Reflections for Teaching: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (Part 1 of 2)
Discussion notes and ponderings for your cli-fi book club
The almost-last chapter (103/106) of The Ministry for the Future (the 563-page thought piece/action plan/novel by one of my favorite writers, KSR) takes place less than a half mile from my office at Kapiʻolani Community College in Honolulu. Tourists know the spot as Diamond Head, but we call it by its Hawaiian name, Leahi.
This scene in the novel takes place about 30 years from now. It is 35 years after the Paris Agreement at COP 21, and the 57th Conference of the Parties has just been held, in Zurich, which is the primary setting of the book. In this scene, Chapter 103, it is approximately the year 2051, by my math.
In 2051, it is three in the morning and a full moon atop Leahi. A youngish, male, nameless non-character, a little bit drunk and high and happy, and thinking about surfing at dawn, participates with three billion others in a global event that KSR said might be called, in Hawaiian, ‘olu ‘olu or harmony day. (He also offers kulike, and I wonder the origin of these choices. I might have chosen lokahi, or aloha, or pono, which are words I associate with feelings that the scene seems meant to evoke.) An interesting discussion point, perhaps — what is the word in Hawaiian (or any other language) for “planetary consciousness?”.
A slight digression. A few years ago I was at UH Hilo when Dr. Larry Kimura shared a newly-coined word in olelo Hawaii. There was no word for “sustainable” in the Hawaiian language, because non-sustainable meant you were basically dead. However, it’s a living language and the word mauō was offered: mau=continuity and ō=enduring. I like it, but I don’t really hear anybody using this word. There’s also pono, which means balance, harmony, which is what sustainability is. There’s also considerations of epistemology, as my friend Kaleo reminds me. (What do you mean by planetary consciousness, he asks? And why are you trying to translate an English concept into Hawaiian? He explains that there are different levels of consciousness in Hawaiian, like the subconscious, the conscious, and the superconscious, and then there is existence in time: me, my ancestors, and the generations ahead.)
Back on Leahi, in 2051, it’s three in the morning because Hawaiʻi is in a time zone in the middle of the Pacific, and this is a global event where everyone in the world simultaneously “sings the praises of the planet, all at once, now is the time to express our love, to take the responsibilities that come with being stewards of this earth, devotees of this sacred space, one planet, one planet….” The idea is to evoke the noosphere, and to have it emerge out of the Zeitgest (These are two of my favorite words, and used practically in the same paragraph, which is why KSR is one of my all time favorite writers.)
The event is to initiate the new planetary consciousness. To celebrate the visible decline in CO2, decline in carbon burn, managed decline in human population, managed increase in wildlife corridors. The Keeling Curve down to 451 and headed for 350 ppm. “The discussion now was how far down they wanted to take it. This was a very different kind of discussion than the one that had commanded the world’s attention for the previous forty years” (p. 478).
The event was to celebrate the change in that infernal hockey stick that has cast such a long narrow shadow upon the future since the first atmospheric carbon data points were captured, also in Hawaiʻi, at Mauna Loa, in 1958.
I imagine this nameless non-character, a young man, as one of my students, though I’ll be long past retirement. He’d be born in the next 5 or 6 years, (this, during a time when many young people are choosing not to have children due to fears of near-term social collapse). He’d be starting community college in his twenties, on the cusp of this new era of planetary consciousness, this ‘olu ‘olu, this time of pono, lokahi, aloha. This worldfulness. I’ll be an old woman, maybe up at three a.m. with the insomnia that old people get.
I imagine myself making some tea and talking to my cat, Ananda the Fifth, telling her about the rough years at the college, and how strange it was in 2020 when we really couldn’t tell how it was all going to play out.
In the current reality of Spring 2021, I’m supposed to be teaching my favorite course, “Landscapes in Literature: Cli Fi, Sci Fi, and the Culture of Sustainability”, but enrollment is down and the course got cancelled this week. (Watching the course enrollment numbers this week has been like watching horse-racing scores, or the stock market.)
I’d love to assign Ministry for the Future. I organize the class around Literature Circles, but I call it a cli fi book club, and students get to choose from a curated list that I’ve created over decades of obsessive sci fi and postapocalyptic novel reading. I wrote an essay called “Pedagogy of the Apocalypse” back around 2012 when the Mayan Calendar said the world ended. (I think it’s the best essay title I ever wrote.)
Ministry is a novel that everybody involved with the climate crisis should read. But experience tells me that students (actually, most normal people) won’t make it through a 563-page novel, so I’m going to summarize the high points for you, starting backwards from ʻolu ʻolu day on the top of Leahi.
I’ve also published a companion guide, The Missing TOC to KSR’s Climate Fiction Masterpiece, which is a summary of all 106 chapters, interchapters, riddles, characters, and themes, crafted in the style of John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy.
Yes, there will be plot spoilers, but don’t worry about that because the novel is not really very plot driven. Come to think of it, it’s not very character driven, either. In fact, like all the best KSR, the novel is not really a novel at all but an exercise in world-building, a way to immerse readers in ideas made real.
I wrote recently about the After the End of the World exhibit at Centre de Cultura de Contemporània Barcelona, specifically the apartment designed by KSR with Studio X. (You can see the apartment in this video titled “How do you Imagine Your House in 2050?”.) I loved how you could actually sit inside the future, rendered ordinary. You could read the newspaper titles and things tacked to the bulletin board. That’s what this novel is like. Reading it is like a trick to slow down your brain.
Reading involves a certain cognitive process of attention, allowing us to circumvent our cognitive biases and paralyzing analytic what-if-nesses. Reading, we live inside the many solutions to climate change, and see how ordinary people make them happen. Reading, we slow down enough to sense the proximal steps and simultaneously stretch out our timespan to imagine not only the quickly-closing ten-year window we have been given by the IPCC report, but also the long game. That’s why the book has to be so long.
The main point of the book is how everything pretty much looks like a mess, until ‘olu’olu day when humanity stops to notice: “Look! It’s working!” KSR calls it a “success made of failures”: “A cobbling-together from less-than-satisfactory parts. A slurry, a bricolage. An unholy mess” (p. 99).
The female protagonist, Mary Murphy, is an Irish woman who serves as the Director of the Ministry for the Future, which is like a UN subcommittee but with more power. I could really relate to her, as I do similar work, but on of course a much much (much) smaller scale. Mary Murphy likes to goswimming in the cold Utoquai Schwimmbud in Zurich. She travels to international climate meetings on solar and wind-driven clipper ships. She attends a lot ofmeetingsand has just a few close friends. It’s not so much that she’s a workaholic as that, she just is her work. I can relate to all these things.
We meet the male protagonist, Frank May, an American aid worker, while he is submerged to the neck in a lake in India, trying to survive a wet-bulb heat wave that ends up killing 200,000 people in one day. Cooking slowly in the lake, the survivors push the dead bodies out to sea and try not to answer their own bodies’ urge to drink the hot, dirty water. Which would cook them from the inside. They are literally like frogs in a pot, but self-aware about their predicament. That is chapter 1, and our introduction to Frank, who works in refugee camps, does time in a low security prison, and then dies a slow death from a brain tumor.
Frank reminds me of Roger Hallam, the activist — and I mean this as a compliment to both men. Especially so, at the plot climax when Frank and Mary’s plotlines meet. Frank accosts Mary in chapter 25, like a kind of rogue gentleman-ecoterrorist. He is frustrated by the lack of action that the Ministry has achieved. He handcuffs her and kidnaps her to her own apartment where they drink tea and he says:
“You’re trying, but it isn’t enough. You’re failing. You and your organization are failing in your appointed task, and so millions will die. You’re letting them down. Every day you let them down. You set them up for death” (p. 97).
Who hasn’t wanted to kidnap someone powerful? In fact, I feel like I’m metaphorically kidnapping people every time I start a Powerpoint presentation. You must think about this! You’re trying, but it isn’t enough!)
The introduction to Frank recalls, for me, the actual experience that Amitav Ghosh describes in his awesome book, The Great Deragement, which is about why its hard to write novels about climate change. Ghosh describes the time when he was in the eye of a freak cyclone that struck Delhi. He writes:
“I saw an extraordinary panoply of objects flying past — bicycles, scooters, lampposts, sheets of corrugated iron, even entire tea stalls. In that instant, gravity itself seemed to have been transformed into a wheel spinning upon the fingertip of some unknown power” (p. 13).
It was a freakish, unprecedented event. Ghosh describes it as “strangely like a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld, and in that instant of contact something was planted deep in my mind, something irreducibly mysterious, something quite apart from the danger that I had been in and the destruction that I had witnessed; something that was not a property of the thing itself but of the manner in which it had intersected with my life.”
As a survivor of the wet-bulb event, Frank is repeatedly described as battling PTSD, but I wonder if it was also something like this?
There is a controlled tension in the novel, a sense of frustration that wants erupt in violence. Enter, in chapter 6, the Children of Kali, an ecoterrorist group. One of the first reviews I saw, before I’d read the novel, was Gerry Canavan’s in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Canavan wrote, “Ministry for the Future is Kim Stanley Robinson’s grimmest book since 2015’s Aurora, and likely the grimmest book he has written to date.” Why grim? I thought as I was reading, because it’s so thrillingly optimistic! Ah, but what Canavan means is that….the whole world-saving thing hinges on a few acts of terror. The Children of Kali strike in chapter 19 (overfishing) and in 33 (the guilty ones) and in 51(air travel). The Children of Kali believe in Grahasatya: Force Peace, kind of an anagram of Satyagraha. “It changes is from a noun to a verb, maybe, and you are exerting that force for peace” (p. 389).
There is also nonviolent action in the novel, such as Captured Davos (chapter 39), a nonviolent takeover of the power elite, again, to make them listen. Frank, however, is really not a terrorist, but is acting out of his traumatized survivor instinct. He sees his unplanned kidnapping of Mary an intersection of fate. Mary Murphy asserts that there is no fate; and yet, she is changed by the kidnapping. Her concluding rumination on fate, which has the last word in the novel, seems to meto speak the true thoughts of the author:
“That we could become something magnificent, or at least interesting. That we began as we still are now: child geniuses. That there is no other home for us than here. That we will cope no matter how stupid things get. That all couples are odd couples. That the only catastrophe that can’t be undone is extinction. That we can make a good place. That people can take their fate in their hands. That there is no such thing as fate” (p. 563).
The key takeaway for climate action, here, is that no one thing works to move the needle. It is a success of failures. Every piece seems essential. Including geoengineering. I’d definitely want to talk with Fred, a climatologist and coastal geographer that I work with, about this. Fred is open to geoengineering, but most of the climate people I know see it as existentially foolhardy. And yet, any read of CO2 drawdown targets says that there has to be something. This is another important theme in the book, and seeing different geoengineering solutions play out is pretty interesting, such as: dying the ocean yellow to increase albedo (ch. 102), or pumping glacier water from underneath glaciers in Antarctica, to make them stick.
And it turns out that the offshore drilling equipment of oil companies is just perfect for pumping seawater BACK to the artic and spraying it in the air so that it freezes. Just constant pumping, the sucking and spitting of a million straws “The saving of civilization, right there before her. A piece of plumbing” (p. 532). It would be cool to research these projects and see how feasible they are or what protoypes exist.
Here are a few other themes that would be interesting to explore:
Economics: Banking, bitcoin, and carbon coin. If I was teaching this book I’d invite a panel of economists, including Linda, my economics colleague, to talk about what KSR gets right and why we could or couldn’t do these things. Economics, in the novel, is tied to equity, the Gini coefficient, and the concept of carrying capacity, or “enough.” (A line that really stuck in my head: “Enough times ten is fucking luxurious.”)
Re-Wilding: creating corridors for wild animals to migrate freely. There are some important scenes where Frank spends time in nature, up in the Alps, and has an encounter with an ibex (or some kind of mountain goat). He calls it, “this person of the Alps” and has a transcendent encounter with the animal as having consciousness. He brings Mary to this spot and they spend an afternoon sitting in the sun, doing nothing. It is important that these ideas appear in the novel, and that nature begins to emerge as a true character, not just a pretty mountain backdrop to the main setting of Zurich.
Religion: Badim, one of Mary’s advisers and confidantes, suggests a few times in the novel, “We need a new religion.” In fact, it is the minor character of Tatiana who first makes this suggestion, a planetary religion. Is it coincidence that Tatiana is the only character in the book who gets murdered? Why is this religion mentioned but never really described?
This made me think about other literary religions, such as Earthseed, from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and also God’s Gardners from Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. According to a religion professor I know, Chandra, Taoism is the most earth-centered religion, but many polythestic belief systems have nature-based practices and beliefs. Maybe what’s really needed is a mindset, as in many indigenous perspectives. I don’t think I would call an indigenous worldview a religion, per se.
Conclusion
While I was working on an early draft of this essay, I happened to watch Antonio Guterres’ State of the Planet speech on December 2, 2020. I was so stunned when he started off with:
“Dear friends, Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back — and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.”
I quickly opened up the first available word doc to write that down. I continued to take notes (here they are, verbatim as I wrote them):
•Global carbon neutrality : net zero emissions in 3 years. Europe climate neutral by 2050. Incoming administration same goal.
•2021 quantum leap toward carbon neutrality for net zero by 2050.
•Shipping and aviation. “it is time to put a price on carbon”.
•Tax burden from income to carbon: from taxpayers to polluters.
•The race to resilience is as important as the race to net zero.
•80% of biodiversity on land managed by indigenous people, heed their voices, reward their knowledge and respect their rights.
I tend to have many (many) tabs open, and docs, and pdfs, and a ton of random screenshots on my desktop. Another of my writing habits is to cut and paste “junk” from the top of the draft down to the bottom of the document. I think of it like combing or carding wool. I just comb stuff down from the top and a bunch of chaff comes out and ends up at the bottom of the doc. As I came to the 2700 word mark of this essay, I ran into those bullet point notes. But I had forgotten about Guterres’ examples about how to meet with renewed energy the targets of the Paris Agreement, and how I had opened a random doc to jot them down.
I was like, wait, what is this? Are these notes from the novel?
Is this real? Could it be?
And that, my reading friends, is the genius of Kim Stanley Robinson.
Don’t have any friends to talk about this novel with? Join me and my friends at Gaianism.org for our monthly book club discussion. We’ll be discussing The Ministry for the Future on February 2.
