This was just excellent. Dystopias can be depressing, but the best of them offer a path through, and in a way that privileges more than the ability to survive. Survival, as Parable points out, is a bare thing - survival skills may keep a person alive, but it needs more than survival to make a life. And the beginnings of the Earthseed religion/philosophy fills that gap nicely. In many ways it strikes me as a sort of eco-religion, which is fitting as it's essentially an environmental dystopia in which these people are living.

I have a horrible feeling that it may also be a particularly prophetic one.