Things are pretty, well, awful. Prices are skyrocketing, with war and floods and fires, the famine will almost inevitably follow. And the almost-routine gun violence in the US, where thousands of families are fractured and devastated monthly, has been overshadowed by the bizarre spectacle of gun violence in Japan!
We desperately need new systems to handle these challenges – systems that can end our addiction to fossil fuels. How is it that we are investing and spending so much on our own extinction? The depth of sorrow I feel is too scary to probe, a grief that underlies all I do; which is not to deny the joy, the joy of playing word games with my kids in bed; the joy of planting seeds and watching them germinate; the joy that Dark City is showing on SBS. But that joy sprouts from the awareness that we are in the end times, that while there are ways out of the abyss we are being herded into, they become fewer and fewer with each passing year.
While my current reading is largely on permaculture and earth building, I’m part of a book club that recently read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future. It isn’t his best book, and quite possibly his worst in many ways. The characters are two-dimensional, especially the main character, Mary Robin… I mean Murphy. I’m sure she’s not based even remotely on the former president of Ireland! But, as is often the case in KSR’s books, the people are ciphers for political positions and stances, in this case a sense of optimism, a hope for the future. More so than in some of his other books, her two-dimensionality makes it difficult to take any of her relationships seriously – with Frank, with Badim, with her friends. As always, landscapes and animals are almost better-developed than the humans! Yet, I don’t think any readers are looking for character development when they pick up this particular book.
What they’re looking for are the solutions to the climate crisis, and while the book is jam-packed with ideas, I find it worrying that they relied on bouts of eco-terrorism, sponsored by the Ministry, for the ideas to take root. This scenario may be plausible – private planes account for 16.5% of France’s CO2 emissions and 19.2% of the UK’s, and to my utter astonishment I found out that fuel for the mega-rich who own these jets is tax-free! And in Sri Lanka, those connected with the ruling party are being hunted down by angry mobs, with five people killed on 16 June… But I felt that the way violence was treated in the book was almost off-hand. If hundreds of planes were blown up on one day, especially if the targets seemed to be the rich and powerful, the resulting security backlash would be terrifying, yet it gets not a mention. And for a book so well-researched in terms of solutions and climate science, the research done on political change and change-making seems skimpy.
I do think it’s a book worth reading. His sci-fi future starts just three years from now, and is realistic. We are in a climate catastrophe, and we are not acting with the urgency needed to prevent extinction, the ship needs to be turned around now if we’re going to avoid the ice-berg (or you know, keep some ice-bergs), and KSR is fully aware of the dire nature of life-as-usual.
