The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “I like this,” she said.

  “Seeing the animals?”

  “Yes.”

  The slight smile returned. “Me too.”

  They watched for a while.

  “Have you seen many?” she asked him. “Animals in the wild, I mean?”

  “Not many. I’d like to see more. So far almost all the ones I’ve seen have been up here in this basin, or basins like it. These guys, mainly. Marmots and chamois. Once an ibex, I think it was. Another time something like a marten. I looked it up later and it seemed like it must have been a marten. It was by a creek up here, with some trees on the other bank. It was running around like a crazy person, back and forth. I couldn’t understand what it was doing. Really fast, but erratic. Didn’t seem to be hunting or building a den, or whatever. Just dashing. Slinky thing with dark fur. Very intent on its own business. I wanted to pull my phone out of my pocket and take a picture, but I didn’t want to spook it. I didn’t want it to notice me. So I stayed still.”

  “How did that end?”

  “I had to leave to make the last chairlift.”

  She laughed. “That’s the Swiss for you.”

  “So true.” He plucked a grass stem from under him and began using it as a toothpick. “What about you?”

  She shook her head. “Galway and Dublin aren’t really places for wildlife. I liked going to the zoo when I was a girl. That wasn’t quite the same.”

  “Yes. What you would want is animals around you where you live.”

  “Probably so. That’s what they’re working on in California. They’ve got so much land there, and they’ve been rewilding for a long time. My contacts there called it the Serengeti of North America, but they were referring to before Europeans arrived. It’s something they’re trying to get back.”

  “Nice for them. But we live in Zurich.”

  “Right. I don’t know. I walk the paths on the Zuriberg pretty often, but I’ve not seen any animals up there. I’m a bit surprised, now that I think of it. It’s quite a big forest.”

  He shook his head. “Surrounded by city. That doesn’t work.”

  “So they need habitat corridors, you mean. Do those work?”

  “I think so. If they’re wide enough, and connect up big enough areas.”

  “That’s what they’re doing in California.”

  “In lots of places, I gather. I think it might work in Switzerland too. Although these beasties might not like it if wolves come back.”

  “Is that who used to eat them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t imagine the Swiss getting on with wolves either.”

  “You never know. I read that with their glaciers going away, they’re thinking of reforesting some lower alps, and helping start plants on the exposed glacial basins. That would make more wolf zone, I think. Wolves need forests, but they’re good in open country too, and there’s going to be more rocky empty areas exposed higher up, with marmots and moles and squirrels. And those areas will be pretty high, and as far from people as they can get in this country.”

  She shook her head. “Hard to believe wolves could come back.”

  “No more so than these guys. At this point, every wild creature is unlikely. It’s going to be tough to come back.”

  “Not if the Half Earthers have their way.”

  He nodded. “I like that plan.”

  They sat there. No reason to leave. Nowhere else they could get to that afternoon would be better. So they sat. Frank chewed a grass stalk. Mary watched the animals, glanced at him. His body was relaxed. He sat there like a cat. Even the marmots and chamois were not as relaxed as he was at that moment. They were busy eating. And indeed that was what would get Mary and Frank off their rock; hunger, and the need to pee.

  And darkness. The sun hit the ridge to the west and immediately the air felt cooler. Shadows fell across the meadow.

  Frank glanced up at the ridge, at her.

  “What say?”

  “We should get back down I guess. There’s a last cable car here too.”

  “True.”

  They stood, stretched. The chamois looked up at them, wandered off. Without appearing to hurry, they were soon across the meadow; and when they had gotten among the rocks bordering the meadow, they disappeared. It was like a magic trick. Even trying, even knowing they were there, Mary couldn’t see them.

  The marmots didn’t seem to care that they were moving. Then one whistled, and the young one who had been feeding near them galumped away and ducked under a boulder. Frank looked up, pointed. A bird far overhead, soaring. Hawk, maybe.

  They started toward the trail that led down to the cable car. Then Frank lurched forward and fell on his face.

  Mary cried out, rushed to him, crouched by his side. He grunted something, looking stunned. Put his hands to the ground and pushed himself up, rolled into a sitting position, sat there with his head in his hands. Felt his face, his jaw.

  “Are you all right?” Mary exclaimed.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “What happened!”

  “I don’t know. I fell.”

  87

  The town meeting included pretty much every single person left in the area; that meant about four hundred people. Looking around the old high school gym, where most of us had gone to school back in the day, we could see each other. Everyone we knew. We knew each other by name.

  The deal had come down from some UN agency called the Ministry for the Future, by way of the Feds and the Montana state government. Everyone was offered a buy-out that pretty much covered the rest of your life; housing costs in expensive places, enrollment in the school of your choice, and options that if taken, might allow most of us to move to the same city. Probably Bozeman. Some argued for Minneapolis.

  Everyone already knew the plan. The night before, the one movie theater still running had screened Local Hero, a Scottish film in which an international oil company based in Texas offers to buy a Scottish coastal village from the inhabitants, so they can rip it out and build a tanker port. The pay-out will make everyone rich, and the townspeople all cheerfully and unsentimentally vote in favor of it. They have a final ceilidh to say goodbye to the town and celebrate everyone becoming millionaires. Then the owner of the oil company arrives by helicopter and declares the town and its beach need to be saved for an astronomical observatory, astronomy being his personal hobby. Burt Lancaster. A funny sly movie. We watched it in silence. It was too close to home.

  Our situation was not so different, although they weren’t going to knock the town down. It would be left to serve as some kind of emergency shelter, and headquarters for local animal stewards, who could be any of our kids, if they cared to do it, or even us, if the idea of coming back to the town empty appealed. And we could come back once a year to visit the place. The movie theater had screened Brigadoon a few nights before, probably to show how stupid that would be. No one had laughed at that one either. Obviously Jeff, the owner of the theater, who had kept the business going at a loss, didn’t want us to close the town. He was whipping on us a little. As we came in he was playing Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” over the speakers, really piling it on. But the vote had been decisive.

  The main thing was, it was going to happen anyway. Or it already had happened. Jeff could have screened a zombie movie to show that aspect of it. Because all the kids were gone. They graduated high school, having bused to the next town over for it, and went off to college or to find work, and they never came back. Not all of them of course. I myself came back for instance. But most of them didn’t, and the fewer that came back, the fewer came back. Positive feedback loop with a negative result; happens all the time, it’s the story of our time. The town’s population had peaked in 1911 at 12,235 people. Every decade after that it had gone down, and now it was officially at 831 people, but really it was less than that, especially if you didn’t count the poor meth addicts, who were zombies indeed. One store, one café, one movie the
ater, courtesy of Jeff; a post office, a gas station, a school for K through 8, a high school the next town over with not enough students and teachers. That was it.

  And of course we weren’t the only one. I don’t know if that fact made it worse or better. It was happening all over the upper Midwest, all over the West, the South, New England, the Great Lakes. Everywhere on Earth, we were told. You could buy an entire Spanish village for a few thousand euros, we were told. Central Spain, central Poland, lots of eastern Europe, eastern Portugal, lots of Russia— on and on it went. Of course there were countries where villages were turning into cities right before their eyes, cardboard shacks melting in every rainstorm, but no. No one thought that was a good way, and anyway it wasn’t our way. We were in Montana, and our little town’s numbers had dipped below the level of function and habitability. Our town had died, and so here we were looking around at each other.

  The buy-out was generous. And if enough of us agreed to move to the same city, we would still have each other. We would constitute a neighborhood, or part of a neighborhood. We would have enough to live on. We could come back here once a year and see the place, see the land. After a while, those of us who had actually lived here would die, and then there would be no reason to come. Then they would let the buildings fall down, presumably, or salvage them for building materials. The land would become part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the greatest ecosystems on Earth. Buffalo, wolves, grizzly bears, elk, deer, wolverines, muskrats, beaver. Fish in the rivers, birds in the air. The animals would migrate, and maybe if the climate kept getting hotter they would move north, but in any case it would be their land, to live on as they liked. The people still here, or still visiting here, would be like park rangers or field scientists, or some kind of wildlife wrangler, or even I suppose buffalo cowboys. Buffaloboys. The authorities were vague on that. They admitted it was a work in progress.

  They planned to pull out a lot of the roads in the region. A few railroads and the interstate would remain, with big animal over- or under-passes added every few miles. Some regional roads too, but not many. Most would be pulled up, their concrete and asphalt chewed to gravel and carried off to serve as construction materials elsewhere as needed. Making concrete was bad in carbon terms, so the price on new concrete was astronomical now, taxed to the point where anything else was cheaper, almost. Recycled concrete from decommissioned roads and old foundations of deconstructed buildings was a way to get rich, or at least do very well. We were given shares in the roads that came through town, also the town’s foundations and so on. A kind of trust fund going forward. Later, with the roads gone, the animals and plants would have it better than ever. Fish in the creeks, birds in the air. The Half Earth plan, right here in the USA.

  So we talked it out. Some people broke down as they spoke. They told stories of their parents and grandparents, as far back up their family tree as they could climb, or at least back to the ancestors who had first come here. We all cried with them. It would come on you by surprise, some chance remark, or a face remembered, or a good thing someone did for someone. This was our town.

  All over the world this was happening, they kept saying. All these sad little towns, the backbone of rural civilization, tossed into the trash bin of history. What a sad moment for humanity to come to. City life— come on. All the fine talk about it— only people who never lived in a small town could say those things. Well, maybe it only suited some of us. And not the majority, obviously. People voted with their feet. The kids were leaving and not coming back, plain as that. So we would move too. Seemed like about half wanted Bozeman, half Minneapolis. That would be like us. Maybe all little towns had that kind of either-or going on, a nearly fifty-fifty split on everything; the mayor, the high school principal, the quarterback, the best gas station, best café, whatever. Always that either-or. So we would split up and go on. Become city folk. Well, it wouldn’t last forever. This was degrowth growth, as the facilitator pointed out. The facilitator was really good, I have to say. She encouraged us to tell our stories. She said in towns like ours it’s always the same. She had done this for a lot of them. It was her work. Like a hospice preacher, she said, looking troubled at that. Everybody cries. At least in towns like this. She said that when they do this same thing in suburbs, no one cares. People don’t even come to the meetings, except to find out what the compensation will be. Sometimes, she said, people are told their suburb is going to be torn down and replaced by habitat, and they cheer. We laughed at that, although it was painful to think of people that alienated. But that was the suburbs. For us— we had a town.

  But it was happening everywhere, she said. All over the world. And after that, in the years and centuries that followed, there would come a time when the world’s population drifted back down to a sane level, and then people would move back out of the cities into the countryside, and the villages would come back. Villages used to be just part of the animals’ habitat, she said. Animals would walk right down the streets. They do here already! someone shouted. Yes, and it will happen again, she replied. People who like knowing their teachers, their repair people, their store clerks and so on. The mayor. Everyone in your town. All that is too basic to go away forever. This is just one stage in a larger story. People lived like this for a long time. But now it’s some kind of emergency.

  And we would still have each other. And we would be rich, or at least well off— secure— with an annuity for life, and a trust fund for the kids. We would still have something to do on a Saturday night. So it would be all right.

  But after a while your eyes began to hurt. People broke down and couldn’t finish what they were saying. Their friends helped them off the stage. This was our town. This was who we were.

  Finally there was nothing left to say. It was midnight and we closed up the town like in a fairy tale. Nothing left to do but go home, feeling hollow, stumbling a little. Go in your house and look around at it. Pack your bags.

  88

  We eat shit and we shit food. A time comes when we need to move together. We follow the sun widdershins, moving all together. We are a herd made of individuals. We move in lines one after another. The land we walk over is mostly water. When we walk on water we grow frightened and hurry to return to land. Some of us lead astray the stupid, others urge fools to rash adventures. If we follow the wrong leader we die. If we panic we die. If we stay calm we are killed. You could eat us but we are of more use to you in other ways, so you rarely do. By our passing we render the land in ways you need more than ever before. We are caribou, we are reindeer, we are antelope, we are elephants, we are all the great herd animals of Earth, among whom you should count yourselves. Therefore let us pass.

  89

  Mary went to work the next day feeling uneasy.

  “How was your day in the Alps?” Badim asked her.

  “It was grand,” she said. “We sat in a meadow and looked at marmots and chamois. And some birds.”

  He regarded her. “And that was interesting?”

  “It was! It was very peaceful. I mean, they’re just up there living their lives. Just wandering around eating. It looked like that’s what they do all day.”

  “I think that’s right,” Badim said, looking unconvinced that this would be interesting to watch. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  Then Bob Wharton and Adele burst in, excited; word had come in that the latest CO2 figures showed a global drop, a real global drop, which had nothing to do with the season, or the economy tanking— all that had been factored in, and still there was a drop: it was now at 454 parts per million, having reached a high of 475 just four years before. Thus 5 ppm per year down: this was significant enough that it had been tested and confirmed in multiple ways, and all converged to show the figure was real. CO2 was going down at last; not just growing more slowly, or leveling off, which itself had been a hugely celebrated achievement seven years before, but actually dropping, and even dropping fast. That had to be the result of sequestration. It could
only be anthropogenic. Meaning they had done it, and on purpose.

  Of course it was bound to happen eventually, they told each other, given everything that had happened. The Super Depression had helped, of course, but that impact had been factored in, and besides that would only have caused things to level off; for a real drop like this one, drawdown efforts were the only explanation. Bob said that reforestation and the greening of the ocean shallows with kelp were probably the major factors. “Next stop three-fifty!” he cried, giddy with joy. He had been fighting for this his whole career, his whole life. As had so many.

  The rest of that hour was a celebration, mainly. They toasted the news with coffee. No one had ever seen Bob so exuberant before; he was usually a model of the scientist as calm person.

  But when everyone left her offices, Mary realized that she was still uneasy. She texted Frank to see how he was doing. Fine, he replied, and nothing more. As if nothing had happened.

  So at the end of her day she trammed down and walked to his co-op, just to see for herself. There he was in the dining hall, sitting on the piano bench with his back to the piano. He looked only mildly surprised to see her. Or like he knew why she was there.

  “What?” he said defensively, when he saw her looking at him.

  “You know what,” she said. “Did you go to the doctor yet?”