The Sheep Look Up, written by British sci-fi author John Brunner in 1972, is a dystopian novel examining the mass environmental deterioration of the United States. The Sheep Look Up is one of four novels (Stand on Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit, and The Shockwave Rider) from Brunner that each deal with a separate social issue that has been magnified in a horrific “What if'' scenario. The Sheep Look Up specifically follows the 1980s when human activities polluted every sphere of the world and society is close to collapse.

Most of the US is under smog cover and the air is too polluted to breathe without face coverings. Food and water are very scarce and most natural places in the country are polluted and full of garbage. A group of environmental activists called “Trainites” is the leading group pushing back against large corporations and the government throughout the novel. They are inspired by Austin Train, the prevalent conservationist of the time who is currently in hiding. Throughout the novel, multiple setbacks to society occur, all related to the environment. 

• A synthetic food product called Nutripon is contaminated by a strange chemical and many people in Africa and then the US fall sick and go insane.
• An Enteritis epidemic spreads across the US infecting 35 million people and shutting down most public services and businesses.
• Insects become immune to pesticides, ruining food across the world.

Due to all this, the US government puts the country in martial law and starts to round up the Trainites, who have slowly begun resorting to terrorist attacks in desperation while government critics are suppressed one by one.
The novel ends with the trial of Austin Trail, where he exposes the government’s role in concealing the source of the contaminations driving people insane (nuclear waste accident). There is no resolution, with the book ending with the poem

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread...



Analyzing the Poem
The excerpt above is from the poem Lycidas, a 1638 poem by John Milton. The poem is a critique of the Protestant clergy at the time, as Milton believed they were stealing in the name of the church from regular people. The hungry sheep are the people, and they are looking toward their leaders for guidance. However, they are filled with the "rank mist" and "rot" and this spreads to everyone around them as well over time.

In the context of the novel, the sheep still represent the common people who are waiting to be saved or told what to do by their leaders. Despite the failings of the government, the "sheep" are still blindly waiting for their next words while they do not do anything to fix their mistakes, which have also caused the crisis.

Disparity of Options
Brunner makes it clear there are differences in how the world is viewed between the rich and poor. We see the conditions most people are living in, yet the President seems unfussed and uses the Tupa terrorists as a reason for his country falling apart. However, he also has time to do many things other than fight the crisis and gives an interview about the terrorists in March “prior to leaving for a vacation in Honolulu” (Brunner 154). 

The thoughts of other prominent and powerful people are further proof that they do not care about the current state of the world much, as Jacob Bamberly, the man in charge of the Nutripon crisis, thinks during an interview in January. Before the interview about the safety of a product that is shipped to millions of starving people, he had a meal of eggplant and lobster (Brunner 116). The leaders are living in a different world, and that only changes when they become directly affected at the end of the novel.

Continued Events 
One of the most accurate parts of Brunner’s novel is how the environment is treated by the wider public. Unlike most pollution-centered stories which focus on a few characters for a short time, The Sheep Look Up is a global story spread out over a year. The year of storytelling enables Brunner to align the novel more with our world by asking How would the media and the entire world deal with an event like this?

Many ecohorror plots are based on a singular event or struggle where nature fights back while The Sheep Look Up looks at the events after nature has already fought back and won. While the horrors of the novel are not tame, they are insignificant compared to the damage already dealt to the Earth in the years past. According to Kate O’Neill, “The Sheep Look Up does not tell the story of a single great cataclysm – a nuclear war or a climate catastrophe. It tells instead the story of ‘death by a thousand cuts’” (O’Neill 1). Instead of being caught up in the event, we can see how such an event impacts everyone on Earth, which is another horrifying thing about this specific kind of ecohorror. These events could happen to random people in our world, and they are happening as we speak. At what point does it impact us the way it impacts the random characters of the novel?

Ecohorror as a Whole
The Sheep Look Up is the worst-case scenario of pollution ecohorror. There is no one cataclysmic event to draw in the reader and there is no answer left for the novel’s world. Yet it succeeds so well as a staple in its genre because our world has the same characteristics even 50 years later. There is no single event that is causing environmental degradation, only repeated small aggressions. There is no clear solution to the climate crisis yet, just measures to slow the decay. The true horror is how similar our world is to Brunner’s wasteland.