The Sin of Short-Sightedness
It has been both illuminating and disconcerting to follow the opinion polls leading up to the mid-term elections. Over the past few months, attitudes and expectations keeps shifting: at first the economy took precedence, then abortion rights and protection of our democracy and now, in the home stretch, it’s back to inflation and high prices at the pump. Unsurprisingly, despite unprecedented recent flooding in eastern Kentucky, unrelenting Western wildfires, and a broad swath of destruction wrought by Hurricane Ian, climate change has fallen off most prospective voters’ radar. As this existential global threat looms larger with each passing day, many Americans are simply tuning it out - which makes Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2021 novel “The Ministry For the Future” all the more relevant.
This is a work of science-fiction in that lengthy sections of Robinson’s weighty tome describe various technologies that could and should be drawn upon to mitigate climate change. The author gives heft to his speculative tale by showcasing solutions that are either already on the drawing board, or being implemented on a modest scale. Unlike the creators of dystopian fiction, who believe we have already passed the tipping point and will soon be overwhelmed by the consequences of global warming, Robinson argues that we still have a fighting chance if the stars align in our favor. Ultimately, though, it is all up to us.
In his New Yorker review of “The Ministry for the Future,” Joshua Rothman writes that “Robinson is the only writer who has offered me some hope about our collective future.” I would concur, but it’s hard to ignore Robinson’s claim that we will almost certainly have to suffer through a near meltdown before mustering the will to engage in meaningful collective action. The prognosis is grim: First, an unrelenting heatwave in central India kills over ten million people. Then torrential rain in the mountains east of Los Angeles produces floods that inundate the entire city. An economic depression, triggered by climate disruptions, throws capitalism into disarray. As Robinson tells Rothman, “The signs will have to become unmistakable - and painful - before we really acknowledge what we know. We will only learn by experience.” He puts the matter even more bluntly in the book, writing:
Until the planet was killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen. To others, yes; to them, no. This was a cognitive error that, like most cognitive errors, kept happening even when you knew of its existence and prevalence.
I think there are additional reasons why the majority of us refuse to prioritize a problem so grave that it could displace more than a billion people, submerge coastal cities, endanger the world’s ability to feed itself, and raise heat deaths across the central latitudes to unimaginable levels. It seems we have become so focused on our immediate financial interests that we are content to let the future take care of itself. Or, as Bill Clinton was fond of saying, “It’s the economy, stupid!”
There’s nothing particularly startling about this. In the late nineteenth century, a Wisconsin state senator was asked whether it might be advantageous to preserve some small allotment of the Northwood’s virgin white pine for “posterity.” A reliable supporter of highly profitable lumbering interests, the senator dismissed the question saying, “Why should I be concerned about posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?”
The same logic seems to inform the attitude of more than a few of my fellow elders toward Social Security and Medicare “reform.” Why do so many retirees continue to vote for candidates who vow to scale back these life-sustaining programs? Because they know that any legislation that’s passed won’t affect their benefits, only those of workers who have yet to hang it up.
Compounding this problem of short-sightedness is the fact that Americans have become increasingly improvident. Walmart recently announced that they planned to add 75,000 seasonal workers to their payroll, in anticipation of a glut of holiday shoppers. According to a recent article in The New Yorker, over fifty percent of Americans buy lottery tickets, and those with incomes under $25,000 spend nearly thirteen percent of their funds on long-odds games of chance.
It also has not escaped me that every time the price of petrol falls - as happened during the pandemic - people rush to buy gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs, while the demand for energy-efficient sedans plummets. These are not sensible purchases; they are often made because of an image the purchaser wishes to project. Yet when the price of a loaf of bread or a quart of milk rises, these same individuals are ready to “vote the bums out of office.” The word “thrift” has been superseded in our vocabulary by the term “entitlement.”
Current attitudes do not bode well for our civilization. The picture of the near future Kim Stanley Robinson paints is one of a species that ultimately deploys an impressive arsenal of technologies to avert an irreversible climate cataclysm. But before that happens, the world is plunged into economic chaos, political upheaval, and a reign of terror as clandestine climate warriors target the producers and purveyors of fossil fuels for assassination.
Ultimately, humanity does exercise its collective muscle, ushering in “the greatest turning point in human history, what some have called the big spark of planetary mind. The birth of the good Anthropocene.” However, Robinson writes, “America…they’ll be the last ones to come around.”
