#221: Save the World

Dear Friends
 
In August, I paused our letter for a fortnight. I spent the time revisiting the letters I’ve written and books I’ve read in my five years of coaching life.

I realised I’ve often only shared a snippet from a book and then moved on, leaving dozens of insights unshared. Of course, only so much can be done in this format, and I would like you to explore the books; the ideas are so much more powerful in context.

Still, there’s something about my approach that feels inattentive, perhaps even wasteful. I haven’t yet resolved what to do. In the short term, the simple solution is to revisit the books I didn’t give full justice. In the longer term, we’ll see – if you have suggestions, please email me. I would appreciate your input.

One such book was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry For The Future. I first shared it with you in this letter.

Today we return to it. If you’ve been here for a while, you know I periodically zoom out from the nuts-and-bolts complexity of leading and living life to bigger themes. Robinson’s speculative fiction grapples with climate change and what to do, so today is one of those days.

There’s a lot to say, so please read my original letter for more context.  

/strategy
“There are some who think we’ve already run out of time, that the hard landing is upon us now, which is what we’re seeing in current events. Have you heard that the warming of the oceans means that the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in fish and thus available for human consumption may drop by as much as sixty percent? And that those fatty acids are crucial to signal transduction in the brain, so it’s possible that our collective intelligence is now rapidly dropping because of an ocean-warming-caused diminishment in brain power?

That would explain a lot”.

Robinson’s book is filled with multiple pause-inducing, thought-provoking moments like that.

Many argue oligarchic power makes change impossible. His unnamed narrator notes, “if it exists at all, it’s so concentrated that it’s weak.

‘How so?’ I must say you amaze me.

Brittle. Fragile. Susceptible to decapitation. By which I mean not the guillotine type of decapitation, but the systemic kind, the removal from power of a small elite. Their situation is very unstable and tenuous. It’s highly possible to shift capital away from them, either legally or extra-judicially”.

It’s a powerful strategic tool, one we can all use. What does it look like when we walk to the other side of the blockage?

With a different perspective, the obstacle can become an ally.

In a sense, Justice Alexandre de Moraes is teaching the world this, democracies have a choice, they need not succumb to what is presented as inevitable, action is possible and the concentration of power can enable it.

De Moraes is not alone. EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager is winning, and losing cases. Around the globe, from Barcelona’s streets to the world’s courtrooms questions are being asked.
 
At 2024’s Africa In the World festival, Dalberg and African Climate Ventures co-founder, James Mwangi recasts a common African response to climate change, “Don’t ask us to act… we’re only 4% of the problem” instead asking, “Who said that being 4% of the problem means we can only be 4% of the solution?” Mwangi’s vision is compelling. Africa birthed humanity, can it save it?
 
Intelligent reframing unlocks strategic possibility. In Robinson’s world, hackers do exactly this. They scramble the account numbers of the fortunes held in Swiss banks. Suddenly, the banks’ shields of anonymity are weaponised.

The bankers reach out to the Ministry for help. Its’ head, Mary Murphy, responds, “… your banks are often regarded as tax havens, because of their secret accounts. Other countries lose tax money which gets put in secret accounts here. So you’re rich in part because you’re the bagman for criminals worldwide. A kind of organised theft”. She helps but secures support for a ‘carbon coin’, an initiative to fund countries to not exploit their fossil fuel reserves.

Again, obstacle becomes ally.

The Ministry For The Future was published in 2020. Since then, many of the levers that Robinson explored have made their way into use or at least into public debate.

The OECD and the G20 have implemented global minimum corporate tax rates.

This year the G20, led by Brazil, South Africa, France and Germany, proposed a minimum wealth tax for the world’s 3000 billionaires. Advancing the proposal they note, “Persisting loopholes in the system imply that high-net-worth individuals can minimise their income taxes. Global billionaires pay only the equivalent of up to 0.5% of their wealth in personal income tax”.

A 2023 UBS report says, “of the 137 people in the global study who achieved billionaire status in the 12-month study period, 53 of them inherited $150.8 billion collectively, more than the $140.7 billion that was earned by the 84 new self-made billionaires in the same time period”.  

Austrian heiress, Marlene Engelhorn, gave away her twenty-five-million-euro inheritance. She co-founded TaxMeNow, an organisation representing German-speaking people who’ve become wealthy through inheritance and believe they should pay higher inheritance taxes.

Gabon has pioneered various bonds, capitalising on its stewardship of natural resources, resources that mitigate climate change and maintain biodiversity. Their recently issued blue bond targets marine conservation. Scientists are exploring geoengineering projects to stabilise glacial ice.

Robinson packs all this and more into his book. Read it.

/// soul
Today, we skip self and head straight to soul.

Nemonte Nenquimo is a Waorani Nation activist and founder of The Ceibo Alliance, an alliance of four peoples from the Ecuadorian Amazon – A’i Kofan, Siekopai, Siona, and Waorani – who collaborate to fight for and protect their jungle home.

Her memoir We Will Not Be Saved was released in June. Like Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed it tells of the destruction of traditional ways of life and living. Unlike Maathai’s work which foregrounds her Nobel-prize-winning activism, Nenquimo’s work is mostly a meditation on the forest’s glory and its destruction.

She tells us more about what she is fighting for than the fight itself. It is a powerful device, we fall in love with her home. We feel her despair as oil and mercury poison rivers, ancient trees are killed, warriors fighting to protect homes get massacred, alcohol sucks young people into shantytowns, and dynamite and drilling destroy the forest’s song.

She decides that to prevent the government from auctioning their lands, they must prove their ownership, they must map them. She returns to her home village to start the process with the elders.

“‘This is an anti-venom for snake bites,’ Wina announced, prying a plant root from the mulch.
Opi stood beside several other Waorani youth. GPS devices and cameras hung from their necks.
‘Let’s take a GPS point here. Medicine for snake bites,’ Opi said excitedly, scribbling in his notebook.
‘A puma sharpened her claws yesterday on the bark of this tree,’ Tementa said.
‘Tree for puma-claw sharpening,’ Opi muttered, scribbling frantically.”

This continues for three hours. Leaves for bathing newborns so they sleep well, other leaves for thatching, wood for canoe paddles, leaves that cure hepatitis… the map-making team is stuck in a small patch of forest.

One observes, “If we aren’t more selective, this GPS device is going to explode with all the information”.

The forest’s complexity and richness transcend our devices. It is this textured, interconnected, layered web of life that Nenquimo fights to preserve.

Predictably, the Ecuadorian government announces an auction of prospecting rights, an Oil Round, “Block 22! The government is calling our forests Block 22!”.

Nenquimo continues, “We had finished the maps of all our villages only a moon before. It had taken us two years. The maps were like colourful spiderwebs stretching across our lands, intricate webs that connected gardens to longhouses, toucans to fruit trees, bees to flowering vines, trails to villages, songs to memories. Like the forest, they were full of colour, full of memories and surprises, the very opposite of the monochrome, meanly drawn government maps.

The red lines on this government map were straight and violent and formed a rectangular cage across an empty forest. Our villages were irrelevant black specks within the cage…”

Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know tells us, “That’s what maps mysteriously do: They obliterate information to provide some information at all” and poet Ocean Vuong’s memoir On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, reminds us “without a name, things get lost”.  

The Ceibo Alliance ensures the maps are rich, that life is not obliterated, that places and treasures are named. They fight and win. The auction is declared illegal. The forest protected. For now.
 
That’s us for today. I hope you enjoyed it.
 
Much love
 
Karl

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