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I am Earthseed. Anyone can be. Someday, I think there will be a lot of us. And I think we’ll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place.

Early in the novel, a teenaged Lauren has already begun building her own life philosophy. Much of her beliefs arise from what she perceives to be a gap in the reasoning of her father and community. Lauren feels that her family and neighborhood are in denial about the intense change the world is undergoing. Lauren knows that the only way to survive this change is to adapt to it, and she wants to help teach others how to do so. In Chapter 7, Lauren has found a name for her philosophical doctrine: “Earthseed.” She considers all humans to be Earthseed—as in, literal seeds of the Earth—as they are born on this planet but have the potential to travel to and settle on other planets. In the present, Lauren envisions that Earthseed will help draw like-minded people into a communal setting where they will live off the land and attempt to survive as a supportive, educated community amidst the many dangers and challenges of the modern era. However, the greater goal of the Earthseed community, which they will work toward throughout the generations, is to find a way to leave Earth, which will eventually become too dangerous for humans to inhabit. During the events of Parable of the Sower, the U.S. government is looking for ways to expand into space and terraform other planets like Mars into habitable landscapes. However, the prospects seem bleak, and the project suffers a significant blow when an astronaut sent to Mars dies on her mission.

Lauren envisions that one day, humans will have perfected the technology to travel to and settle on distant planets. However, she knows that that day is far off in the future, and that the current objective is to build a trustworthy community of people with shared values who can endure the chaos of the climate crisis and the collapse of the U.S. While many of the people who make up the initial Earthseed community have little interest in Lauren’s teachings or space-travel initiatives, Lauren hopes that, as the group grows and thrives, she can convince the members and their eventual offspring of Earthseed’s higher purpose. Ultimately, Lauren believes that the survival of the human race may depend on the ability to work as a supportive community to find a solution to Earth’s disastrous crises.

Given any chance at all, teaching is what I would choose to do. Even if I have to take other kinds of work to get enough to eat, I can teach. If I do it well, it will draw people to me—to Earthseed.

In Chapter 11, Lauren states her passion for teaching early on, before the death of her father or the destruction of her neighborhood. Even as a teenager, she is already building the Earthseed doctrines and envisioning a future in which her greatest purpose is to spread this wisdom to others. Lauren is a natural teacher, and her talents as a leader and teacher are a vital part of her life. Lauren’s father, Reverend Olamina, was also a natural teacher, and he passed down his wisdom to his daughter. Reverend Olamina was both a professor and a preacher, fulfilling the role of teacher in both traditional and religious contexts. Lauren has followed in his footsteps. She passes along knowledge in farming and survival techniques to her peers and preaches Earthseed to her followers. During her childhood, Lauren saw how the people of her Robledo neighborhood were drawn to her father, who was the lynchpin of the community, and relied on him not only for practical help but for emotional and spiritual guidance. Lauren knows that if she is to manifest her vision of Earthseed, she too must fulfill these roles for her community. Unlike her father, she faces the greater challenge of drawing people into a new mindset, rather than upholding an existent belief system. To hold enough authority to convince people of her teachings, Lauren must position herself as a visionary leader. Teaching is her greatest purpose, and although she might work other jobs to survive, it will always be her highest calling and the thing she exists to do.

Additionally, Lauren’s philosophy surrounding teaching includes the understanding that students and followers have their own lessons to offer the community. Lauren sees teaching as a reciprocal, symbiotic relationship. Teaching is not just a linear process of information being passed from the master to the student—it is a cyclical process in which everyone learns from each other. Lauren does not see herself as the creator of Earthseed, but rather as an observer of the world who has recorded its most potent and useful truths. Thus, anyone can discover and teach new truths of Earthseed, not just Lauren. This non-hierarchical view of teaching fits well with Earthseed’s communal structure.

She wants a future she can understand and depend on—a future that looks a lot like her parents’ present. I don’t think that’s possible. Things are changing too much, too fast.

While living in her Robledo neighborhood, Lauren often remarks on her community’s unwillingness to accept the reality of their circumstances. In this passage in Chapter 12, Lauren refers to Joanne Garfield, her childhood best friend who has decided to move with her parents to the privatized town of Olivar. Despite her intelligence and reason, Joanne continues to live in denial. While she is skeptical of Olivar and its promises of safety and security, she convinces herself that moving there is the correct decision. While Lauren hopes that her friend is safe and happy in Olivar, she worries that Joanne has fallen victim to the foolish hope that she might find a place where she can live the rest of her life in a secure community not unlike their walled Robledo neighborhood. But Lauren believes that these neighborhoods are quickly disappearing vestiges of the past, and that her friends and family would be better off looking to the future for new solutions. Lauren knows that many of the society’s current processes and structures will soon become obsolete, and that survival will require not only entirely different structures but also entirely different mindsets.

Before the Garfields moved to Olivar, Lauren attempted to introduce Joanne to Earthseed. She told Joanne her plans to build a self-sufficient community in the north and encouraged Joanne to study the indigenous plants of the region, but Joanne, frightened by Lauren’s insistence that the neighborhood would be destroyed and its people forced to survive elsewhere, shares the plans with her parents, betraying Lauren’s trust and stalling her Earthseed project. Ultimately, Joanne—like so many others in the Robledo neighborhood—allows her fear of the challenging and the unknown to cloud her judgment. She doesn’t want to accept that she will have to turn to an entirely new, uncomfortable, and dangerous way of living if she has any hope of surviving the growing crisis. Instead, she falls victim to Olivar’s false promises because she desperately wants to believe that nothing about her world or her life will change. Parable of the Sower is clear that those who cannot accept and adapt to change, such as Cory, Joanne, and even, to an extent, Reverend Olamina, are consigned to a terrible fate.

The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.

This passage appears during the funeral of Lauren’s father in Chapter 12. At the ceremony, Lauren preaches to the neighborhood, citing Bible verses from Luke 18. She tells the story of the persistent widow, who sought justice against her adversary by pleading her case to an unjust judge who cared for neither God nor man's opinion. However, because she persists in her pleas, she eventually wears the judge down, and he grants her justice. Lauren believes that if enough weak people continue to persist, they can eventually overcome their oppressors or attackers. While she doesn’t think that her neighborhood will survive forever, her belief that humans, as a whole, can persist against all odds becomes an important tenet of her doctrine.

As Lauren has seen firsthand due to the death of her father, persisting is not a safe act—working against powerful, dangerous people and systems can often be a fatal fight. The danger of persistence only becomes increasingly clear. The initial community of Earthseed does not make it to Northern California unscathed. In their persistence, they lose Jill Gilchrist to a group of attackers. Her death is the group’s first blow as an organized community, but they do not allow the loss to destroy them. Lauren uses her hyperempathetic gifts to care for Jill’s sister Allie, helping her to shoulder her burden of grief. In sharing each other’s pain and turning to communal support for relief, the Earthseed community continues to persist, finally finding their way to Bankole’s land in Northern California. While Lauren knows that one or many of them could die soon, the true goal is that the community of the “weak” survive, as opposed to any one individual.

Earthseed deals with ongoing reality, not with supernatural authority figures. Worship is no good without action. With action, it’s only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, eases your mind.

Lauren speaks these words during a conversation with Travis and Harry, where she is explaining the Earthseed doctrine to Travis. Although he’s skeptical, he’s also interested in Earthseed, as he recognizes that its main tenet—acceptance of and adaptation to ever-constant change—falls in line with the theory of entropy, the word that defines the scientific concept that hot matter is always moving toward coolness, and that the universe is in a constant state of losing heat. In this sense, Earthseed meshes with scientific principles of thermodynamics, which makes Travis more open to learning about it. However, he’s still unconvinced by the spiritual aspects of the philosophy. Even when Lauren explains that change is undoubtedly the most pervasive and constant power in the universe, he still can’t conceptualize change as a type of God. This is because Travis still visualizes God by traditional standards – an all-knowing, all-powerful figure that is consciously involved in the lives of humans. Lauren, on the other hand, perceives God only as a source of power. For her, change is God because it is a powerful and unstoppable force, not because it is omniscient or omnipotent.

When Travis expresses doubt that anyone would want to “worship” change, Lauren agrees with him, explaining that change is not the type of God that needs to be worshipped. Change is not a supernatural ruler—it is simply an immutable principle of the universe. While religions such as Christianity utilized prayer and worship in the hopes that God would hear these prayers and take responsibility for changing the world’s circumstances, prayer and worship are considered unnecessary and useless in the Earthseed doctrine unless they are accompanied by real, practical action. One may reflect on or pray to change in order to gain clarity, but this is a fruitless exercise unless this clarity is followed by action. Change does not listen to worship or prayers because it is not a God in the traditional sense. It is a neutral force, neither malicious nor benevolent. In Earthseed, it is humans, not God, who are responsible for adapting to and shaping change, thereby making positive impacts on their circumstances.

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