April 25, 9:30-10:50 a.m. A discussion of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future led by Joyce and John Munro. Unami’s Peace and Social

The concerns committee brings you this fictional manual on what might be done about climate change.

The book takes place several decades from now. Robinson imagines a world (like ours) affected by climate change but doing something about it. The Ministry for the Future is the international organization charged to enact the Paris Climate Treaty. Robinson uses the science, technology, human behavior, and economics that are already at hand. For example, living through the pandemic of 2020 and the depression of 2008, we can see what quantitative easing can do.

The story opens with a heat and humidity event that has horrible consequences for Indians and an American named Frank who works for an NGO in India. In chapters as short as a paragraph, we hear in choric form from things that do not usually speak such as a carbon atom. In short eyewitness reports, we get the emotional impact of a change. For example, the matriarch of a family who has spent many years

in a refugee camp is now opening a restaurant. We see what happens at Davos, where the rich and powerful attempt to conduct business as usual. We sit at the conerence of big banks when they agree to adopt the carbon coin, which transforms economies and incentivizes everyone. It’s a world where no wealth can be hidden and dark money is exposed.

Survival is now understood to include all creatures, all pollinators, and so corridors of wildness are protected and can only be visited overhead in noiseless airships. Gradually through many means, a whole earth adjustment occurs. This book shows how it might happen. This book could give us stamina to work now for the future. The end is a wonderful celebration. Don’t be scared away by the book’s size. Two copies are available for checkout at the meetinghouse.