In Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, natural disasters as a result of climate change contribute to a larger theme of personal accountability. Throughout the book, readers are given insight about the global effects of these events through economic, cultural, and environmental perspectives and a common trends across all of disasters is the way unaffected parts of the world reacted to them. Robinson uses the natural disasters to provide commentary on how humans avoid and reject responsibility when it comes to things like climate change until they are unable to ignore it.
The horrors of climate change is something that Robinson doesn't shy away from. The novel opens with Frank suffering through the India heat wave and eventually being the only one that survives in the town he was in. Over 20 million people died from the unprecedented heat wave, yet it became an event that most people outside of India chose to ignore. The heat wave was described to be similar to "mass shootings in the United States- mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next" (25). People were horrified and scared but not to the point of making any change because they weren't the ones personally affected by it. As Chandra says to Mary, "Everyone know, but no one acts" (20) because it is easier to ignore a problem that you don't have to immediately deal with. The mindset of thinking you won't have to deal with the consequences of an event like this because you weren't the one to witness it is extremely harmful and only makes things worse as time goes on.
The first big strike due to climate change that really made people realized that they can't ignore it anymore was the major flooding in LA. With over 7 thousand people dead and one of the most iconic places in the country destroyed, people in the US began to understand the gravity of the situation and that change must happen: "(California's government) and the US Federal government.. both were making efforts to help. Love it or hate it, LA was important to them" (286). While turning a blind eye to the millions dying across the world, Americans only began to care about the climate crisis when it was happening in their backyard. Pushing off responsibility is easy when you can still live comfortably ignorant. Robinson takes until almost the very end of the book to show that any real change has been made and it is because change is hard to do in a world that prefers to not address the problem head on. The novel serves as a cautionary tale about what can happen if we continue to avoid responsibility and not hold ourselves accountable for the climate crisis. Ignoring the people that are being harmed now will only lead to more suffering in the future.
I agree that America embodies the quote "Ignorance is Bliss" throughout the novel. I would even go to say the tragedies that kill thousands in the U.S still do not lead to the entire country understanding the gravity of the situation and/or changing their actions. For example, after the flood that killed seven thousand U.S civilians in L.A, Robinson writes, "So now one could imagine that the American people might support action on the climate change front...But no...In fact, no place that was not LA cared about it at all" (Robinson 285-286).
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, the heat waves in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida killed "somewhere between two and three hundred thousand" people (348). However, even after this people in the U.S continued to live in ignorance claiming, "It couldn't happen in the North. It couldn't happen to prosperous white people" (349).
Robinson attributes this completely delusional way of thinking to the theory of structure of feeling as well as the fact "the dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are frightened to accept change" (248). It is hard for people to conceive the idea that these horrible things could happen to them until they do. This is a very dangerous way to approach climate change because eventually, in one way or another, it will affect everyone if not completely end the human species.