Dear Reader,
The weather here in New England has been so warm. Another unseasonable season. And the ocean is still warm. I swam in the ocean this week, the latest I have ever done so without a wetsuit. I will probably swim again tomorrow.
In a couple of weeks, world leaders, scientists, and activists will gather in Glasgow for COP26. This seems like a good time to take on a book that centers on the role of the UN in addressing the climate crisis.
Review
The Ministry for the Future
Kim Stanley Robinson
Orbit Press, 2021
576 pages
$17.99
Although August 12th, 1986 is not remembered as an important date in world history, we might do well to designate that day as a yearly occasion for somber reflection. Another even more worthy candidate might be June 23, 1988, the day that NASA climate scientist James Hansen, testifying before a U.S. Senate committee, delivered an urgent warning about the threat of global warming from the burning of fossil fuels.
In the judgement of onthisday.com, the most notable occurrences of 8/12/86 were related to baseball (Don Baylor was hit by a pitch for a record-setting 25th time that season) and to the conflict between Iran and Iraq (they made attacks that day on each other’s oil infrastructure). But here’s what I think truly mattered. On August 12th, 1986, President Ronald Reagan gave a press conference and did something at which he was exceptionally skilled. He delivered a sound bite:
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the Government and I'm here to help.’”
Reagan’s killer sound bite was hardly the beginning of conservative attacks on the nature of government and the need for it to deliver certain services. Far from it. That particular hostility has deep and sprawling roots in American history. But sound bites were Twitter before Twitter was Twitter. Reagan wielded his sound bite superpower to devastating effect. His words were repeated constantly, wielded as a catchy cudgel by all manner of Republican activists against all manner of potential government responses to the problems of our time—with the notable exceptions of weapons and prisons.
Indeed, on this latter point, one might be forgiven for thinking that the “most terrifying” words might actually be pronouncements like: “I’m from the Government and I’m here to take your children from you and then place you in separate detention camps.” Or: “I’m from the Government and I’m here to bomb your village.” See what Reagan did there? He employed a rhetorical turn that somehow gained energy and power from its dark, frantic absurdity. Here we have a textbook example of the paranoid style in American politics.
For my money, August 12th, 1986 marks the beginning of the Great Inaction, the era in which, alas, we still live. During the Great Inaction, the role of government has been derided and undermined by a key faction of the political class, along with their funders, many with a financial stake in petrochemical industries. As a result, the American political system itself has been corrupted and corroded: it has become too weak to respond to society’s most pressing challenges. Just today, for example, I learned that the U.S., owing to Republican opposition, is one of only two nations that is not a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity; the other is the Vatican, which is a real head-scratcher in the context of Laudato, Sí. In her recent speech at the Youth4Climate Summit, Greta Thunberg pointed out that over 50% of cumulative carbon emissions have occurred since 1990—that is, during the Great Inaction.
Given America’s role as global hegemon, the Great Inaction has opened up a giant umbrella of permission for other countries not to undertake helpful actions, on their own or in concert. It has also weakened multilateral institutions like the UN, a frequent target of Republican ire going back to the days of Reagan. Anybody remember Jeane Kirkpatrick, the first of our series of theatrical UN-bashing Republican UN Ambassadors? And yet, and yet . . . we can point to the Montreal Protocol (see Frugal Chariot Issue 23) as an important exception, and the U.S. under Barack Obama did engage in a series of major multilateral efforts, most importantly the Paris Agreement, that imperfect but possibly species-saving scaffolding for the construction of a (mostly) post-carbon economy.
In his most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, veteran science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson games out the consequences of this deadly policy vacuum, which is the only regime Americans under the age of forty have ever known. Robinson has created a vast output and won a devoted following. Friends on Twitter recommend his Mars Trilogy and Aurora. In 2017 he published New York 2140, which envisions the way large coastal cities might adapt successfully to sea level rise. He often paints scientists as heroes, and he favors the utopian over the dystopian mode.
I must confess that this is the first science fiction book that I have read in many, many years—though I was a devoted subscriber to Omni Magazine back in the 70s, and a huge fan of Carl Sagan. Nevertheless, I should acknowledge that my familiarity with the genre is limited. The Ministry for the Future seemed perfect for a first foray into “cli-fi,” as its heroine is a rather bland, deeply sincere middle-aged bureaucrat named Mary Murphy, a girl after my own heart.
Mary, the former Foreign Minister of Ireland, has moved to Zürich to run a new UN agency, The Ministry for the Future (or TMftF, as it is affectionately known to KSR fans on the interwebs). The Ministry’s remit is to do what existing global governance has failed to do: represent and defend all life that is not yet born and get buy-in to policy solutions to the ever-worsening climate crisis. The story begins in 2025, and it develops quickly around the novel’s other main character. Frank is a humanitarian aid worker, whom we meet during a horrific heat wave in Uttar Pradesh. The heat wave set piece is the first of a series of eyewitness accounts and observations from ordinary people around the world that Robinson weaves into the narrative. Even a carbon atom gets a turn on the stage.
These eyewitness perspectives introduce dynamic mini-plots that complement the overall arc of the book, which addresses nothing less than the fight to save human civilization and slow the sixth extinction. Extra shots of drama are helpful because the book is also loaded with technical disquisitions on policy: white papers and debates between Mary and her colleagues about solutions involving glacier stabilization, crypto-carbon-coins, Piketty taxes, new user-owned social media platforms built on blockchain, co-housing and refugee resettlement for humans, and wilderness refuge corridors for large mammals and other species.
The cover of TMftF informs us loudly that this was ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR. It is easy to see why the most cerebral of former leaders of the free world might have enjoyed this wonk-fest. Entire sections are devoted to minutes of the meetings of Mary’s team. The room where it happens is crowded with central bankers. To invoke another famous sound bite: “It’s the economy, stupid.” I enjoyed a lot of this, even if the pieces don’t quite always fit together.
The Ministry for the Future was somewhat disappointing for me from an artistic perspective. The prose style, though generally workmanlike, is not my favorite flush of Darjeeling. Dialogue is mostly clipped and hard-boiled. Mary’s and Frank’s internal monologues are often dominated by tedious sentence fragments and clichés, like the following:
What a thing. Death and memory.
The days grew short, the air chill.
Furthermore, the book’s final third presents an over-long denouement that introduces an important new character, who unfortunately is never fully realized. The novel floats gradually to its destination, like the stately, solar-powered eco-tourism airships that Robinson invents.
But here’s the thing about this book: it’s not merely loaded with important ideas and interesting voices. It also paints a highly credible picture of a violent eco-terrorism movement led by traumatized victims of climate disasters. These people see no other way to force systemic change in the economic system. Blood flows into the vacuum created by the political failure to modify capitalism. Davos gets dangerous. This possibility is really worth thinking about.
In an interview, Robinson has called this potential development a “loose, ragged ‘War for the Earth.’” What stays with me are the fraught moral relationships that Frank and Mary and the members of Mary’s team have to the rise of eco-guerilla warfare. The Age of Inaction is creating a cycle of no help and no hope, pushing us to a future that may not only be terrifying, but also terrorized.
And yet, and yet . . . the fight to break this cycle is playing out right now in Washington D.C., and will continue at the ballot box in 2022 and 2024. We won’t have to speculate about 2025 for much longer. Kim Stanley Robinson has said he believes that hope is a moral obligation. So here’s a peg to hang your hope hat on. Climate change is becoming a voting issue in the U.S., and the more that is true, the more elected officials are going to promise that they are here to help stop it.
Other Voices, Other Forms
Lest you think that Kim Stanley Robinson is being totally wild-eyed in imagining waves of climate terrorism, I refer you to the excellent new podcast from NPR Marketplace co-host Molly Wood: How We Survive. In exploring the growth in demand for batteries to store renewable energy, Wood reports on a planned lithium mine in Nevada, and finds out that some of the activists who oppose the mine are part of a radical eco-movement which, in its quest to disrupt industries of extraction, sanctions (at least theoretically) acts of sabotage and violence. It’s a compelling listen.
Poem of the Week
Here are some lines from “Runaway,” the title poem in Jorie Graham’s latest collection, which explores the relationship between our present, the trends we have set in motion, and our future.
For Your Reading Radar
Another book that speaks to climate futures is Anthony Doerr’s new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land. Hepzibah Anderson, writing for the Guardian, says:
As well as a tribute to the magic of reading, Doerr has pulled off something timelier. Through its exploration of loss, heroism and destiny, Cloud Cuckoo Land grapples with the climate crisis and humankind’s culpability, and does so with wisdom and clemency. By its close, a novel characterised by its questing nature for “the mysteries beyond” has become an ode to home.
For Your Calendar
The University of Glasgow’s College of Arts is running a program “hosting creative and critical responses to climate emergency.” It’s called The Dear Green Bothy, and is tied to COP26 Glasgow. As part of this series, Kim Stanley Robinson is giving an online talk next Monday, October 18th at 18:00 GMT. Register here.
Bookshop of the Week
This week we are linking to one of Kim Stanley Robinson’s local bookshops, The Avid Reader in Davis, California, which had some fun with the Bernie Sanders mittens meme earlier this year.
See you next week . . . . xo Nicie