Lucky Mud & Other Foma: A Field Guide to Kurt Vonnegut’s Environmentalism and Planetary Citizenship

A fascinating deep dive into Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre and legacy, illuminating his unique perspective on environmental stewardship and our shared connections as humans, Earthlings, and stardust.

Vonnegut’s major apocalyptic trio--Cat’s Cradle, Slapstick, and Galápagos--prompt broad global, national, and species-level thinking about environmental issues through dramatic and fantastic scenarios. This book tells the story of the origins and legacy of what Kurt Vonnegut understood as ＂planetary citizenship＂ and explores key roots, influences, literary techniques, and artistic expressions of his interest in environmental activism through his writing.

Vonnegut saw writing itself as an act of good citizenship, as a way of ＂poisoning＂ the minds of young people ＂with humanity . . . to encourage them to make a better world.＂ Often that literary activism meant addressing real social and environmental problems--polluted water, soil, and air; the plasticization of cultures and lives; racial and economic injustice; isolating and dehumanizing technologies; and lives and landscapes desolated by war. Vonnegut’s remedies took many forms, from the redemptive power of the arts to artificial extended families to vital communities and engaged democracies. Reminding us of our shared connections as humans, as Earthlings, as stardust, Lucky Mud helps fans, scholars, and book lovers of all kinds experience how Vonnegut’s writings offer whole Earth, interstellar, and species-level perspectives and purposely challenge readers to think, create, and love.

CHRISTINA JARVIS is Professor of English at State University of New York at Fredonia, where she teaches courses in sustainability and twentieth-century American literature and culture, including several major author seminars on Kurt Vonnegut. She is the author of The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II, and has published in journals such as Women’s Studies, The Southern Quarterly, The Journal of Men’s Studies, and War, Literature, and the Arts. She lives near the shores of Lake Erie in Western New York with her family and an indestructible goldfish named Kilgore Trout.