Core claim: In After the Parch and The Seed Apple, Sheldon Greene imagines futures where the climate has turned hostile and the usual authorities cannot be trusted. Instead of disaster spectacle, he focuses on small communities in contested valleys that try to make their own rules while navigating corporations, churches, militias and states. The novels ask what justice and responsibility look like when the weather is breaking down and the big systems are already compromised.
· Start with a concrete image that feels weirdly close to now.
o Bran looking down on the San Joaquin Valley and seeing a “vast brown blanket” with only sparse squares of green, the irrigation channels now sending all the water south of Fresno.
o Or Mendel stepping off the plane into Canyon Springs in 1947, feeling his skin shrink in the desert air and discovering “Jewish Indians” in a place that was supposed to be all orange groves and cars.
· Tie to the present: fires, droughts, floods, and a public mood that increasingly mistrusts governments and corporations to handle any of it honestly.
· Introduce the move:
o Greene does not give us apocalyptic collapse or sleek sci-fi.
o He gives us two valleys and asks what happens when ordinary people have to live with climate damage under shaky regimes.
After the Parch
· Quarantined California Republic after decades of drought, epidemic and political breakup.
· Bran comes from the Glade, a self-sufficient outlaw community in the hills.
· A corporation moves to claim the mine and land they occupy.
· Bran is sent south to register the Glade’s title and protect it.
· His journey turns into a road story through slums, corporate enclaves, church tunnels and underground democratic networks.
The Seed Apple
· Postwar California seen through Mendel, an immigrant Jewish cataloger with bad lungs sent to dry Canyon Springs.
· He discovers a strange valley world of “Jewish Indians,” mystics, builders and activists.
· A massive construction project in the builders’ valley draws in:
o A defense contractor and the Department of Defense.
o A charismatic church and its protégée Reverend Linda Blaney.
o Native activists and environmentalists, plus unions threatening a strike.
Set up the parallel: both books are about valleys under pressure in a dry land, and about people who refuse to be just scenery in someone else’s project.
After the Parch – the Big Parch
o A twenty-year drought, an earthquake that damages a reactor, and a drug-resistant flu starting in Los Angeles leave California physically and politically altered.
o The rest of the country quarantines California, and over time the quarantine becomes permanent. Public land is handed out to those who stay; later, criminals and dissidents are sent there as well, and the state turns into a place of exile.
o The results show up in small, concrete ways: salted soil, diverted water, abandoned suburbs stripped for materials.
The Seed Apple’s dry California
o Mendel’s doctor sends him to Canyon Springs for his lungs, into a town of stucco, dust, pools and evaporative coolers, surrounded by desert.
o The builders’ valley is where water, sacred land and a large construction project come into direct tension.
In both novels drought and damage are not just backdrop. They are the given conditions that explain why valleys become sites of conflict and why decisions about land and work feel so loaded.
The Glade in After the Parch
o A small settlement in the hills, with gardens, goats, shared kitchens and a nursery-school lodge.
o People live by mutual obligation and shared work more than by formal state rules.
o Bran’s journey to register a patent for the mine and land is both a legal errand and a test of whether the Glade can deal with outside institutions without being swallowed by them.
The builders and “Jewish Indians” in The Seed Apple
o Canyon Springs introduces Mendel to Jewish Indians and to Arin’s world of valley builders.
The valley community combines:
o Old Jewish stories of exile and return.
o Native practices and sacred geography.
o Modern engineering, law and political organizing.
o They are not “purely traditional” or purely modern. They are improvising ways to live with corporations, churches and agencies all focused on their ridge.
The aim of this section is simply to show that both books are interested in how ordinary groups of people try to protect a way of life when much larger forces have plans for the places they inhabit.
After the Parch
· Standard and other corporations ready to strip what they can from the ruined landscape.
· Inspection stations and data banks that turn movement itself into a controlled resource.
· Jails that are paid “by the night,” so guards hold prisoners until after midnight to bill another day.
· Political networks like Unity America, militants, and regional factions that want their own republics and are willing to kill to get them.
The Seed Apple
· Windel and the Department of Defense negotiating over a huge construction project in the valley.
· Reverend Linda Blaney and the church turning a ridge protest into a charismatic show.
· Strikers, environmentalists and Native groups all trying to use the same moment to push their claims.
Thread to pull: in both books, every large institution is compromised. Justice never arrives from the top. At best, power can be nudged or played against itself.
· Bran: hill farmer, not an activist by design, forced into learning law, politics and urban systems just to keep his home from being taken.
· Mavis and Leah: keep community and care afloat in the Glade, even when fire and death hit them hardest.
· Nikanor: musician and underground strategist trying to keep a fragile democracy from sliding into militancy.
· June: voice student who embodies both the seductions and costs of city life in a broken republic.
· Mendel: cautious cataloger who becomes a witness to the valley struggle and slowly understands that “just observing” is also a choice.
· Arin and Miriam: hosts and builders who carry both mystical and practical responsibility for their community.
· Zev and Francesca: younger generation with horses on the protest ridge, literally moving between factions.
Angle: Greene’s climate futures are not about heroes saving the world. They are about small decisions made by people who never asked to be responsible for anyone beyond their valley.
· In The Seed Apple, Mendel arrives in California with images of America from films and finds Jewish Indians and a family history that runs back through Europe and the war.
· Jewish history shapes how he sees exile, land and covenant in the builders’ valley, even as he moves among Native and Christian actors.
· After the Parch is not explicitly “Jewish,” yet it inherits patterns from Greene’s other valley books:
o Communities trying to live by covenant like rules.
o Quarantine and exile as permanent conditions.
o A constant awareness that history can turn on small bureaucratic decisions like patents and identity papers.
· Suggest that Jewish memory here works as a kind of quiet software running under the more visible climate and political plots.
· Connect the novels’ futures to current climate justice debates:
o Who gets water when there is not enough.
o Which communities are sacrificed or exiled “for the greater good.”
o How often criminals, migrants and dissidents become convenient dumping categories.
· Emphasize Greene’s core suggestions:
o Climate crisis is never just natural. It is always tied up with law, borders and old inequalities.
o Distrust of power is rational, but isolation is not a real option. The Glade and the builders’ valley both must negotiate.
o Justice, if it exists at all in such worlds, is local, relational and provisional rather than global and final.
· Return to one of the opening images:
o Bran looking over the half farmed valley.
o Mendel breathing the dry air and feeling both relief and unease.
· Close on the idea that many of us are already living in a mild version of “the Parch”:
o We know the climate is shifting.
o We know the systems above us are imperfect.
· Greene’s futures are not predictions. They are rehearsals.
They ask how we might build Glades and valleys of our own, not to escape responsibility, but to practice a different kind of politics before the ground cracks further.
Book Written By Sheldon L. Greene.
More of Sheldon Greene’s reflections on law, memory and belonging can be found on his Substack: https://sheldongreenee.substack.com/