The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Quickly everyone had heard the news, and then most people doubted it. Yet another camp rumor. They always flashed around at the speed of speech, word of mouth moving through the camp to full saturation within an hour, I would say. But then always the doubt. So many rumors had proved false. Almost all of them in fact. But occasionally it was just the news, that’s all. And this time there was a meeting announced for right after breakfast. Or meetings; there was nowhere in the camp that would have held everyone in it at once. So each block would have a meeting in its dining hall. Request to keep the smallest children back in the dorms, so there would be room for almost all the adults at once.

  Of course it would happen this way. No warning; ad hoc; an improvisation, just as it had been all along. They toy with us: cage us, release us, it’s all made up moment to moment. That’s history.

  We assembled. There was a team from the camp administrators, a couple of them familiar faces, and a few more strangers. Swiss looking. Whatever else, the meeting was real.

  They had said the meeting started at eleven, and we had learned well that the Swiss meant what they said when it came to schedules and times. The big digital clock on the wall went from 10:59:59 to 11:00:00, and one of our regular keepers went to the mike and said, “Hello everybody,” in English, then “Guten Morgen” and then “Sabah alkhyr.”

  She continued in English, which I thought was odd, as about seventy or eighty percent of the people in this camp spoke Arabic, and about thirty percent of those didn’t speak English, at least that was my impression. But then I got caught up in her message.

  They were indeed releasing us. We were to be given world citizenship, meaning we had the right to live anywhere. We were warned there would be immigration quotas for many countries, and possibly we would have to get on a waiting list for some of them. But we could do that, and the quotas for all the countries put together added up to two hundred percent of the number of people who had been held in refugee camps for over two years, which was the criterion for this world citizenship. Citizenship would be in your name, non-transferable, with a global passport. Families would be wait-listed together. The requests for residency were to be coordinated all over the world, and the ones who had been in camps the longest would be the first allowed to choose. They could take their immediate families with them. The process of relocation would begin at the start of the next month. Combined with a worldwide universal job guarantee commitment, and transport and settlement subsidies, everyone should end up okay.

  Switzerland had committed to taking twice as many people as were now being held in all the Swiss refugee camps. The housing for these new citizens had been built already or was being finished. It was distributed throughout the country, every canton taking a proportional share. The housing was to consist of apartment blocks conforming to ordinary Swiss building and housing codes. Employment would be offered according to need, the canton as employer of last resort. There was work to be done. Facilities for cooperative restaurants were already in place, ready for opening if the newcomers so desired. It was felt that food could be both a gathering place for the new residents and an outreach to the host community. So it had often been in the past.

  This arrangement was not quite the same as open borders, they said. Countries would still have passports and immigration quotas. The hope was that many people would want to return home. Polling showed that many refugees felt that way, and would go back home if it could be done safely. The destabilized countries that had generated the most refugees would be helped to restabilize as much and as quickly as possible.

  People had lots of questions, of course. That part shifted into Arabic for the most part, and other people on the stage answered, taking turns, or answering when a question matched their expertise.

  Before it was over I left the meeting and went to the north perimeter, full of clashing thoughts. Anywhere! What did it mean? Where would I choose?

  Most of us would be talking it over with family. Some of us would go back home. I could see the lure of that. Assuming it would be safe, why wouldn’t you? But I didn’t think it would be safe. I didn’t trust any of it. Surely there had to be a catch. Surely, if this was possible, they would have done it long before.

  But why think that? Things change.

  I tried to convince myself that things change. It wasn’t that easy. Do things change? I had lived the same day for 3,352 days. It seemed proof that things don’t change.

  But of course that was wrong. Nothing stays the same, not even life in the camp. We had formed study groups, classes, sports clubs, activity groups. We had made friends. We taught the children. People had been born, people had died. People had gotten married and divorced. Life had gone on in here. It wasn’t the case that things hadn’t changed, that time had stopped outright.

  But there is change and there is change. Looking through the fence at the mountains, hazy in the late morning light, I felt a deep stab of fear at the idea that my life might really and truly change. A big change. New people. Strangers. A new life in a new city. After such giant changes, would I still be me? Of course I recalled the poem about how you can never escape yourself, every place is the same because you are the one moving to that place. No doubt true. I recalled also the old notion from psychotherapy that people fear change because it can only be change for the worse, in that you turn into a different person and are therefore no longer yourself. Thus change as death.

  But death of habits. That’s all it is, I told myself. Remember the poem; you can’t help being yourself. You’ll drag yourself with you all over the Earth, no matter how far you flee. You can’t escape yourself even if you want to. If what you fear is losing yourself, rest easy.

  No: the fear I was feeling was perhaps the fear that even if things changed, I would still be just as unhappy as before. Ah yes, that was a real fear!

  Well, but I was always afraid. So this was no different.

  Would I miss this place? The beautiful mountains, the beautiful faces …

  No. I would not miss it. This I promised myself; and it seemed like a promise I could keep. Maybe that was my form of happiness.

  93

  Project Slowdown had been active for a decade, and the thirty largest glaciers on the planet, all of them in Antarctica and Greenland, had seen expeditions to their crux points where wells had been melted through their ice and the meltwater under them pumped to the surface and spread to refreeze as near the pumping wells as was convenient. Our team had been involved with the Weddell Sea area effort, which was particularly complicated, as a dispersed fan of glaciers and ice streams had fed into the Filchner Ice Shelf and the Ronne Ice Shelf in a way that was difficult to deal with. The landforms under the ice resembled a half bowl, not steep enough to easily identify the places upstream where glacial input was fastest. But we had done the best we could with that, and drilled 327 wells over a five-year period, focusing on the crux points we could find and hoping for the best.

  It wouldn’t have been possible without the navies of the United States, Russia, and England. They let a little village of their aircraft carriers freeze into the sea ice and overwinter in the Weddell Sea, and from these carriers we were able to keep the work going year round, and supply the land bases that were set on the ice of the Ronne and Filchner. Fleets of helicopters kept these camps supplied, and helped to move camps from drill site to drill site. Something like ten billion dollars was spent on the effort just in our zone alone. Such a deal, as Pete Griffen used to say. A lot of us had worked with him back in the day, and he was often remembered.

  All good. Only four deaths, including his, all from accidents, and three of those accidents resulting from stupid decisions, including his. The other death, weather. Pretty good. Because Antarctica will kill you fast. And none of the deaths were people on our team, although we never said that of course. But it was a comfort, given what had happened to Pete. No one in my group wanted anything like that to happen to us.

  So; ten years in Antarctica, with good
work to do, and no more grant applications either. Papers got written, science got done, but mostly it was engineering the drills and pumps and dispersion technologies. There were papers to be had there too, even if it wasn’t exactly what we had gone down there for. Actually the glaciologists were getting data like never before, especially structures of ice and flow histories, and most of all, bottom studies. For sure no one had ever had the kind of information about glacial ice/glacial bed interactions that we have now! If we had been doing that research only for its own sake, it would have taken centuries to learn what we’ve learned. But we had an ulterior motive, an overriding concern.

  So, at the end of the season, we were flown into the middle of the Recovery Glacier, where we had drilled a double line of wells five years before. One of the lines was reporting that all its pumps had stopped.

  Helo on up to a pretty dramatic campsite, on a flat section of the glacier between icefalls upstream and down, with the Shackleton Range bulking just to the north of us, forming the higher half of the glacier’s sidewalls. Lateral shear at the glacier’s margin was a shatter zone of turquoise seracs, so tall and violently sharded that it looked like a zone of broken glass skyscrapers. You never get used to helo rides in Antarctica. Not even the helo pilots get used to it.

  Out on the flat we went to the wells that were reported as stopped. We had drilled these long before, back at the beginning, and now it was a familiar thing to check them out. Everything looked okay on the surface, and it wasn’t the monitoring system. Very quickly the problem noticed by the automatic monitoring was confirmed, pump by pump, just by looking in the exit pipes and seeing nothing there. The closer to the center of the glacier the holes were, the less water they were pumping. Most were pumping nothing at all.

  We were moving around on skis, and roped together, just in case the crevasse-free route between the wells had cracked in the years since someone had been there. There were no crevasses, so we flagged the new route, then got on the snowmobiles and tested the route to be sure. No fooling around in our team.

  The wells were in the usual line cross-glacier. Tall pole with transponder and meteorological box, tattered red flag on top. Under that a squat orange insulated plywood box covering the wellhead, a very small shed in effect, heated by solar panels set next to it. The pipeline was lime green, crusted with gray rime. It pumped the water south, up to a hill beyond the south bank of the glacier, joining a big pipeline there, which took a feed from all the pumps in the area.

  We got the door to open, and went into the hut covering the wellhead. Nice and warm in there. Dark even with the lights on, after the glare outside. Wind keening around the sides of the thing. Nice and cozy; it had to be kept above freezing. Checked the gauges; no water coming up. We opened the hatch on the well cap, fed a snake camera down the hole. The snake’s reel was so big a snowmobile had had to haul it here on a sled of its own; two kilometers of snake on one big wheel.

  Down went the camera. We stared at the screen. It was like doing a colonoscopy of an exceptionally simple colon. Or probably it’s more like the cameras that plumbers use to check out a sewer line. No water in the hole, even two hundred meters down; this was a sign something was wrong, because when a hole is open from the bottom of a glacier to its top, the weight of the ice pushes water up the hole most of the way. But here we were looking far down the hole, and no water.

  Got to be blocked, someone said.

  Yes but where?

  Eventually we got to the bottom of the hole; no water at any point along the way.

  Hey you know what? This glacier has bottomed out. There’s just no more water to pump!

  So it will slow down now.

  For sure.

  How soon will we know?

  Couple years. Although we should see it right away too. But we’ll need a few years to be sure it’s really happened.

  Wow. So we did it.

  Yep.

  There would be maintenance drilling, of course. And the glaciers would still be sliding down into the sea under their own weight, at their old slower speed, so every decade or so they would have to be redrilled upstream a ways from the current holes. There were going to be lots of people working down here for the foreseeable future— maybe decades, maybe forever. A rather glorious prospect, we all agreed, after thawing out and getting into the dining hut, standing high on its big sled runners. Little windows on the south side of the hut gave a view of the Shackleton Range, oddly named, as he never got near this place. Possibly it was near where his proposed cross-Antarctic route would have gone, but when the Endurance got caught in the ice and crushed, all that plan had to be scrapped, and they had set about the very absorbing project of trying to survive. We toasted him that day, and promised his ghost we would try to do the same. Drop Plan A when the whole thing goes smash, enact Plan B, which was this: survive! You just do what you have to, in an ongoing improvisation, and survive if you can. We toasted his rugged black-cliffed mountains, rearing up into the low sky south of us. We were 650 meters above sea level, and ready for food and drink. Another great day in Antarctica, saving the world.

  94

  The 58th COP meeting of the Paris Agreement signatories, which included the sixth mandated global stocktake, concluded with a special supplementary two-day summing up of the previous decade and indeed the entire period of the Agreement’s existence, which was looking more and more like a break point in the history of both humans and the Earth itself, the start of something new. Indeed it can never be emphasized enough how important the Paris Agreement had been; weak though it might have been at its start, it was perhaps like the moment the tide turns: first barely perceptible, then unstoppable. The greatest turning point in human history, what some called the first big spark of planetary mind. The birth of a good Anthropocene.

  So the last two days of this meeting consisted of one day of people summarizing, listing, and celebrating various aspects of the positive changes made since the Agreement was signed. The second day was devoted to listing and describing some of the outstanding problems they had yet to solve if they were to secure the progress inherent or promised by the things mentioned on the first day. Both were very busy days.

  On the first day, the day of celebration, Mary walked around the poster halls drinking them in and feeling first startled, then amazed. The big banner with the Keeling Curve stretching across it, with its continuous rise, then the leveling, then the recent downturn, stood over everything else like a flag. And under that, there was so much going on that she had never heard of. She felt again the power of the cognitive error called the availability heuristic, in which you feel that what is real is what you know. But there was so much more going on than any one person could know, reality was so much bigger than the self, that it was alarming to contemplate. This explained the error: one felt the vastness and shrunk in on oneself like a snail’s horns, instinctively trying to protect one’s mind.

  And yet there was no real harm in it, this contact with the larger reality. Mary tried to feel that. She stuck her horns out and took it all in. The conference halls had the look of any other scientific meeting, poster after poster describing project after project. In this case all the posters, and the various organizational tables, and the panel discussions and plenary talks, described good things being done; but then again this was always true, at any scientific meeting ever held: they were utopian gatherings, spaces of hope. The difference here was that together the posters were describing a global situation that no one would have believed possible even ten years before; and forty years ago it had looked impossible.

  First, powering everything in a most literal way, was the news that a lot of clean energy was being generated. Mary recalled Bob Wharton saying something to this effect many years before, back in the beginning, during that time that now seemed on the other side of a great mountain range, those invisible Alps over which there was a younger self she could barely remember: if we can generate lots of clean energy, Bob had said, lots of other good
stuff becomes possible. Now they were doing that.

  Also, crucially, even though they were creating more energy than ever before, they were burning far less CO2 into the atmosphere, less per year than in any year since 1887. So Jevons Paradox appeared to be foxed at last; not in its central point, which stated that as more energy was created, more got used; but now that it was being generated cleanly, and for fewer people as the population began to drop, it didn’t matter how much of it was being used. Since there was a surplus at most points of supply, most of the time, and created cleanly, they had simply outrun Jevons Paradox. And where excess energy was being lost by lack of completely effective storage methods, people were finding more ways to use it while they had it: for desalination, or more direct air carbon capture, or seawater pumped overland into certain dry basins, and so on. On and on and on it went. So clean energy, the crux of the challenge, had been met, or was being met.

  Then also, another great poster: the Global Footprint Network had the world working at par in relation to the Earth’s bioproduction and waste intake and processing. World civilization was no longer using up more of the biosphere’s renewable resources than were being replaced by natural processes. What for many years had been true only for Cuba and Costa Rica had become true everywhere. Part of this achievement was due to the Half Earth projects; though this was not yet an achieved literal reality, because well more than half the Earth was still occupied and used by humans, nevertheless, broad swathes of each continent had been repurposed as wild land, and to a large extent emptied of people and their most disruptive structures, and left to the animals and plants. There were more wild animals alive on Earth than at any time in the past two centuries at least, and also there were fewer domestic beasts grown for human food, occupying far less land. Ecosystems on every continent were therefore returning to some new kind of health, just as the result of the planetary ecology doing its thing, living and dying under the sun. Most biomes were mongrels of one sort or another, but they were alive.