![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/2014\/06\/yearoftheflood.jpeg\" "\\"yearoftheflood\\"")
<\/a>Now that he\u2019s just about finished promoting his environmentally conscious movie about a Flood that wiped out most of the world\u2019s population in the distant past, Darren Aronofsky has signed on to produce an environmentally conscious HBO series<\/a> about a \u201cWaterless Flood\u201d \u2014 actually a pandemic brought about by genetic engineering \u2014 that wipes out most of the world\u2019s population in the near future.<\/p>\nThe series, MaddAddam<\/a><\/i>, will be based on Margaret Atwood\u2019s trilogy of that name, which includes the books Oryx and Crake<\/i> and The Year of the Flood<\/i>.<\/p>\n Interestingly, this series not only has the environmental themes that Aronofsky has been plugging into lately, but it may have the sort of religious themes that have popped up throughout his filmography as well. I have not read these books, but I gather that they revolve, in part, around a group of people known as \u201cGod\u2019s Gardeners\u201d. Here is how Atwood described them<\/a> in an article for Sojourners<\/i> on the real-life Christian environmental group A Rocha: I met Markku and Leah Kostamo of A Rocha<\/a>, an international Christian environmental organization, on the set of a television show in Toronto. The show was Context<\/a><\/em>, hosted by the welcoming Lorna Dueck. This show explores the stories behind the news from a frankly Christian viewpoint.<\/p>\n I had been invited to talk with Dueck about my MaddAddam<\/em> future-time book trilogy, and in particular about characters in the second book, The Year of the Flood<\/em>, called the \u2018God\u2019s Gardeners,\u2019 a green religious group that raises vegetables and bees on flat rooftops in slums. It is headed by a man called Adam One and includes a number of ex-scientists and ex-doctors who have withdrawn from a too powerful, greedy corporate world in which they can no longer function ethically.<\/p>\n The God\u2019s Gardeners group represents the position \u2013 probably true \u2013 that if the physical world is going to remain possible for human life, religious movements of many kinds will be an important element. We don\u2019t save what we don\u2019t love, and we don\u2019t make sacrifices unless \u2018called\u2019 in some way to make them by what AA refers to as \u2018a higher authority.\u2019<\/p>\n Dueck and I talked a little about that, and then \u2013 surprise \u2013 right before me were two people who closely resembled the God\u2019s Gardeners of my fiction. Leah and Markku Kostamo<\/a> are walking the God\u2019s Gardeners walk \u2013 through A Rocha, a hands-on creation-care organization. . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Aronofsky has expressed his admiration for Atwood before, e.g. by tweeting the following picture of her and her fellow Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki on March 13, just two weeks before Noah<\/a><\/i> came out:<\/p>\n two heroes, @DavidSuzuki<\/a> and @MargaretAtwood<\/a> : pic.twitter.com\/kjzchzP4Y0<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 darren aronofsky (@DarrenAronofsky) March 13, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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