin to exhaust Le Guin’s many influential novels, short stories, poems, translations, children’s books, essays, talks, and other kinds of writing connecting environments and ecologies to gender, race, and sexuality; criticizing state violence and techno-fix thinking; and imagining other societies and worlds. Always Coming Home (1985), a speculative fiction rooted in Northern California lands where she grew up, is perhaps Le Guin’s most ambitious novel.

Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, attended Berkeley High School, and spent summers in California’s Napa Valley, where her family was sometimes visited by her father’s Native friends and collaborators. Le Guin’s father, Alfred Kroeber, founded the UC Berkeley anthropology department while her mother, Theodora, authored the University of California Press bestseller Ishi in Two Worlds (1961) and other books. Le Guin graduated from Radcliffe, then earned a master’s degree in Renaissance French and Italian literature from Columbia in 1952 before receiving a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Paris. On the way there, she met her husband-to-be, Charles, whom she married in Paris. After they returned to the United States and moved to Portland, Le Guin left academia to raise their children in their northwest hills home down the street from Forest Park, where she lived for the rest of her life.

In the archive, the significance of California and Oregon places, spaces, and the more-than-human world comes through powerfully in syllabi, class notes, drawings, and documents Le Guin created and collected from workshops she helped organize in Portland, on the Oregon Coast, on the McKenzie River, at the Malheur Field Station, and at Humboldt State in Arcata, California. Le Guin wrote that “the great, improbable impetus” to The Tombs of Atuan (1970) was “our first visit to Harney County, a high and lonesome land of mountains and great sagebrush plains, of pure skies, far distances, and silence…I knew my novel would be set in that desert…I began to dream my story. The land had given it to me.” Climate change visions of transformed Oregon and California places and spaces show up in the worlds Le Guin imagines in The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The New Atlantis (1975), and Always Coming Home.

Le Guin told the reporter that she could do without people a lot better than she could do without animals, plants, and rocks.

When Mount St. Helens erupted in May 1980, Le Guin watched it all day long from her bedroom while listening to a country and western radio station, only turning on the television later that night. Soon thereafter, she conducted a research project in which she invited people to send her their dreams about the eruption, then delivered a lecture at the Portland Jung Institute in which she read excerpts from forty-nine dreams while providing “some random commentary.” Le Guin placed ads in Willamette Week and the PSU student newspaper, the Vanguard, stating she was collecting dreams about Mount St. Helens for an Oregon Friends of Jung meeting talk and perhaps a magazine article. In a 1980 issue of Parabola magazine, Le Guin published an essay entitled “A Very Warm Mountain,” which she reprinted in a chapbook called The Red Zone (1983) that she and her artist friend Henk Pander created after visiting the blast area sixteen months later. Le Guin’s prose and poetry mourn the dead forest and other living Earth beings while exulting at the mountain’s power.

In a photograph of Le Guin published in 1984, when she was fifty-five, she smiles at the camera while resting her arms on a large rock in front of Mount St. Helens. Le Guin claims that science fiction is like landscape painting because it gives you a world. She thinks of the volcano as a kind of companion. The article emphasizes that Le Guin’s books are preoccupied with nature. Le Guin told the reporter that she could do without people a lot better than she could do without animals, plants, and rocks.

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