David Brin - Earth

#(54,893) “I hear in Burma and Royal Quebec they’re letting convicted killers choose execution by disassembly , so their organs can go on living in other people. One fellow’s still 87% alive, they recycled him so well! Can anyone help me trace the origins of this concept? Where does execution leave off and a kind of immortality for felons begin?”

#(54,894) “How about fighting the greenhouse effect by sending lots of dust into the atmosphere, to block sunlight like those volcanoes did during the chill snap of ’09? I recently found a swarm of references to something called nuclear winter they were all worried about back during TwenCen. It might have been scary when there were all those bombs lying around, but right now I think we could use some winter around here! Anyone interested in starting a subforum about this?”

#(54,895) “Why jiltz poor wire-heads whose only tort is self-perving? Sure they’re vice lice, but where’s the fraction in evolution in action? I say let ’em unbreed themselves, and stop forcing therapy drugs on the pleasure-centered!”

#(54,896) “My company blood test shows a 35% higher than average genetic presensitivity to cell-muting by trace chlorine. The boss says, stop using public swimming pools or lose my supra-insurance. Can she use a company test to tell me what to do on my free time? Any public domain law programs on the subject?”

#(54,897) “Say, does anyone else out there feel he or she’s missing something ? I mean, I can’t pin it down exactly, but… do you feel something’s going on, but nobody’s telling you what it is? I don’t know. I just can’t shake this feeling something’s happening…”

The Bay of Biscay glowed with the same radiant, sapphire hues Logan remembered in Daisy McClennon-’s eyes. He fell for those delicate shades again as he traveled swiftly southward aboard a Tide Power Corporation minizeppelin. The beauty of the waters was chaste, serene, pure, but all that would change once Eric Sauvel’s engineers had their way.

Sauvel sat next to him, behind the zep’s pilot, gesturing to encompass the brilliant seascape. “Our silt stirrers are already scattered across eight hundred square kilometers, where bottom sediments are richest,” he told Logan, raising his voice slightly above the softly hissing motors.

“You’ll provide power directly from the Santa Paula barrage?”

“Correct. The tidal generators at Santa Paula will feed the stirrers via superconducting cables. Of course any excess will go to the European grid.”

Sauvel was a tall, handsome man in his early thirties, a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique and chief designer of this daring double venture. He hadn’t welcomed Logan’s first visit a few weeks ago, but changed his mind when the American suggested improvements for the main generator footings. He kept pressing to have Logan back for a follow-up. It would be a lucrative consultancy, and the partners back in New Orleans had insisted Logan accept.

At least this trip was more comfortable than that hair-raising truck ride from Bilbao had been. That first time, Logan had only seen the tidal barrage itself — a chain of unfinished barriers stretching across a notch in the Basque seaboard. Since then he’d learned a lot more about this bold type of hydraulic engineering.

All along this coastline the Atlantic tides reached great intensity, driven by wind and gravity and funneled by the convergence of France and Spain. Other facilities already drew gigawatts of power from water flooding into the Iberian bight twice a day, without adding a single gram of carbon to the atmosphere or spilling an ounce of poison upon the land. The energy came, ultimately, from an all but inexhaustible supply — the orbital momentum of the Earth-Moon system. On paper it was an environmentalist’s dream — the ultimate renewable resource.

But try telling that to those demonstrators, back in Bordeaux.

This morning he had toured the facility already in place across the former mudflats of the Bassin d’Arcachon, near where the rivers Garonne and Dordogne flowed past some of the best wine country in the world. The Arcachon Tidal Power Barrage now supplied clean energy to much of southwestern France. It had also been bombed three times in the last year alone, once by a kamikaze pilot pedaling a handmade ornithopter.

Demonstrators paced the facility’s entrance as they had for fourteen years, waving banners and the womb-shaped Orb of the Mother. It seemed that even a pollution-free power plant — one drawing energy from the moon’s placid orbit — was bound to have its enemies these days. The protestors mourned former wetlands, which some had seen as useless mud flats, but which had also fed and sheltered numberless seabirds before being turned into a dammed-up plain of surging, turbid saltwater.

Then there was the other half of Eric Sauvel’s project, about which still more controversy churned. “How much sediment will you raise with your offshore impellers?” Logan asked the project manager.

“Only a few tons per day. Actually, it’s amazing how little sea bottom muck has to be lifted, if it’s well dissolved. One thousand impellers should turn over enough nutrients to imitate the fertilizing effect of the Humboldt Current, off Chile. And it will be much more reliable of course. We won’t be subject to climatic disruptions, such as El Nino.

“Preliminary tests indicate we’ll create a phytoplankton bloom covering half the bay. Photosynthesis will… is the correct expression skyrocket* .”

Logan nodded. Sauvel went on. “Zooplankton will eat the phytoplankton. Fish and squid will consume zooplankton. Then, nearer to the shore, we plan to establish a large kelp forest, along with an otter colony to protect it from hungry sea urchins…”

It all sounded too good to be true. Soon, yields from the Bay of Biscay might rival the anchovy fisheries of the eastern Pacific. Right now, in comparison, the bright waters below were as barren as the gleaming sands of Oklahoma.

That, certainly, was how Sauvel must see the bay today, as a vast, wet desert, a waste, but one pregnant with potential. Simply by lifting sea floor sediments to nourish the bottom of the food chain — drifting, microscopic algae and diatoms — the rest of life’s pyramid would be made to flourish.

Dry deserts can bloom if you provide water. Wet ones need little more than suspended dirt, I suppose.

Only we learned, didn’t we, how awful the effects can be on land, if irrigation is mishandled. I wonder what the price will be here, if we’ve forgotten something this time?

A lover of deserts, and yet their implacable foe, Logan knew stark beauty was often found in emptiness, while life, burgeoning life, could sometimes bring with it a kind of ugly mundanity.

So the tradeoffs — a bird marsh exchanged for a dead but valuable energy source… a lifeless but beautiful bay bartered for a fecund sea jungle that could feed millions…

He wished there were a better way.

Well, we could institute worldwide compulsory eugenics, as some radicals propose — one child per couple, and any male convicted of any act of violence to be vasectomized. That’d work all right… though few effects on population or behavior would be seen for decades .

Or we could ration water even more strictly. Cut energy use to 200 watts per person… though that would also stop the worldwide information renaissance in its tracks.

We might ground all the dirigible liners, end the tourism boom, and settle down to regional isolationism again. That would save energy, all right… and almost certainly finish the growing internationalism that’s staved off war.