Michael Crichton - State Of Fear

And on and on.

And on.

"So what you have," Kenner said, "is a history of ignorant, incompetent, and disastrously intrusive intervention, followed by attempts to repair the intervention, followed by attempts to repair the damage caused by the repairs, as dramatic as any oil spill or toxic dump. Except in this case there is no evil corporation or fossil fuel economy to blame. This disaster was caused by environmentalists charged with protecting the wilderness, who made one dreadful mistake after anotherand, along the way, proved how little they understood the environment they intended to protect."

"This is absurd," Bradley said. "To preserve a wilderness, you just preserve it. You leave it alone and let the balance of nature take over. That's all that is required."

"Absolutely wrong," Kenner said. "Passive protectionleaving things alonedoesn't preserve the status quo in a wilderness, any more than it does in your backyard. The world is alive, Ted. Things are constantly in flux. Species are winning, losing, rising, falling, taking over, being pushed back. Merely setting aside wilderness doesn't freeze it in its present state, any more than locking your children in a room will prevent them from growing up. Ours is a changing world, and if you want to preserve a piece of land in a particular state, you have to decide what that state is, and then actively, even aggressively, manage it."

"But you said we don't know how to do that."

"Correct. We don't. Because any action you take causes change in the environment, Ted. And any change hurts some plant or animal. It's inevitable. Preserving old-growth forest to help the spotted owl means Kirtland's warbler and other species are deprived of the new-growth forest they prefer. There is no free lunch."

"But"

"No buts, Ted. Name an action that had only positive consequences."

"Okay, I will. Banning CFCs for the ozone layer."

"That harmed Third World people by eliminating cheap refrigerants so that their food spoiled more often and more of them died of food poisoning."

"But the ozone layer is more important"

"Perhaps to you. They might disagree. But we're talking about whether you can take an action that does not have harmful consequences."

"Okay. Solar panels. Water recycling systems for houses."

"Enables people to put houses in remote wilderness areas where formerly they could not because of lack of water and power. Invades wilderness and thus endangers species that were previously unmolested."

"Banning DDT."

"Arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. DDT was the best agent against mosquitoes, and despite the rhetoric there was nothing anywhere near as good or as safe. Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. All together, the ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths.* Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted. And the environmental movement pushed hard for it."

"But DDT was a carcinogen."

"No, it wasn't. And everybody knew it at the time of the ban."

"It was unsafe."

"Actually, it was so safe you could eat it. People did just that for two years, in one experiment.* After the ban, it was replaced by parathion, which is really unsafe. More than a hundred farm workers died in the months after the DDT ban, because they were unaccustomed to handling really toxic pesticides."

"We disagree about all this."

"Only because you lack the relevant facts, or are unwilling to face up to the consequences of the actions of organizations you support. Banning DDT will someday be seen as a scandalous blunder."

"DDT was never banned."

"You're right. Countries were just told that if they used it, they wouldn't get foreign aid." Kenner shook his head. "But the unarguable point, based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban, Ted. Once again, there can be no action without harm."

A long silence followed. Ted shifted in his seat, started to speak, then closed his mouth again. Finally he said, "Okay. Fine." He adopted his most lofty, presidential manner. "You have persuaded me. I grant you the point. So?"

"So the real question with any environmental action is, do the benefits outweigh the harm? Because there is always harm."

"Okay, okay. So?"

"When do you hear any environmental group speak that way? Never. They're all absolutists. They go before judges arguing that regulations should be imposed with no consideration of costs at all.! The requirement that regulations show a cost-benefit was imposed on them by the courts after a period of wretched excess. Environmentalists screamed bloody murder about cost-benefit requirements and they're still screaming. They don't want people to know how much their forays into regulation actually cost society and the world. The most egregious example was the benzene regulations in the late 1980s that were so expensive for so little benefit that they ended up costing twenty billion dollars for every year of life saved.* Do you agree with that regulation?"

"Well, when you put it in those terms, no."

"What other terms are there, Ted, besides the truth? Twenty billion dollars to save one year of life. That was the cost of the regulation. Should you support organizations that push for such wasteful regulation?"

"No."

"The lead benzene lobbying group in Congress was NERF. Are you going to resign from its board?"

"Of course not."

Kenner just nodded slowly. "And there we have it."

Sanjong was pointing to the computer screen, and Kenner came over, sliding into the seat next to him. The screen showed an aerial image of a tropical island, heavily forested, and a broad curving bay of blue water. The photo seemed to be taken from a low-flying airplane. Around the bay were four weathered wood shacks.

"Those are new," Sanjong said. "They went up in the last twenty-four hours."

"They look old."

"Yes, but they're not. Close inspection suggests that they are artificial. They may be made out of plastic instead of wood. The largest one appears to be a residence, and the other three house equipment."

"What kind of equipment?" Kenner said.

"Nothing has been visible in the photographs. The equipment was probably offloaded at night. But I went back and got a decent description from Hong Kong customs. The equipment consists of three hypersonic cavitation generators. Mounted in carbon matrix resonant impact assembly frames."

"Hypersonic cavitation equipment is for sale?"

"They got it. I don't know how."

Kenner and Sanjong were huddled together, speaking in low tones. Evans drifted over, leaned in close. "What's a hypersonic whatever-it-is?" he said quietly.

"Cavitation generator," Kenner said. "It's a high-energy acoustic device the size of a small truck that produces a radially symmetric cavitation field."

Evans looked blank.

"Cavitation," Sanjong explained, "refers to the formation of bubbles in a substance. When you boil water, that's cavitation. You can boil water with sound, too, but in this case the generators are designed to induce cavitation fields in a solid."

Evans said, "What solid?"

"The earth," Kenner said.

"I don't get it," Evans said. "They're going to make bubbles in the ground, like boiling water?"

"Something like that, yes."

"Why?"

They were interrupted by the arrival of Ann Garner. "Is this a boys-only meeting?" she said. "Or can anyone sit in?"

"Of course," Sanjong said, tapping the keyboard. The screen showed a dense array of graphs. "We were just reviewing the carbon dioxide levels of ice cores taken from Vostok and from North GRIP in Greenland."