#186: The Ministry for The Future
Dear friend
It’s the last month of the year. Today’s letter is only soul. It’s longer than normal and breaks our normal format. It’s more contemplative, a lot more. I felt that as we approach the possibility of pausing for a while, it may serve us to think about where we are and what is possible. Next week will be about self and then we’ll wrap it up for this year. Thank you for being here. I hope it’s useful.
A few weeks ago, a client asked me “How are you?” I answered, “The world weighs heavy on my soul”.
There are many reasons. I think they’re linked, but not in ways I can fully understand or express. Today’s letter is a starting point. I’d value hearing your thoughts, please do write back. I sense we are all on this journey.
Last week, as I swam, a Black Oystercatcher landed on a rock near me. Many of you won’t have seen one. Estimates vary, between 6,000 and 12,000 alive. In a sense, they’re a good news story; their numbers have increased since the 1980s. In another, disaster. Imagine for a moment a news headline that said, by 2030, there will be 12,000 of us left alive.
They’re beautiful creatures. To describe their plumage, it is tempting to invoke oil and coal, what an insult that would be. Their plumage is that of the moonless, desert night. Their beaks are a Serengeti sunrise. There are fewer of them left in the world than the human population of a tiny town.
On Monday, at dusk, as the sky turned to pastels, a juvenile African penguin arrived on our local beach. I first noticed it as it waddled across the sand. If you don’t know the penguin waddle, think of a drunk’s walk, hoping to hide the fact, and failing, that’s a penguin on land. Then, a wave washed over it, it dropped to its belly, stubby flippers transforming into wings for water. A second wave pulled it deeper; the wobble long forgotten as it torpedoed through the water with all the grace the drunk hopes he has. By all accounts, within the next decade, they’ll be instinct in the wild.
And then, there are all the tragic human killings of the last months, the destruction, whose pain will scar generations yet to be born. The world weighs heavy on my soul.
You may think it frivolous, to put wildlife and war together, but these are worlds we create. The destruction is destruction we bring. The solutions rest with us.
There are, of course, those people who bring hope, who fight for hope, who seek humanity and connection, who reject parochialism, who reach across the border of pain to find each other, who fight to restore the planet. These are the people we must celebrate and support.
For some of us, it is our life’s work – the activists, the peacemakers, the negotiators, the policymakers, the sustainability directors, the builders of all manner of businesses. In many senses, these roles are the hardest of all, they carry the title of the future but often operate in old contexts.
Some of us do it in everyday ways – the smile that acknowledges a stranger, the buying from local producers, the shifts in diets, the donations to organisations fighting the fight, even the social media post showing solidarity. This matters too, thread count is as important in life as in bed linen.
Others of us are exploring, we hold positions of influence and are testing what we can do with them, probing to see how far we can stretch our organisations’ boundaries to be more humane, more caring, more intentional. This too is brave work. Organisations have their own inertia, their own accepted truths, setting a new path, a path of intention is courageous.
Thank you all for being here and doing what you do.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future was published in 2020 (thank you Chantal Pasquarello for the recommendation), Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead in 2022.
Superficially, they’re very different books. Robinson writes in the near future, the 2030s and 40s. He tells the tale of a UN-established agency “charged with defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protection”. Demon Copperhead unfolds in Lee County Virginia, in the not-too-distant past, decimated by poverty and oxycontin addiction.
Kingsolver starts by quoting Dickens “It’s vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence on the present”. Therein lies the link, they both force us to look at our world, neither has any doubt that we need a different path.
Robinson explores the world of strategy, of central banks, blockchain, taxation and multilateral policies. He shows us what might be possible, using tools we have. The journey with Kingsolver is intimate, the life of one boy, one community, decimated by legalised, profit-gouging, drug addiction that takes root in soils prepared by coal mines that destroyed lands and lives, leaving little left but the desire for escape.
Demon finds himself in foster care, his mother lost to another bout of addiction. The foster ‘father’, a tobacco farmer scraping by, looking for cheap labour. One night, an older boy passes around a hat of pills, “A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain. Children, choices. Ruin, that was the labour and materials we were given to work with”.
As Demon stumbles into, indeed is snared by, opioid addiction, Kingsolver reminds us that before oxycontin was tobacco, “If Philip Morris and them knew the devil had real teeth, they sat harder on that secret than you’d believe. Grow it with pride and smoke it with pride, they said, giving out bumper stickers to that effect. I recall big stacks of them at school, free for the taking. Grow and smoke we did, while the price per pound went to hell, and a carton got such taxes on it, we were smoking away our grocery money. We drove around with ‘Proud Tobacco Farmer’ stickers on our trucks till they peeled and faded along with our good health and dreams of greatness”.
Still, even in the pain, people find connection, love, reasons for hope. Kingsolver leads us to the forces beyond their lives, the forces explored in detail by economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain. She confronts the devastation, leaving us to explore what we might do.
It is there that Robinson takes over. Yes, The Ministry for the Future is fiction, but one might also call it optimistic scenario planning. The book starts with a devastating heatwave in India that kills millions. It is followed by massive floods in LA. The two events crystallise the need for action.
Robinson alternates between the novel’s narrative, the Ministry’s work and the activism of underground movements, and dips into policy possibilities. He takes what is overwhelming and makes it concrete. He provokes us.
He lists nineteen organisations critical to reducing carbon usage. He estimates that those organisations are led by five hundred people. Suddenly, change become simpler. What can we do to shift the decision-making of just five hundred (admittedly enormously powerful) people?
He notes that the pay differential in the US Navy, the difference between what a recruit and an Admiral earns, is 1 to 8. And goes on, “Whereas in the corporate world, I’ve read the average wage rate is like one to five hundred. Actually, that was the median; one to 1,500 happens pretty often. The top executives in those companies earn in ten minutes what it takes their starting employees all year to earn”.
In one paragraph, he opens a world of possibility, asking “what if the whole world ran more like the US Navy?”, after all it works for them.
In Robinson’s world, wealth gets capped at $50 million. That felt radical, probably is radical. It would mean that Scott Smith, co-founder of cloud computing company Qualtrics, one of the poorest billionaires on the planet, ranked at 2540 in Forbes most recent rankings, would have to give up $950 million. That would, presumably, hurt. It would hurt me. Although, it’s hard to think that life would be unbearable on $50million – at least that’s the logic of The Ministry for the Future and its allies. Forbes tells us we currently have 2,640 billionaires. Big fortunes, small number of people. Rarer than an Oystercatcher, perhaps better protected.
(Incidentally, nothing against Mr. Smith, I chose him randomly from the 100 or so poorest billionaires, all languishing in position 2540, with only $1billion.)
In Robinson’s utopia, income inequality gets tackled alongside climate change, the two inextricably interlinked. In his telling, uncapped profit drive leads to unsustainable everything. It is that drive that led to the devastation in Demon Copperhead’s life. Saving the planet that we live on means ensuring a more equitable distribution of everything. Kinda simple. Kinda obvious. Radical.
In Chapter 85, he tells of a gathering of organisations working to restore the earth. It’s a four-page listing of organisations. I don’t know if they’re all real, but it did lead me to Egypt’s efforts to grow a forest in the desert and South Africa’s experiments to save its penguins and Dr. Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya. It was a powerful reminder that alongside devastation, there are thousands of people and organisations working towards transformation. In Copperhead, Kingsolver tells us of a community nurse, June, who resists opioid prescriptions, who steers patients in other directions, who devotes her life to supporting addicts. All of us, in our spaces, have power.
If you’re interested in changing your world, read The Ministry for The Future, you probably won’t agree with everything, but you will leave it with more possibilities than you had before.
Kingsolver leaves us with love found and hope restored. Robinson leaves us with a more equitable world, with global warming reversing, with vast swathes of land returned to wildlife. She is 68. He is 71. Earlier this year, I told you of Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s A Spell of Good Things, and Wanjiru Koinange’s The Havoc of Choice, both books leave us in unresolved pain, no happy ending. They represent a younger generation, a generation shaped mostly by loss; they distrust that we will transform. Perhaps confronting that truth will lead us to be bolder.
I hope today’s reflections help as you exercise your influence on the present.
All the best
Karl
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