Austral

by Paul McAuley

Turns out that capitalism is unkillable because it kills every other system first.’

Pick up the world and turn it over, as Mama liked to say, and you won’t find fair written anywhere on it.

I didn’t understand then that she was too often caught in the jaws of depression’s black dog. She had lost her freedom and her husband, was raising a child whose future was uncertain, who would be persecuted everywhere outside the island community. The bitter taste of failure, the lash of self-blame, self-hatred – she shed all of that in the first days as we walked south. It was like watching a flower open to the sun.

Some old-time writer once claimed that happy families are all alike, while unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way. If that’s true, then happiness can be earned only by sacrificing or suppressing some part of whatever it is that makes us different, by unselfishly giving up our wants and desires and submitting to something larger than ourselves.

The people who’d designed it had been thinking in terms of a century or more, she said, but the politicians who’d had to approve the enormous costs couldn’t see any further than the next election cycle. If the planet had been run by a world government able to ruthlessly mobilise people and resources, global warming and climate change might have been reversed. Instead, efforts to fix them had been doomed by the same short-sightedness and competing national interests and jealousies which had delayed attempts to cut the amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere, the same compromises and half-measures which had shut down the work of ecopoets and driven them into exile.

The sting of a death recedes into the past, but hope claws us afresh each and every day.