“What is history? An echo of the past in the future, a shadow of the future on the past.”
Victor Hugo: The Man Who Laughs (1869)
Before there could be stories about the future, there had to be a sense that there was something that would be different called the future. The industrial revolution gave western civilization a consciousness of change, both extensive and rapid. If the present is different from the past, the future is likely to be different from the present. The question then was: What will that future be?
H.G. Wells applied Darwin’s logic of evolution to define our sense of the future as change governed by discernible forces, by processes. So there was a way to imagine a future, and tell stories about what the future might be (or could be, or should be), and that way was rooted in what leads to that future. If you remember the future, you’d best anticipate the past.
Now those questions confront us again, regarding the slow motion nuclear war we blithely call climate change or global warming, the climate crisis or increasingly now, the climate emergency. And so we are telling stories about that.
Some previous posts in this series were devoted to describing a kind of progression of atomic apocalypse stories. At first—even before the first atomic bomb exploded-- there were first a variety of print stories, mostly in science fiction magazines, for a self-selected but limited readership. A few post-apocalyptic tales briefly became best-sellers in the early 1950s.
Then in the mid-1950s there were the atomic monster movies like Gojira/Godzilla and Them! The earliest and best of them released suppressed fears in somewhat symbolic, mythical form. Then there were metaphoric variations: the invasion from space substituting for a nuclear attack, the subversion or monster from within expressing a range of related fears. Political satire entered with Doctor Strangelove, and other stories highlighting the absurdities required to start nuclear war, such as the 1983 WarGames with Mathew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.
The Day After Tomorrow
On the subject of the slow nuclear war of the climate crisis and climate calamity, there is perhaps more of a jumble, but a similar pattern. A variety of climate fiction print stories substantial enough to earn the genre name of “cli-fi” reach a self-selected by so far limited readership (though Richard Power's Pulitzer winner, The Overstory, is sometimes classified among them.)
Movies and television stories mostly have used climate and environment generally as a remote cause for apocalypse or dystopia, substituting it for nuclear Armageddon, though some popular stories (for instance, The Road) at best only imply a cause.
Instead of environmental causes, some dystopias (notably The Hunger Games) tend to concentrate on the same social divisions that inspired the future of the Eloi and the Morlock in Wells’ The Time Machine future: the powerful and rich few and the many oppressed and poor. Occasionally the connection is made that these riches are usually accumulated by destructively exploiting the planet.
So we do not yet have the climate equivalent of The Day After or Testament—not even an On The Beach. We don’t yet have a cause-and-effect apocalyptic story about climate. But oddly, what we do have are climate crisis utopian stories told in realistic terms, set in the near future.
After The Warming
Despite the scornful cliches, utopian stories never pretended to depict a perfect society—just a better one. But in other ways, utopia as a story form has changed over time. In the early 20th century, H.G. Wells introduced three variations: the “kinetic” utopia, or the utopian community built to keep on changing and getting better, the utopia that was spread over an entire planet instead of only a single isolated place, and the utopia set in the future.
In his keynote address at the “Utopian Dreaming Conference” in 2015 at the University of California Santa Cruz, author Kim Stanley Robinson added another key ingredient. It was no longer enough to describe a utopian society—this was just an exercise in modeling (he included his Mars trilogy of novels in this type of utopian story.) A utopian story for our age has to describe the ways and means to get to that utopia, from this moment forward.
Using these criteria, it turns out there have been several such utopian stories focused on addressing the
climate crisis. In the midst of some
very hot summers, especially in the eastern US, Bill McKibben’s The End of
Nature and several other books of warning more or less inaugurated the era
of climate crisis concern in 1989. A
climate crisis utopian story emerged that same year, in an unusual form: a two
hour television program by James Burke called After the Warming.
Beginning in the 1970s, Burke wrote and hosted many imaginative hours of television on science and technology in their historical and social contexts, such as The Day The Universe Changed and the various Connections series. The premise of After the Warming was a look back at global response to the climate crisis from the future of the year 2050.
The first hour catalogued the decisive changes in the history of life on Earth, including the development of the human species and human civilization, largely caused by major changes in climate. It’s difficult not to notice that the relatively benign and stable climate that supported the last thousand years of western civilization had completely blinded our leaders, historians and other explainers to climate’s role. But this hour is perhaps the most literal enactment of: To remember the future, anticipate the past.
The second hour was a “retrospective” account of how human civilization felt the effects of what was then called the greenhouse effect, and how it then addressed the long-term crisis resulting from global heating.
The utopian aspect of this future is that human civilization addresses each element of the ongoing effects while confronting the causes with a wide range of measures, from green energy to some ingenuous inventions and a return to old ways of cooling homes without high-powered air conditioning. There are more challenges ahead in this 2050, but the far future of runaway climate collapse and the resulting end of human civilization are avoided.
Now that we are more than 30 years into this future envisioned in 1989, we can see that the dimensions of the effects it predicts did not happen as early as it stipulates, and neither has the size of the response. Burke tried to inject some political realism by projecting that the world wouldn’t take concerted action through the UN until the year 2000—a delay of more than a decade, which may have seemed so long a lapse as to qualify as cynical. But then, the realities of the climate crisis were not immediately accepted in 1989, not even by all scientists in the relevant fields (as Burke himself found in post-program discussions aired on PBS.)
First, there are profound time lags between causes and effects, between the greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere, and the effects on weather and longterm climate, including melting ice and sea level rise, higher temperatures, droughts, fires, flooding, storms and heat waves of greater proportion, and secondary effects like famine, water shortages, and more disease spread by insects who live through warmer winters.
One ramification was immediately understood: if serious effects were to be avoided, action had to be taken to reduce greenhouse gases even before these effects were evident. That was to a great extent something new.
Another ramification took longer to understand and accept: time lag meant that even if action in the present effectively reduces greenhouse gases, the near future will still suffer effects of past emissions.
A second characteristic is related but not quite the same: the importance of what became known as tipping points. A rise in global temperature past a certain point could tip the climate into another state, that would likely last for a very long time—potentially thousands of years.
Later science suggested a series of such tipping points: polar ice cap melting that once past a certain point, won’t stop until completed, with devastating consequences to the world’s coastlines. And probably the most fateful tipping point of all: the point at which the oceans can no longer sustain life.
Because of these characteristics as well as just because of the nature of the natural world, scientists and policymakers had to face the sheer complexity of the interactions that make climate. Everything from deforestation and key species extinctions to the interactions of barely understood phenomena like clouds and wind were involved.
But the “greenhouse summers” of the late 1980s came and went, and throughout the 1990s, “global warming” was studied and discussed but—despite several flurries of interest, including Al Gore’s book and film, An Inconvenient Truth—the climate crisis seldom made it to the top of the news and never high on the national or international agenda.
Then between 2004 and 2007, Kim Stanley Robinson published a trilogy of novels that constituted another climate utopia. Known collectively as the “Science in the Capitol” trilogy, their author later condensed them into one volume as a single novel titled Green Earth, published in 2015.
Green Earth
Anna gets interested in the monks opening an embassy in the same building as NSF representing the (fictional) island nation of Tibetan Buddhist exiles called Khembalung, which is threatened by rising sea levels. Frank is upset that the Foundation isn’t doing enough to confront the climate crisis, and writes an angry letter to its director, Diana Chang. These actions begin the chain of events and relationships that carry through this richly textured novel.
At about the same time as the fictional Sandy hits the East Coast, an enormous storm attacks the West Coast of a type that has also since become a reality (a result of the “atmospheric river,” a phenomenon that didn’t even have a name when this part of the novel was first published.) All of this is closely associated with climate distortion, and adds impetus and urgency to concern and even action in this fictional Washington.
Also a major climate element in the plot is the same phenomenon fictionalized in the movie The Day After Tomorrow: the slowing of the North Atlantic conveyor that results in periods of very cold weather in Washington, among other places. One of the first actions initiated by scientists is a massive effort to add salt in key areas of the ocean to try to reverse the slowing.
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| KSR |
Though climate tragedies continue to happen—including the complete inundation of Khembalung—the idea of science guiding policy leads to a hopeful conclusion. In fact, the novel winds up being a comedy in the classic Shakespearian sense, because it ends like a climate As You Like It: good people restoring the state, gathered in nature for marriages (including one that is more than symbolically a marriage of science and power)—blessed by none other than the Dalai Lama.
No sooner had the final volume of this utopian climate story been published however, than real world prospects suddenly began to look so alarming that attitudes among those thinking and writing about the climate crisis shifted. The possibility of even this utopia was slipping away.
A World of Falling Skies
At first there were debates about whether sounding the alarm on coming effects would distract from addressing the causes of greater catastrophe in the farther future. There was worry about “alarmism” either damaging the credibility of climate scientists and climate action advocates, or driving people into the numbed inaction of despair.
But despite these fears, the writing about the climate crisis began to darken a few years later, in 2009 or so, as scientific observations—particularly of polar melting—were showing consequences not predicted to happen for decades even in worst case scenarios. The rhetoric of “solving” the climate crisis (in Al Gore’s words) quietly slipped away. Instead, various writers attempted to constructively confront the prospect of a darker future, hoping to prevent an even worse one, at least in the farther future.
A particularly eloquent example was environmentalist David Orr’s Down to the Wire (2009.) The evidence that global heating was causing grave consequences, and due to time lag effects, would continue to do so for the near future, became his guardedly accepted premise. “The news about climate, oceans, species, and all of the collateral human consequences will get a great deal worse for a long time before it gets betters,” he wrote. “The reasons for authentic hope are on a farther horizon, centuries ahead...The change in our perspective from the nearer to the longer term is, I think, the most difficult challenge we will face.”
The early and persistent voice on climate belonged to writer and activist Bill McKibben, and his 2010 book Eaarth acknowledged the new prospects. His title was meant to symbolize that the planet had already changed from the Earth we knew, and won’t change back. The best we can do for the near future is “manage our descent.”
Also in 2010, Paul Gildings The Great Disruption was billed as an optimistic view because he believed that humanity will eventually rise to the occasion, though only after we “tragically lose a few billion people.”
Journalist Mark Hertsgaard, who got onto the time lag consequences early, wrote about ongoing efforts to deal with the near and farther future of the climate crisis in Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (2011.) (In a 2005 essay he called the two tracks “protection” and “prevention,” though in this book he reverts to the conventional and confusing nomenclature of “adaptation” and “mitgation.” I prefer to simply call them causes and effects.) Hertsgaard provides a practical mantra for planning along both tracks: “Avoid the unmanageable, manage the unavoidable.”
A major figure in Childs' long Greenland chapter is Koni Steffans, a European climate expert whose research camp Childs is visiting. From time to time, government officials and others visit the camp for updates, Steffans said. “What he tells people who visit,” Child writes,” is not that the sky is falling but that we live in a world of falling skies, and it is best not only to know your options but to make moves ensuring the worst does not happen.”
The long-term worst is a severely hotter world that lasts for thousands of years, obliterating human civilization and most forms of life as we know them now. But climate alone is not the only path to that profound end. The Sixth Extinction (2014) by science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert details the increasing danger if not likelihood of the permanent death of most forms of life, all in one way or another caused by what humans are doing. Climate distortion is a major but not sole cause of the extinction of half the species now existing on the planet, before this century is half over. A more optimistic estimate is one-fourth.
The same is true of other effects that are very likely at the end of the road we’re on. If the ocean dies—acidified and deprived of oxygen—people can’t bring it back. If the North Atlantic/Gulf Stream currents stop, there’s no do-over, no reset button. The only solution is to anticipate these effects and prevent them from happening. This requires imagining a future before it arrives.
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about one climate crisis future or another several times after his Science in the Capital trilogy. But when he returned to a near-future utopian tale centered on climate issues in 2020, he had a dramatically specific definition for what constitutes a utopia today: a future that manages to avoid a mass extinction event.
That’s it. That’s all. But it looks so difficult to attain that it is utopian, in its several senses (including the pejorative.) Which in several ways may qualify his resulting novel, The Ministry for the Future, as the Last Utopia.
The Ministry for the Future
“I happen in the present but am told only in the future, and then they think they speak of the past, but really they are always speaking about the present. I do not exist and yet I am everything.
You know what I am. I am History. Now make me good.”
KSR: The Ministry for the Future (2020)
By the summer of 2021, with its clusters of apocalyptic climate disasters and the UN climate scientists’ dire now-or-never report, Robinson’s very near future novel was already bumping up against reality. The paperback edition scheduled for fall 2021 had a new cover, featuring the face of an old style pocket watch, but with no hands. The future is now.
In his keynote speech for the Utopia Dreaming conference in 2015, Kim Stanley Robinson provided the aforementioned criteria for a utopian story today: it has to be global, and it has to not only describe the utopian result, but how it was achieved. He then described what a 2015 utopian tale might look like, with a lot of detail about world finance that seemed to stun his audience into silence. But he centered his tale in the United States, because it was the indispensable nation, the obvious superpower.
He had already set his Green Earth utopian novel in
Washington, and largely in the United States.
But in striking contrast, his 2020 near future utopia seldom even visits
the US and barely mentions its role, except as a reactionary government and a
problem. Confronting the climate crisis
is left to the rest of the world.
The Ministry of the Future begins in India, with a climate catastrophe that is orders of magnitude greater and more horrific than the storms in Green Earth. From at least the time of H.G. Wells (including his film script for Things To Come), utopian stories often begin with apocalypse. Often these are the result of wars, lately nuclear wars. This novel depicts their climate equivalent.
Part of what made the imagery of nuclear war so powerful was the new element of radiation and its effects. But many climate distortion effects are phenomena that might be awesome and terrifying but also familiar, though perhaps not on the same scale: floods and fires, storms and drought. But what had not been much discussed prior to 2020 was the most obvious effect of global heating: heat itself.
In just its first twelve pages, this novel indelibly describes what an extreme killing heat event might be like. In 2004, a superstorm flooding a northeastern US city was a stretch, if not much of one. But this time, the event described here is more like the opening scenes of the 1936 Things To Come, in which a major city is shown bombed from the air a few years before such an attack actually happened for the first time: it’s an eerie look at an all but inevitable near future.
In this novel, such a heat wave covers a large area of India. It is days and nights of the combination of heat and humidity that exceeds the human body’s ability to function. Though there are more precise descriptions, basically people are cooked by the air. In this event, the heat affects machinery as well as organisms, and very soon the power goes out, and with it the slim hope of air conditioning. Old people, babies and young children begin to die. In the one town described, people stand in a lake, but in the sun the water is close to the boiling point. Everyone there dies, except one survivor.
Across this region of India, perhaps twenty million people die from the heat. The government responds with anger and resolve. It begins with the controversial geoengineering technique of scattering sulphur dioxide in the stratosphere to block solar radiation, to cause slightly lower global temperatures for a few years, much as the volcano Pinatubo did in 1991.
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| former President of Ireland is model for Mary Murphy |
Followers of fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson know of his predilection for naming one of his main characters Frank. The author claims (perhaps with tongue in cheek) that he gives the name to characters who are not always truthful. However, in his two climate-themed utopian novels discussed here, his Frank character notably gets action going precisely by being frank.
In Green Earth, scientist Frank Vanderwal writes a scathing letter to his boss at the National Science Foundation claiming the NSF isn’t doing enough to address climate change, which leads to action and a forward momentum for the rest of the story. In The Ministry for the Future, the character Frank May does something similar, but the difference again reflects the new urgency. This time, Frank briefly but forcibly kidnaps Mary Murphy to demand that the Ministry for the Future do more.
Frank Vanderwal became a somewhat damaged character in Green Earth, but Frank May, an American who wanted to do good by running a medical clinic where it was most needed, is deeply and permanently damaged in the novel’s first pages—for he is the single survivor of the heat wave in that town in India. He remains a character for most of the book, but mostly as a quietly courageous friend to Mary, who is never quite sure why she needs him.
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| Zurich |
But there is also a darker side—groups like the Children of Kali, who use targeted assassinations and other acts of violence, some of it in cyberspace. Even the Ministry has a “black wing.” Both the ethics and effectiveness of such acts are debated, but remain as measures of the desperate moment. That moment—this moment—is neither exaggerated nor minimized, which is sobering in itself.
Through the “trembling twenties” and even after the Great Turn in the 2030s there are more catastrophes along the way, including a flood that destroys Los Angeles, and a couple of serious economic depressions. But the world starts to look better, with more animals (including the Ghost Dance dream of the buffalo’s return) and fewer people. The ruinous control of most of the world’s wealth by a few is largely over: there is more equality and broader sufficiency. Airships (high tech dirigibles) replace jet planes, and on the oceans fossil fuel driven vessels are replaced by the kind of high tech sailing ships that brings this utopia more towards the one in KSR’s first utopian novel, Pacific Edge (1990), which he wrote while living for a year or so in Zurich.
In figuring out ways that an extinction event could be stopped and the future saved from the broadly fatal climate cataclysm, Robinson ends up with a classic utopia: a greatly changed but better world, that nevertheless saves the best of what’s still around. But it is neither perfect nor permanent, especially as climate distortion effects continue, and some of the environmental consequences (such as ocean acidification) are in a practical sense permanent. But it is a kinetic utopia—built to continue to respond and change.
Elsewhere in this novel Robinson mentions the statue in Zurich of 20th century writer of mythic fiction, James Joyce. In the original preface to his first collection of stories, The Planet On The Table, he conducts a dialogue with it, and the Joyce statue talks back. Robinson concludes this novel with a circular Joycean flourish, in which the end is also a beginning, in Mary’s testament of stubborn faith in the future:
“We will keep going, she said to him in her head—to everyone she knew or had ever known, all those people so tangled inside her, living or dead, we will keep going, she reassured them all, but mostly herself, if she could; we will keep going, we will keep going, because there is no such thing as fate. Because we never really come to the end.”
Next post in this series: “Soul of the Future Concluded: The Culture of Hope.”
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