What’s In Our Way?

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.

The response from the international community was muted – it grabbed a headline or two in more cosmopolitan outlets like the BBC and al-Jazeera, but was quickly forgotten even in these places. Crisis in Mozambique still garners international attention today in 2021: but more readily with respect to the aspiring “al Shabab” insurgency, which aims to establish an Islamic State of Mozambique. Its advance has been steady and deadly over the past years, accelerating with last summer’s offensive to seize the port city of Mocimboa da Praia, endangering a nearby $60 billion dollar natural gas industry.

In 2012, New York City faced a similar crisis: Hurricane Sandy. The storm was a thousand miles wide and flooded some 17% of the land mass of the city, doing nearly some $75 billion in economic damage. The hurricane ravaged Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in addition to the United States, where the storm claimed 106 lives, 43 of whom were New Yorkers.

So far so good: the obvious contrast of disaster response in the different zones of the world – across the divide between a “high income” country and “least developed” (Mozambique and Malawi) and “lower middle income” (Zimbabwe), or between a member of the Global North and the Global South, or of the First World and the Third World if you can stomach Cold War lingo. In terms of natural systems, there are many similarities between New York and Beira’s calamities – while Idai was the more intense of the storms, the difference between those we call “hurricanes” and “cyclones” have to do with their location on Earth rather than their intensity.

The difference maker was, of course, the social systems. In the much richer US, the hurricane activated a variety of social support mechanisms that constrained the vulnerability of the affected populations: vast public and private bureaucracies enabling the coordination of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for federal disaster relief organizations like FEMA, private insurance payouts. That version of disaster response represents a city that was “hardly prepared” for the disaster – the regulatory reckoning with various levels of mismanagement continued seven years later, with revamped building codes, disaster safe zone maps, and new smartphone-ready alert systems. The Mozambican government organized an effective health intervention to the cholera outbreak, aided by Médecins Sans Frontières, the World Health Organization, and the usual cast of other NGO characters – but the difference in the scale of what was made possible there and in New York is nevertheless clear.

Among the interesting aspects of Kim Stanley Robinson’s new climate fiction book The Ministry For the Future is its attention to a much different version of the North/South contrast. The book opens with a calamitous heatwave in Uttar Pradesh, which claims the lives of millions of people in horrific fashion. The responses in Indian politics are deep, wide ranging, and difficult to categorize in blanket, positive or negative terms. The incumbent BJP is removed from power, in favor of a multi-party coalition that gets to work refashioning Indian politics. The agricultural system shifts, switching to the kinds of labor intensive, regenerative agricultural approaches practiced in Sikkim and Bengal with strong local administration modeled off the governance practices of Kerala, a Communist state. The Indian Air Force begins running missions into the stratosphere, spraying aerosols to reflect sunlight back upwards. A network christening itself the “Children of Kali” targets passenger airplanes and surgically assassinates corporate executives it deems responsible for continued carbon emissions, and thus the tragedy the book begins with.

Later in the book, another calamity happens: this time in the Global North. The waters rise up and claim the entire city of Los Angeles. If they are anything like me, the reader braces for a sweeping political change of the kind they saw earlier in the book: a reconstruction of the formal political system, an immediate reckoning and recalibration of all productive industries, a radical break with business as usual. But what comes is interesting: there’s an immediate coordinated attack on the international system – the IMF, the Swiss banks, and the Ministry of the Future (the titular organization that aims to reshape the global political system).

The destruction of Los Angeles opens the breach for the Ministry of the Future. Suddenly, Mary Murphy is able to corral the leaders of major central banks into minting a carbon coin tied to sequestration, which they govern in a Climate Coalition for Central Banks. Meanwhile, the African Union sends drones to remove the guards operating a foreign owned mine in Namibia – ownership of which is then given to the workers, to be held cooperatively by whoever wishes to stay.

What is most interesting about this contrast is the level of centralization in the political responses to the two calamities. What the tragedy of Uttar Pradesh sets into motion in India is a full social transformation, stewarded most broadly by peasant leadership. There are transformations at the top, of course, but these mainly take the form of reconstituting the state so as to get out of people’s way, to put it somewhat polemically. The opposite seems to be the story in the North’s response to the tragedy of Los Angeles: while there are certainly people’s movements involved, the protests at the various major capitals at the world where people engage in alternative economies, what is important to the plot of the book at that point in the story is the response of the titans of capital. Neither Los Angeles’ disaster, nor a subsequent one in Arizona, leads to an immediate reshuffling of domestic political systems.

In one sense, Robinson’s narrative choice is equal parts fatalism, pragmatism, and optimism. One can read into the text a thought something like this: the capacities of a rich state express themselves in both directions: positively, when responding to calamities like Hurricane Sandy, and also negatively, when responding to threats to the established order. The same vat of resources which provides housing assistance payments also keeps COINTELPRO running – this radically circumscribes the space of transformative politics in the North in the ways it does not in the South. This is why calamity in Los Angeles and Arizona leads to symbolic political protest where tragedy and destruction in Namibia Uttar Pradesh ignites more holistic transformations of social and even natural systems (through agricultural and stratospheric aerosol injection).

On the other hand, maybe this lets us Northerners off the hook too easily: the idea that a fuller transformation is possible in the South than in the North is at the very least compatible with a radical imagination in which it is their job to take the revolutionary actions that liberate us all – taking their share of the risks on their land and at their dinner tables while Mary Murphy and the Ministry take their share at conference tables. If Robinson’s description of the horizon of political possibility is correct, then perhaps this is an objection of the wrong kind – if we object to this arrangement, we’re really objecting to the embedded unfairnesses of world history, and to direct this charge at Robinson is to shoot the messenger. But stakes should motivate us to, at the very least, double check the message: is it, in fact, true that the best we can do is cajole the elites of the elites into capitulations as slight as the construction of a new financial instrument?

To put the question another way: what prevents us from learning from Kerala and Sikkim, in the very same way that the incomprehensibly diverse and massive country of India manages to do in Robinson’s telling? What prevents us from giving the mines to the workers, as the Namibian government and the African Union manages to do in this same novel?

And what stories might we have to tell to make this possible?