The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  52

  Our Sikkim became a state with fully organic agriculture between 2003 and 2016, aided by the scholar-philosopher-feminist-permaculturist Vandana Shiva, an important figure for many of us in India. Of course Sikkim is the least populated Indian state, with less than a million people, and the third smallest in economic terms. But it grows more cardamom than any place but Guatemala, and one of its names is Beyul Demazong, “the hidden valley of rice,” beyuls being sacred hidden valleys in Buddhist lore, including Shambala and Khembalung. Sikkim is precisely this kind of magical place, and its version of organic agriculture, one aspect of permaculture generally, became of interest across India in mid-century, as part of the Renewal and the New India, and the making of a better world. Here again Vandana Shiva was an important leading public intellectual, combining defense of local land rights, indigenous knowledge, feminism, post-caste Hinduism, and other progressive programs characteristic of New India and the Renewal.

  Important also has been the example of Kerala, at the opposite end of India, for its crucial innovations in local government. A state blessed by location on the southwest coast of India, with a long history of interactions with Africa and Europe, home to fabled Trivandrum, Kerala has long been governed by a power-sharing agreement between the Left Democratic Front, which was very influenced by the Indian Communist Party, and the old Congress party, which though out of favor at the national level, always kept a fairly substantial level of support in Kerala, as representing the party of independence and Gandhi’s satyagraha, meaning peace force. The LDF has been the dominant party in Kerala since Indian independence a century ago, and one of the main projects for the party has always been devolution to local governance, closing in on the goal of what one might call direct democracy. In Kerala now there are panchayats for every village, then district governments that coordinate these panchayats and oversee disputes and care for any necessary business at the district levels; and above them is the state government in Thiruvananthapuram, looking after such business as involves the whole state together. The focus on local government has been so intense and diligent that there now total 1,200 governmental bodies in Kerala, all dealing with issues in their particular area whatever it might be.

  Strangely, perhaps— or perhaps it is not so strange— it is often said of both Sikkim and Kerala that they are exceptionally beautiful places, and both attract more tourists than most Indian states. But in truth almost every Indian state is beautiful, if you take the trouble to visit it and look. It is a very beautiful country. So the answer to the success of these two states cannot be put down entirely to the beauty of their landscapes.

  Although treated very poorly for a long time by various invading interests, including the Mughals, the Rajas, the British, globalization, and corrupt national governments from every party, but especially from the Congress party in its waning days of power, and then the Hindu triumphalist BJP party, both now disgraced for their connections to the heat wave, India continues to rise above all and do its best. So in the New India, in the time since the heat wave, there was a complete revamping of priorities, and if at all possible the introduction of India-based solutions to the problems afflicting us. Here Sikkim and Kerala are in their different ways great exemplars of what can be done by good governance and India-first values and practices. Of course the solutions to our ills can’t come entirely from within India’s borders, big though it is compared to many countries, both geographically and in terms of population. No matter how big, all countries now need the whole world to be behaving well. Still, India is big, and big enough to provide human, agricultural, and mineral resources for a great deal of rapid upgradation.

  What has been of interest is to see if the advances pioneered in the states could be rapidly scaled to the whole country. Not just Kerala and Sikkim, of course, but also states like Bangalore, the so-called Silicon Valley of India, which has led the way in that regard by founding a great number of engineering colleges. Now Bangalore, the Garden City, third largest in India, is thriving as a global hub for IT, and innovations there in the creation of the so-called Internet of Land and Animals might well help the process of full modernization of the Indian countryside. And then of course there is Bollywood in Mumbai, and the enormous mineral resources all up and down the spine of the country. Even taking coal off the table, as we have, the sheer physical wealth of India is unsurpassed; and in a world powered by solar power, India is indeed blessed. More sunlight energy falls on India than on any other nation on Earth.

  So the important thing now is to join up past and future together, and join up also all the diversity of people and landscapes that is India, into a single integrated project. The biggest democracy on Earth has huge problems still, and also huge potential for solutions. We need to learn our agriculture from Sikkim, governance from Kerala, IT from Bangalore, and so on and so forth; each state has its contribution; and we must then put them all together to work for everyone in our country. When we have done that, then we will provide an example for the world that it needs; and also, having solved the contemporary problems of life in a democratic fashion for one-seventh of all humanity, there are that many fewer people for the rest of the world to worry about.

  53

  I zing and I ping and I bring and I bling. Freed to self in the heart of the sun, I banged around in there for a million years before popping out the surface and zipping off. Then eight minutes to Earth. In the vacuum I move at the speed of light, indeed I define the speed of light by my dance.

  Into Earth’s atmosphere, exhibiting aspects both wave and particle but not either, I am a four-space conceptualized as an hourglass shape in three-space, where time and space cross in the human mind. Hitting things again, slowing down, breaking off brothers and sisters trapped in things, all the same, all without mass, all spin one, and so bosons, not fermions; one three-hundred-sixty-degree turn and I’m back where I began in that regard, while for fermions it takes seven hundred and twenty degrees of turning to get back to its original position; fermions are strange!

  I am not strange, I am simple. Banging into atoms and moving them as I too move, simple as Newton, bang bang bang, the atoms of the atmosphere move more than they would have without my kick in their pants. That’s heat. Until I kick into something that captures me and I stop moving on my own. That or I might bounce off something I hit and head back out into space, become the light in the eye of some lunatic observer, looking up at the big blue ball and seeing me bang something in their retina. A blue pixel of the utmost granular fineness, so much so that the wave I make is easier to detect, maybe even easier to imagine. The wave/particle duality is a real thing, and both at once is hard to think, hard to see. It doesn’t really work, four-space in your three-space mind, no. I am a mysterious thing, massless but powerful. There are more of us than there are of anything else. Well, perhaps that’s not true. We don’t know about dark matter, which should be called invisible matter, we don’t know them or what’s going on there. Presumably its individual constituent elements are something like me, but maybe not; no one knows. All that stuff flies around as if in a parallel universe slightly overlapping ours, maybe just waves, in any case gravity works on it for sure, because its very existence has been revealed to us by its gravitation effects. If we are similar to those dark-matterinos, it is in the way that light and dark are similar. Two parts of a whole, perhaps. I am visible, I embody light itself; dark matter is not actually dark, it is invisible, and we don’t know how or what it is. Our absent self, our shadow, our twin. Although there are a lot more of them than us, maybe. A mystery among all the other mysteries, we fly through each other like ghosts.

  But me, me, me, me, banging Earth, bouncing back up into the eye of an observer on the moon, then off again, immortal, immutable, I bang bluely on and on and on, and in the process, passing by just this once in a cloud of my brothers and sisters, we hit Earth and light it up, and the gas wrapping the planet’s hydrosphere and lithosphere gets warmer from our touch. M
y brothers and sisters follow me and they continue that warming.

  What am I? You must have guessed already. I am a photon.

  54

  Mary hunkered down in the wan light of winter Zurich, meeting daily with her team to plot their next moves. The whole baker’s dozen gathered in the mornings to share the news and plan the day, the week, the decade. It was like a war room now, yes, and their work felt like war work. Not war, however; there was no opponent, or if there was, it consisted of fellow citizens with a lot of money and/or passion. If it was war, they were outgunned and on the defensive; but really it was mostly just discursive struggle, a war of words and ideas and laws, which only had brutal death-dealing consequences as a derivative effect that could be denied by aggressors on both sides. It was a civil war, perhaps, a body politic punching itself over and over. In any case, war or not, it had that same besieged awful feeling of existential danger, of stark emergency that never went away. The large number of people living rough in Zurich, busking for change, looking for work, or worse, not looking for work; that never got ordinary. It was not a Zuri thing.

  Nevertheless, Mary’s life settled into a routine that was, she had to admit, almost pleasant. Or at least absorbing. Busy; possibly productive. There were worse things than having a project in hand that felt crucial. She stayed in Zurich. When its winter gloom got to be too much for her, she took a Sunday train up to one of the nearby Alpine towns, popping up through the low cloud layer that banked on the north side of the Alps and made winter life in Zurich so sunless and gloomy. There had been eight hours of sunlight in the first fifty days of this year, they told her, scattered over several days; it was like them to quantify a thing like that. But on a Sunday she would take a break and train up into brilliant snowy light. The ski resorts were too crowded, and Mary was not a skier; but there were many Alpine towns that had no skiing to speak of, being surrounded by sheer cliffs: Engelberg, Kandersteg, Adelboden, some others. In these towns she could walk on cleared snow trails, or snowshoe them, or just sit on a terrace, soaking in the chill brilliant light, the small crystalline sun in its big white sky. Then back down into the gloom.

  In Zurich she met with her team and with outside helpers and antagonists. The fossil fuels industry’s lawyers were getting more and more interested to learn how much they could extort from the system if they chose to sequester their asset. This was by no means a trivial topic, indeed it was a crucial matter, and Mary entered into it with great interest. To a certain extent it felt to her like she was negotiating to buy off terrorists who had explosive vests strapped around their waists, and were saying to her and to the world at large, pay us or we blow up the world. But this was not exactly right. First, if no one would buy their product, their explosives wouldn’t go off, and they couldn’t blow up the world. So their threat was hollowing by the day, which explained why they were talking to her at all; their leverage as terrorists, with the biosphere as their hostage, was lessening. And as the Ministry for the Future was one place where they might be able to negotiate a settlement, they were coming to Zurich to bargain.

  Then also, they were not terrorists. It was an analogy, maybe a bad one, or at least a partial one. Civilization needed electricity, and it was citizens who had powered themselves on these fossil fuels for the last couple of centuries. The owners of these fuels were sometimes private individuals who had gotten fantastically rich, but many times they were nation-states that had claimed ownership of the fuels found within their boundaries as assets of the state and its citizenry. These petro-states controlled about three-quarters of the fossil fuels that had to stay in the ground, and they too were seeking compensation for the losses they would incur by not selling and burning their fuels.

  So it was a mixed bag in that respect. ExxonMobil was big, yes, and held more in assets than many nations in the world; but China, Russia, Australia, the Arab states, Venezuela, Canada, Mexico, the US— these were bigger in carbon assets than ExxonMobil and the other private companies. And they all wanted compensation, even though all of them had agreed in the Paris Agreement to decarbonize. Pay us for not ruining the world! It was extortion, a protection racket squeezing its victims; but the victims were the national populations, so in effect they were putting the squeeze on themselves. Or their elected politicians were putting the squeeze on them. So the situation was bizarre, both hard to define and constantly changing.

  So meetings kept happening. Mary kept on pushing the idea of creating the money to pay for decarbonization and all the necessary mitigation work. As the weeks passed and the global economy went from recession to depression, Dick almost convinced her that taxation might be a good enough tool to do the job all by itself. What counted, he said, was differentials in cost and benefit. So in that sense, meaning in effect the bottom line in accounting books, taxes were both stick and carrot. On the bottom line, whether a person’s or a company’s or a nation’s, there was no difference between stick and carrot. They were both incentives. And if nations levied taxes they got the money themselves, rather than having their central banks print new money; they took in rather than shelled out. So if you did something that was stiffly taxed, and progressively taxed the more you did it, that tax was a stick to beat you away from that activity; then, if you didn’t do that activity, you thereby dodged the tax and didn’t have to pay it, and your bottom line showed that lack of payment as a plus in the ledger. So avoiding the action that got taxed created a carrot.

  Mary saw Dick’s point, but at the end of every discussion, didn’t actually agree with him. Maybe it was just psychological rather than economic, but people liked to be paid for doing things more than they liked avoiding having to pay for something. There was a mental difference between carrots and sticks, no matter if the numbers were the same in a ledger. With the one you got fed, with the other you got hit. They simply were not the same. She would make this point to Dick over and over, and he would respond with his crazy economist’s smile, his acknowledgment of economics’ fundamentally alien nature, the way it was a view from Mars, or a helpful but clueless AI. Which last was more or less the case.

  Also, in terms of making a carrot: the oil industry had equipment and an expertise that could be adapted from pumping oil to pumping water. And pumping water was much easier. This was good, because if they were going to try to pump some of the ocean’s water up onto Antarctica, the pumping effort was going to be prodigious. Even if they confined their efforts to draining the water from under the big glaciers, a lot of pumps would be needed.

  So the oil industry needed to stop pumping oil, for the most part, but they could be hired to pump water. Or to pump captured carbon dioxide down into their emptied oil wells. Direct air capture of atmospheric CO2 was looking more and more like an important part of the overall solution, but if it scaled up to the size of the problem, it was going to produce an enormous amount of dry ice, which had to go somewhere; pumping it underground was the obvious storage location. In some ways, these reverse pumping actions were easier and cheaper than pumping up oil; in other ways they were a bit harder and more expensive. But in any case they made use of an already-existing technology which was very extensive and powerful. If the industry could be paid to do something with its tech to help in the current situation, all the better.

  The fossil fuel lawyers and executives looked interested when this was proposed to them. The privately owned companies saw a chance of escaping with a viable post-oil business. The state-owned companies looked interested at the idea of compensation for their stranded assets, which they had already borrowed against, in the usual way of the rampant reckless financialization which was the hallmark of their time. Paid to pump water from the ocean up to some catchment basin? Paid to pump CO2 into the ground? Paid how much? And who would front the start-up expenses?

  You will, Mary told them.

  And why? When we don’t have it?

  Because we’ll sue you if you don’t. And you do have it. You can pay the upfront costs of the transition, an
d if you invest in that, we’ll pay you in a guaranteed currency that is backed by all the central banks of the world to increase in value over time. As an aspect written into the currency itself. A sure bet no matter what happens.

  Unless civilization crashes.

  Yes. You can short civilization if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay you if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilization, and civilization (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long.

  Go long. She found herself saying that a lot. Bob Wharton called it the Hail Mary pass. It was a little strange to be saying “go long” to middle-aged men, so sleek and smooth in their wealth; sexually satisfied, said their aura, such that saying to them “go long” might be enough to trigger what she had once heard described as a hard-on in the heart. Well, if she was enticing them to expand confidently into the world, to make an intervention into the body of great mother Gaia, so huge and vivid and dangerous, then fine. So what. Mary had no illusions that she herself, a harried middle-aged female bureaucrat in a limp toothless international organization, represented for these men any kind of stand-in for the Earth mother; but she was a woman, perhaps even the fine remains of a woman, as the pirates of Penzance had said about Ruth so hard of hearing. She could push that a little, and she did. Little sadistic lashings of what was really just Irish contempt for any form of pretense, of which there was a lot in these meetings. These men were often quite disgusting, in other words, but there was a higher purpose to be pursued.