As I return to this document on Aliah’s third birthday, having failed to turn it in to my publisher and with a growing doubt that I ever will, I’m jealous as always of her mother’s rich storytelling. Moniza recently journeyed to Nunavut, the Canadian territory in the Arctic Circle where melting ice and tundra are exposing massive deposits of copper, diamonds, gold, uranium, and zinc. The Legislative Assembly of the Inuit, whose ancestors date back to the first arrival of Homo sapiens on the North American continent, implemented a radical new policy, flummoxing every culture’s xenophobes: A program of assisted migration brings refugees from every corner of the planet to work the mines but also uses that newfound mineral wealth to build homes, schools, and grant small-business loans to displaced peoples. Free housing, health care, and language school for all new arrivals. Children receive an education in the history of the Inuit people and how they’ve survived for millennia in one of the most inhospitable climates humans have ever known.
“In just a few short years,” my wife wrote, “Iqaluit has transformed from a sleepy capital village to a bustling hub of global trade and prosperity with a Little Haiti, Little Cambodia, Little Bangladesh, Somalitown, Manilatown, even a Little California. Other Arctic Canadian provinces are now looking to follow suit, and one can imagine Whitehorse and Yellowknife and Eagle Plains becoming, if not the new cradle of civilization, then at least places where the weariest of peoples can renew their lives, where lavish government funds will give them the opportunity to start over while holding on to whatever memory of their vanishing homes they can manage to keep alive. Maybe this is what hope looks like as a great wandering of nations begins, a mass movement of human beings that will not end for centuries.”
Perhaps this experiment is spilling over, as young people in the southern latitudes once again attempt to use language and manners to attack intractable social, political, and ecological injustice. Now all the talk is about how wrong it is to identify a person based on any nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or other imagined community. Calling someone “she,” “American,” “trans,” “Black,” or “Catholic” is suddenly frowned upon. According to the social scientists, it’s an attitude grown out of virtual reality and the masking of identity the format makes possible. In VR, people live entire lives outside of their genetic or cultural identity groups, and now this approach has stormed into the real world the way so many once-radical ideas quickly become normative. The older generation really hates this, as it becomes an excruciating exercise to form a basic sentence describing an individual’s features and background. In the unlikely event I ever get the courage to publish, I’m aware this book will be riddled with offenses. More to the point, border guards don’t like people scratching out the distinctions on their passports, and debates frequently erupt about erasures of history. This new ideology’s most vociferous proponents argue that a collective human identity is the only way forward, that the next generation must understand how these imagined divisions, created barbarically out of thin air and handed down generation after generation, have led the human project to the brink.
For now, these divisions remain fraught and dangerous. Even before her reelection, President Aamanzaihou was not shy about using military power to stem chaos in the Global South: rapid reaction forces to manage disorder; surveillance of foreign populations; the Pentagon annexing small chunks of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia where displaced persons live under the control of the US military. Even as the global economic order reshapes itself, the rare earth minerals powering decarbonization, particularly lithium, must keep flowing, and suddenly once-cutting-edge progressives see the utility of certain oppressive arrangements. My daughter turned five as the president’s second term began, and I have to explain to her why our leader is threatening to use force against countries that continue to build coal-fired power plants.
Three months after I bought Aliah a birthday cake, self-professed Democratic Socialist Tracy Aamanzaihou used drones to subdue an American Patriot League compound in Idaho, choking it with CS gas and pummeling it with nonlethal weaponry, yet killing three people. With the radical expansion of our democracy, our country’s unruly nature has become even more apparent. New parties form in bioregions, intent on protecting their fresh water or farmland, empowered unions want to blow up global trade agreements, the rising Communist Party of America calls for revolution, Indigenous tribes demand the return of their ancestral lands, Texas demands secession, Oregon demands secession, Black separatists demand their own nation-state, and white-power politics still nips dangerously at the mainstream everywhere.
But democracy requires belief. It is, after all, only an idea in all of our heads, and if you go to Cleveland these days, the idea blazes wondrously. The transition of government operations and institutions from the quickly drowning swamp on the Atlantic to the more safely nestled and freshwatered locale of gentrifying Cleveland continues. The New White House is not exactly white. When I visited with my family we touched the walls of bioluminescent algae glowing bright blue as they sequestered carbon. The city looks like a jungle snaking over futuristic ruins, but that’s because the buildings are alive with biofuel plants, mold gardens, water recycling canals, and at night, these trippy-ass bioluminescent streetlights. My wife, daughter, and I visited the observation deck at the apex of the New Capitol Building, with its solar skin and walls built with living plant matter. It’s the best place to look up at the sky to see the new settlements, and I suffocated with an absolute boyhood wonder that I had lived to see the first city lights on the surface of the moon. Finally, we walked to the olivine statue, placed approximately the same distance from the Capitol as it would have been in the streets of D.C.: Kate Morris, twelve feet high, screaming like a madwoman, daring a military vehicle to run her down.
One day Aliah will begin to read about her parents’ generation, what we faced, what we did, and what we failed to do. She will no doubt go down a rabbit hole about this period from the 2010s through the ’30s when the nation and the world convulsed as it finally confronted this emergency. She may even read this manuscript, though as the years flip by, as the planet heats and the seas rise, I still can’t bring myself to finish it.
While it remains vexing to imagine where the world is going, there are certain things I don’t wonder about. I know my daughter will live to see the dust storms blowing hot and blinding across the deserts and plains as winds scour the soil free and a noose tightens around the planet’s fresh water. She’ll have a different relationship to our fellow species and may never know what a cow is. Beginning this year, the CMA has banned ruminant animals, and her generation will likely not believe what went on in the livestock industry of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The extinction event of course rages on, as insects vanish and food webs lose links, and species disappear. She’ll certainly never marvel at a firefly landing on her finger, but she will live in fear of ticks and mosquitoes. She may see polar bears, elephants, lions, whales, sharks, and all the megafauna that mesmerized me as a child, but they will only ever again live in zoos or reserves, the products of captive breeding or de-extinction techniques. Curiosities from a geologic epoch that could sustain biodiversity.