Delight Springs

Monday, April 18, 2022

Ministry for the future

Kim Stanley Robinson hasn't stopped thinking of what humanity might yet make of itself. We're going to read his Ministry for the Future in Environmental Ethics this Fall, alongside Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken, and the Sunrise Movement. 

"Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face." (g'r)

Yes, it's a work of fiction, of the imagination; but that's the source of possibility and the power of maybe. Maybe life will be worth living, climatically speaking, in the decades to come. Dreaming it is a necessary condition of its reality.

The burning source of all our power gets a cameo chapter and speaks bluntly.
“I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive. Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn. Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.”

We don't need to worship Sol, but we do need to respect her. Now. KSR says this possible future had best begin no later than January 2025. The window is shrinking fast.


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