If The Handmaid’s Tale were Margaret Atwood’s only novel, we might assume that she thinks religion is the opiate of the right-wing masses. That dystopian 1985 novel—made into a blockbuster series on Hulu last year—is about a future version of the United States in which fundamentalist Christians have instituted a militarized, patriarchal theocracy.
But Atwood’s 2009 book The Year of the Flood offers another kind of dystopian vision in which the religious figures are the heroes. In the novel, a group of Christians known as God’s Gardeners rejects the power of biotech corporations and survives a mass extinction event brought on by global warming and DNA tampering. The Gardeners are a quasi-monastic community that sings hymns to moles and nematodes and regards Dian Fossey and E. O. Wilson as saints.
When Atwood appeared on a Canadian TV show in 2009 to promote her book, the host subsequently introduced to viewers what he called the “real God’s Gardeners”—Leah and Markku Kostamo. The Kostamos are founders of a group called A Rocha Canada and have helped lead a Christian community based on a farm in Surrey, British Columbia, that teaches people about the environmental, protects the local watershed, and tries to live in harmony with each other and the land.
