In 2019, Cyclone Idai generated the fastest wind speeds ever recorded on the African continent. Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe were all affected – the Mozambican city of Beira was levelled, and hundreds of thousands of people in the region were displaced. Many died from the heavy rains before the hurricane landed, many more died from the hurricane itself, and still more from the cholera outbreak in the wake of the first two calamities: a month after the storm, over a thousand lives had been confirmed lost. A year after the crisis, over 40,000 Zimbabweans and nearly 100,000 Mozambicans were still living in makeshift shelters, and nearly ten million in the region were still in need of food aid.
Over the next ten days, we’re running a seminar on Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novel about climate change and how our political and economic system might have to change to stop it, The Ministry for the Future. We’re happy to be able to do this – it’s an important book. Since it came out, it’s had an enormously enthusiastic reception (see e.g. Barack Obama and Ezra Klein). What we want to do in this seminar is not to celebrate it further (although it certainly deserves celebration) but to help it do its work in the world. So we’ve asked a number of people to respond to the book, by arguing it through and, as needs be, arguing with it. We’ve also published a reply by Stan.
If you want to link to the entire seminar, use this address. The seminar is generally available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. In plain language: you can probably do what you want with it so long as you don’t try to make money from it, and so long as you are willing to share whatever changes you make under the same conditions as we are sharing it. You can find hyperlinks to the pieces below. If you prefer to read it as a PDF, you’ll find that here. And if you want to remix it under the above license, it is available in various formats at the bottom of this post.
The participants in the seminar:
- Henry Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. Technocracy and Empire.
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Maria Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. What is Ours is Only Ours to Give.
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Jessica Green is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Can the World’s Bankers Really Save the Climate?
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Oliver Morton is The Economist’s briefings editor. On Solar Geoengineering and Kim Stanley Robinson.
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Suresh Naidu is a professor of economics and international and public affairs at Columbia University. This Is How It Gets Better.
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John Quiggin blogs at Crooked Timber. Half the Earth?.
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Olufemi Taiwo is an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. What’s In Our Way?
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Todd Tucker is director of governance studies at the Roosevelt Institute. Ministry for Your Future Soul.
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Belle Waring blogs at Crooked Timber. The Sudden Tempest of Ultimate Summer.
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Kim Stanley Robinson is a writer. Response.
Seminar Markdown Version.
Seminar TeX Version.
Seminar HTML Version.
Seminar Word .docx Version.