Soul of the Future: Culture of Hope (Part 1): Science as Salvation

“In the act of searching out the future, Home sapiens crosses the frontiers of the unknown and is transformed from the man of action, who responds in the moment, to the man of thought, who takes account of the consequences of his actions.”

 Fred Polak

The Image of the Future

  In stories about fatal threats to the future—especially movies, at least before the superhero epics—the future is most often saved not by military force or dithering politicians but by science. (Though prominent scientists often laugh at the lone scientist who predicts the danger or offers the solution.)

 So can science save the real future, particularly against the ruinous threats to civilization and planetary life as we know it, namely the climate emergency and mass extinction? 

Some recent books—including fictions—suggest that it might.  In at least three novels, Kim Stanley Robinson suggests various technologies that can be applied to specific elements of the climate crisis, most recently including a formerly feared favorite of “geo-engineering” technological fixes, the artificial cooling of the atmosphere by injecting particles to mimic the effects of the dust layer created by a giant volcano.  (It’s a technique that one of those earlier novels seemed to dismiss as causing devastating unintended consequences.)

 But KSR and others do not claim that technological fixes alone can possibly prevent global heating or its consequences far into the future. Such efforts could possibly help, temporarily, and may be necessary, but there must also be fundamental economic, political and cultural change, because otherwise the job won’t get done.  It’s just too big, and complicated.

 Many people automatically turn toward science and technology for last-minute solutions.  Many of the measures to address the climate emergency proposed so far involve technologies, especially clean energy systems, but also carbon capture and various other schemes.  Other proposals include or assume the participation of science, such as robust public health systems and medical treatment for heat-related conditions.

 But at least in the United States there does not appear to be a consensus, or even the extent of agreement that existed within western societies a generation or two ago, that science is the answer, or even that science has proved there is a question.

  Globally but especially in America, attitudes towards science are dangerously stratified.  One side rejects the scientific consensus that identifies the climate emergency, accusing the scientific establishment of systematic lying for institutional and personal gain, for a political agenda, and for even more sinister motives.  On climate as well as the Covid-19 global pandemic, alternative explanations and conspiracies are vociferously asserted.  But it all is clearly part of a larger, deeply adversarial group position that is most often expressed as political.

 This position is identified as anti-science, and so the other side digs in to defend “science” against all criticism.  “Trust the science” has become an adversarial mantra and motto.

 But not all science—or the products of science-- can be trusted, as history shows. Yet those not wishing to find themselves allied with creationists and anti-vaxxers cannot criticize “the science” even when conclusions, procedures or even institutions warrant such criticism, or at least scrutiny.

 Does “science” even exist as much more than a polite fiction?  There is a scientific method, there are ideals of how science should be conducted, and there are scientists and institutions that sponsor, conduct and regulate the work of scientists.  But as shorthand, “science” can be deceptive and unproductive.

 Indeed there are images of “science” in the public mind, with a complex of emotions attached, from awe and admiration to suspicion and fear.  Often these two contrary reactions are held simultaneously in some proportion or other, as expressed in science fiction movies of the 1950s discussed earlier in this series.  Science unlocked the unearthly power of the atom, and science was often called upon to protect humanity from its monstrous consequences.  In this way, science takes on the ambiguous and mysterious power of gods.

 The nature of science is even obscured by the heroic stories that illustrate its ideals. We have this image of the scientific thinker dreaming up theories or following their curiosity in lab experiments, and coming up with an immense general discovery. Then after it is finally if tentatively accepted, others busy themselves applying this discovery to practical ends—to processes and products that have an important and usually lucrative function in the society of the day.

 Sometimes this is more or less true.  But the story obscures a larger point: much if not most science, even the most theoretical, is supported and undertaken with some practical end in mind.  Science is not about discovering how the universe works; it is about discovering how the universe works in order to achieve human ends.  Science is about learning things primarily in order to do things.

 These ends historically have mostly been military advantage or economic gain, though ultimately, it’s been both together.  The laws of physics were investigated on the payroll of rulers interested in the effectiveness of weapons: in how to make their archers more efficient, or where to place their guns or deploy their forces, or build better defenses. Other discoveries were paid for so that one seafaring nation could gain an advantage in global trade by navigating better, or building faster and bigger ships.  And so on.

 The industrial revolution saw an immense increase in the number of people employed in science and engineering, because industry needed them—to mine ores better, refine them better, to build better machines and manufacturing processes.  English industry encouraged the government to expand educational opportunities (including the new university that H.G. Wells attended) and extend them to the lower classes to find the scientific diamonds in the rough, and to provide a scientifically literate layer of technicians.  It wasn’t until then that the word “scientist” even existed, and it was coined to describe these technicians.  Since then, the connection between science and consumer products has not only been obvious--it's proudly shouted in their advertising.

 The point is that science was always oriented towards what it could enable people to do, and that was usually to expand economic activity through machinery and processes, while fixing people up (always the rich at first) when they broke.  This was the triumph of science, and one of its weaknesses, for knowledge that didn’t fit into the science of making things go just got ignored.

 Despite the imagery, science was practical. Chemistry was clearly practical. There was some patience for science that wasn’t obviously going to pay off right away, but might eventually pay off big.  Geology was a bit that way, though its relationship to mining was there from the beginning of it as a science.  Biology was more that way perhaps. The scientific knowledge that could improve weather forecasting had obvious benefits, especially to seafaring nations, for instance.  But there was leeway, because highly useful knowledge sometimes came from unlikely inquiries.

 So some scientists—not many, not particularly well funded, and not generally listened to-- managed to study the Earth’s atmosphere and how chemicals released into the air could affect it.  Eventually they would be among the first to give science a new practical function: to save civilization from destroying itself and the stability of the living Earth. 

 Unfortunately, this crossed purposes with most science: the expansion of human manipulation of the environment, and the unfettered exploitation of the Earth’s resources.  That's primarily what they were paid to do, and by extension, paid to think about.  It was the way they were institutionally biased to look at the world. 

 Not surprisingly, scientific findings that don’t support the interests of those who pay the scientists did often get suppressed, ignored or changed.  Some scientists skewed findings to support their employers’ interests.

 This does not negate all scientific findings. The main scientific findings on climate are so thoroughly proven in so many ways by so many scientists over so many years that they are as solid as science gets.  But it’s all more complicated than “believe the science.” 

 Knowledge or observations got ignored also because, in order to make things go, even in very complex machines and processes, the science had to be pretty simple.  Of course, starting from scratch, the progress was prodigious.  Still, for most of human history scientists learned how to do very basic stuff, including how to treat the ailments of the body that responded to gross mechanical interventions.  

 This kind of science is pretty straightforward on how to address the climate emergency.  Attack the causes of global warming by stopping greenhouse gases from polluting the atmosphere.  Build non-greenhouse gases polluting systems to meet energy requirements. Address the ongoing effects of global heating and the climate emergency. 

 There are known technologies and systems to do all of this, though new technologies can make these efforts more widespread and efficient.  Some of these technologies may employ biological and chemical as well as grossly mechanical means.  Some may be ingenuous and subtle.  They may be large projects on massive scales, or very many small projects.

 But there are now other components to science just beginning to become useful.  The 20^th century brought us relativity, quantum physics and chaos theory. Part of what makes them different is that they are all more or less incomprehensible, even to experts, but scientists have figured out some uses based on them, because the math works. Nobody really understands quantum physics, but quantum mechanics is usefully worked out, and today’s computers would be impossible without it.  There is the hope of new science as well as new technologies.

 Involved in practically all efforts to address the climate emergency is the relatively new and rapidly evolving science of ecology, and related insights into systems behavior and complexity.  While not itself a science, the concern for the future that is wedded with evolutionary and ecological insights is an essential underpinning, as well as ancient wisdom that was a mixture of insight and observation, such as the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee: “In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation to come.”

 Arguably, ecological insights have already changed science, from concentrating on doing things to include examining the possible consequences of doing those things.

  But it is society that must engage these efforts to address the climate emergency, which involve politics and economics, and ultimately culture.  So far, movement towards action has not been fast enough or large enough to prevent the first devastation of the climate emergency, which will likely grow and cascade for some decades to come. 

Some of those who don’t believe humanity will meet this challenge—and there are many—suggest only a fundamental change in humanity itself will make the difference.  Such a possibility has been the theme of science fiction.  For example, a sudden evolutionary change, a genetic mutation either created by aliens or naturally, appears in the work of Arthur C. Clarke, Greg Bear and Doris Lessing, among others.

 Still other stories involve deliberate genetic manipulation, from major enhancements or changes to more subtle effects on thinking and behavior, as in everfree, the concluding novel of Nick Sagan’s apocalyptic/utopian trilogy. Most recently, such changes are the result of neurofeedback therapy in Richard Powers’ near-future novel Bewilderment.

 Among others who believe humanity is not yet capable of dealing with environmental crises and their cascading global effects, there are those who turn to science and technology for salvation according to their particular hopes and fears.  Some see humans transplanting to other planets as the only hope for the future.  Some see a humanity weakened by crisis becoming subsumed by the artificial intelligence beings it has created. And some hold both views.

 Science fiction stories and other forms of imagining alternative futures have presented intriguing possibilities and fostered many insights into the present and the past as well as the future, but care must be taken that they are not seized upon as literal predictions or even possibilities.  

There’s a rich tradition of stories about robots and artificial intelligence, as well as humans living on other planets.  But although they represent fruitful story premises, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson argues that neither is a real possibility for our future. In his view, science doesn’t support the likelihood of artificial intelligence beings surpassing humans in the foreseeable future, though science does suggest that humans cannot survive for long on other planets without at least periodic contact with the biology of the Earth.  “There is no Planet B.”

 The climate crisis has been shaping up for some time to be the ultimate challenge of humanity’s ability to take the next evolutionary step in consciousness by marshaling forces to ascertain and confront a crisis of an unprecedented kind not yet obviously occurring in front of our eyes.  The evidence now in front of our eyes is that it hasn’t met this challenge, and if our civilization hasn’t run out of time already, it probably will soon.

 We may yet turn more urgently to science for our salvation, and it may help, but it alone won’t save the future.  It is a tool, and still a fairly blunt one.  It allows us to do some things well.  But even when it works as well and as ethically as it ideally can, it is still too simple-minded to match reality.  We need other resources, even to know how to use science well.  We need to be better people, perhaps starting with greater humility. 

I had some correspondence with Nick Sagan after he’d published everfree.  I questioned whether genetic intervention was necessary for people to change.  He said he’d had the same discussion with his father, Carl Sagan.  Nick’s view of human nature was that humans  couldn’t (or wouldn't) change on their own, but his father argued they could. 

 Many social visionaries have called for or predicted a relatively sudden change of consciousness, or what Star Trek’s Captain Picard called an “evolved sensibility,” without sudden biological change or the intervention of genetic or other technologies.  It’s been called the Great Turn or the Great Turning and so on. 

 Is it possible?  Those of us who remember the omnipresent ashtrays of the 1950s know that deeply entrenched cultural phenomena can change relatively quickly.  The scale of necessary change is indeed daunting, but as Ursula K. Le Guin suggested, “ We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.”  

There is change in the world now—in awareness, political will, as well as in science and technologies—though it all does not seem to be enough. Chaos theory however suggests that small changes can eventually induce large ones, beyond our ability to predict.  The principle is simple enough, when we consider that seed money in the present can turn out to have vast consequences for the world of the future.  But we must return to one of our basic definitions of the future: it is what hasn’t happened yet.

 Yet there are aspects of the future we can be pretty sure of.  And while many possibilities exist, hope in the future doesn’t depend on any of them.  It does not even depend on believing in any of them. More on that  in the next—and last—post in this series.

Into October

Into October 

 These must be the colors of returning

 the leaves darkened now but staying on

 into the bronzed morning among the seed heads

 and the dry stems and the umbers of October 

the secret season that appears on its own

 a recognition without a sound

 long after the day when I stood in its light

 on the parched barrens beside a spring

 all but hidden in a tangle of eglantine

 and picked the bright berries made of that summer

 --W.S. Merwin

Anything To Avoid Reading The News

 

Dim Brightness

Dim Brightness

 Heaven will last,

 earth will endure.

 How can they last so long?

 They don’t exist for themselves

 and so can go on and on.

 So wise souls

 leaving self behind

 move forward,

 and setting self aside

 stay centered. 

Why let the self go?

To keep what the soul needs.

-- Ursula LeGuin 

 

Her version of Tao Te Ching #7.  Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Public Health Needs Help

Governor Newsom triumphed in the California recall.  He counseled other governors to face the Covid crisis head-on.  Good idea.  Humboldt County, as it happens, is in California.  A lot of politicians seem to forget that.  And this county needs help.

There were four Covid deaths announced today.  There was one yesterday.  There were three on Monday.  This county does not have a lot of people, so these are high numbers. Infections and hospitalizations are still high.

Meanwhile, our county Public Health office has cut back on some of its activities, including contact tracing.  Their announced reason is staff cutbacks because of cuts in state funding.  That doesn't sound like facing the crisis.  

This is after billions were allocated by the federal government.   This state had an immense budget surplus. Why is Public Health being starved?  Our local governments seem hard pressed to invent ways to spend this money, but they seem to be spending it on everything but public health.

The state needs to address this. Public Health funding was already shockingly low.  Public Health should be a major budget priority. 

We need the most precise information possible.  That information will be important for future public health crises.  Not paying to have it gathered is foolhardy, not only for today.  

In the midst of this Delta surge, the longest and most lethal of the pandemic, we are still not getting timely and relevant information from Public Health or anyone else on where and how people are getting infected.  There have been media stories on aspects of the pandemic.  But nobody seems to be on this one.

With this persistent danger, we need more information.  The Public Health director recently stated to somebody that the reason he is not more specific on where and how people are being infected is because the virus is everywhere.  That's not very helpful in making decisions. How dangerous is it, in a given locality, to shop for groceries, to wait for take-out in a restaurant?  What about the schools?  The public events? There has to be better information on relative risk and safety, apart from the generic advice on masks and social distancing and of course, vaccination.

We need it to make informed decisions.  All we get is a useless dashboard.

If the Humboldt Public Health officer doesn't have more press conferences, and continues to avoid providing information, he should resign.  Even if our media is too timid to demand them.

As a recent national article observed, headlines have claimed for months that our healthcare system is on the verge of collapse--but that's not really where we are.  It has collapsed.  People are dying in droves from Covid, and they are dying from other health problems because Covid is soaking up the medical attention and resources.

In Humboldt this is a crisis on top of a crisis, for we are dangerously short of doctors and medical capabilities.  People are being sent hundreds of miles at their peril for procedures that should be done here.  Even routine medicine--including dental and all kinds of simple medical specialties, like dermatology--are in woefully short supply or non- existent.  The only effort to address this I've seen mentioned lately is a former public servant, now a paid advocate for Humboldt State University, who wants to get more medical care for the students that HSU plans to import in quantity.

The most remarkable aspect of this Delta phase has been how everybody acts like everything is normal, and the way to deal with it is to ignore it. It seems to take no time at all for two deaths a day to go from shocking to normal.  Now it will be four deaths a day.

  Meanwhile, more Americans have died in this pandemic than in the post-World War I flu pandemic, the worst in our history, though history mostly has ignored it.  This time, we're not waiting for history to ignore it.  The silence of the lambs.

Return

Return 

 A little too abstract, a little too wise,

 It is time for us to kiss the earth again,

 It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,

 Let the rich life run to the roots again.

 I will go to the lovely Sur Rivers 

 And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders. 

 I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers

 In the ocean wind over the river boulders.

 I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,

 That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,

 The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks

 So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly. 

 Things are the hawk's food and noble is the mountain, Oh noble

 Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble. 

 --Robinson Jeffers 

 Born in a town outside Pittsburgh, Pa., Robinson Jeffers relocated to California at the beginning of the 20th century. He was a famous poet by the 1930s, though his popularity waned due to his muddled political poems and pacifism during World War II, and the alleged implication that he believed humanity was rushing towards extinction.

 He inspired generations of poets and ecologists, forging a direct line of California poets through Kenneth Rexroth to Gary Snyder and beyond, a legacy that still expands and flowers. He put Big Sur on the map for those succeeding generations as well.

 Unfortunately, there’s nobody enjoying these particular Big Sur landscapes at the moment due to drought and fire, for the second year in a row. Even the timeless is subject to the times. But the impulse is the same: tired of politics and abstraction, he seeks contact in the fullness of the natural world, and simultaneously, the fullness of the moment when opened to that world. Which we can do just about anywhere.

Dreaming Up Daily Quote For Today

 "It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting."

--a character in Jumpers, a 1972 play by Tom Stoppard

Coming of Age

 It will not be enough

 to recall stills from along the way

 to glimpse from its hill

 the long-gone night pasture

 the light on the river

 but not the river

 the sunbeam on the scuffed stairs

 in the soundless house

 but not where it was going

 the eyes of a dog 

watching from beside me

 a face in shadow

 silent as an old photograph

 our meeting our first night

 and waking at home together

 again

 I was there

 these same hands and these eyes as they were

 when they wondered where it was going

 where it had gone

 it will not be enough

 it will be enough 

 --W.S. Merwin

Photo: Flora Severini at the 1939 New York World's Fair.  Happy birthday.

Why You Should Trust Polls

 

Pacific Dusk

 

DUSK APPROACHES

while looking westward over the Pacific

while seeing the sun fade below the horizon

while awaiting the flash of phosphorescene

while imagining death might come during sleep

while realizing morning could have new meaning

while sensing the inevitable move closer

while family headstones make room for me

while remembering quicksand in cowboy movies

while everything sinks and becomes smaller

I marvel at my swelling passion to be me

---Jay Matson

Jay Matson's new collection of poems is As I Recall.

Eyes Wide Shut: Covid Summer in Humboldt (with Updates)

Update 8/31: August is over now, recording 22 deaths from Covid Delta in Humboldt County, nearly a third of all deaths due to Covid since the pandemic began in March 2020.  There were more than 2,000 infections confirmed in August and 98 hospitalizations.  The August positivity rate was nearly 16%, more than triple that of California as a whole and a third higher than the national rate. There are currently 37 hospitalizations, including 8 in intensive care.  

Lacking official information or professional reportage, we hear that our largest hospital is in near chaos, with nurses and other staff devastated, and patients with other conditions not receiving the usual care, which some claim has already led to early deaths.  They won't be counted in these statistics, but they are victims as well--primarily of the unvaccinated, many of whose misguided stubbornness and at times hostility result not only them and their families paying a price with their own health and lives, but causing pain and harm to innocents, as well as the very people tasked with taking care of them... Someone online quoted (without attribution or specific identification) an ICU nurse as saying, " 'You don't know what the fuck you're talking about'--- several patients have said this to me, and it's the last thing they ever said to anyone."

August is over, but our summer is not, and this Delta surge is not.  The county fair that was permitted to go on is just over, children are returning to school, and so it is feared that it will continue.   

original post Aug. 26:

The North Coast and much of Humboldt County has quietly escaped some ravages of this summer.  There are pockets here and there that have suffered from fire, smoke, excessive heat and the drought, but most of us have been spared. 

 But that isn’t the case with Covid.  The Delta variant is cutting through this county like a scythe—with the grim reaper behind it.  Of the 65 total deaths of Humboldt County residents officially attributed to Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, there have been twelve just this month, which is not yet over.  A fourth of the total number of infections and a fifth of the hospitalizations have also occurred this month.  That’s more than 1600 positive tests in August.  This week alone is certain to be more than 500.

 On Wednesday, the daily tally was three dead, including someone in their 20s, and a patient in their 70s who had been fully vaccinated—the first in the county to die. (He was weakened by serious illness, and his daughter confirmed his continued support for the vaccines.)   Every day, here and elsewhere, the Delta version of Covid-19 proves itself capable of infecting, sickening and killing people of all ages.

 As of Thursday there were 33 patients hospitalized, with 11 in intensive care.  The county Public Health director Dr. Hoffman told a county supervisors meeting that hospitals are transferring patients out of the county, including some who are critically ill with other conditions.  While hospital capacity is at its highest of the pandemic, Hoffman said that the most pressing problem was shortage of staff.

 Humboldt County has a very high positivity rate, which on some days reaches 20% (on Thursday, nearly 30%), but in general is about three times the California state rate, and a third higher than the national rate.  Positivity measures the proportion of Covid positive infections out of the number of people tested.  I’m not sure what that really means, since even at this late date there is so little testing capacity that only people who have symptoms or have been exposed to infected people are even getting tested.  Why after all this time—and all that money allocated by Congress—do we still not have abundant testing?

 This Covid Crisis is exposing the costs of our vulnerabilities in Humboldt County.  One is the fragile medical care system, with dangerously low numbers of physicians in all fields.  The last of those who made a life in this community for years are retiring, and no one is taking their place.

 Another is the dearth of timely information, due in part to our barely existing news media.  The few outlets that keep going have dangerously small numbers of reporters, and even many of them are also doing other jobs, like talking on the radio. 

 Meanwhile, the new Public Health director is not taking media questions as regularly as his predecessor.  In fact, hardly ever.  Yet apparently no one in the media is complaining, or even taking notice.  So we don’t really know where all these cases are coming from, or really any information that can guide people in making choices to safeguard their health, other than the general ones.  And are those even enough?

 The only information we typically get is the Public Health daily press release, which is either printed as is, or slightly rewritten, perhaps augmented with numbers from another data base, in a cut and paste article.   There is sometimes more (including some effective reportage) but there isn’t nearly enough. 

 I can guess at some reasons why we aren’t getting more information, other than we don’t have news media insisting on it.  Apart from legal and privacy concerns, Public Health doesn’t have adequate staff.  Why doesn’t it?  Wasn’t some of that federal money supposed to support local public health?  What about state funding?  What about some money from the county, who found the funds to support the county fair this year, where breeding Covid infections could have been entered? 

 The staffing problems may in part be more than a matter of money.  In this horrible matter of a pandemic, this county as in too many other places in this country does not operate as a community or a civic entity, but as two warring factions. One of them refuses vaccinations and effective measures like wearing masks.  They guarantee therefore that overworked and exhausted medical workers, already traumatized by the relentless and overwhelming tide of suffering and death, will see only a future of more of it.

So when exhausted and discouraged medical personnel move on, we all suffer from less effective medical care--not just for Covid but for everything.  When people can't work because of illness or won't because of fear of it, or for other reasons related to the pandemic, supply lines fray, and we all must deal with shortages and delays.  So even apart from the increased dangers of becoming infected by the feckless anti-vaxers and anti-maskers, everyone may pay a price, beginning perhaps with their children.  

 But that isn’t their only kind of attack.  Some of those in this faction harass and threaten the safety and the lives of medical workers, public health officials, and anybody else who doesn’t bow to their fanaticism.  And they threaten their families as well. 

 Together with the pandemic fatigue all of us feel, this fanatical pressure has evidently cowed our political leaders.  While our news media mostly turns its coverage to other subjects (a national as well as local trend), I see expressions of alarm in some online comments about lax or nonexistent precautions in schools starting to reopen.  We might understand the fatigue, and the fear, but why as a matter of public health policy can it be that there are fewer precautions now than earlier in the pandemic, while there are many, many more infections, hospitalizations and deaths? 

 For what we have now clearly is a local epidemic within the pandemic.  Averting our eyes won’t make it go away.

Update: The week ended with six Covid deaths announced on Friday, at least double the number of deaths announced on any earlier day of the pandemic.  They included two people in their 50s and over 80, and one in their 30s and 60s.  That's 10 deaths this week.  There was no accurate number of infections, due to staff shortages and reassignments.  There are now 37 people hospitalized for Covid.  Humboldt's largest hospital announced it was cancelling all non-emergency procedures, including cancer and heart operations.  Six local residents have been sent to out of county hospitals.

At this point the Public Health daily report is raising more questions than it is answering.  And still there is silence from what passes for the local Fourth Estate.

Idiom of the Hero

Idiom of the Hero

 I heard two workers say, “This chaos

 Will soon be ended.” 

 This chaos will not be ended,

 The red and the blue houses blended,

 Not ended, never and never ended,

 The weak man mended, 

 The man that is poor at night

 Attended

 Like the man that is rich and right,

 The great men will not be blended...

 I am the poorest of all.

 I know that I cannot be mended,

 Out of the clouds, pomp of the air,

 By which at least I am befriended. 

 Wallace Stevens

 from the collection Parts Of A World (1942)

Soul of the Future: The Last Utopia

 “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) 

Regarding the future, we come to the ultimate question of our time: Is there going to be one? If the soul of the future is in the stories we tell, what do those stories say about that?

 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. 

But then came the question that exploded in 1945, and shrouded the 1950s and beyond: will there even be a future?  The fact of nuclear weapons powerful enough to destroy civilization led to both attempts to predict outcomes of nuclear war (those Herman Kahn megadeath scenarios), and stories about how war could happen and what the consequences would look like in various futures.

 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.  

 Then there were straightforward confrontations with the reality of nuclear war itself: quietly at first, with On the Beach (1959) and Fail Safe (1964), and finally with specific horror in Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1966), Testament (1983), Threads (1984), and the television movie that reached a huge U.S. audience, The Day After (1983).

 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.  

There’s a symbolic dimension in substituting climate change for the usual nuclear explosion that revives monsters, as in the 2021 streaming series The Tomorrow War, or swapping humanity’s threat to the natural world as the chief indictment made by powerful aliens, as in the 2008 remake of the previously nuclear war-themed The Day The Earth Stood Still, or a couple of Marvel’s Avengers movies.  The animated Wall-E may function as the satirical Dr. Strangelove environmental equivalent, though deceptively gentler.  

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.  

 This division is also inherent in the genre that is perhaps closest to the 1950s atomic monster movies in their pop symbolism: the vampire and zombie stories. Vampires are the upper class exploiters (he was Count Dracula, after all), sucking the blood of the faceless masses as well as the natural world.  The zombies are the embodiment of the faceless and mindless masses, maddened into swarming and destroying.  Though zombies may also symbolize the breakdown of civilization that could result from pandemics and environmental catastrophes, vampires more cynically exploit the veneer of civilization to mask their savagery.  As such, these stories can be seen as critiques and satires of this exploiting civilization, as can such stories as The Hunger Games. 

In the atomic movie age, symbolism and satire were followed by more realistic stories. As of this moment, the one hit movie with some claim to a realistic approach to the climate crisis was Roland Emmerich’s 2004 The Day After Tomorrow.  Though it sacrificed scientific credibility to enhance its dramatic story, it at least mentioned causes for a climate shift, and depicted some predicted effects, particularly in early scenes before the main action. The ice sheet breaking, the hail storm, the tornadoes caused in part by climate changes are among the effects that have since happened in the actual world.

 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 20^th 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.  

Wearing a simplified 2050 futuristic suit (which got the fashion right so far—no tie), Burke spoke of carbon trading as a means of limiting and then ending industrial processes that added greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.  There would be a United Nations authority in charge of managing these efforts, as well as responses to the ongoing effects of those greenhouse gases emitted in the past, called the Planetary Management Authority.  As climate effects become more pronounced (droughts, food shortages, sea level rise, huge refugee movement, border wars), the PMA even has a military component.  

 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.)

 Burke’s breezy, colloquial style at times oversimplifies both problems and solutions, but this 1989 program correctly assumes particular characteristics of the climate crisis that are different from other crises that modern societies have faced.  Some of these characteristics would not be more generally understood for years, even by those who advocated action. 

 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.

 Part of the rationale for tipping points involve a third characteristic: feedback effects.  For example, melting ice and snow means there is less white surface to reflect solar radiation, which leads to even faster melting of the ice and snow that’s left. 

 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

 This story is set in contemporary or perhaps an unspecified near future Washington, with some differences in the public figures. It is narrated chiefly by three characters: Anna Quibler, a scientist at the National Science Foundation, and her husband Charlie, an environmental policy advisor to California Senator Phil Chase, currently working on a climate bill from home while taking care of their toddler son. Frank Vanderwal is a West Coast scientist with an active interest in sociobiology and primatology (Robinson named him after famed primatologist Frans de Waal) who is working for a year at the NSF with Anna.

 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. 

The climate itself becomes a character in probably the book’s most fabled sequence, when a superstorm crashes up the East Coast, seriously flooding subways and streets in Washington.  Robinson named it Tropical Storm Sandy.  Eight years later in the real world of 2012, another perfect storm, formed in a similar way, became Tropical Storm Sandy, and then Hurricane or Superstorm Sandy that did extensive damage in 24 U.S. states and several Caribbean islands, notably in substantially flooding subways and streets in New York City.  

 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.  

KSR

Though the climate plotline is not the only one in this capacious story of more than 1000 pages, it is central.  Eventually Senator Phil Chase is elected President and begins both governmental change and persuasive focus on the climate crisis, especially in a series of blog posts and conversations.

  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   

From around 2005, scientists—especially in Europe-- were seeing the prospect of climate disruption coming much sooner than generally predicted: not necessarily the abrupt climate shift that fascinated storytellers but a worsening series of already known effects (floods, fires, ice melts, heat waves, droughts, etc.) and possibly some unknown ones, that were going to continue no matter what the world did to limit greenhouse gases.

 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.” 

In Apocalyptic Planet (2012), another important work of journalism and a book of deep eloquence, Craig Child visited places where climate distortion consequences were tangible, and to extreme places where one apocalypse or another already happened in the past.

 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 element of extinctions emphasized another profound aspect of the dilemma.  Once it happens, extinction is permanent.  It is probably impossible to reverse it for any species, let alone a significant number of them.  Then changes begin in the ecosystem because of extinctions, and it is deformed in ways that humans can’t fix. 

 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) 

Published in 2020, The Ministry for the Future won widespread praise and interest, notably outside the science fiction community.  New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein extolled it and interviewed the author.  The book made several best or favorites of the year lists, including that of former President Barack Obama, who played a key role in creating the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which every nation on Earth acknowledged the deadly seriousness of the climate crisis and pledged to confront it.  In interviews publicizing the book, author Robinson suggested this was such an unexpected watershed achievement as to qualify as science fiction.

 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.  

Summer heat waves are even more familiar.  Dangerous to some (the old, the unsheltered poor), getting through them was a kind of game to others.  Some reveled in them, as some people claim to love the hottest hot sauce they can find.  Illnesses and deaths from heat were hard to quantify, and the imagery of heat waves in the media was seldom scary: usually people dousing themselves with water to cool off.  At least before the summer of 2021, heat didn’t seem all that dangerous.  But global heating makes possible and even likely the combination of temperature and humidity that human beings simply can’t survive.

  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. 

former President of Ireland is model for Mary Murphy

The year before this heat wave, responding to a general lack of compliance to the agreed promises, a conference of the parties to the international Paris Agreements on climate sets up a new organization to “advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens” and to defend “all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves.”  This organization, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, is soon known as the Ministry for the Future.  It is headed by Mary Murphy of Ireland.

 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. 

Zurich

The novel covers some 25 years, ending about where After the Warming ends: around mid 21^st century.  The efforts to address climate and extinction advocated and orchestrated by the Ministry are various--technological (including the novel idea of sucking out the water underneath polar glaciers to slow their sliding into the sea), economic and financial, and a number of other ways that might be grouped as political.  Unlike Burke’s Planetary Management Authority, the Ministry for the Future has no power to compel nations or even individuals to do or not do anything—which is certainly more realistic for today’s world.  How it is effective, in partnership with highly placed government officials (notably in India and China) and—of all people—major bankers, is this book’s utopian substance.

 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. 

He uses a few narrative forms in short chapters (first person accounts by unnamed characters never mentioned again, “Who I am?” riddles like those presented in old school texts and children's magazines, and meeting notes and transcripts) in addition to the main narrative that mostly follows Mary Murphy.  Some of these interpolations are real highlights.  A chapter that is nothing but the names of a number of grassroots permaculture organizations introducing themselves, while functioning as an economical way of suggesting the hundreds of activities that contribute to making this better future, turns out to also be powerfully moving.

 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. 

 The novel ends with Mary Murphy, newly retired from the Ministry for the Future, and living in the kind of housing co-op that Robinson made up in Pacific Edge and now actually lives in. She is in the company of a new flame, the less than dashing pilot of one of those new airships, attending an event with centuries of history and continuity: the Fasnact, Zurich’s version of Mardi Gras. 

 Elsewhere in this novel Robinson mentions the statue in Zurich of 20^th 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.”