The Ministry for the Future

all over but the shouting, which of course has never subsided. No one agrees on what happened or what it meant. But I know that a lot of what we did mattered, and it was supported at the time by ordinary Parisians, especially the women of the city, they were the real organizers when it came down to it, not the people at the microphones. And now of course a lot of us are back in yellow vests talking to people driving by in the roundabouts, and there is a lot of support for what we say. One driver when the traffic had stopped leaned out his window and said to me, Look it’s all about how we treat the land, the revolution will happen there. Another man said I don’t own my kids’ teacher, I don’t own my doctor, I don’t need to own my house. I just want to pay the collective for it, not some landlord.

So maybe someday the solidarity will overcome the splitting. I hope so. During the occupation I didn’t want reform, I wanted something entirely new. Now I’m thinking if we can just get the fundamentals working, it would be good. A start to something better. I don’t like to think of this as giving up, it’s just being realistic. We have to live, we have to give this place to the kids with the animals still alive and a chance to make a living. That’s not so much to ask.

Of course there is always resistance, always a drag on movement toward better things. The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change. So we don’t change, and one hard thing now is to go through a time like that, like ours during Paris, two hundred days of a different life, a different world, and then live on past that time in the still bourgeoisified state of things, without feeling defeated. For a time everything seemed possible, you felt free. You feel things so intensely when you’re young, and really it’s the first time I spoke to the world, the first time I wasn’t just the stupid kid in school, but a real person with a real life. Those seven months made me, and I’ll never forget it, never be the same. I only hope to live long enough to see it happen again. Then I’ll be happy.

56

The International Criminal Court was separate from the UN, founded by its own international treaty to prosecute crimes that were somehow outside of nation-state court systems’ jurisdiction. It was targeted toward individual crimes, and could be effective only when a combination of factors came into an unlikely conjunction. The US and several other big countries had withdrawn from the court’s jurisdiction after negative rulings against their citizens.

The World Court, more properly named the International Court of Justice, was a UN-sponsored body, so that all member states of the UN were theoretically bound to follow its rulings; but it was designed to adjudicate state-to-state disagreements, and all UN agencies were forbidden to bring cases before it. The Ministry for the Future was an agency created in the implementation meetings of the Paris Agreement, but the Paris Agreement had been brokered under the umbrella of the United Nations; so the ministry was forbidden to bring cases to the World Court.

What it came down to was that to prosecute a state, you needed to be a state, and not the UN or an individual. More than that, you had to be a state that had agreed to be within the World Court’s jurisdiction. To prosecute an individual outside a national court system, you needed to convince one of the international courts to take your case, and historically this had been hard to do. In short, these two international courts, both located at The Hague, were not well-designed as places to litigate climate justice.

Tatiana was getting more and more frustrated by this situation. If the ministry had been founded to bring legal standing and therefore lawsuits on behalf of the people of the future and the biosphere itself, fine, she said, fine fine fine: but in what court?

Tatiana concluded one of her reports to Mary with this:

— If legal action has to occur in the various national courts, even though the crime is global, and committed by those same states whose courts would be asked to judge against them, the actions will not prevail.

— If we convince a signatory nation to go to the World Trade Organization and file a complaint to the effect that destroying the biosphere contravenes WTO rules against predatory dumping and the like, this is so tenuous and slow as to be useless.

— Meanwhile the fossil fuel companies keep pouring vast sums into buying elections, politicians, media, and public opinion. Even when they come to the table to negotiate with us, they never stop these other aggressive actions. Because the best defense is a good offense.

— This last is true for us as well as for them.

Mary read this and ground her teeth. Tatiana was one of her fiercest warriors. They were now at atmospheric CO₂ levels of 463 parts per million.

The crash in insect numbers put every ecological system on terrestrial Earth in danger of collapse. Collapse— meaning most of the species currently on Earth dead and gone. The surviving species subsequent to this event would be free to spread in all the empty ecological niches, spread and evolve and speciate, so that in twenty million years, maybe less, maybe only two million years, a differently constituted array of species would fully re-occupy the biosphere.

Mary replied to Tatiana’s memo with an instruction: Pick the ten best national cases from our point of view. Do what you can to help them.

The inadequacy of this, the futility of it, made her shudder. Hoping to counter this desperate feeling, she convened her nat cat group. Natural catastrophes: it was possibly a contradiction