Environment

Despite being published over 70 years ago, Lord of the Flies remains an exciting and challenging book to teach. One of the more relevant themes of the novel in the 21st century is Golding’s celebration of nature, and his depiction of the negative impact of human behaviour on the natural world. Golding wrote that the pleasure he got ‘from writing the book stemmed from being on a coral island. Hence the elaborate description of natural phenomena’. And indeed, Golding presents a beautiful landscape, entirely untouched by humans:

‘The shore was fledged with palm trees. These stood or leaned or reclined against the light and their green feathers were a hundred feet up in the air. The ground beneath them was a bank covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of fallen trees, scattered with decaying coconuts and palm saplings. Beyond this was the darkness of the forest proper and the open space of the scar. […] Perhaps a mile away, the white surf flinked on a coral reef, and beyond that the open sea was dark blue. Within the irregular arc of coral the lagoon was still as a mountain lake – blue of all shades and shadowy green and a purple. The beach between the palm terrace and the water was a thin bow-stave, endless apparently, for to Ralph’s left the perspectives of palm and beach and water drew to a point at infinity; and always, almost invisible, was the heat.’

This presents an opportunity for pupils to creatively engage with the description of the island through art and creative writing. What would their own version of the island look like? How can the flora and fauna be protected?

This is a world dominated by nature, and by the animals who live on the island. The plane crash has already caused a change to the landscape, represented by the ‘long scar smashed into the jungle’. However, as the boys take over this place, they have a further negative effect on its ecosystem. A subtle change is in the insects – Golding describes the abundance of butterflies in the early stages of the book: ‘the air was thick with butterflies, lifting, fluttering, settling’. By the time Jack displays a pig’s head on a stick, the butterflies have been replaced in the stifling heat by the stench of decay: ‘Over the island the build-up of clouds continued. A steady current of heated air rose all day from the mountain and was thrust to ten thousand feet; revolving masses of gas piled up the static until the air was ready to explode. […] Nothing prospered but the flies who blackened their lord and made the spilt guts look like a heap of glistening coal’.

The two fires on the island are most significant in exploring Golding’s theme of environmental destruction. In the second chapter, the boys light a fire which spirals quickly out of control with fatal consequences. As the flames destroy the surrounding flora and fauna, Piggy comments, wryly: ‘“You got your small fire all right”.’ The boys’ thoughtlessness is the first act of destruction and death, but it is not the last. In the final terrifying chase of Ralph, Jack orders his group to smoke him out of the hiding place:

‘Smoke was seeping through the branches in white and yellow wisps, the patch of blue sky over head turned to the colour of a storm cloud, and then the smoke billowed round him’.

In their desperation to catch Ralph, they set the entire island alight, without considering their survival. Ralph thinks to himself, ‘The fire must be almost at the fruit trees – what would they eat tomorrow?’.

These damaging blows to nature are similar to the devastating fires in the Amazon rainforest, and across the world. The reports state that the fires have been caused by human hand, in order to expand cattle grazing land to satisfy the growing demand for meat. Just as Jack wants the forest burned for his short-term gain, the Amazon inferno represents a similar kind of recklessness. If the rainforest continues to be destroyed, humanity’s long-term survival is very much at risk. In Lord of the Flies, Golding shows how easy it is for humans to threaten nature and the earth’s endurance; both on the microcosm of the island, and in the wider world destroyed by nuclear war.

The environmental crisis has stirred huge numbers of young people to take action, through school strikes and campaigning across the globe. By focusing on the environmental concerns in the novel, there are still lessons to be learned from Lord of the Flies.