Every morning, when I’m done with the stretching and the walking and the fistful of supplements, I pull up an old office chair to a folding table under my favorite tree. It’s a redwood, with thick auburn bark and broad needles, sucking up the fog that weighs down the morning air. I don’t know how tall it is, so purely based on my feeling of awe when I look up, I tell people it’s a hundred feet.

My eyes can’t measure its height, but they can see the marks of its story. This tree is a survivor. Around its perimeter, others have been razed to make room for road and clearing. Logging trails cut through the nearby ravine, leaving stumps in their wake. Scorched bark mark an older generation marred by fire. Yet this one remains.

I begin to write, once again, within its shade, as the summer sun rises overhead. It’s the season of thirst, and despite the persistent fog, the needles are beginning to brown. In a few hours, the clearing around it will be baked in heat, and I will stay cool.

I want to know this tree better. I look down at my screen and Google its taxonomic chart. I trace an angular path from Pinales (pine) to Cupressaceae (cypress) to Sequoia (redwood) and finally to sempervirens (coast). This tells me something of its lineage. It tells me it’s technically a cypress, though it lacks the quintessential lizard-scale needles of the Monterey or the wizard-beard silhouette of the Mediterranean.

Classifying the living world in this way is often credited to 18th-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. It is now widely accepted as an objective measure, but history reveals it as a frought method. Linnaeus’s system was a reflection of his own eyes, categorizing by physical characteristics. It was also colored by his own agenda, to uncover God’s work. And so he built in a hierarchy in the Christian tradition, with humans above animals above plants above minerals. Within the human, of course, there was an order too.

Scientists have since evolved his system, incorporating genes to continuously reclassify species. But what we know now troubles the very idea of categorization itself. Just as each human comprises countless other microbes in symbiosis, so trees are made of more than just plant. And species continuously blend — through microbial DNA transfer and regular old sex — forming Franken-plant assemblages that explode Linnaeus’s neatly drawn boxes.

Still we inherit some lingering assumptions: that the world can be broken into separate things, that those things form uniform categories, and that some of those categories are more valuable than others. Hence clearing trees for roads. Hence logging down the ravine. Hence protecting homes from fires, only to create more destructive ones down the line. I’m as guilty as the rest, driving down the road, walking the logging trails, tiptoeing around fire.

And yet this tree stands. Just behind it, a massive blackened stump juts up from the ground as a reminder of its ancestry. Encircling the stump is not just this tree but an entire ring of clones interwoven beneath the ground, troubling the idea that each trunk marks an individual thing.

I gaze up from my screen. My senses tell me there are clear boundaries where needle meets fog, where bark meets insect, where trunk meets soil. And yet with a small injection of play, my mind can, for a moment, redraw those lines to include the fog and the insect and the soil, the entire family of clones and parents and relations, to relinquish my attachment to the idea of tree as thing.

Fall has arrived, thinning the dried summer foliage, putting trunk on display through a canopy kimono. I watch a drone course a spiraling path up the tree, taking snapshots at regular intervals. My friend Sascha is visiting, and he makes a hobby of scanning run-down places like ours for preservation. Down the ravine, he seems particularly curious about a broken, moldy trailer left over from a previous owner.

He shows me a model on his computer, stitched into virtual space from thousands of images. I’m awed once again by this new perspective on the tree — from above, from the side, from any which way. I learn that my naive estimate of 100 feet was not quite right — 115 is more precise. I see more clearly how the tree, along with its siblings and cousins, form a canopy. I feel I can reach out and hold them in my hands.

Flying through my own terrain, I’m reminded of what Donna Haraway calls the god-trick, a false perspective that promises to see “everything from nowhere.” This has long been a dream of science — an objective model of the world that, like Linneus’s taxonomy, includes no observer within its bounds. To Haraway, this isn’t just an impossible pursuit, but erasing the seer also allows those with power to hide from view. Claims of objectivity become convenient means of suppressing those lower on Linneus’s hierarchy and those who know in other ways. Mostly sidelined, except in spurts of resurgence, are the corporeal, the indigenous, the spirited. Our disembodied tools of sight, like the one in front of me, surveil and control from a distance — as Haraway puts it, “eye fucking the world to make techno-monsters.”

But, of course, I’m not flying through my terrain — only my mind is. My body is still here, beneath the very same tree my mind is coursing around, in front of a computer screen.

Upon closer inspection, the image is…not quite right. The needles are smudged together in blankets of green. The conical silhouette resolves into a stack of wrinkled kale chips. The branches, hidden from view, lie completely still. This wrongness is not merely an accident of limited technical resolution. By projecting the tree out of the dynamic landscape of reality into virtual coordinates, we have stripped it of its livingness. Space is treated, by design, with uniformity along standardized axes. Gone are the messy relations, the warped topologies, the insurgent memories that mark real space.

This model reveals something that science masks about itself: that it is not just a way of knowing but also a way of being. In philosophical terms, that epistemology and ontology are entwined. Separating the observer from the observed reinforces a false sense of separateness between self and world, of living among dead objects, of superiority of a particular kind of knower. These are the hidden qualities of being often blindly enacted through the scientific gaze.

Haraway reminds me that knowledge is always generated from a particular vantage point, wading through a fog of context to catch glimpses of the whole. Linnaeus’s flaw was not projecting his beliefs (it’s impossible not to) but rather conflating his beliefs with objectivity. To find anything like objectivity, we must eschew the god-trick and instead come together to negotiate diverse perspectives.

I look up from this model and back at the tree itself, blending perspectives from above, from below, and from within. In my body, I hold the weightlessness of the tree’s virtual model with the rootedness of its material form. They stretch and swirl through my trunk and limbs. I become a new kind of assemblage — not just of beings but also ways of being.

A particularly dense fog pulls us out of fire season into rain season. Beads of water hang before my eyes, enveloping the tree in a white cloak. Some land on its fog-catcher fronds, supplementing its root supply. Above a certain height, a redwood becomes an air plant, sipping from the clouds. Any surplus turns to rain, dripping from the tips of its needles a hundred feet down to quench the soil’s thirsty residents.

On the spookiest and mistiest nights, I take any young children around to the burnt-out stump at the center of the redwood circle. Knife-inscribed in giant demonic script are the letters MIMI. I know Mimi as the first in a quintessentially Californian lineage of owners of this place that includes a child actress, a pot farm, a Hindu ashram, and a Burning Man camp. I also know Mimi as the bequeather of many odd artifacts we’ve dug up around the property — not just the trailer but also a dozen chicken statues, a pile of ornate melon-sized tiles, and a 400-pound cast-iron stove.

One of these artifacts, I tell the kids, was a set of Barbie dolls, still in their packaging, grown over in moss. For years after we arrived, those dolls sat nestled within a cavity just below Mimi’s name in the charred stump. But after one rainy winter, just like this one, they disappeared, never to be seen again.

At this point, the children naturally grow bright-eyed. Had Mimi, ancestor to the land, returned? Or had the tree finally consumed her sacrifice? The truth remains a mystery even to the adults.

It occurs to me that stories, like drone scans, are models of the world. But they are situated models, placing the knower in relationship with the known, infusing the world with vital energy. What I love about this particular story is that it forces us to reckon with the agency of trees and history, with the limits of what we can know. It asks the question: What does the tree know that sits beyond my mental reach? What has the tree experienced in its deeper, slower expanse of time? What can the tree do with its strange and particular assemblage of matter? These threads, once sewn, draw us toward surprising realities.

Not far down the mountain, a rock shows the marks of an old Ohlone village, easily overlooked depressions once used to grind acorns. Winter, with the acorn harvest stored away, would have been the time for sitting around the fire and telling stories about how Coyote made the world and showed the people how to work with trees. These stories appeal to myth over reason, yet they encode an alternate and perhaps truer epistemology (that knowledge is found in entanglement between self and world) and ontology (that all things are connected and alive).

Ohlone stories and their languages are mostly lost, erasures of the European gaze, unworthy in Linneus’s ranking. Only faded etchings remain. I track down a 1979 account, which places a translation of coast redwood neatly in a table: ho-o-pe. But stripped of its storied context, the word becomes just another object for the observer to project their own story on.

I recall Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s great lengths to reclaim her ancestral language, practiced today by only nine native speakers. In “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” she finds that the word for bay, like other living things, is a verb: wiikwegamaa, or “to be a bay.” Herself immersed in the European gaze of her schooling, she proclaims the thought absurd. Yet she later concludes: “A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa — to be a bay — releases the water from bondage and lets it live.” She awakens to a storied world teeming with “Birch people, Bear people, Rock people” — so much for Linnaeus’s hierarchy.

I wonder what it would mean to think of the tree not as a thing at all but instead as a verb, as the land treeing. A willful process of nutrients exchanging, of species entangling, of forests becoming. Of water pumping hundreds of feet up towards the sky and back down again. Of fire creeping through its understory to nourish the soil with ash that again becomes root. Once more, the tree reforms in my mind into something more alive.

In springtime, I make my way through the redwood circle, shears in hand, removing freshly sprouted clones. I am a small fire coursing through the understory, creating new ash for roots to grow below and new space for canopy to stretch above. The smell of cut stems and scrapes of rough bark sting nostrils and flesh.

If I reframe the tree is the land treeing, how am I to be the land humaning? To human, perhaps, is to return the favor. To thank the tree for offering its shelter. Tending to it helps it thrive and continue to offer its gifts.

Kimmerer calls this relationship reciprocity, a continuous exchange among animate beings forming wholes greater than any sum of parts. “If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water,” she writes, “then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.”

Thus we introduce one more philosophical precept to the mix: just as knowing and being are not separate, neither is doing. How we know shapes who we are, and who we are shapes what we do. If our ways of knowing deaden the world, then we trade in commodities. If our ways of knowing enliven the world, then we tend to relations. Humaning stitches these fragments back together — conversing with kin, telling stories of their vitality, and cultivating their integrity.

But probing the tree’s needs is no easy task for me. The stories of the Redwood people are mostly gone, along with the traditional ecological knowledge nested within them. This loss led to a century of fire suppression, depriving the redwoods of maintenance until the fuel built so high that fire medicine became fire poison. Today’s ecologists — the disciplinary descendants of Linnaeus — are awakening to the need for fire, and they’re turning to indigenous instruction where they can still find it.

I press my hand against the bark of the tree. I ask it what stories it wants me to tell. It doesn’t speak in any language I know. But it shows me its blackened scars and its remaining armor, gaps stitched with spider webs. It shows me its arching cavities and the dens animals have made inside. It shows me the low branches it has shed to protect its canopy, becoming mulch for soil and cover for a blue-bellied lizard that scurries at my approach.

If the tree indeed consumed Mimi’s Barbie dolls, the most distorted reflections of our own self-image, perhaps it’s sending us a message that we have reached the limits of our disembodied gaze. That we can only look at our models of our models so many times before they — and we — become eye-fucked techno-monsters. That we must return our embodied sight to the world itself.

The next time I tell the children the story of the blackened stump, I’ll speak of the fire that consumed our mirrors to remind us how to see. I’ll tell them that the dolls no longer remain in the cavity, but in their place grows new life, waiting for us to human.

It’s fall again, and the tree has made it through another fire season. I’m crouched beside it, arranging LED votive candles along a discarded limb. My friends Regan and Adrien are getting married here this weekend, and they’ve dedicated the redwood circle as an altar. Regan is stitching branches together with Tibetan flags. Adrien’s brother, Philippe, is placing photographs of our guests’ ancestors, emailed to us and wirelessly transmitted to a handheld printer.

What kind of family tree is this? Certainly one that troubles the neatly drawn paths of Linnaeus’s taxonomy, scribbling in the margins between plants and animals and nature and culture. It tells new and ancient stories of relationships beyond categories.

With truth an ever more divisive concept, we’re tasked with one more challenge of humaning: to reconcile multiple ways of knowing. To pursue scientific knowledge while acknowledging the perspectives of knowers. To create models of the world that enliven its story. To listen for the lessons of our places and respond in kind.

Night descends on the altar, and with our guests at dinner, I pay the tree one more solitary visit. The flickering candles place the renderings of our ancestors in a distorted light. Against the glossy, curved paper, redwood fronds project onto a wrinkled face. They remind me, once again, of kale chips (maybe I didn’t eat enough at dinner). But this time there’s no god-trick, no pretending of all the answers. Only the messy relations, the warped topologies, the insurgent memories that mark real space.

I am knee-deep in an unruly patch of strawberries at a community garden in San Francisco. Hidden beneath overgrown leaves, fruits dangle like precious gems, some seductively red and others still budding. Many have already fallen to feed the worms. I ask my host, Alberto, whether I should trim back the stems to give the berries more room to grow. He laughs as he tells me there are no rules in this garden. “Once you start adding rules, you have to call upper management for every little thing.”

I take stock of my surroundings through this new lens of garden anarchy. Messy rows of lettuce and flowers jut in all directions, with no walls defending their soil. Nearby, a group of older Chinese ladies sing in Mandarin while pouring neon blue liquid into their beds. I ask Alberto whether any portions of the garden are organic. “We don’t use labels,” he shrugs. I know his statement isn’t about me, but as a queer human I feel welcome.

After filling several cartons of strawberries, I place the bulk on a table for the other volunteers and keep one container for my friend Rachel, whose son Jasper was born just weeks prior. Rachel has mastitis from breastfeeding, and I want to bring her something sweet. Alberto contributes a bunch of fresh-cut flowers.

I hop on a cross-town bus with arms full of berries and flowers and dirt-crusted gloves and pull a stem out for the bus driver, who clutches her heart and threatens to cry. I meet Rachel with Jasper lying quietly against her chest, and we find a vase for the flowers while we savor the fruits. These are small gestures, but I can’t help but feel like a fairy leaving a trail of treats around the city. The place feels more alive today.

Jasper is just the first stop on my list this week. Next I’ll be visiting Lola with my drums for her very first jam session. And then joining Cullan and Emer for a messy dinner. After, I’ll fly to New York to see Sloane, born to my brother and his wife a few months ago.

Being an uncle is a new label for me, and it’s not one I chose. During the pandemic, I suddenly went from the youngest of my line to an uncle of five tiny humans. There’s my blood niece, Sloane, and then there’s also the new generation of my chosen family in California, a group I share land with. When we signed our contract to live together, we also made an implicit commitment to one day become the proverbial “village” raising collective offspring. Ready or not, that day is here.

As the sole queer member of the group, I never imagined children of my own, and I never planned ahead for family. Caught up in my own life, I didn’t see room for the all-consuming project of parenthood.

Instead, I looked to queer theorists like Lee Edelman, who protested against our cultural obsession with “reproductive futurism” in his defiantly titled book No Future. In Edelman’s view, our society is overly obsessed with children as a symbol of innocence. Queerness should not be about the palatable gay couple raising a child but the pleasure-seeking self saying no to the reproductive social order.

What feels right to me, here and now, should be enough. Yet somehow I find myself, here and now, inexorably pulled towards a new generation.

I am back in my own garden, applying what I learned from Alberto. I eschew structured formalities like planting schedules and formal structures like deer fences. Instead, some friends and I patch together beds from a leftover chicken coop, plant an assortment of gifted seeds and tubers left too long on our kitchen counters, and wrap the whole setup in simple netting. Babies watch from the shade, and I keep them company in tentative shifts. Interpreting their cries feels as foreign to me as diagnosing dried-out leaves.

But it is not long before we see bunches of lettuce blurting from the ground, tendrils of snow peas gossiping between them, anchored to stalks of corn as they shout above the nets. Meanwhile, not a peep from the potatoes.

We are listening to hear what works, in this earth, in this season. We are prodding at the land, inquiring into its lineage. With which plants have you slept, we ask, faithfully evolving together? And which progeny do you abort, for lack of nutrients, or warmth, or microbial suitors?

This patch of life returns me to the problem of reproduction, no longer a promise of the future but a fact of the past. Entangled lineages make us who we are — beings selecting, over and over, to meet and create more life. Yet somehow, somewhere, the earth said yes to an unlikely mutation that said no, that queer revolt praised by Edelman, punctuating life’s branches over and over with refusals to reproduce. I am the unyielding potato, indulging in its own slice of time. The future, you say? I can’t be bothered. Wouldn’t it be more delicious to slather me in oil?

Digging through the past, I discover that the lineage of queer evolutionary thought extends back to an unlikely origin, with the founder of natural selection himself. After publishing his famous Origin of Species, Charles Darwin went on to confront a thorn in his theory: individuals often act at the expense of their own fitness, in the form of altruism. He later concluded in The Descent of Man that we evolve not just as individuals but also as groups. When we work together, we form a kind of super-organism that can outcompete other groups. After all, what is an individual but an orgy of countless smaller beings?

If this is true, queerness could have evolved as a kind of altruism: an eschewing of the drive to further our own line in order to further the group. And when those we helped were related to us, they passed down our own genes, some of which predisposed offspring to more queerness.

This theory has historical grounding, particularly during crises when selection plays an acute role. I land upon the story of the 1917 Halifax explosion, when soldiers and sailors played the biggest part in helping their communities survive because they lacked the responsibility of their own families. I imagine myself in such a calamity. I don’t fancy myself much of a soldier, but with earthquakes and fires ever on California’s horizon, I hope I would rise to meet the need.

If the evolutionary function of queerness is to advance the group, Edelman was both right and wrong. Queerness may not be found in reproduction, but it is equally absent from selfish pleasure. It is expressed most in the will to make kin, here and now, on a planet that needs us to mend more and produce less. We weave relations in the form of blood and chosen families, broader communities, and acceptance of love in its abundant diversity.

A renewed sight in our garden is the busywork of bees. We have set up new hives just in time for spring. Some of our older residents made it through their first winter, while others did not. We are still listening.

I dress up our oldest nibling, Cullan, in an oversized beekeeping suit, and he cautiously inches toward the hives before letting out a sharp “No!” and sprinting back to safety. Huddled close to the ground, he yells out bee facts he learned on YouTube while the adults tend the honeycomb. “Only the queen reproduces!” he reports over the buzz. “The rest of the females are workers.” Now that’s a society with healthy queer representation.

I watch a worker bee buzz from flower to flower. She inserts herself so deep into a pride of Madeira that I can only see the tip of her butt cradled by tiny blue petals.

This queer bee, I think, is moved by a perfectly Edelmanian pleasure. Lacking a will to reproduce, she is simply immersing herself in the presence of nectar. But so is the flower immersing in desire, for it has located its nectary at its base, drawing the bee as deep as possible into itself so that its grains of pollen will join with the bee’s body. These are selfish desires that attract, not just between organisms but between species. If there is a role for me in this garden, it is not to control but to nurture these relations.

What makes their desires unique from Edelman’s is that they originate beyond the self. They have co-evolved in an ancient story that troubles the boundary of the individual. The bee says to the flower: Your pleasure is my pleasure, and mine yours. You and I have been in a dance for millions of years, and look at all we have created by the simple act of desire. The flower says: You are right, dear bee, but you are not mine alone; you desire many flowers. And the bee says: My love is one that connects.

This is a different story of queerness: a love that connects. It tells me I have work to do now, following my desire toward broader and deeper relations, each producing greater abundance than we could make alone. It softens the hold of an older story: that love is something we find only in a partner, that it is in short supply, that it must be defended from other potential loves. It allows me instead to fall in love over and over without diminishing the love I already hold for others. It is an anarchy grown in Alberto’s garden, foregoing structure in favor of a simpler tending, to relations here and now.

Most of my niblings might not be related by blood, yet we can still make each other kin. The small gestures — picking strawberries for Jasper or beekeeping with Cullan — are tendrils on a vine reaching out to touch another, listening to what works, in this earth, in this season. They are attempts to learn what it means to be an uncle in a lineage of altruism, in a story of connection. I trust I will learn from the bee, practicing the sacred work of entangled desire.

With time, I imagine these acts filling gaps left between the nuclear families in my community like mycelium stitching soil so that plants can thrive. Together, these acts make a garden, and to the garden itself I call myself uncle.

Having stepped into my new role as uncle to the collective, last of my genetic line, I receive one more call, this time from my friend Andy.

Andy wants to be a single mom, but she is not alone. She organized her own collective support network, a “sperm donor selection committee,” which met regularly to review the profiles of anonymous sperm donors and ultimately determine Andy’s genetic match. Having arrived at a shared choice, she threw one final option into the mix: What if the donor were not anonymous? What if the donor were kin? What if the donor were me?

I ask Andy what I would be called. She says, of course, uncle.

Her offer dangles before me, a bright gem of a fruit hanging from the vine. Another nibling in the garden. An expanded sense of what it means to be an uncle. A shared desire entangling us both. I say yes.

Thanks for spending time with these thoughts. You can to subscribe to my writing or visit my website to learn more.

Queer as Kin was originally published in Prism & Pen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

8:15am —

You wake to the song of house sparrows. Their chorus of descending trills pierce your ear in staccato polyrhythm, weaving avian contralto and soprano just below the threshold of ultrasound. Though you cannot see them, you trace their warbling out your window, down the brick-clad alley, and up the bark of a ficus tree, whose leaves bunch like a thick fog above the street. Shrouded within, male sparrows project a stream of sound, an announcement of their presence to nearby prospects. But they are also a call to you — towards morning, towards listening.

Having snoozed through sunrise, you stir instead with the second plea — the soundrise. Nesting in the nooks of roofs and windows, house sparrows have long been our partners in this task. You follow their song further, centuries ago, to their first journey across the Atlantic — eight mating pairs offering foreigners a sense of the familiar. With an affinity for the man-made, their numbers multiplied alongside ours. They turned our homes inside-out, finding a nook or a perch just on the other side of our protective barriers.

It gives you comfort to think of your home as an ecology. In spite of fortification, chatter permeates the air, weaving species into auditory webs. Your home is home to the sparrow too, and its song makes a nest beside you as you rise.

8:45am —

Light and shadow paint pointillistic pictures on your bedroom walls. Outside your window is a flat utilitarian roof, lined with synthetic rubber, which collects pools of water from overnight rainfall. Morning light hits the water at just the right angle to drench your room in dazzling display, shifting organically with breeze from the nearby bay. It is a light show in the original sense. Panels of tones fold into each other as if a signal from a creative intelligence. Thinly colored bands trace their edges, microscopic rainbows reawakening from their post-pour slumber. You too reawaken to the sensation of form.

If the light is imparting a message, it is in its power to transform. Our light begins as smoldering sun, radiates across space, and bends through atmosphere. Meeting all our varied material, it becomes shade and color. It ripens into food for hungry plants and relief for morose people. Channeled through a child’s magnifying glass, it returns to fire once more. But rarely do you find light so ostentatious as when it dances with water and wind. In this partnership, it cycles through its many forms in pulsing succession. “See me,” it demands, “and all I can be.”

What might you be today? Before you the light paints infinite possibilities. Might you be dark or light, blue or green, fire or wave? Perhaps a vibrant assemblage of expression? Or maybe you will simply flow with the water and wind, allowing the elements you meet to imprint themselves onto the self.

10:30am —

You pour hot water over a neat pile of dried white peony. Its spearmints and khakis swell to sage green, seeping out to the water in curious tendrils. Steam rises in spurts, carrying odorous compounds to your nostrils. It smells of reeds, reaching from marsh like lanky limbs. You take a sip. Its taste is mildly sweet and bitter, faintly of freshwater. You are transported — to a calm day by the lake, running your hands through high grasses, kicking water into ripples of your own. The warmth of the tea relaxes your body, which has not yet noticed the caffeine.

China’s most ancient style of tea, white tea calls to mind the Taoist concept of wu wei, action without effort. Though prepared from the same plant as the stronger greens and blacks, it is processed the least. Young buds are left to wither in open air, skipping the crushing and burning that embolden its siblings. What is left retains its natural form while imbuing it with poetic delicacy. Even as new ways to prepare the drink evolved, tender white teas remained the choice offering to China’s powerful emperors.

In preparing the tea, you search for the subtle sensation of action without effort. Of allowing the ritual to carry you through its sequence. Of permitting the flavors to draw your attention. It is a give and take with the world, a channel opened for flow.

11:45am —

You stand in a position known in the West as the “tree.” Your right foot is raised, tucked into the inner part of your left thigh. Your left leg has become a trunk, rooted to the ground while birds buzz through your caffeinated mind. Your body wavers. Muscles tense and relax along the many lines branching out from your foot, swaying as if carried by wind. The tension divides itself into smaller pathways through chest to arms and fingertips. Your body is stretching, searching for equilibrium.

To balance, you feel, is to be in sensuous relation with gravity. It is your body’s response to other bodies. The earth exerts the greatest force, but so does every mass tug gently upon yours. Balance sets an order to things through this invisible connection. Every time you encounter another, tiny crystals shift in your inner ears, and a small tether is formed between you. You imagine all the material of the universe swaying together in interconnected musculature.

Standing in delicate balance, your muscles awaken, tuning themselves to the pushes and pulls of the surrounding world. You practice a responsive wavering, resilience to shifting landscape. Life is a process of change, you think. To be fixed is to be dead.

12:30pm —

You gather a brandywine tomato for slicing, and already your saliva is flowing. Growing up to one and a half pounds each, brandywines carry flavor in bulk. You feel its weight against your palm, fingers pressing back into rubbery flesh. Its skin is less glossy than the bright-red roma; instead, it radiates streaks of gold like solar flares, traversing deep troughs into a sea of pink-orange. As you slice, your nose detects a vegetal freshness, colored slightly sour by burnt hues. You take a bite, meeting a chewy resistance as juice lubricates the tongue. Only then do you taste: wonderfully sweet, unusually so, cut by a mild tart.

The character of this particular tomato, like all life, exists in lineage. The Aztecs cultivated their xitomatl from wild pea-shaped ancestors, and dubbed the new fruit “fat water with navel.” Through modern breeding, the water has grown fatter at the expense of flavor. Supermarket shoppers associate redness with ripeness, so commercial breeders select for uniform scarlet hues. Flavor has leached out of the recipe.

In attending to the brandywine’s sweet heft, you connect with a form of ancestry — of the fruit and of the humans who coevolved with it. In gardens resilient to the forces of time, heirlooms like the brandywine revive a wild heritage, growing in a riotous array of weights, colors, and patterns. You too are rewilding from the shaping of human minds.

1:45pm —

The facades of buildings slice into diagonal portions, like New York black-and-white cookies. You are walking to a nearby park, and the world is split under the knife of the midday sky. The sun is casting its hardest shadows, with brights at their lightest, darks at their dimmest, and stepwise jumps at each boundary. It is as if the day is intentionally split in half so as to pull you into afternoon. You are torn between these two worlds, basking in sun like a phototropic plant and finding periodic sanctuary in the shade of trees.

Your world reflects the will of the sky. On clear days like today, the sun’s white light glares at you from glass facades, while softer blue light from scattered atmosphere blankets the ground. On cloudy days, all is faintly white, with hardly a shadow in sight. To the sky, you are but a mirror to look back at itself. Now, it presents the challenge of poles, those binary opposition’s that tense your mind. Light and dark, hot and cold, day and night. Good and evil, passion and logic, certainty and mystery.

Which of these, you wonder, is your nature? Or at least your afternoon ahead? You allow these dualities to tug at each other as friendly adversaries. To compete, in the original sense, is to strive together. Perhaps that is the lesson of the sky, to choose neither, to allow both.

2:15pm —

You fall into rhythmic pulses of calisthenic motion against the park’s cool dirt. Repetitions of push-ups mirror the force of the earth, like entrained pendulums in twin grandfather clocks. Muscles across your chest and arms coordinate to expand and contract. A deep burn courses through them, tightly woven threads unraveling with each movement. Your heart pulses loudly, the sounds of the park falling into lockstep with its rhythm. The warmth of the sun ramps with the flushing of your skin. But in this flow you hardly mind.

You know many types of pain. The sharp sting of an open wound, the dull throb of a headache, the visceral unease of nausea, the contorted heart of loss. But in exercise you meet the wide gulf between pain and suffering. It starts with a tear or a burn or an ache. But when the body is in motion, the brain releases its natural painkillers, endorphins, coloring the experience more pleasant. Your body knows some pain is good for you; your muscles grow back stronger, your heart more resilient.

Squatting in an invisible chair, your thighs twinging in tension, you remain open to the body’s wild sensations. Perhaps you can treat many of life’s pains this way, with a curious mind and a soft smile, untying pleasure from gnarls.

3:00pm —

As you return towards home, your body smells faintly ripe, but of a wholly different variety from the brandywine. Like any quality perfume, the odor carries an arc, from the lightest compounds to the heaviest. At first the scent is sweet with spikes of anise stars. Then comes a gamey odor, with the primal sensation of fresh meat. Finally, a pungent tinge lingers like the aftereffect of crushing garlic. In the right frame, it is not such a bad bouquet. It awakens something animalistic from a long dormancy. Still high from endorphins, you feel electrified, confident, sensual. You savor the tinged air.

There is a reason odors transport you out of your mind. The oldest human sense, smell is processed first in the centers of emotion and memory before coming to conscious awareness. Your responses — attracted, repelled, wrapped in nostalgia — are primal and confusing. Scents are wild information. Trees send odorous messages that inform each other of predators, ants pave pathways to food, and humans too communicate cues from emotion to age.

You often feel the urge to conceal challenging odors, but instead you consider what signals you might be tuning out. By attending to the body’s odors, science suggests, you might better gauge your stress, assess your health, and find attraction in would-be partners. That said, you could really go for a bath.

4:15pm —

You sink into the water, just hot enough to prickle the skin. The lights are out, and all is invisible sensation. So slowly do you move that it is hard to tell whether you are descending into the water or the water is rising to consume you. At first your flesh recoils at the heat, but then it relaxes, each muscle melting in turn, until your neck finally rests along a curved ledge. You run your hands through the water, and a gradient of pressure forms around your fingers. You bring your head down below. Sounds resonate more deeply, warping like the light reflected through your morning window, directionless and timeless.

Water is a sensory portal. It consumes you in otherworldly delight to be submerged, or floating, releasing the weight of gravity. The portal transports you to your origins, to aquatic ancestry and amniotic incubation. Mammals may dwell on the land, but you are also amphibious, spending your earliest days submerged. Your connection to water, however, has weakened. Unlike stick bugs, with their sensors that swell in water’s presence, you must piece together an assemblage of proxies: thickness against skin, friction along surfaces, heat in your nerves. Never can you know water directly.

Still, you feel comfort in this womblike return. Water is the original nostalgia. Connecting with this life-giving source both relaxes the worries of now and energizes the future.

6:00pm —

You are joined on the roof by a partner, watching the day fade. It is the golden hour, when all the world is dosed with a radiant magic. They reach out to hold your hand, and the magic begins to radiate through you. It starts as a soft pressure on your palm, then a tingling up your arm, and a lightening of your chest, until your body lifts off the ground, and you are levitating in the gilded urban landscape. You kiss them gently on the cheek, and the electrical circuit is closed, sensations making loops through your limbs, generating a protective field. The roof within becomes a holy site.

There is something about the touch from another being that cannot be simulated. Press an inanimate object against your palm with just the right pressure and caress, and you will still feel cold. Try to tickle yourself with your own fingers, and your brain locks up, your motor cortex telling your sensory center to block the signal. It is in meeting the intelligence of another, with the complexity of their emotion and understanding, that touch comes to life. The touched must touch back. The magic is the exchange, adapting in active improvisation.

Locked in the rapturous kinship of touch, you wield its power with a sense of responsibility. Like all magic, contact can both heal and poison. The difference is listening, reaching out a hand not to write but to read.

7:15pm —

The fiery blaze of sunset gives way to the yellow underglow of twilight, finally settling to the azure rest of dusk. It all passes in the blink of an eye, and now the world is turning upside down. As if the sun continues its course beneath the earth, the city itself glows alight, casting shadows of clouds against the sky, pressing back the faded light of distant stars. If daytime is the realm of nature, nighttime here is the sphere of people. When the world grows quiet, you make your own light, your own sound, your own warmth.

The night gives space for our most creative urges. From the once-dark cityscape, architects have floodlit skyscrapers like castles, adorned them with radiant crowns, and tiled facades with neon panels. But creation often ushers unintended change. To those who thrive in the dark, our nightlights provide alarming stimulation: nocturnal animals remain asleep, creatures that cloak become easy prey, birds that migrate by moonlight fly off course. The marching pulse of day and night that shaped evolution is now a bebop rhythm, with unpredictable swings and few rests.

Up on the roof, you watch the city pulse. What are the reaches of your unknowing impact? How might you tread more lightly, or darkly, or nourishingly? Perhaps it is enough, sometimes, to simply watch.

9:00pm —

You sit in meditation, cross-legged and straight-backed, and sights and sounds begin to melt. It requires concentration at first, meticulously selecting the sensations of the breath over all distractions. But suddenly the rhythms of the breath, body, and mind click into synchrony. The outside world becomes silent, and the inner experience grows expansive. You float, suspended in the vast ocean of your mind. From here you can observe clearly — a fleeting thought, a flickering static, a flashing light. These sensations are always there, underlying the imprints of the world, the beautiful chaos of silence.

Silence seems a rare gem in our clamorous culture of sensory products. Muzak, the quintessential background music, fills department stores and lobbies, influencing your mood without notice. On television, anchors fill gaps with sound, as if breaking the momentum of the broadcast will also break its spell. Today, the incessancy has found its way into your pocket; feeds of content on your phone scroll, by design, without end. Sometimes absence takes more effort to keep it than to fill it.

In this precious moment of silence you observe your own inner workings — of your senses, of your mind, of simply being. You sit in an endless field of possibility, of coming-to-be. In observance, silence becomes not just an absence, but a potential for clarity to arise, cutting through the noise.

10:15pm —

Settling into bed, your body perks at the coolness of the sheets. But cradled gently by cover and mattress, the muscles release and the eyelids grow heavy. Soon, your body no longer registers any tactile sensation at all, the sheets as invisible as Muzak. You enter a liminal space between awake and asleep. Scenes from the day flow through the mind, of teas and tomatoes and twilights. You find yourself contemplating the act of sleeping, but it cannot be willed. Like the revealing of an optical illusion, it must emerge naturally with an open gaze and a quiet mind. You return instead to the place of silence within you and before you know it you are dreaming.

You often think of sleep and wakefulness as two opposing states, but there are degrees of both. You daydream, sleepwalk, nod off, wear out, and hallucinate. Scientists say that sleep is defined by your brainwaves, the rhythm of trillions of synapses pulsing in synchrony. There is the alert beta state of wakefulness, the relaxed alpha of meditation, the free-flowing theta of hypnosis, and finally the detached delta of sleep.

You pass through these thresholds to arrive at your destination, and like all of life’s passages, they require some grace. On the river of time, when you charge forward too forcefully, you capsize. When you cling too tightly to the past, you get lost at sea. Letting go, allowing the flow to carry you, you drift through the gate.

11:00pm —

Your inner world comes alive with iridescent imagery. You are on a barren planet with a high-frequency color palette, Death Valley in ultraviolet. The dust-swept surface glistens with ground amethyst, rising to ridges of meteor-pocked mesas. Scattered flora keep to themselves, weaving silver threads of mana through lilac flesh, drunk through straws rooted deep in the dirt. You too are a strange creature — scaly, mulberry, reptilian. You stand in a group of your own species, gazing into the vast unknown. You reach out prismatic tentacles and attach yourselves to the surface, luminescing, uniting.

In your mind, the boundary between fantasy and reality ripples like water. Even in wakefulness you imagine constantly: what’s around the bend, where your keys might be hiding. But in this special kind of sleep, your visions run wild, stitching remembered symbols into disorderly patchworks. Yet these shapes show you something real — the longings, fears, and questions that go unattended in woken states. They speak to you through coded stories, sneaking past your cognitive defenses and into your soul.

In the strange landscape of your dream, the soils and the seeds and the scales are all new. Still you find a familiar urge — to venture into the unknown and sense its flesh. To discover, within broader terrain, yourself and your place in the world.

A Day in the Life of the Senses was originally published in the Cafe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is part of a series:

1. Introduction
2. Government
3. Market
4. Military
5. Collective

So far in our exploration of The Ministry for the Future, we have looked primarily at the ways Kim Stanley Robinson envisions institutions shifting to a new world order. But this reorganization would not be possible without changes in public sentiment and activities emerging from the grassroots. Here we will investigate our final two themes:

1. Decentralized organization for local climate interventions and community resilience…
2. …and the emergence of a collective planetary consciousness through direct personal interactions with climate.

Within each theme, I will outline the specific ideas proposed and how they manifest both in the book and in the real world today.

Decentralized Organization

As power shifts away from the market and towards the public sector, Robinson also envisions that distributing out to the edges of society. Local participation plays a role in regenerating ecosystems, ensuring community resilience, earning collective buy-in, and enacting climate justice.

Participatory Local Government

What’s the idea? Effective local governance is important for decentralized climate efforts occurring in ecosystems around the world. When done in a participatory way, it can also uplift social standing, decrease population growth rates, and garner public support.

What’s The Ministry’s take? In the book, India identifies effective models around the country to apply nationally in a strategy known as positive deviance. The Kerala model is selected as the de facto form of local governance to be emulated. The model has produced a high quality of life despite low per capita income by focusing on quality of life indicators, redistribution of wealth, and democratic participation.

What’s happening in the real world? Environmentalist Bill McKibben called Kerala “a bizarre anomaly among developing nations, a place that offers real hope for the future of the Third World.” Prior to the recent coronavirus spike in India, several writers lauded Kerala’s response to the pandemic, suggesting it should be applied throughout India and around the world. Case studies abound for applying lessons from Kerala elsewhere in India, as well as modeling participatory governance off of other positively deviant systems elsewhere. But lifting a social system that works in one place and dropping it elsewhere is no easy feat, facing entrenched cultures and political structures. A key factor that makes this work in The Ministry is India’s unified national identity arising from its heatwave.

Nonviolent Direct Action

What’s the idea? Nonviolent direct action involves acts of civil disobedience to demonstrate collective power of a group in obtaining political goals. Even if a minority of the public is engaged with an issue, direct action can mobilize awareness and support more broadly.

What’s The Ministry’s take? The ministry’s initiatives are advanced by grassroots direct action throughout the book. In one instance, a march of cowboys, protestors, and animals stopped a militia group from blocking wildlife corridors. In another, students collectively defaulted on loans, causing a cascading financial crisis that gave the ministry leverage over central banks to adopt carbon coin.

What’s happening in the real world? Direct action on climate is mobilized by groups like the Sunrise Movement in the US, Extinction Rebellion in the UK, and Fridays for Future in Sweden. The movements use varying takes on direct action and electoral involvement, including stopping traffic, protesting at politicians’ homes, and occupying public areas. The groups differ in terms of their level of involvement with electoral politics and mobilizing support for progressive candidates. Another organization, Debt Collective, has organized a debt strike in pursuit of student debt forgiveness and free college tuition, threatening to escalate if President Biden does not forgive student debt.

Indigenous Stewardship

What’s the idea? Many indigenous communities have intimate knowledge of their local ecosystems and manage them for biodiversity and resilience. Recognizing indigenous sovereignty over land can improve ecosystem health and enact conservation in a more just way.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Rebecca, the ministry’s liaison to indigenous peoples, incorporates native partnerships into their plans, including paying carbon coins to groups in the Amazon Rainforest and allocating land in the Half Earth project to indigenous groups.

“His friends Tobias and Jesse were helping to create what they called the Anthropocene wilderness, a composite thing that was like the wilder wing of the Half Earth movement, and many of the governments there were cooperating in creating a vast integrated park and corridor system that included and supported the local indigenous human populations, as park keepers or simply local residents, part of the land doing their thing.”

What’s happening in the real world? The conservation movement has a history of stealing land from indigenous communities. When the US national park system was created, the army removed native peoples. Yet studies show that indigenous-managed land has equal or higher biodiversity than the modern “fortress conservation” approach of removing all human interaction. The Campaign for Nature, a movement to set aside 30% of land and sea for conservation by 2030, states that “community conserved areas” are an important part of its plan and calls on governments to respect indigenous leadership.

Worker-Owned Cooperatives

What’s the idea? Giving workers ownership of organizations increases collective resilience to economic disruptions and makes businesses more likely to prioritize the needs of their community over shareholder-focused growth.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Robinson gives cooperative models accolades, including the Mondragón Corporation, credit unions, and housing cooperatives. A citizen reporting from Mondragón reports on their holistic approach, including a network of businesses, credit unions, universities, and insurance companies with wage ceilings regulating how highly executives can be paid. By the end of the book, this model spreads throughout Europe, meeting some cultural resistance elsewhere in Spain.

What’s happening in the real world? Cooperatives can help mitigate the effects of rising inequality in income and climate justice. Several movements have arisen to organize a transition to a more collectivist economy, including the Solidarity Economy, New Economy, and Just Transition. These movements advocate for collective ownership, non-extractive finance, participatory budgeting, mutual aid, land trusts, and other practices to make the economy more equitable and democratic. Loan funds like Seed Commons enable individual lenders to make funds available to cooperatives.

Open-Source Social Networking

What’s the idea? Putting social networking into the commons via open-source technology could empower people to collectively organize their digital, social, and economic activity. This would shift power away from technology companies and governments and possibly enable distributed climate action.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Janus Athena develops YourLock, a platform that replicates social networking features with open-source technology, distributed computing power, and the ability for users to own and sell their data to earn a basic income. YourLock also becomes used for banking in local currencies, as well as funding and organizing local ecological projects. The ministry leverages this to negotiate with federal banks with the threat of administering carbon coin through YourLock. With time, a global identity arises:

“We’re seeing an increasing rate of uptake on YourLock. Already a new internet; now its users may be turning into a new kind of citizen of the world. Gaia citizenship, or what have you.”

What’s happening in the real world? Many open-source social networking alternatives have been attempted. There’s Minds instead of Facebook, Mastodon instead of Twitter, D.tube instead of YouTube, Aether instead of Reddit, and Signal instead of WhatsApp. Most have yet to take off, much less see the utopian activities Robinson imagines, including local currencies, crowdfunding, and time banking. Whether such a platform could cross the threshold for networking effects to drive growth and manage to handle the required technical and operational scale mastered by proprietary platforms like Facebook has yet to be seen.

Collective Planetary Consciousness

Under the book’s surface of systemic change is a slowly rising tide of culture towards a global sense of identity and concern for the planet. However, these changes tend to only occur in situations where people are personally and deeply impacted by climate.

Social Disruption

What’s the idea? The most personal way that climate will affect individuals is through social disruptions, such as environmental disasters, ecoterrorism, and financial crises. Such events break down the patterns of social life in a community and may galvanize new relationships with climate change.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Robinson maintains that empathy for others affected by climate change will not solve our problems. Many individuals are not motivated to change their behavior or advocate for structural change until they are affected by social disruptions, including the heatwave in India, flooding in Los Angeles, and regime change in Saudi Arabia. In these cases, galvanizing effects only occur within affected areas, with outsiders failing to take action. An attempt to manufacture a social disruption was made by holding Davos attendees hostage for reeducation, but it had little apparent effect.

What’s happening in the real world? It’s a central question to climate efforts: what will drive people to change their behavior? A study of the effects of climate documentaries concluded that storytelling can generate concern but not action. Another tested the effects of personalized climate messaging and found no impact on willingness to pay for regional climate measures. A third focusing on the effects of weather anomalies found little impact on climate opinions. These studies support Robinson’s conclusion that empathy alone should not be relied on to motivate climate action.

Planet-Centered Spirituality

What’s the idea? Reviving a sense of the nature’s sacredness may give people a more personal sense of meaning in engaging with environmental issues. This could be achieved through a new planet-centered religion inspired by indigenous animistic spirituality but with a global scope.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Noting that secular society lacks a meaningful connection with the world, Badim proposes a new planetary religion:

“I think we need a new religion…Well, maybe it’s not a new religion. An old religion. Maybe the oldest religion. But back among us, big time. Because I think we need it. People need something bigger than themselves. All these economic plans, always talking about things in terms of money and self-interest — people aren’t really like that.”

This proposal culminates in a moment of collective prayer called “Gaia day.” The event attempts a sense of global, cross-cultural connectedness, though it comes across as a slightly awkward digital simulation of connectedness.

What’s happening in the real world? Drawing on the Andean traditional reverence for pachamama, or Mother Earth, the United Nations adopted a resolution in 2009 to designate April 22 each year as International Mother Earth Day. This effort was led by Bolivian President Evo Morales Ayma, drawing on his work integrating pachamama into official policy. Robinson’s use of the term “Gaia” draws from Gaia theory, proposed in the 1970s, which suggested that the earth acts as a single self-regulating unit. Adopting the metaphor of Gaia gave the theory spiritual connotations, which has both raised skepticism in the scientific community and enhanced its popular adoption. Many of its propositions have proven true, and its philosophy has inspired more recent research into biospherics and systems theory. The theory also inspired Gaianism, a holistic, earth-centered spiritual practice.

Collective Energy Conservation

What’s the idea? Though per capita energy use varies hugely by country — from 300 watts per year in Bangladesh to 12,000 in the US — studies suggest the worldwide average sits at a comfortable level. If each country shifted towards 2,000 watts per person, all could enjoy a high standard of living.

What’s The Ministry’s take? When Frank is living under the radar in Zurich, he engages with a group called the 2,000-Watt Society, which promotes the goal of living on 2,000 watts per person on 75% renewable energy without sacrificing quality of life. The group seeks to accomplish this by increasing the efficiency of infrastructure, including buildings and transportation. He decides to live in a co-op with society members.

What’s happening in the real world? The 2,000-Watt Society has been operating since 1998, founded by the university ETH Zurich. In 2001, they launched a pilot in Basel, with Zurich, Vancouver, Munich, and other cities joining later. Interventions in these cities include strategies like carbon-neutral Passivhaus building standards, efficient public transit, and converting power generation to renewable energy.

Ecotherapy

What’s the idea? Climate change is already impacting mental health, and its effects are likely to worsen with environmental disasters and media messaging. Ecotherapy offers mental health tools focused on reconnecting people with the natural world and making sense of environmental narratives.

What’s The Ministry’s take? The character most affected by mental health is Frank, who suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the aftermath of India’s heatwave. His psychiatrist offers a treatment using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which seeks to shift patterns of thought and behavior. Ultimately, he finds the most solace hiking the Alps and getting lost in eye contact with chamois antelope. He takes Mary with him, and she too reconnects with the reality of what she is working so hard to save.

What’s happening in the real world? In 2017, the American Psychology Association published a report on climate change and mental health, categorizing impacts into acute (e.g., trauma and PTSD from disasters) and chronic (e.g., loss of meaningful places and occupations). They recommend helping patients foster resilience, cultivate meaning, and connect to place. The benefits of spending time in nature are well-documented for mental health. Forest bathing, or spending attentive time in forests, reduces stress through biophilia (our evolutionary affinity for nature) and aromatherapy. Horticultural therapy, a form of gardening, restores feelings of efficacy and care. Involvement in conservation activities helps people make meaning in the face of climate change and feel capable of making an impact.

Making the Future

Whether Robinson’s collectivist climate vision is appealing to you may be a matter of values, and whether it is possible may be a matter of faith. For all its narrative power, The Ministry leaves to the reader’s imagination the details of how these ideas will materialize. Would the US really allow carbon coin to upend the distribution of global wealth overnight? Would a social network really be used for collective good just because its code is open-source? Some ideas need fleshing out and some may prove to be fantasies.

But what is real is the seeds of just about every proposal Robinson includes in his book. They all exist today, powered by real people dedicating their life’s work to changing the way we live, work, and relate to the world. It is within our power to seek out and nurture the seeds we want to become the forests of the future.

This article is part of a series:

1. Introduction
2. Government
3. Market
4. Military
5. Collective

Climate Solutions from Ministry for the Future: The Collective was originally published in Climate Conscious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is part of a series:

1. Introduction
2. Government
3. Market
4. Military
5. Collective

Having covered The Ministry for the Future’s take on the role of public and private enterprises, we now turn to the military, where Robinson envisions a shift of power from nation states toward actors working on behalf of the planet. Below I outline specific ideas proposed within this theme and how they manifest both in the book and in the real world today.

Shifting Military Power

In The Ministry, the global balance of power is constantly shifting. While nation states still retain much of their power, it is no longer backed by strong militaries as other actors are enabled by a proliferation of new technologies and strategies. This enables the rise of a War for the Earth chipping away at the old world order.

Mutually Assured Destruction

What’s the idea? When multiple military forces have the power to annihilate each other, all are deterred from engaging. This is known as mutually assured destruction, and, in theory, it could rebalance power away from the strongest nation to a network of state and non-state actors, who become better able to negotiate in favor of the global collective on issues like climate change.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Mutually assured destruction lays the groundwork for the book’s military context, driven by the invention and proliferation of weapons called “pebble mobs” that target and disable other military technology:

“They were more powerful than the atomic bomb, in this very particular sense: you could use them. And they couldn’t be stopped…They were small, they launched from mobile launchers, they came from all directions in a coordinated attack in which they only congregated at their target in the last few seconds of their flights. They did not give off radioactive signals, and thus could be hidden until the moment of launch. And they were relatively cheap.”

The proliferation of pebble mobs leads to mutually assured destruction, not necessarily of large populations of people but of military technology. It spells the end of traditional war and gives increasing power to ecoterrorist groups. Ultimately, the US redeploys its navy away towards climate disaster relief.

In a recent interview, Robinson posed that greenhouse gas emissions also present a scenario of mutually assured destruction:

“There’s a strange sense in which the nation-states, especially the big petro states like Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Iran, and Indonesia, are all like terrorists with an explosive vest around their waist. They’re all in the same room and they’ve all got buttons with which they can blow up the room and everybody else in it. Well, it’s kind of mutual assured destruction.”

What’s happening in the real world? Today, mutually assured destruction is discussed in reference to nuclear weapons, arising between the US and Russia during the Cold War. The landscape has since changed, with nuclear weapons spreading to more military powers, nuclear defense capabilities advancing, nuclear powers like Pakistan forced into desperate situations, and others like North Korea led by unpredictable leaders. In 2007, a group of Cold War policymakers who previously promoted the idea that nuclear weapons made the world safer reversed their position, supporting disarmament instead.

Ecoterrorism

What’s the idea? Targeted attacks against powerful climate-violating individuals, organizations, and infrastructure projects could halt their immediate goals, increase perceived risk of engaging in such activities over the long-term, and raise public awareness of climate issues.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Ecoterrorism advances the work of the ministry within the undercurrents of society. The Children of Kali form in the aftermath of the Indian heatwave, named for the Hindu destroyer of evil (and likely a book about a 19th-century Kali-worshipping criminal group). Their focus is killing powerful climate violators while avoiding collateral damage. The group initially uses suicide bombs and evolves towards targeted drone strikes. This culminates in a War for the Earth, with a demand to discontinue all fossil fuel transport and cow livestock. Drones attack jets, dismantling the fossil fuel airline industry, and shoot darts with mad cow disease at millions of cows, killing the market for beef and milk.

What’s happening in the real world? Ecoterrorism, while not officially part of government plans, has claimed major environmental successes. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS), founded in 1977, has damaged and sunk whaling vessels. In 1982, the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling, and SSCS continued to pursue perceived violators of the ban. Around the time of the SSCS’s founding, author Edward Abbey published The Monkey Wrench Gang, which popularized the idea of “monkeywrenching,” or sabotaging infrastructure like dams that damage ecosystems, and inspired the formation of the groups Earth First! and Earth Liberation Front (ELF). These groups use tactics like arson, bombing, and tree spiking to impede destructive projects.

Black Operations

What’s the idea? Black operations are actions by government agencies performed in secret and often funded by black budgets. Where agencies responsible for mitigating climate change cannot convince actors to take action via legal or transparent means, they may opt to engage in black ops.

What’s The Ministry’s take? When Mary realizes her legal mechanisms are failing and she might need a black ops wing, she learns that she already has one. The organization engages in agency-administered ecoterrorism, primarily in cybersecurity. Mary grapples with the ethical questions raised by what she calls “playing the god game” but ultimately concludes it is necessary.

“You grew up in Nepal, right? And I grew up in Ireland. In both places there was a lot of political violence. Which really means murder, right? Murder and all that follows murder…It’s not at all clear it has ever done any good in the world at all.”

What’s happening in the real world? Declassified CIA documents have revealed instances of black operations throughout history, including an assassination plot against Fidel Castro, promotion of regime change in Iran, and surveillance of reporters to identify their confidential sources. Documentation leaked by Wikileaks revealed that the US engaged in espionage and threats to garner support for the 2009 Copenhagen climate accord and details the extent of political negotiations in setting its terms.

Cyber-attacks

What’s the idea? Attacking technology systems can aid in obtaining classified information or bringing down targeted operations. Compared to physical attacks, cyber-attacks can minimize human harm and public visibility.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Cyber-attacks are the primary weapon of the ministry’s black ops wing. One target is coal plants, with the aim of increasing the perceived risk of funding additional plants.

“Possibly some coal plants have experienced problems. They’ve had to go offline, and the investment crowd has seen that and understood that they won’t ever be good investments again…New coal plant construction worldwide is down eighty percent since these things started happening.”

What’s happening in the real world? Cyber attacks against the energy sector are on the rise, primarily from nation states seeking to disrupt energy grids and cybercriminals using ransomware to extort profits. Notable cases include disabling an electrical grid in Ukraine in 2015 (possibly by Russia), damaging Iran’s nuclear centrifuges in 2010 (possibly by Israel and the US), and taking over oil plant controls in Saudi Arabia in 2017 (possibly by Russia). Instances of attacks by hacktivists are also on the rise, though these are mainly constrained to taking down or defacing companies’ websites and exposing private information of officials. In 2019, a well-known hacker launched a Hacktivist Bug Hunting Program to reward other hackers for leaking information from organizations furthering economic inequality.

This article is part of a series:

1. Introduction
2. Government
3. Market
4. Military
5. Collective

Climate Solutions from Ministry for the Future: The Military was originally published in Climate Conscious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is part of a series:

1. Introduction
2. Government
3. Market
4. Military
5. Collective

So far, we have introduced The Ministry for the Future’s fundamental theses regarding climate resilience, as well as the role of the public sector. In this article, we will shift towards the role of the market in the following themes:

1. A market manipulated by governments to incentivize the reduction of greenhouse gases and preservation of natural resources…
2. …resulting in the proliferation of technologies for reducing greenhouse gases.

Within each theme, I will outline the specific ideas proposed and how they manifest both in the book and in the real world today.

Manipulating the Market

Kim Stanley Robinson leverages the efficiency of the market in proliferating climate solutions, with manipulation from governments to internalize greenhouse gas emissions. Central to his approach is extending the “stick”-based approaches popular today (e.g., carbon taxes, cap-and-trade) to include rewards as well.

Modern Monetary Theory

What’s the idea? Since the market incentivizes companies to reduce labor costs, governments must also create jobs to achieve full employment in a society. One approach, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), seeks to guarantee jobs and print money (i.e., quantitative easing) to pay for them. Critics claim this will cause inflation, but proponents say this is only the case at full employment and point to the US’ response to the 2008 financial crisis as a successful example of quantitative easing.

What’s The Ministry’s take? The book uses MMT to carry the US through its COVID response and Green New Deal. As Robinson explains:

“Economics was a tool for optimizing actions to reach goals; the goals could be adjusted, and should be. So the MMT crowd admitted they were proposing a move to a new political economy, rather than merely adjusting capitalism. It was not just Keynes Plus, nor just the ad hoc theory or rather praxis that had gotten them through the 2020 crash, nor just the theory or praxis that had bolstered and ultimately paid for the Green New Deal, that early shot in the War for the Earth. It was more than that: it was trying to think through how to do the needful in the biosphere’s time of crisis, while orthodox economics failed to rise to the occasion…”

What’s happening in the real world? MMT is being pushed by the American left to pay for increased government spending on programs like the Green New Deal and a universal jobs guarantee. While it has its critics, quantitative easing has been used in the US again in response to the COVID pandemic. Whether it will pay for increasingly large social welfare programs — and the effects that might have on the economy — remain to be seen. For now, President Biden’s American Jobs Plan aims to be covered by more traditional corporate tax increases through the Made in America Tax Plan.

Blockchain Fiat Currency

What’s the idea? Making national currencies digital using blockchain would increase transparency, making transaction history visible to all. This could allow governments to crack down on tax havens, increasing their tax revenue to pay for social and environmental programs.

What’s The Ministry’s take? In the book, the major nations have converted their fiat currencies to blockchain, enabling governments to eliminate tax havens. This helps the ministry cap the wealth of wealthy individuals and better negotiate with them on climate activities:

“Now [money] can be traced, in fact it has to be to stay real. So there’s no place to hide, there are no tax havens. We blockaded the last ones, got the WTO to declare them a disqualifier, all that. No. For individuals, if you want to stay rich in the current moneyscape, it’s best to take the haircut and accept your fifty million and walk.”

With a complementary increase in property taxes, wealthy individuals also avoid shifting their money into property, with an additional side effect of more property entering the commons as public land.

Robinson is not shy about his distaste for non-fiat cryptocurrencies. In a recent talk, he contrasted the two, singling out Bitcoin, which uses about half the energy of the global banking system and about 50 times more energy per transaction than proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies.

“It’s not a cryptocurrency — particularly not the horrible cryptocurrency of Bitcoin, which burns carbon into the atmosphere to make its value, which is a scam and presumably a bubble that I hope will pop soon.”

What’s happening in the real world? Non-fiat cryptocurrencies dominate the blockchain landscape, criticized for energy use and speculation. Several national governments are exploring central bank digital currencies (CBDC), though not necessarily with blockchain technology. Depending on how these currencies are designed, they may still give governments a similar level of transparency into transaction activity or otherwise prioritize privacy, keeping transactions anonymous except in the case of a warrant. More than 60 countries are now exploring CBDCs, most notably China testing its digital yuan and the US in a research phase. Some countries like France and New Zealand have expressed a more positive attitude towards blockchain in general.

Carbon Quantitative Easing

What’s the idea? Combining MMT and blockchain fiat currency, carbon quantitative easing would issue money in exchange for drawdown of greenhouse gases or avoidance of emissions. Its new currency would be issued with a guaranteed price floor, underwritten by a consortium of central banks, and tradable for other fiat currencies.

What’s The Ministry’s take? The book’s manifestation is “carbon coin,” which becomes a major driver of change. Recognizing that people respond to rewards and penalties differently, the ministry intends to pair carbon taxes with carbon coins. Central banks are initially resistant but later backed into a corner in the face of financial crisis. Carbon coin ultimately funds projects like regenerative agriculture, carbon capture, and leaving oil in the ground. Coins are issued by a large bureaucracy known as the Climate Coalition of Central Banks (CCCB), which evaluates claims.

What’s happening in the real world? The “Chen paper” referenced in the book is real. In the paper, Delton Chen and his co-authors proposed a policy called Global Complementary Currencies for Climate Change (Global 4C). The team continues to advocate for carbon quantitative easing among academics and policymakers through the recently rebranded Global Carbon Reward initiative.

Carbon Taxes

What’s the idea? Putting a price on greenhouse gases seeks to internalize emissions within the scope of the market. One method is to tax it, incentivizing companies to reduce emissions.

What’s The Ministry’s take? If carbon quantitative easing is the carbon carrot, carbon taxes are the stick. Robinson’s view is that the most effective climate policy includes both. The book explores ways to ensure carbon taxes do not unfairly impact low-income communities, including a progressive carbon tax, increasing at higher emissions levels, as well as feebates, pairing taxes on the high-emission products with discounts on low-emission ones.

What’s happening in the real world? Many countries have implemented a carbon tax, including several EU members, Canada, India, and Japan. Carbon tax proposals in the US have repeatedly failed (for example with the 2018 MARKET CHOICE Act), though they have been implemented locally in cities like Boulder. Debates continue as to whether the US should pursue a carbon tax or a cap and trade system, which would set a limit on pollution for each industry and allow under-polluters to sell emissions credits to over-polluters. The EU, California, and others have already implemented cap and trade, and China is set to implement its own system. One risk of any carbon pricing scheme is that it gives an advantage to under-regulated competitors overseas, which is why the EU is evaluating a tax on imports from high-emitting countries, known as a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).

Temporal Discounting

What’s the idea? Temporal discounting assesses the relative value of investing resources in future vs. current generations. It is used in budgeting to adjust the value of a social investment with a return sometime in the future. Understanding relative temporal weighting can help evaluate the economics of climate change mitigation.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Given the ministry’s mission to advocate for future generations, understanding their relative value is a natural focus. The book suggests that future people tend to be highly discounted, but morally they should not be discounted at all. However, if you weight all current and future people equally, future generations will always infinitely outweigh the current generation. India sets an example by setting a very low discount rate for the next seven generations, after which the rate increases dramatically.

What’s happening in the real world? Temporal discount rates are hotly debated in climate economics since they greatly impact the outcome of climate change cost analyses. They range from 3% in Germany to 15% in the Philippines. In the United States, the rate changes by government agency and over time. The UK and France have adopted a declining discount rate, with the future discounted less over time given the future’s relative uncertainty.

Debt Relief

What’s the idea? Since the 1950s international creditors have engaged in debt-trap diplomacy: intentionally extending excessive credit to debtor countries, which cannot be repaid, so that debtors need to make concessions to the creditors. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and, more recently, China have been accused of this practice. Developing countries have been forced to extract natural resources and privatize government services for the benefit of creditors, exacerbating climate change. Debt relief forgives some or all of their debts.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Debt relief is demanded by an initiative called Africa for Africans (possibly inspired by a poem by Marcus Garvey), seeking to restore power from foreign institutions back to African nations. It starts with the rise of national-level political parties and culminates in the African Union’s declaration of all debts to the World Bank and Chinese government illegitimate and backing complete debt forgiveness.

What’s happening in the real world? In 1996, the IMF and World Bank created the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative to assist 39 countries with high poverty and debt overhang, mostly in Africa. However, assistance was tied to additional required reforms, including privatization of government programs and reduced government spending, which have been criticized as sacrificing social welfare for economic extraction. So far 36 of the 39 countries have completed their commitments, and the program has issued USD 76 billion in debt relief. Yet debt from African countries to international creditors (increasingly China) continues to increase.

Technology for Reducing Greenhouse Gases

With the right incentives in place, The Ministry almost magically sees a proliferation of technologies and practices for reducing global greenhouse gas concentrations. Many of these technologies exist today, some see boosts in efficiency, and others are envisioned reclamations of the past.

Carbon-Free Energy

What’s the idea? Reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations requires stemming anthropogenic emissions. Switching electricity production from fossil fuels to carbon-free sources and electrifying other systems will reduce these emissions.

What’s The Ministry’s take? The book passively mentions wind and hydropower, but it gives huge real estate to solar. Solar photovoltaics power swaths of India, geoengineering efforts in Antarctica, futuristic sailboats and aircraft, and experimental microwave-beaming satellites. In a recent interview, Robinson shared his outlook on solar:

“Solar power has already become cheaper. If you didn’t subsidize the carbon industry massively by taxpayer money, you already have the crossover power where clean energy could be quickly put in by government supported projects and it would be full employment, it would be a thing to do and you could have clean energy so much faster than we thought even 10 years ago.”

What’s happening in the real world? As of 2018, only 15% of energy came from renewable sources (including carbon-free sources and biofuels). The current trajectory projects an increase to 23% by 2050, but to keep global temperature increases below 1.5 °C, renewables may need to reach 74%. The Drawdown framework suggests that solar (including photovoltaics and solar thermal) will lead the way, reducing carbon emissions by up to 212 gigatons by 2050, with wind in second at up to 160 gigatons. According to the 2020 Annual Energy Outlook from the US Energy Information Administration, the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) is already lowest for solar, followed by oil and onshore wind. President Biden has pledged to reduce the cost of solar power by an additional 60% in 10 years through research on emerging technologies like efficient perovskite solar cells.

Regenerative Agriculture

What’s the idea? A quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions comes from agriculture and land use. Traditional industrial agriculture focuses on maximizing yield of monocultures through tilling and application of fertilizers and pesticides, which degrade soils and cause them to release carbon. Regenerative agriculture seeks to nurture soil health and biodiversity, converting land from a carbon source to a carbon sink.

What’s The Ministry’s take? In the book, significant swaths of agriculture are converted from traditional to regenerative practices. The leader is India, who rushes to decarbonize their economy in the aftermath of their heat wave. They view this effort as a reversal of the Green Revolution, which benefitted American agrochemical companies and degraded soils around the world.

“Sikkim and Bengal have been developing an organic regenerative agriculture that, at the same time it provides more food than before, also sequesters more carbon in the soil, and this too has been taken up across the country. Indian agriculture moving into its post–green revolution is also a giant step toward independent subtropical knowledge production, achieved in collaboration with Indonesian and African and South American permaculturists…”

What’s happening in the real world? A UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official estimated that with current practices, the world’s topsoil would be lost by 2074. Today, of the 1.4 billion hectares cultivated with crops, only 12 million hectares use regenerative practices. In India, Sikkim has become the first state to use 100% organic farming by law. The Drawdown framework estimates that by 2050, up to 322 million hectares could be converted to regenerative, and another 400 million could be converted to a less-intensive conservation state. Key drivers of adoption include major corporations like General Mills and PepsiCo recently committing to converting a total of 3 million hectares of cropland, as well as a proposed US Agriculture Resilience Act, which would fund improvements.

Direct Air Capture

What’s the idea? Direct air capture seeks to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere. The extracted carbon may be stored in bedrock or sold to third-party organizations as a manufacturing input.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Direct air capture plays an important role in the book’s drawdown efforts, complementing biosequestration methods. Adoption picks up when the ministry pressures fossil fuel companies to repurpose oil wells for storage of CO₂ as dry ice and when the concrete industry adopts captured CO₂ as an input.

What’s happening in the real world? According to the European Academies Science Advisory Council, direct air capture will be needed to keep global temperature increase below 1.5 °C due to its rapid and reliable uptake of CO₂. Biosequestration methods, while providing additional ecosystem benefits, have been criticized recently for underperforming relative to carbon capture claims. Though direct air capture is still nascent, carbon capture from point sources like power plants and factories is already mature. Currently, recovering CO₂ from ethanol, cement, and natural gas range from $46–107 per tonne, while direct air capture still costs more than $200. A key factor in adoption is carbon pricing. In California, cap and trade credits have reached $200, whereas in the EU, credits recently passed $50. Another factor is how the CO₂ is stored or reused. For example, reusing CO₂ in agriculture or beverage carbonation, while making capture more profitable, does not store carbon permanently.

Airships

What’s the idea? Aviation accounts for 2–5% of anthropogenic carbon emissions, but it could increase to 25% by 2050 as air travel increases and other sectors decarbonize more easily. Carbon-free aviation would reduce the impact of a sector that is responsible for significant emissions in high-income countries and difficult to decarbonize.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Air travel is treated as a symbol of excess among wealthy elite, and jets become targets of ecoterrorism. This spurs rapid change in the aviation industry to alternatives like battery-powered, biofuel-powered, and most notably, airships (blimps, dirigibles, and hot-air balloons). Robinson’s focus on airships appears an aesthetic choice in line with solarpunk (he also included airships in his Mars trilogy), for he emphasizes the opportunity to take things at a slower pace and enjoy the view:

“He met her on a pad on the side of Mount Tamalpais where his craft was tied to a mast, and ushered her up the jetway and along to the craft’s viewing chamber, which was located at the bow of the airship’s living quarters, a long gallery that extended under much of the length of the airship’s body, like a big keel. The gondola, they called it. A little group of passengers were already in this clear-walled and clear-floored room, eating appetizers and chatting. Nature cruise.”

What’s happening in the real world? Though many climate plans ignore air travel for its decarbonization challenges, the aviation industry is seeing pressure to take action. Norway has set a target of 30% of aviation fuel being sustainable by 2030 and 100% of short-haul flights being electric by 2040. Carbon taxes are also making fuel more expensive. A survey of flyers found that a third were considering reducing air travel due to climate concerns. But trajectories aren’t currently pointing towards an airship future. Rather, the focus is on carbon offsets and technologies like biofuels, batteries, and hydrogen.

This article is part of a series:

1. Introduction
2. Government
3. Market
4. Military
5. Collective

Climate Solutions from Ministry for the Future: The Market was originally published in Climate Conscious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is part of a series:

1. Introduction
2. Government
3. Market
4. Military
5. Collective

In the previous article, we looked at a piece of landmark climate fiction, The Ministry for the Future, and its envisioned sustainable world order. We discussed the author’s underlying premise: that solutions must be driven by and among nation states. In this article, we will focus on his proposed role for the public sector within the following themes:

1. Nation states working together to improve social and environmental welfare…
2. …and bringing more of the biosphere into the commons, actively regulating it toward a life-sustaining equilibrium.

Within each theme, I will outline the specific ideas proposed and how they manifest both in the book and in the real world today.

Nation States Working Together

The Ministry envisions an expansion of power at the national and international levels compared to the market. This power is used to regulate social and environmental welfare towards a set of indicators beyond GDP.

Global Agreements

What’s the idea? Given that power is currently concentrated with nation states but our problems are global in scope, national governments need to come together to form agreements like the Paris Agreement to address climate change. Such agreements may or may not be legally binding under international law.

What’s The Ministry’s take? The book takes a largely pessimistic view of the Paris Agreement’s efficacy. Since commitments made to address climate change are voluntary under the agreement, nations do not initially make much progress. At the first global stocktake of progress in 2023:

“Reporting was inconsistent and incomplete, and yet still it was very clear that carbon emissions were far higher than the Parties to the Agreement had promised each other they would be, despite the 2020 dip.”

The fictional ministry charged with its implementation grows particularly frustrated with its inability to hold countries accountable in courts. The International Criminal Court only allows prosecution of individual crimes, and the US does not participate. The International Court of Justice only allows states to prosecute each other. National courts are unlikely to hold their own countries accountable.

What’s happening in the real world? So far agreements have had mixed success. In 1992, the United Nations formed the UN Framework for Climate Change Convention (UNFCC), which established the Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings. In 1997, the COP adopted the Kyoto Protocol, which legally required developed countries to reduce emissions by an average of 5% below 1990 levels and created a carbon trading market. However, by 2012, its participants (which excluded the US, China, and India) only accounted for 15% of global emissions. In 2015, the COP adopted the Paris Agreement, which applied to virtually all countries but allowed each nation to set its own voluntary targets. In 2020, participants were expected to increase commitments, but the conference was postponed due to COVID-19.

Ministry for the Future

What’s the idea? Under a failing Paris Agreement, a Ministry for the Future is proposed as a subsidiary body of the COP acting permanently outside of COP meetings to ensure the agreement’s implementation.

What’s The Ministry’s take? The book establishes the ministry as a subsidiary body in 2025 with the following mission:

“…to advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens…defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protection.”

Despite its limited ability to take legal action, the ministry ultimately makes the Paris Agreement successful. With persistence, the ministry devises creative solutions for reducing greenhouse gases through a combination of mediating additional agreements (e.g., carbon coin), negotiating with industry (e.g., repurposing oil wells towards direct air capture), and administering its own projects (e.g., through its black operations wing).

What’s happening in the real world? Economist Tatsuyoshi Saijo, a proponent of future design, has proposed a similarly named “ministry of the future,” aiming to incorporate representation of future generations into institutional decision-making. Robinson’s ministry may have drawn inspiration from this, as well as the Paris Agreement’s allowance of the COP to establish “subsidiary bodies…deemed necessary for the implementation of the Agreement.” The mission of promoting legal standing for “all living creatures” appears inspired by the rights of nature movements, which has successfully extended legal personhood to ecosystems in New Zealand, Ecuador, and India and continues to build traction.

Alternative Prosperity Indices

What’s the idea? Governing to the maximization of gross domestic product (GDP) has led to social inequality and environmental degradation. Recognizing that happiness and income are not correlated beyond a certain point, alternative prosperity indices seek to better represent overall welfare and incorporate factors external to the market.

What’s The Ministry’s take? By the end of the book, “a whole new economics” arises including new ways of measuring measurement. Those mentioned include:

• The Big Index (i.e., atmospheric CO₂ concentration)
• Gini coefficient
• Genuine Progress Indicator
• Human Development Index Inequality Adjusted
• Happy Planet Index
• Inclusive wealth
• Food Sustainability Index
• Ecological footprint
• Biosphere and Civilization Health Meta-Index (a theoretical aggregation of indices)

What’s happening in the real world? Most of the above indices are real and used today in varying degrees. Only in a few cases have governmental bodies officially adopted these metrics as governing indicators — for example, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness and the UN Development Program’s Human Development Index. Both the US and China have attempted to implement a Green GDP indicator, which would adjust GDP according to resource depletion and pollution, but efforts were derailed by the fossil fuel industry and political opposition.

AI-Supported Central Planning

What’s the idea? While the market has proven to be a more efficient calculator of value than central planning, central planning can shape value according to additional factors of social and environmental welfare. The rise of artificial intelligence could make a more efficient form of central planning possible. Such an AI would track the flows of money, simulate scenarios, allocate resources, and adjust prices incorporating social and environmental costs.

What’s The Ministry’s take? The ministry’s resident computer geek, Janus Athena, presents a conceptual proposal for how AI might enable new forms of central planning that are as efficient as the market while incorporating additional factors. This approach informs various projects undertaken by the ministry, including carbon coin (a currency distributed based on evidence of carbon capture) and YourLock (an open-source social network and source of data for the ministry’s digital “shadow government”).

What’s happening in the real world? Artificial intelligence is reviving an age-old debate between central planning and the market. The book points to high-frequency trading, which already uses artificial intelligence to outperform the market. AI has also been proposed for setting tax policy and many other governance use cases. Likely AI will increasingly be used to guide human decisions for specific use cases along these lines before the possibility emerges for it to set prices economy-wide. As feasibility progresses, the question will remain: what values are we driving the market towards, and what data is available to guide the system?

Global Passport

What’s the idea? Given the expected rise in refugees in the face of climate catastrophe, a “global passport” could allow refugees to live in any country of their choosing. Countries would have immigration quotas and waitlists, with priority given to families residing in refugee camps longest.

What’s The Ministry’s take? At the start of the book, Mary and Badim grapple with the possibility of climate justice, noting that the countries most affected by climate change are driven to collapse by the highest emitters.

“Justice?” Badim made a skeptical face. “What is that?”

The global passport, enacted by the COP at the end of the book, is Robinson’s image of climate justice. He pairs it with a worldwide universal job guarantee and subsidies for transportation and settlement. In the hopes that refugees eventually return home, stable countries help repair countries with the most refugees.

What’s happening in the real world? The global passport is modeled off of the Nansen passport, devised by Norway’s Fridtjof Nansen and issued by the League of Nations from 1922 to 1938 to relocate stateless refugees after World War I. 450,000 passports were issued and honored by governments in 52 countries. In the 1950s, the United Nations began issuing refugee identity certificates and refugee travel documents, some of which allow refugees to travel and return home. A new program called Qualifications Passport for Refugees has also originated in Norway to facilitate migration for refugees pursuing higher education. The passport has been adopted by the Council of Europe and is being piloted internationally under UNESCO.

Energy Policy

What’s the idea? In an attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, regulations can facilitate the transition to renewable energy and increased efficiency.

What’s The Ministry’s take? When Mary asks her team, “What should we be telling national governments to do?” they respond with a list of policies, the majority of which focus on regulating energy. These include industry efficiency standards, renewable portfolio standards, building codes, and vehicle electrification and fuel economy standards. According to her team, these recommendations are “quite old now” but still “not happening” due to political inertia. In seeming opposition to these proposals, the book also promotes the idea of Jevon’s paradox: as efficiency increases, consumption also increases, canceling out the efficiency effects.

What’s happening in the real world? The 2021 Annual Energy Outlook by the US Energy Information Administration lists renewable energy portfolio targets and a history of applicable energy efficiency regulations at US federal and state levels. It concludes that “most states are meeting or exceeding their required levels of renewable generation, based on qualified generation or purchase of renewable energy credits.” Additionally, the currently proposed American Jobs Plan proposes the establishment of an Energy Efficiency & Clean Electricity Standard (EECES) with a target of 100% carbon-free power by 2035. The other leading emitter, China, has set a target of reaching net-zero emissions by 2060, though skeptics point out its slim interim targets.

Bringing the Biosphere into the Commons

One of Robinson’s proposed roles of government is to expand the commons to include larger swaths of the biosphere. But in his vision, we must move beyond mere conservation towards active alteration, boosting biodiversity, biosequestration of carbon, and regulation of the climate.

Rewilding

What’s the idea? Human use of land and water has degraded large swaths of natural habitat, caused mass extinctions, and increased desertification. Humans and livestock account for 96% of mammal biomass. Restoring land and sea to natural habitat would increase nature’s carbon drawdown potential, preserve remaining biodiversity, and improve local water cycles, making life on the planet more resilient to disruptions.

What’s The Ministry’s take? The book’s Half Earth campaign to rewild half the planet slowly takes shape in the margins. It starts with supporting natural wildlife migration by connecting existing habitats through wildlife corridors and tagging animals in an Internet of Animals. The initiative expands through larger-scale restoration projects around the world. The main challenges are garnering public support and encouraging residents to migrate. Public officials in the US initially market the idea as beneficial to agriculture. Eventually, they pay people to relocate while allowing those who wish to stay to work in conservation.

What’s happening in the real world? The campaign is based on the real Half Earth project spearheaded by biologist E.O. Wilson. Also picking up steam is the Campaign for Nature, based on a paper which recommended a lower 30% restoration of land and sea by 2030 and an additional 20% set aside as “climate stabilization areas” in order to prevent 70% of anticipated species extinctions. The Campaign for Nature has become known as “30x30” and caught on with legislators. Last fall, the governor of California issued a 30x30 executive order and US Senator Tom Udall introduced a 30x30 bill. In January 2021, President Biden also issued a 30x30 executive order. A case study highlighted in the book, the Yukon to Yellowstone (Y2Y) corridor, has been successful. The idea for the Internet of Animals is likely based on a project launched in 2018 with the same moniker, which uses satellites to track animal migrations.

Solar Radiation Management

What’s the idea? Solar radiation management seeks to increase the reflectivity of the earth’s atmosphere and surface to decrease temperatures. With many known risks, the technique is considered at best a temporary fix since greenhouse gases may continue to build up as interventions wear off.

What’s The Ministry’s take? The book treats solar radiation management as inevitable in the face of inaction on emissions. In the aftermath of India’s heatwave, the government sprays sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to increase reflectivity. Temperatures in India decrease 2 °C and globally 1 °C, with the effect fading over 6 years. They monitor effects on monsoon activity and find nothing major. At the end of the book, Mary arrives in the Arctic, where melted sea ice has been replaced with yellow dye to boost reflectivity.

What’s happening in the real world? Many interventions are being evaluated, including injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, brightening clouds, fertilizing the ocean with iron, brightening ship wakes, spreading silica beads over Greenland, installing a sunshade in outer space, genetically engineering brighter vegetation, and painting roofs white. Stratospheric injection has been garnering attention due to its efficiency, though it comes with risks to the water cycle and ozone layer, depending on the material used (calcite is currently considered the safest option). Another risk is “termination shock”: if greenhouse gases rise in the background, temperatures will jump suddenly as aerosols fade, causing severe effects. The first test, planned by a Harvard team for this summer, has been postponed due to public concerns.

Mass Deposition

What’s the idea? Critical ice formations are melting, including the West Antarctic ice sheet, Arctic sea ice, Greenland ice sheet, and Himalaya ice caps. These varyingly increase temperatures by reducing reflectivity, contribute to sea level rise, and disrupt ocean currents by desalinating the water. Dumping sea water back onto the ice could help prevent irreversible tipping points.

What’s The Ministry’s take? A research crew works tirelessly to make water refreeze on the West Antarctic ice sheet. They ultimately succeed with a design that pumps just enough water from directly beneath the ice sheet, relying on the pressure of the glacier to aid in the pumping. The ministry then helps scale the solution across Antarctica and Greenland.

What’s happening in the real world? A paper published in 2019 (likely the one referenced in the book) showed that reversing melting in Antarctica through mass deposition was possible but requires significant energy and infrastructure for desalination and snow production. A proposal for pumping water up from the glacier base was included in a recent article, among other ideas, including buttresses to support glaciers where they meet the ocean.

Watershed Management

What’s the idea? Climate models predict that certain regions will become dryer, with decades-long mega-droughts impacting the North American southwest. Local water cycles have also been degraded by land use practices, leading to increased desertification and flooding. Improved watershed management will be critical to ensuring a continued supply of water during dry periods.

What’s The Ministry’s take? Mary’s visit to California reveals a regional approach to managing water through drought. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) had “created a new commons, which was water itself, owned by all and managed together.” Through a combination of dams in the reservoirs of the Sierra Nevada foothills and storage of groundwater beneath the Central Valley, water could be reliably distributed throughout the state via a network of pipelines and system of allotments.

What’s happening in the real world? This model appears to be an evolution of the Central Valley Project, created in 1933 to irrigate California’s Central Valley via reservoirs in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and other mountains. The project was administered by the US Bureau of Reclamation in part to support the resettlement of thousands of individuals displaced by the Dust Bowl, which was caused by a combination of poor agricultural practices and drought. The SGMA policy was enacted in 2014, requiring water agencies to keep water basins balanced and funding local improvement projects.

This article is part of a series:

1. Introduction
2. Government
3. Market
4. Military
5. Collective

Climate Solutions from Ministry for the Future: Governments was originally published in Climate Conscious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is part of a series:

1. Introduction
2. Government
3. Market
4. Military
5. Collective

Swimming in an ocean of apocalyptic media and political gridlock, it can be difficult to imagine a future in which we successfully meet the great challenges of our time. That’s why Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest book, The Ministry for the Future, impacted me so deeply. Weaving a diverse tapestry of the latest ideas for meeting our planetary crises, he manages to paint a narrative that, while far from utopian, feels both optimistic and realistic. Ezra Klein, too, called it “the most important book I’ve read this year.”

The ideas in The Ministry are not new. Nearly all of them exist today as either proposals or mature projects. What Robinson does particularly well is show, step by step, how these ideas might piece together to form a new world order. In a recent interview, he explained his literary aim as follows:

“It’s hard to imagine how we get to a better system. Imagining the better system isn’t that hard; you just make up some rules about how things should work…But the story of getting to a new and better social system, that’s almost an empty niche in our mental ecology. So I’ve been throwing myself into that attempt.”

Robinson takes an opinionated stance on the roots of our climate gridlock, which forms the foundation of his narrative. He clarified this position in a recent talk:

1. The international political community has set a target threshold of limiting global warming to 2 °C compared to pre-industrial levels to avoid catastrophic tipping points. We can burn another 500 gigatons of fossil fuels before we reach this threshold.
2. 3,500 gigatons of fossil fuels are still available for extraction. In today’s economy, this represents $1.6 quadrillion dollars in value, with little incentive to leave it in the ground.
3. 80 percent of these reserves are state-owned, and the rest are on land regulated by states. Therefore, the problem fundamentally rests within the power of nation states.

While the particular numbers can be debated, the premise is helpful: interventions must be made by and among nation states. This doesn’t stop Robinson from chipping away at the problem from the grassroots as well. In Robinson’s world, as in ours, there is no silver bullet. Many diverse solutions come together to create emergent transformation. There is a role for each of us.

Paths to the Future

In the articles that follow, I outline seven tenets I perceive as core to Robinson’s approach, as well as the specific climate solutions implementing each tenet. For each solution, I provide additional context on where the solution stands in the real world. You will see that just about every technology, project, and social movement in the story already exists today in some form, awaiting our support.

Nation states working together to improve social and environmental welfare…

1. Global Agreements
2. Ministry for the Future
3. Alternative Prosperity Indices
4. AI-Supported Central Planning
5. Global Passport
6. Energy Policy

…and bringing more of the biosphere into the commons, actively regulating it toward a life-sustaining equilibrium.

1. Rewilding
2. Solar Radiation Management
3. Mass Deposition
4. Watershed Management

A market manipulated by governments to incentivize the reduction of greenhouse gases and preservation of natural resources…

1. Modern Monetary Theory
2. Blockchain Fiat Currency
3. Carbon Quantitative Easing
4. Carbon Taxes
5. Temporal Discounting
6. Debt Relief

…resulting in the proliferation of technologies for reducing greenhouse gases.

1. Carbon-Free Energy
2. Regenerative Agriculture
3. Direct Air Capture
4. Airships

Military power shifting from nation states toward actors working on behalf of the planet.

1. Mutually Assured Destruction
2. Ecoterrorism
3. Black Operations
4. Cyber Attacks

Decentralized organization for local climate interventions and community resilience…

1. Participatory Local Government
2. Nonviolent Direct Action
3. Indigenous Stewardship
4. Worker-Owned Cooperatives
5. Open-Source Social Networking

…and the emergence of a collective planetary consciousness through direct personal interactions with climate.

1. Social Disruption
2. Planet-Centered Spirituality
3. Collective Energy Conservation
4. Ecotherapy

This article is part of a series:

1. Introduction
2. Government
3. Market
4. Military
5. Collective

Climate Solutions from Ministry for the Future was originally published in Climate Conscious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is part of a series:

• Introduction: What are tipping points?
• 1. The Arctic
• 2. The Antarctic
• 3. The Oceans
• 4. The Weather
• Reflection: Where to start?

Where to Start?

With so many critical tipping points, we are still left with the question of where to focus. All of these tipping points require action to prevent their occurrence and mitigate their effects. But by now you may be seeing patterns: some are more urgent than others, and some cascade into others like dominoes. Underlying all of them is an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. With global efforts to keep average temperatures down to 1.5 °C, models predict that the worst effects can be avoided. However, in some cases observations have been outstripping initial predictions, so we must assume that there are factors and interactions that simply can’t be anticipated.

What criteria might we use to evaluate the urgency of these tipping elements? Here are a few:

1. To what extent are we already seeing the dynamics of the tipping element play out?
2. How long might it take to reach a tipping point threshold under anticipated emissions trajectories, recognizing that our predictions are inherently uncertain?
3. What are the impacts of the tipping element: locally, cascading to other elements, and/or further driving global warming?
4. How possible is it to reverse the dynamics? How much time do we have to do so? What are the risks of our available options?

In some cases, tipping points may have already been reached, including the melting of several major ice masses and the collapse of coral reefs, which could justify some level of geoengineering intervention. One in particular, the melting of the Arctic sea ice, drives countless cascading effects. Other elements stand to accelerate global warming through further emissions, such as the dieback of the Amazon Rainforest and thawing permafrost. Some elements are reversible through local action without requiring global greenhouse gas reductions or geoengineering, including protecting the Amazon and boreal forests.

When it comes down to you, a final factor to consider is where you personally feel drawn to dedicate your energy. The world is calling upon us to take compassionate action to heal it. Coral reefs will be saved by people who love the sea. The Arctic will be saved by those who long for eternal days and nights. If each of us finds a way to make change that resonates, new tipping elements will emerge moving the earth back to a state of wholeness.

This article is part of a series:

• Introduction: What are tipping points?
• 1. The Arctic
• 2. The Antarctic
• 3. The Oceans
• 4. The Weather
• Reflection: Where to start?

A Guide to Climate Tipping Points: Where to Start? was originally published in Climate Conscious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is part of a series:

• Introduction: What are tipping points?
• 1. The Arctic
• 2. The Antarctic
• 3. The Oceans
• 4. The Weather
• Reflection: Where to start?

4. The Weather

The oceans, land, and atmosphere interact in complex ways that drive changes in air circulation, temperature, and humidity over our continents. Climate change is expected to drive more extreme weather, but that will look different depending on where you are in the world. We have seen how the polar jet stream affects weather throughout North America. Other major drivers include the El Niño system over the Pacific Ocean, monsoon systems across land-ocean boundaries, and local hydrological cycles maintained by forests and mountains.

4.1 More Permanent El Niño State

How does the system normally function? Over the equatorial Pacific Ocean, trade winds move water from east to west, piling up hotter water in the western Pacific and drawing up cooler water in the eastern Pacific. In a cycle that lasts about four years, the winds speed up and slow down, shifting the location of the hot water. When the hot water moves east, El Niño conditions occur, driving extreme wet and dry weather in different parts of the world, partly through displacement of the polar jet stream (see #1.9). When the hot water moves west, La Niña conditions occur, with opposite weather effects. The coupled water-atmospheric system is known as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

How is it affected by climate change? The interactions between ENSO and climate change are complex, but most scientists agree that shifting surface temperatures and atmospheric dynamics will have an effect. One study suggests that the ocean surface will warm particularly over the eastern Pacific, due in part to disruptions to ocean circulation patterns even in the Atlantic (see #1.3). This would increase the temperature gradient in El Niño events, making them more intense. Locations of rainfall are also likely to shift.

How does this affect the planet? About every 20 years, a particularly extreme instance of El Niño or La Niña will occur, but climate models suggest that, with rising temperatures, extreme events are likely to occur more frequently. The effects would be experienced around the globe, including dryer monsoon rainy seasons in India (see #4.4) and in the Sahel (see #4.3).

What are the tipping points? Current climate models do not demonstrate tipping point behavior in ENSO shifts, suggesting they could be gradual and reversible.

What is the timeline? Studies suggest El Niños are already becoming more intense and that the frequency of extreme events could increase to every 10 years by 2100, even under a 1.5 °C global temperature increase.

What can we do about it? Reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations can reduce the warming effects driving ENSO shifts. But in all parts of the world, communities should prepare for more extreme cases of the weather they have come to expect from El Niño and La Niña.

4.2 Dieback of the Amazon Rainforest

How does the system normally function? The Amazon Rainforest serves multiple benefits to the planetary system. It is one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, as well as a major carbon sink, containing about 15% of total carbon stored in global vegetation and drawing down about 5% of annual carbon emissions. Through transpiration, it creates reflective clouds and draws air from the ocean, pouring rain over the South American continent.

How is it affected by climate change? The primary driver of Amazon dieback is land use practices encouraging the active destruction of rainforest habitat for agriculture and livestock. However, the ecosystem is also impacted by climate change dynamics under counterbalancing forces. On one hand, warming and drying diminish rainforest viability. However, increased atmospheric CO2 accelerates photosynthesis and makes it more water-efficient, albeit with less transpiration and, therefore, a slower water cycle. Precipitation is also influenced by shifting El Niño cycles (see #4.1), and nutrient cycles depend on the future of the Sahara (see #4.3). So far, about 11 percent of the rainforest is considered deforested and another 17 percent degraded. Findings also indicate that the rainforest is getting wetter, while deforested areas are getting drier.

How does this affect the planet? Reduced forest cover and viability restrict the system’s effectiveness as a carbon sink, both releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere and shrinking its drawdown capacity. Disturbance of the water cycle will lead to drought on the South American continent. Mass extinction would result in the biodiversity hotspot, reducing variation in the genetic pool and, therefore, overall resilience of the biosphere.

What are the tipping points? A tipping point has been predicted for deforestation at 20–25% of land cover, triggering a shift to a savanna ecosystem over large swaths of the region and converting from a carbon source to a carbon sink. Recent droughts and floods appear to indicate that the ecosystem is beginning to oscillate between two states. In the absence of deforestation, global warming could trigger a similar transition with a temperature increase of 4 °C.

What is the timeline? Deforestation was brought under control by Brazilian policy in 2011, but under the leadership of Jair Bolsonaro, it is again on the rise. If trends continue, some predict the tipping point could be reached in 10–15 years.

What can we do about it? The most urgent action is to protect and restore the Amazon rainforest ecosystem. Jair Bolsonaro has refuted international pressure as a threat to Brazilian sovereignty, but the US is in talks to make a deal.

4.3 Greening of the Sahara/Sahel

How does the system normally function? Between Africa’s arid Sahara Desert and Sudan-Guinea Savanna lies a thin transition region called the Sahel. The climate of these areas is governed by the West African monsoon, a seasonal cycle of alternating winds driven by differences in humidity between the Sahara and the Atlantic Ocean. Typically, the monsoon drives alternations between a dry season with lower vegetation and a wet season with higher vegetation.

How is it affected by climate change? Paleoclimate studies suggest that the behavior of the West African monsoon has been highly variable throughout history, including a period where the Sahara Desert was wet and vegetated from 12,000 to 5,000 years ago. More recently, in the 1970s, an increase in ocean surface temperature caused drought in the Sahel, offering a glimpse of changes to come. As land heats up faster than ocean from global warming, the Sahel and southern parts of the Sahara could see more rain, driving new, stable vegetation. However, there are counterbalancing forces. Atmospheric aerosols from human pollution could dampen the increase in land temperature, and slowing ocean currents could lead to faster increases in water temperature (see #1.3).

How does this affect the planet? Greening the Sahel and Sahara could have positive effects on the bioregion, including increased biodiversity and ecosystem services for the region, as well as serving as a new carbon sink. However, the change would come with ripple effects on other ecosystems. A major factor is dust. Huge volumes of nutrient-rich dust from the Sahara’s historical green periods move over the Atlantic Ocean each year, adding carbon to the ocean, decreasing tropical cyclone activity, and fertilizing the Amazon Rainforest. Increasing rainfall would mean less dust, disrupting the marine carbon pump (see #3.1), El Niño cycles (see #4.1), and the Amazon Rainforest (see #4.2).

What are the tipping points? Based on paleoclimate evidence, we know that tipping points can bring about rapid change, alternating the region between desert and savannah ecosystem.

What is the timeline? Given the competing forces, models do not predict a high confidence in reaching a threshold under a 2 °C global increase.

What can we do about it? Many see a greening Sahel as a net positive, and efforts to terraform the region are already underway. A major initiative to plant trees across the Sahel known as the Great Green Wall initially failed due to an inhospitable climate and insufficient management, though it has evolved into more localized and intensive reforestation efforts focused on restoring small water cycles. Models suggest that an engineered forest in the Sahara would only drive 15–20% of the rainfall it would need to survive.

4.4 Chaotic Indian Summer Monsoon

How does the system normally function? The Indian monsoon functions similarly to the West African monsoon, whereby seasonal differences in temperatures between the land and sea drive alternating wet and dry seasons. The monsoon delivers about 70 percent of India’s annual rainfall. Because the monsoon trough shifts north and south around the foothills of the Himalayas, rain in each location can vary dramatically throughout the summer wet season.

How is it affected by climate change? Similarly to the West African monsoon, competing factors are at play. Increasing land temperatures could increase rainfall, while aerosols from pollution could dampen the effect. This could possibly lead to increased variability and extremes. Increased humidity from rising air temperatures could make wet seasons longer and more intense, though this would decrease during more extreme El Niños (see #4.1). One study suggests that monsoon rainfall has already been increasing since 2002.

How does this affect the planet? Chaotic monsoon activity is likely to impact India’s population, including increased flooding and disease, as well as disrupted food production. For example, during the 2018 record wet season, thousands of people died, and 2.5 million people were injured or displaced. An extreme heat wave in 2019 was exacerbated by a delayed wet season, causing hundreds of deaths.

What are the tipping points? Scientists debate whether the system has clear tipping points. Some propose that monsoons have stable active and dry states, while others claim that the spectrum of activity is linear and reversible.

What is the timeline? Predictions are mixed, with some reports predicting no change under a 2 °C temperature increase and others predicting increased precipitation and variability over the course of the century.

What can we do about it? Reversing the trends of rising temperatures and air pollution could help stabilize the Indian monsoon. However, it is likely that India will need to prepare to mitigate the effects of flooding. This could include creating embankments and dams to control floods, planning cities with ponds and permeable surfaces, restoring wetlands and forests, and regulating development in floodplains and hills.

4.5 Melting of the Himalayan Glaciers

How does the system normally function? The Hindu Kush-Himalaya mountain system separates the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan plateau, bordering 9 countries. Meltwater from snow and glaciers feeds several major river systems, which provide drinking water and ecosystem services to nearly 2 billion people. The meltwater is replenished by snow, driven by seasonal activity in the Indian and East Asian monsoon systems (see #4.4) and varying greatly across its complex topography.

How is it affected by climate change? The processes that drive Arctic amplification similarly drive a phenomenon known as elevation-dependent warming (see #1.1). The highest elevations of the Himalayas are seeing accelerated warming due to a feedback loop: elevated temperatures melt snow and ice, reflectivity decreases, and atmospheric water vapor increases, increasing atmospheric heating further. The effects of moistening are pronounced at higher elevations, which are currently driest. Aerosols, particularly black carbon and dust, encourage more rapid glacial melt, similar to the Greenland ice sheet (see #1.2). Recent reports indicate the rate of glacial melt has doubled since 1975, totaling a 15% loss of volume.

How does this affect the planet? A melting Himalaya could disrupt the lives of billions of people in terms of water, food security, natural disaster, and forced migration. The bioregion is also home to multiple biodiversity hotspots, such as mountain forests, alpine meadows, and wetlands, that could migrate, shrink, or collapse. Globally, the melt will contribute to sea level rise.

What are the tipping points? Parts of the Hindu Kush Himalaya range have already crossed a threshold into net mass loss. Multiple current and potential dynamics appear difficult to reverse, including upward migration of boundaries with permanent snow cover and transitions in ecosystem states.

What is the timeline? A recent study estimated glacier volume loss by 2100 at one-third at low emissions (1.5 °C increase), one-half at moderate emissions (2 °C increase), and two-thirds at high emissions (4–5 °C).

What can we do about it? Reducing atmospheric greenhouse gases can slow down melting. Preparing for inevitable changes will require transnational collaboration in a region of political tension. Proposals include improving mountain ecosystem resilience and disaster monitoring and response infrastructure.

4.6 Aridification of Southwest North America

How does the system normally function? The climate of the North American Southwest is typically characterized by warm and dry conditions. This is largely a result of its position between the polar jet stream and subtropical jet stream, where the northern atmospheric Hadley cell tends to deposit dry air. Historical records show variation in aridity as a result of natural oscillations in Pacific and Atlantic ocean temperature, including frequent decades-long “megadroughts” between the years 900 and 1600.

How is it affected by climate change? Climate models forecast an expansion of the Hadley cell, which would intensify heat and aridity in the region. This increase is reinforced by positive feedback: rising temperatures mean the air will tend to suck up more moisture, drying out water bodies and soils. Snowfall will also give way to rains, decreasing surface reflectivity and further increasing temperature. Drought could also be intensified by more frequent extreme La Niña states (see #4.1).

How does this affect the planet? Local impacts have already been observed, including heat waves and wildfires in California, diminishing water reserves in Arizona, lack of mountain snow in Washington, and drought in Utah. Climate models predict worsening and lengthening drought conditions, impacting water supply, food production, and the stability and carbon cycle of ecosystems.

What are the tipping points? Some level of aridification is thought to be irreversible on human timescales. Local tipping points in the ability of soil to retain moisture, the ability of mountains to replenish ice, or the capacity of ecosystems to restore to a pre-drought state would be difficult to reverse.

What is the timeline? A recent study estimated the likelihood of multidecade droughts in the southwest by the year 2100 at 75% under moderate emissions (2 °C increase) and over 80% at high emissions (4 °C increase).

What can we do about it? Diminishing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations is, once again, a critical factor. Communities in the North American Southwest can also prepare for increased drought and fire by managing water sources and use, recycling water through “sponge cities,” cultivating small water cycles, adopting drought-resistant agricultural approaches, improving management of and response to fires, and cultivating ecosystems to be more drought-resistant.

This article is part of a series:

• Introduction: What are tipping points?
• 1. The Arctic
• 2. The Antarctic
• 3. The Oceans
• 4. The Weather
• Reflection: Where to start?

A Guide to Climate Tipping Points: The Weather was originally published in Climate Conscious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.