Response to combination of two prompts:
How different is the world Robinson imagines from the world in which we live? What would you need to give up to live in such a world?
“To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above no one can rise. Enough is as good as a feast—or better” (58). Robinson invites the reader to respond to his suggestion. How do you respond?
The world that Kim Stanley Robinson imagines in The Ministry for the Future is not much different than the world in which we live. But only in the beginning. By the end of the story, Robinson’s society has an entirely different cultural identity than our world; it is more focused on community and less on endless individual choice. Frank experiences the deadly heatwave in India during the year 2025. While it seems unimaginable that such a horrific event would happen so near in the future, it’s not. More than 4,000 people died in 2015 in India and Pakistan due to a heat wave. (Rafferty) Furthermore, The World Health Organization predicts that “around 89,000 people are estimated to die every year in India from hot temperatures… With 4C of global warming, heat deaths will rise to 1.5 million a year.” (Fickling, Pollard) Robinson succeeds in painting a realistic futuristic picture of what our world would turn into if we leave the climate crisis alone. The horrifying events are horrifying because they are realistic.
However, the reality of Robinson’s solutions is more questionable. The entire world would be forced to give up their way of life. The intense rise of nationalism (especially in the US) and individualism (especially in the Western world), will make the process of solving the climate crisis excruciatingly painful and slow. Robinson’s solutions come from the destruction of a capitalistic economy and the creation of a legitimate, sometimes violent, power from a global government. First, this means that entire nations would need to give up their power to an international government. Nations would then need to provide enough resources to every single person so that no one lives in poverty.
More practically, people would need to give up the ability to have everything they want at any moment in time. This means no more billionaires, no more one-day Amazon deliveries, and no more abundant immediacy. Communities would need to become more self-sustaining and provide people with the ability to have everything they really need close to them. The rest of the solution falls around that. People would need to give up their time-frame to focus on a community-based schedule that allows sustainable transportation (trains, bikes, etc.). Robinson provides a glimpse of this life through the dismantling of the bank system, introducing the carbon-coin, and changing transportation methods. The true essence of Robinson’s imagined world appears when he discusses the celebration of Gaia. “We are all children of this planet, we are going to sing its praises all together, all at once… to take the responsibilities that come with being stewards of this earth, devotees of this sacred space.” (Robinson 501) Robinson imagines a world in which people must give up their way of life in order to gain the gift of life itself.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future” ultimately examines the depth and severity of the sacrifices, on both individual and global levels, which the world must make to combat climate change. Each major party the novel focuses on undergoes traumatic moral consequences because of their attempts to minimize the impacts and progression of climate change. For example, despite the fact that “Frank was drowning” (Robinson 64) after the heatwave, he still attempts multiple times to get more powerful people to do something about climate change. Frank’s actions cause him to continuously lose people in his life, as well as his own mind at times, due to his self-isolation and other people’s perceptions of him as a “baffled and confused . . . madman” (Robinson 93). This trend reveals the brutal truth: one must put aside their own trauma and privileges for present-day and future generations.
ReplyDeleteThe Children of Kali, though, represents an extreme response to this truth. As opposed to Mary’s more diplomatic approach as the head of the Ministry for the Future, this group was “the one who blew up [the] office” (Robinson 546) of the ministry. Badim implicitly leads the Children of Kali by using violence and the threat thereof to convince people to switch to carbon-neutral and carbon-negative lifestyles. This organization sacrifices the lives of profiteers of the carbon-positive global order, but they also sacrifice their own moral values as a result. Robinson explores how the latter part of this sacrifice can transform into obsession as Badim urges his organization to “stand down” (Robinson 389) after spending years making an international statement with their assassinations and acts of terrorism, but its other leaders continue to attempt to justify their work. The Ministry of the Future ultimately warns of the individual and moral consequences of failing to make smaller lifestyle sacrifices for the good of the world.