Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

ONE DAY SPENCER CALLED FRANKon his FOG phone.

“Hey Frank, did you check out your Emerson for the day?”

Frank had everyone reading it now: Diane, Spencer, Robin; even Edgardo, who only rolled his eyes and questioned the intelligence of any optimist. “No,” he said now to Spencer.

“Well here, listen to it. ‘I remember well the foreign scholar who made a week of my youth happy by his visit. “The savages in the islands,” he said, “delight to play with the surf, coming in on the top of the rollers, then swimming out again, and repeat the delicious maneuver for hours.” Well, human life is made up of such transits.’—Did you hear that, Frank?”

“Yes.”

“Ralph Waldo Emerson, saying that life is like surfing ? Is that great or what ?”

“Yes, that’s pretty great. That’s our man.”

“Who was this guy? Do you think somebody’s making all these quotes up?”

“No, I think Emerson made them up.”

“It’s so perfect. He’s like your Dalai Lama.”

“That’s very true.”

“The Waldo Lama. He’s like the great shaman of the forest.”

“It’s true, he is. Although even more so his buddy Thoreau, when it comes to the actual forest.”

“Yeah that’s right. Your treehouse guru. The man in the box. They are teaching you, baby!”

“You’re teaching me.”

“Yes I am. Well okay then, bro, surf your way up here and we’ll tee off at around five.”

“Okay, I’ll try to be there.”

In all the wandering, work was his anchor, his norming function. The only thing that was the same every day. These days he put in his hours focusing on the many problems cropping up as they tried to convince all the relevant agencies and institutions to act on their various parts of the mission architecture. They were also obtaining UN and national approvals for the sea water relocation projects. Holland was taking the lead here, also England, and really most countries wanted the stabilization, so the will was there, but problems were endless. The war of the agencies had gone incandescent in certain zones, and was coming to a kind of climax of the moment, as resistance to Diane’s mission architecture and the Fix-it coordinating efforts flared up in the Treasury Department and Interior and Commerce, big agencies all.

The technical issues in powering a massive relocation of sea water were becoming more and more naked to them. They mostly involved matters of scale or sheer number. Floating platforms like giant rafts could be anchored next to a coastline, and they could move about, they did not have to have a fixed location. Pumps were straightforward, although they had never wanted pumps so large and powerful before. Pipelines could be adapted from the oil and gas industry, although they wanted much bigger pipes if they could power them. Power remained the biggest concern, but if the rafts held an array of solar panels big enough, then they could be autonomous units, floating wherever they wanted them. Pipelines in the northern hemisphere had to be run overland to the playas they wanted to fill. China and Morocco and Mauritania had been the first to agree to run prototype systems, and other countries in central Asia had jumped on board.

Down in Antarctica, they could set them anywhere around the big eastern half of the continent, and run heated pipelines up to the polar plateau, where several depressions would serve as catchment basins. Cold made things more complicated down there technologically, but politically it was infinitely easier. SCAR, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, had approved the idea of the project, and they were as close to a government as Antarctica had, as the Antarctic Treaty signatory nations never met, and never kept to the treaty’s rules whether they met or not. In many senses NSF was the true government of Antarctica, and the relevant people at NSF were good to go. They saw the need. Saving the world so science could proceed: the Frank Principle was standard operating procedure at NSF. It went without saying.

After another long day at work, about a week later, Diane asked whether he wanted to get something to eat, and he said of course.

At dinner in a restaurant on Vermont Avenue she talked about work things that were bothering her, especially the tendency for innovation to bog in groups of more than a few people, which she called reversion to the norm. Frank laughed at that, thinking it would be a good joke to share with Edgardo. He ate his dinner and watched her talking. From time to time he nodded, asked questions, made comments.

Phil Chase was too busy with other things to give much time to their issues, and he was having trouble getting legislation and funding through Congress. Access to him was controlled by Roy Anastophoulus and Andrea Blackwell, and while they said he remained interested in climate and science, he was still going to trust Diane and the agencies to do their jobs, while he focused on his, which ranged all across the board; his time was precious. Not easy to get any of it, or even to contact him properly. Get on with it, they seemed to be saying. Diane wasn’t pleased with their priorities. She asked Frank if he would mind asking Charlie to ask Roy to ask Chase about certain things more directly; she laughed as she said this. Frank smiled and nodded. He would talk to Charlie. He thought word could get passed along. Maybe in Washington, D.C., he suggested, six degrees of separation was not the maximum separating any two people, but the minimum. Diane laughed again. Frank watched her laugh, and oceans of clouds filled him.

ANNA QUIBLER HAD BEEN RESEARCHINGthe situation in China, and she found it troubling. Their State Environmental Protection Administration had Environmental Protection Bureaus, and environmental laws were on the books. There were even some nongovernmental organizations working to keep the crowded country’s landscape clean. But the government in Beijing had given power for economic development to local governments, and these were evaluated by Beijing for their economic growth only, so laws were ignored and there was nobody who had a good handle on the total situation. It sounded a little familiar, but in China things were amplified and accelerated. Now an NGO called Han Hai Sha (Boundless Ocean of Sand) was sending reports to the division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that coordinated or at least collated the information for all the Chinese environmental studies that were being done. For a country of that size, there weren’t very many of them. In theory the Academy division was an advisory body, but the Communist Party political command made all the decisions, so the environmental scientists made their reports and had included advice, but as far as Anna’s contacts could tell, few major decisions resulting from their advice had ever been made.

Facilitating rapid economic growth had been the ruling principle in Beijing for three decades now, and with a billion people on about as much land as Brazil or the United States, unleashing this engine of human activity had left little room for considerations of landscape. The list of environmental problems the Chinese scientists had gathered was large, but Anna’s contact, a Professor Fengzhen Bao, was now writing to her from an e-mail account in Australia, and he was saying that the big areas in the west that had been militarized were going unstudied and unreported. Except for evidence from the windstorms of loess that blew east, they had little to analyze and were not sure what was happening out there. They knew the government had agreed to fill the Tarim Basin, the major dry playa in the Takla Makan, with sea water pumped up from the China Sea, but that was not their worry; indeed some thought it might even help, by covering some of the toxic dustbeds being torn open by the hot strong winds now sweeping the drought-stricken country so frequently. It was the impact of all the other economic activity that was the danger, including strip-mining, coal power generation, deforestation, urbanization of river valleys, cement production and steel manufacturing, and use of dangerous pesticides banned elsewhere. All these factors were combining downstream, in the eastern half of the country, impacting the big river valleys and the coasts, and the many megacities that were covering what farmland they had. Fengzhen said many were seeing signs of a disaster unfolding.