Mere weeks ago, the world watched as Altadena, the hometown and burial place of Black author Octavia Butler. For many, the scenes of Black farmers guiding their panicked horse through the flames felt eerie because of their similarity to scenes from Butler’s magnum opus, The Parable of the Sower, and the dystopian society it depicted. It seemed to some as though this cemented Butler as a prophetic author. Others rejected the classification of her work as prophecy, saying that Black and Indigenous people have always written and talked about ecological destruction and fascism — people just weren’t listening.

Now, in the wake of these wildfires, Los Angeles and Southern California face an unprecedented health, housing, and ecological crisis, with many dead, Black families housing stability and home ownership threatened, Indigenous rights further degraded, and a host of respiratory illnesses exacerbated by the toxicity of urban wildfires and several concurrent pandemics.

Many of us have already read Parable of the Sower and some of us have been meaning to. We invite you to join us in reading this work and applying it to the times we find ourselves in — and the times from which we came — to think of how we can safeguard health and rights for Black and Indigenous people in North America.

Leading up to book club, we’ll be discussing the book on our Instagram stories and highlighting mutual aid funds for Black and Indigenous people impacted by the wildfires.