The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  At the end of the meeting, the Chinese finance minister, Madame Chan, joined her at the west window, where the late sun was making the Farallons again look like a sea serpent’s spine. What was that rising, there in the west?

  These are just trims, she said to Mary with a smile. Buttoning up the coat you already made. Surely you don’t mean to stop there?

  What do you have in mind?

  We’ve been looking at what India is doing. They’re leading the way now in all kinds of things.

  They were radicalized, Mary said.

  Yes, and who wouldn’t be? We don’t want what happened to them to happen in China, or anywhere else. So now they’re teaching us regenerative agriculture, and we need it. But of course it keeps coming back to how we pay for these good things.

  I suppose, Mary groused.

  Chan smiled. Of course. Think of it as land reform. That’s a financial arrangement too. So, land taxes, which in China means a tenure tax. Creation of a commons for every necessity. Also, simply the legal requirement that private businesses be employee-owned.

  Mary shook her head skeptically as she listened, but she was smiling too, thinking that now the baton had passed to this woman. A woman with real power, huge power. We’ll back you, she said happily. Take the lead and we’ll back you. And Madame Chan nodded, pleased with her.

  Afterward Mary had been planning to fly home, but she cancelled that, and got her team to book a train sleeper and then a clipper ship, New York to Marseille. She worked all the way home.

  85

  Hi, I am here to tell you about Argentina’s Shamballa Permaculture Project. We are representatives of Armenia’s ARK Armenia, happy to be here. Down in Australia we’ve connected up our Aboriginal Wetland Burning, Shoalwater Culture, Gawula, Greening Australia, How Aboriginals Made Australia, Kachana Land Restoration, One Acre Small Permaculture Project, Permaculture Research Institute, Purple Pear Farm, Rehydrating the Landscape, Regenerate Australia, and the Yarra Yarra Biodiversity Corridor. We’re a busy crowd!

  We are from Belize’s Coral Reef Restoration. I represent Bolivia’s Food Security. I, Borneo’s How to Restore a Rainforest. We are from Brazil’s Centro de Experimentos Forestaisis, also Restoration Through Agroforestry. We come to you from Burkina Faso’s The Forest of Lilengo, and the group Reforesting with Ancient African Farming Practices. Cameroon here: the Bafut Ecovillage.

  Canada’s delegation represents Bkejwanong Traditional Knowledge, Jardins d’Ambroisie, the Great Bear Rainforest, Miracle Farms, Taking Root, and Water for the Future. China’s delegation is happy to speak for A Man Plants a Forest, Eco-Civilization, Greening China’s Desert, Horqin Desert Reforestation, Karamay Ecological District, Kbuqi Desert Greening the Silk Road, Loess Plateau Watershed Restoration, Transforming Deserts to Cropland, World’s Largest Man-made Forest, and Zhejiang Green Rural Revival Program.

  From the Congo we are Bonobo Conservation, Participatory Mapping, and Virunga National Park. From Costa Rica, we are the Orange Peel Experiment, Punta Mona, and Vida Verde Water Retention. I am here to proudly speak for Cuba’s Sustainable Agriculture Revolution, on its eighty-fifth birthday. We are from Denmark’s Vitsohus Permakultur. I have been sent to you by Ecuador’s Cloudforest Agroforestry. I from Egypt’s Creating a Forest in the Desert. From England we represent Agroforestry Research Trust, the Eden Project, Knepp Estate Rewilding, Rewilding Britain, and River Restoration.

  From Eritrea we are Manazares Mango Regeneration, from Ethiopia, Ethiopia Rising, the Miracle of Merere, Regreening Ethiopia’s Highlands, Restoring Ecosystems, and the Watershed Movement. For France we happily represent Pur Projet Agroforestry. From Guatemala we are Reserva de Biosfera Maya and the Asociación de Comunidades Forestales. We speak for Reforesting Haiti. From Holland we represent the Land Life Company and Tiny Forest.

  Honduras sends you the Roots of Migration. The Hopi Nation is here with Hopi Raincatchers. Iceland sends you Afforesting Iceland, and Regenerating Forests. From India we come to tell you of Agroforestry in Arau, Aravali Institute of Management, Barren Land into Luscious Forest, Cooperative Sustainable Agriculture, Creating a Forest in a Cold Desert, Crowd Foresting, the Farmer Scientist, Fishing Cat Conservancy, Food Sovereignty, Foundation for Ecological Security, Hand-Planting a 300-Acre Forest, Mangrove Restoration in the Sundarbans, Miracle Water Village, Miyawaki Afforestation Program, Natural Farming, Navdanya Biodiversity Farm, Planting 50 Million Trees in One Day, Planting 66 Million Trees in 12 Hours, Protecting Rice Diversity, Rejuvenated Lakes in Bangalore, Sadhana Forest, Sai Sanctuary, Seeds of Life, Sikkim the First Organic State, Water Fields, Water Harvesting, and River Restoration.

  Indonesia greets you with its Biorock Coral Reef Restoration, Mangrove Action Project, Mangrove Restoration, and Manta Reef Restoration Project. Israel present its Growing Forests in the Desert, and Kibbutz. We are from Japan and bring news of Creating Forests to Reduce Tsunamis. I come from Jordan to tell you of Greening the Desert. We Kenyans are proud to represent East African Hydrologic Corridor, Green Belt Movement, Kaikipia Permaculture Center, Northern Rangelands Trust, and Rainwater Harvesting. Madagascar celebrates its Great Forest Restoration by the example of Project Moringa, and Using Trees to Save Lives.

  Mexico presents Greening the Chihuahuan Desert, Intensive Silvopasture, Hidden Rivers, Reforestation and Water Protection Group, and Via Organica. Morocco brings you its organization Making the Desert Bloom. We come from Nepal to describe the Beyul Project and the Anthropocene Wilderness Group. New Zealand here: Hinewai Reserve, Mangarara Eco Farm, and The Regenerators. As with all the other countries gathered here, tip of the iceberg really.

  I come from Niger to tell you of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, and Re-greening in Niger. From Norway we speak of Polar Permaculture Solutions. The Oglala Lakota Nation sends a representative from the Oglala Lakota Culture Economic Revitalization. We are from Panama’s Mamoni Valley Preserve. Peru wants to tell you of its Biocorredor Martin Sagrado. We from the Philippines have news of Forest Regeneration, National Greening Program, and Saving a Fishery and Coral Reef.

  We from Portugal celebrate the Fazenda Tomati Permaculture, Sown Biodiverse Pastures, Tamera Water Retention Landscape, and Wildlings. I am from Qatar’s Sahara Forest Project. From Russia with love: Pleistocene Park, Wet Carbon Storage, and Siberian Wildlife Support. I am from Rwanda’s Forests of Hope. We Scots are here for Britain’s Oldest Forest, Dendreggan Forest Restoration, Isle Martin Regeneration, On the Deep Wealth of This Nation, and Peat Bog Restoration. I speak to you for Senegal’s Great Green Wall Initiative, also Rolling Back the Desert. From South Africa we speak about EcoPlanet Bamboo, Joe’s Garden, Making the Desert Bloom, and Restoring the Baviaanskloof.

  I am from the South Korean project Reforestation with 350+ Million Trees. I am from the Spanish project Camp Altiplano. I am from the Syrian project The Art of Regeneration, please help us. I come from Tajikistan to tell you of Reforesting Tajikistan. From Tanzania we speak for Reforesting Kokota Island and Reforesting Gombe’s Surround. Tasmania here, we’ve got a great Giant Kelp Restoration Project, also Restoring Pine Plantations. I am from Thailand to tell you about Indigenous Knowledge and Forestry, Planting Mangroves, and Sahainan Permaculture Farm. Uganda sent me to speak of Permagardens and Uganda’s New Forests.

  We come from the United States as representatives of Accelerating Appalachia, American Prairie Reserve, Broken Ground Permaculture, Food Forest Farm, Holistically Managed Bison, Homegrown Revolution, Institute of Permaculture, Kiss the Ground, Klamath River Basin Restoration, Lake Erie Bill of Rights, the Land Institute, the Leopold Institute, Los Angeles Green Regeneration, Mirroring Nature’s Management, Permaculture for the People, Planetary Healing, Planting Justice Farms, Regenerative Ranching, Restoring the Colorado River, Restoring the Redwoods, Restoring the Snake River, Rodale Institute, Saving the West, the Sierra Club, Singing Frogs Farm, Soil Health Institute, Stewards of the Wild Sea, Tabula Rasa Farms, Tending the Wild, Weaving Earth, Wild Idea Buffalo
Company, and Wild Oyster Project.

  I am from Zambia to tell you of the Betterworld Mine Regeneration. I am from Zimbabwe to speak for the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, and the Chikukwa Ecological Land Use Community Trust.

  We are all here together to share what we are doing, to see each other, and to tell you our stories. We are already out there working hard, everywhere around this Earth. Healing the Earth is our sacred work, our duty to the seven generations. There are many more projects like ours already in existence, look us up on your YourLock account and see, maybe support us, maybe join us. You will find us out there already, now, and then you must also realize we are only about one percent of all the projects out there doing good things. And more still are waiting to be born. Come in, talk to us. Listen to our stories. See where you can help. Build your own project. You will love it as we do. There is no other world.

  86

  Back in Zurich, Mary emerged from a couple of weeks of intense work, every waking moment right at the face of the seam, so to speak. She was ready for a break. Frank May was now out of jail, living in co-op housing near the jail; what was he doing? How was he doing? She had lost track of him now that he was out, and was almost afraid to check in.

  “I’m doing okay,” he told her when she called. “Hey listen, I’m going to the Alps tomorrow to look for chamois. Rupicapra. It’s some kind of goat-antelope, and the maps show they’re all over up there. Do you want to come?”

  “Look at animals?” Mary said dubiously. “Like at the zoo?”

  An impatient snick. “Except no zoo.”

  One could use tracking apps to see where the creatures were hanging out, then go there and probably see some. He had done it before and liked it. There were some above Flims, it was a nice region.

  “I guess so,” Mary said.

  So they met at Hauptbahnhof just before the 6 AM departure to Chur, and an hour later, after eating breakfast on the train, sitting silently next to each other, uncomfortably aware perhaps that they had never done anything like this before, they got off and switched to the narrow-gauge train that headed upvalley to the Vorderrhein. This was a much slower train, but they didn’t stay on it long, getting off and taking a waiting bus up to Flims. A cable car from the station there lofted them high up into a big south-facing basin, elevation about 2,000 meters where they got left off. It was 8:30 AM and they were in the Alps. Mary had told her bodyguards in advance to leave them once they got on the trail, and they did; as so often, there was a little restaurant at the cable car’s upper station, and they would wait there.

  She and Frank found themselves hiking up into a big indentation in the Alpine range that formed the northern sidewall of the Rhine River’s uppermost headwaters. Near the end of the last ice age, after the ice had melted out of this part of the valley, a massive landslide, one of the biggest ever known to have occurred, had slumped down this south-facing wall. The entire village of Flims rested on the flat top of the remains of this landslide. Above it the green alps filled overlapping stacked bowls of rock, rising more and more steeply to the Tschingelhörner ridge, a wall of steep gray crags with a horizontal crack running through it. This crack was so deep that it had created a gap in the range, a giant window of sorts through which one could see a big patch of sky, well under the gray crags above. Yet another strange Alpine feature resulting from millions of years of ice on rock.

  Trails ran up the green alps under the crags. Mary and Frank ascended one that led them westward, away from ski lifts and farms and other human sites, toward wilder territory, what in the Alps passed for wilderness. The wild creatures of the Alps couldn’t afford to be too picky, Frank told her as they hiked, when it came to hanging out near people; if you weren’t on sheer vertical rock, people were going to be passing by pretty often.

  Though it looked like a gentle upward slope, this was partly because the gray cliffs ahead and above were so steep. In fact their ascent was quite a slog of a climb. By the time they got up into one of the highest bowl meadows, floored with a rumpled carpet of short grass, studded with rocks and spangled with alpine flowers, they were tired and hungry, and the sun was well overhead. They sat on a low boulder and ate.

  The meadow was littered with big fallen chunks of the ridge above, gray boulders that had detached and crashed down and rolled onto the meadow; or perhaps they were erratics, conveyed by the ice of a long-departed glacier and dropped there when the ice melted. As they sat on their low rock, eating their bahnhof sandwiches and drinking from water bottles, they were rewarded for their silence by a first sighting of alpine creatures: in this case, marmots.

  These were fat gray things, like groundhogs or maybe badgers; Mary didn’t have much basis for comparison. The color of their fur no doubt made predators take them for rocks, including the hawks soaring overhead. Perhaps because of these overseers, the marmots seemed to have a tendency to stay still; except when moving from one spot to another, they were as motionless as the rocks they were on. They spoke to each other by way of high staccato whistles. As Mary and Frank listened, it became clear that this must be a language much like any other.

  “Down in Flims they speak Romantsch,” Frank mentioned.

  The marmots did not mind them talking, Mary saw.

  Frank saw this too, and went on. They had heard a little Romantsch in the bus on their ride up from the train station to Flims, he said. It was like Italian and German put in a blender, they agreed. They shared their pleasure in the story of how Romantsch had become one of Switzerland’s four national languages, by way of a rebuke to Hitler. Thus the national myth, and they were both inclined to believe it.

  The sun beat on the meadow, causing it to shimmer. It was warm in the sun. The marmots got comfortable with them sitting nearby, even though they had apparently occupied a marmot outpost; piles of little dry turds were clustered in the cracks on the top of their boulder. Herbivores, by the looks of it.

  Frank and Mary sat there like big marmots. They didn’t say much. Mary thought it a little dull. Then one of the younger marmots, judging by size and fineness of fur, ambled their way, unconcerned by their proximity. It stopped, reached out a forepaw, pulled all the grass stalks within its reach toward its face. This created a small cluster of tiny grass seeds clutched inside its forearm, which it then munched off the top of the stalks. It only took a few bites. When that gathering and eating was done, it let the topless grass blades spring back into position and moved on. Did it again. Then again.

  Seeing this, then looking around the meadow at the level of the grasstops, Mary suddenly realized that the little beast’s source of food was almost infinite. At least now, when the grass was seeding. Probably it was the same for all the alpine herbivores.

  Frank agreed when she mentioned this. The marmots would eat all day every day, until they were fat enough to get through the coming winter. They hibernated through the winter like little bears, tucked in holes under the snow and living off stored fat, their metabolisms slowed to a crawl. In the spring they would emerge to another summer of eating.

  Then a clutch of larger animals appeared over a low ridge. Ah ha! Chamois!

  Probably these weren’t the animals Frank had seen online, as none wore a radio collar. If that was in fact how GPS got attached to animals these days; she didn’t know. Frank was watching them closely.

  They were odd-looking beasts. Round-bodied, short-necked, short-legged, snub-faced. Short curving horns. They had the rectangularly pupilled eyes of a goat. Devil’s eyes. After Frank had proposed this trip, she had read they were “goat-antelopes,” whatever that meant. Obviously they were their own beast, neither goat nor antelope, and not even much like the other species in their same family. The youngsters were slender and hornless, and stayed near their moms. They nibbled, looked around, walked calmly over rocks from one patch of grass to the next. They regarded Frank and Mary curiously. She was surprised that they seemed so unconcerned to see people; there were Swiss hunters, or so she had heard, and these beast
s were among the most commonly hunted. Why were they so unafraid?

  She muttered this question to Frank.

  “Why should they be afraid?” he replied.

  “We might shoot them.”

  “We don’t have any guns.”

  “Do they know that?”

  “They’ve got eyes.”

  “But have they seen guns before? Wouldn’t that put them off people entirely?”

  “Probably. So maybe they haven’t seen any guns.”

  “I find that surprising.”

  “The Alps are wild.”

  “I thought you said they weren’t.”

  He thought about it. “They are and they aren’t. Lots of people up here, yes. But the Alps can kill you quick. They’re savage, really. Didn’t you say you went over one of the high passes?”

  “I did.”

  “That should have taught you.”

  She nodded, thinking it over. “That was definitely wild. Even savage, yeah— if the weather had turned, sure. Nothing but rock up there.”

  “And that was a pass. There are lots of places up here where people don’t ever go. They’re really hard to get to, and they don’t lead anywhere. If you look on the maps you see them all over.”

  “Not like this, then,” Mary said, gesturing around. On the grass under their boulder lay scattered about twenty varieties of alpine flower, either tucked into the grass or waving over it, flowers at different heights for different plants, so that the air was layered by color: at the top yellow, waving over a white layer; lower still a blue layer; then the grass, spangled with a variety of ground flowers.

  “Not like this.” Frank smiled.

  Mary saw that with a start; it seemed to her that she had never before seen him smile. Flower-filled meadow, wild beasts grazing all careless of them, the young ones literally gamboling, defining the word as they popped into the air and staggered around on landing, then did it again. Gray wall above, with a window in it to make it Alpine-strange. Blue sky. It was definitely a cheerful sight. Even a little hallucinogenic. Breeze flowing over the flowers like a tide, so that they bobbed in place. The young marmot still there near them continued to draw grass stalks to its mouth. The oily sheen of the bunched seeds it had caught in its paw gleamed in the sun. Quick little fans of food. The demon eyes of the chamois just a bit farther away, placidly chewing their cuds, unafraid of anything.