The Ministry for the Future

A Montana townsperson narrates this chapter. The federal government and nongovernmental agencies are offering to buy the town and relocate the 400 hundred people in this town to a nearby city so the land can be reclaimed as a habitat corridor. Like many rural towns in the Upper Midwest, this one is depopulating because young people leave as soon as possible. On the night of the final vote, people mourn and tell stories about their memories of the town. Some are opposed to the move, but they take the deal in the end. This is one face of plans to heal the environment.

This chapter is a riddle, the answer to which is herd animals. The first-person plural narrator reminds the reader that humans are herd animals and that they need other herd animals to regenerate land damaged by climate change.

The big and smaller projects to reduce the amount of carbon emissions finally bear fruit when a substantial drop is reported. Things are moving in the right direction. Two events overshadow what should be a moment of triumph for Mary. Frank is diagnosed with a brain tumor, and Tatiana is assassinated one night after she steps out of her safe house briefly. The bullets they find nearby our American ones. Mary is forced to hole up in her house, but she is furious. She tells Badim that she wants those responsible found and agrees that they should be killed by the black wing. She instructs her teams to prepare full presentations on every successful project as an act of defiance against the killers.

This chapter is a Socratic dialogue on whether technology is a driver of history. The first voice argues that it is, while the second voice argues that this is only true if you define everything as technology. The second voice argues we are the drivers of history—our intentions. The first voice notes that despite big advances in technology to mitigate climate change effects, the diminishment of nutrients in food as a result of climate change might mean we are all getting less intelligent.

Mary stays busy getting ready for the conference, but she sometimes visits Frank despite her dread of seeing him dwindle away. Frank has an aggressive form of cancer that is likely to kill him quickly. On one visit, she notes that he no longer seems so full of opinions. He says he is losing things one by one. She tells him about working cooperative systems spreading across Europe and how all the climate treaty signatories (every country at this point) plan to grant global citizenship with a passport. Frank introduces Mary to Art, an airship pilot who takes people on tours to see animals.

This chapter is narrated in the first-person by a woman in one of the Swiss refugee camps (she first appears in Chapter 48). On Day 3,352 in the camp, she learns of the scheme to release all people from the camps with global passports and supports to establish life in a country of their choosing—including their home countries as they restabilize. The narrator cannot believe it will happen at first. A month later, the process of release begins, shocking the narrator. She realizes she is fearful of yet another big change because adapting is hard. She also fears her happiness will endure even when she is allowed to leave the camp; maybe she would be unhappy no matter where she is. The only form of happiness she can commit to in the end is a promise not to miss the familiarity of being in the camp.

This chapter is a first-person narrator who mostly uses "we" pronouns. The narrator is a member of an Antarctic team working on pumping water from beneath glacier beds. They note that few deaths have occurred since Griffen died. On this day, the team realizes that they have completely pumped out all the water from under a glacier. It will take time to verify, but this should slow down the rate at which the glacier slides into the water.

The result be a slowing sea-level rise, which will in turn save wide swathes of human civilization that would have gone underwater. They cheer this good news with a toast to Ernest Shackleton, an Antarctic explorer whose achievement was survival once his exploration ship got crushed during a 1915 expedition. These modern scientists, using help from the US, Russian, and English navies, believe they've helped save the world.

The day of the COP (the Paris Agreement conference) arrives. The first day is devoted to the many successes in mitigating climate change, and there is an air of jubilation as people realize what they've managed to accomplish. The second day is devoted to what Mary calls "wicked” (480) problems. Some of these problems are the continued subordination of women, heat and die-off in the oceans as a result of previous carbon burning, and the 30 or so countries still dealing with instability (most of it the result of American and Western capture of their economies with debt). In fact, Mary concludes, the Americans are the real problem; American hegemony (dominance) after World War II created a new kind of empire, a new kind of colonialism. People at the conference won't officially talk about this, though, because they are all beholden to the US.

There are other uncomfortable data as well. One is that the population is dropping, which is good for the biosphere. No panels or presentations about it are present because of the fear that environmentalists will be accused of being anti-humanist. It is the same with the downward pressure the Super Depression put on carbon emissions. Lots of human suffering is the other side of these events.

Worse still for Mary is that Frank is in hospice and at the end of his life. Mary visits him after the conference, and he is suffering. His suffering reminds her of the same when her husband Martin was dying years ago. On another visit, she interrupts a visit from Syrine and one of her daughters. It is obvious that they both love and are frightened of Frank, that he has somehow hurt them. She leaves when he calls for medication to manage his terrible pain.

This chapter is a riddle, the answer to which is Earth, which tells the reader to discover it.

Mary begins spending more time with Frank, who is in and out of consciousness. She comes because she doesn't want him to die alone, and it seems he has no visitors. He is dead one day when she arrives. She is shocked by her grief and realizes that Frank’s dying—especially his pain and her own sense of not being able to hold on to him—has triggered her memories of the same with Martin (her husband) nearly 30 years ago.

She wanders around Zurich and ends up by the statue of Ganymede. She imagines tis this time that maybe Ganymede is “perhaps asking Zeus for a ride to Olympus. It wouldn’t be good when he got there, but he didn’t know that” (499). He was doing what humans always do—asking for “life to come through for you” (499). Life didn’t come through for Frank. He is just gone. Mary realizes that she is also suffering from a kind of PTSD and that this suffering might simply be a part of the human condition. Zurich had been for her a place where she could forget Martin's death because they had never lived or visited there together. Now Zurich is in part the place where Frank died, and Frank was her friend.

This is a chapter on the “structure of feeling” during this time. There are more animals, and they now range farther because habitat corridors and human depopulation have opened up land for them. Human population is on a downward trend, and this is okay because "[w]hat's good is what's good for the land" (502). We know all this because there is now an Internet of Animals whereby researchers tag animals to track their movements and numbers. The predominant spirit of the times is that the world is healing and that this is now a time to feel joy instead of fear.

Mary retires, and Badim is named as the acting minister. She will pop in as needed and be a professor at the local university.

This chapter is a Socratic dialogue between the traditional economist and one who rejects traditional theories. The traditionalist asks if "totalizing” (505) solutions can address what Mary called the "wicked" problems confronting the planet. The skeptic believes that there are no such solutions. Even allies on this issue fall victim to fighting over small differences in how to solve problems, so they will fail. The skeptic also argues that the so-called market at the center of capitalism no longer exists. Invisible revolutions driven by legal changes and technologies mean the paper money formerly by elites at the top of the food chain can be legislated out of existence. There is nothing backing money these days, so taking it from rich elites is very simple. Capitalism as we know it is dead.

Mary travels by airship to San Francisco for one last meeting with the central banks. She realizes that the world has essentially been saved by bankers because they now see protecting the biosphere as prudent economic policy. Madame Chan proposes some major next steps, and it strikes Mary that Minister Chan will likely be leading the bankers from here on out. She tells Minister Chan, “I pass the torch" (510).

The first-person narrator is a person active in the fight to help Honk Kong, a former colony of Great Britain's for over 150 years, to stay self-governing after 2047, the date specified for reintegrating the Hong Kong back into China's political system. An unnamed interviewer whose questions, many of them offensive to the narrator, prods the narrator to talk about why Hong Kong managed to keep its legal status as a special entity with some powers of self-governance.

The narrator thinks it was because of solidarity, persistence—30 years of weekly protests—and the “structure of feeling” that comes from having escaped one empire. They simply refused to be subalterns (colonized and powerless in a colonial system) again. They used mass, nonviolent protest, solidarity with other Cantonese speakers and the protests by the billions, a willingness to tedious work like going to meetings, and they won. Even more important, their fellow Cantonese speakers in Guangdong, a southern province, are also demanding better treatment.

After the San Francisco meeting, Mary takes a world tour in an airship piloted by Frank's friend Art. She gets the chance to see the impact of efforts to heal the biosphere across several continents. She also engages in a flirtation with Art, a quiet man who seems to like her. When they reach the end of the tour, she tells him she wants to be his girlfriend. He isn't an assertive man, but he responds positively when she makes it clear she likes and wants him. He tells her his home base is a room in Zurich, but he spends a lot of time in the air because he loves it up there. Mary promises they will figure out how to be together, and they part on good terms.

A linguist and surfer from Hawaii narrates this chapter in the first person. They recall the night that people all over the world simultaneously sang a hymn to the Earth—a global Earth (Gaia) Day. The narrator felt a sense of deep connection to the biosphere and all living things in that sublime moment. This event seems to be a spontaneous eruption of one of the first rites of the Earth religion Badim called for previously.

Mary slowly builds a life for herself. She finds a co-op room where she can live, takes up her swimming again, and eventually goes to work as a volunteer for the agency working with refugees entering the global passport scheme. She meets up with Badim one day and finds him gloomy, burdened by his work. She discovers he still doesn't trust anyone enough to engage in the work of the MftF's black wing, so he is likely still carrying that burden as well. She tells him that she believes he was responsible for the bombing of the MftF, a smart political move that bought them goodwill and more government backing. He denies it, but she doesn’t believe him. They talk about the Gaia Day celebration, and he says it was a good thing, especially because having some form of Earth-prioritizing religion is necessary to the work of protecting it.

The first-person narrator is the former refugee from the Swiss camp. She now lives in a more rural Swiss canton (state) and has opened a restaurant by combining her funds with another resettled family. When she was first released from the camp, she planned to go back to her native Syria, but she realized she had spent so much of her life away that she was no longer that same person. Once in her new hometown she strove to learn the language. She learned High German, one of several languages spoken in Switzerland, and found that doing that made people treat her less as a foreigner/outsider and more like someone who belonged.

She still finds the Swiss odd, especially their obsession with punctuality, but she sees that it must have taken a degree of openness to allow refugees numbering almost as many as the Swiss to become a part of their country. The place the Swiss made for them, despite the financial difficulties and their in-between legal status as foreigners, restored her dignity and that of others like her. This sense of dignity is what she wants for everyone, even the white nationalists who attack people like her.

Mary and Art reconnect so they can participate in Fasnacht (similar to Mardi Gras in the United States), a carnival night when people celebrate, drink, and listen to music played by professionals and amateurs alike. Mary and Art go from bar to bar and even play Irish tunes on slide whistles in front of a small audience. At the end of the night, Mary takes Art to the statue of Ganymede and the eagle (said to represent Zeus) and asks him what he takes it to mean. Art tells her the man is offering his life to the eagle, and maybe this is a symbol of what humans are now doing—offering their lives to the animals. Mary experiences a moment of deep connection to everyone, most particularly Art, and she has that everything feeling she talked about with Frank. Unlike Frank's, this one is not about feeling everyone’s suffering. It is about the sense that no matter what, people hold their own futures in their own hands. There won't be an end to them.