State of Fear

While State of Fear is firmly interested in the social aspects of environmentalism—the media’s involvement, the role of universities and research, nonprofit groups, and so on—it also draws on natural imagery. Lightning is a prime example of how State of Fear shifts the significance of motifs of natural imagery throughout the novel. In several instances, lightning is a lethal force. It kills Nat early in the novel, almost strikes Sarah dead, is used in ELF’s attempted assassination of Kenner and Sarah at the group’s test site in Arizona, and is part of the storm the eco-terrorists use to unleash a flash flood in McKinley State Park.

All of these appearances of lightning in the novel have one thing in common: They are artificial creations or alterations of a natural phenomenon, developed at ELF’s test site in Arizona. For example, the strike that kills Nat dead stems from attracting lightning to a manipulated cell phone. This same technique is later used in ELF’s attempts to strike Evans and Sarah in the McKinley State Park. Moreover, the storm created in the park is amplified with a rocket array that causes “a change in the electric potentials of the infra-cumulus strata,” or put more simply, seeds artificial lightning (313).