Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

Sara was a marine biologist with an enduring interest in Norway’s coastal biomes; it was off the coast of Norway that she’d met Detlef. Detlef had been invited to consult on a private methane ice DIP (development investment project). Several of his best students, all specialists in drilling techniques, were on the project team; naturally they asked their old teacher to come on board.

The survey boat Detlef was on was operating in waters just off the continental shelf where Sara happened to be leading a protest against a whaling vessel. Detlef, taking a none-of-my-business attitude, watched the situation unfold with detachment. He was a man who believed in professional competence, and appeared rather condescending, as if he were standing in judgment over the protesters.

The protest boat wasn’t large. The “Don’t Massacre the Giants of the Sea” banner they were holding up flapped in the frigid wind, and with Sara’s red hair billowing out in front, it was really an arresting sight. Whether by accident or design, the whaling ship changed course and ended up scraping the protest boat. It was just a scrape, but the difference in tonnage was so great that the protest boat couldn’t absorb the impact without tipping. The protesters fell into the water, and, because it was so close by, the survey boat offered emergency assistance. Luckily, the protesters were wearing life jackets. They all seemed to know very well how to survive in such a situation, which gave Detlef the impression that the protesters had let the boat go over on purpose. Then, when the redhead, soaking wet, was being helped onto the ambulance, she gave Detlef an unwitting glance, which gave him the “irrefutable” (a term that cropped up frequently in his technical reports) sense that something had hit him.

Detlef came up with some excuse to visit Sara in hospital, and soon they went on a date to the seashore. As they looked out across the seemingly icy waters of the Norwegian Sea, the lights in the distance were like flickering embers. The couple talked about everything under the sun: from the ecological consequences of methane ice extraction, the whaling industry and changes in coastal shellfish ecology to poetry; Sara used to share her enthusiasm for Keats and Yeats.

One time they got into a disagreement about whether Norway should continue whaling. Sara said, “The reason you think it’s no big deal is because you’ve never seen a minke whale bleed to death right before your eyes.”

“But many whalers are whalers because that’s what their forebears have always done.”

“Yeah, but aren’t there lots of whalers whose forebears weren’t whalers. I mean, can’t people’s occupations change? Can’t tradition change?”

“Perhaps,” Detlef said. “But you’re also against methane ice mining.”

“I am,” said Sara.

“But it’s a resource. The exploitation of this resource isn’t going to hurt anyone.”

“Not going to hurt anyone ? Depends on your definition of ‘anyone.’ Methane ice is different from petroleum. As you well know, scientists now believe that it forms when gas migrates from deep within the crust along faults until it precipitates or crystalizes upon contact with ice-cold polar seawater. Which is to say that methane ice deposits are actually part of the ocean floor. We really don’t understand how much damage extraction might do to the Arctic region. It could well alter fragile landforms and microclimates, couldn’t it? Maybe no people will die, but other life-forms won’t be able to adapt to such dramatic environmental change.”

“But if we don’t continue to develop, how will humanity survive?”

“Why not ask how other life-forms will survive if there are too many people? If the population of Homo sapiens were controlled, then we wouldn’t have to extract so much from the environment, would we?”

“I think,” said Detlef, “that as long as we can keep developing new ways of feeding even more people, as occurred during the Green Revolution, that means that the world can support ‘this many people.’ It’s our generation’s responsibility to feed all the people who are alive in the world.”

“But in fact,” said Sara, “there’s mounting evidence now indicating that we can’t afford to support ‘this many people,’ and that if everyone lived the way you and I do we’d need three earths. They calculated the ecological footprint at the end of the last century. But the reality is that wealth never reaches the poor, and they’re the ones who have the most mouths to feed. This issue cannot be solved politically or technically, by another Green Revolution. The rich and powerful are already entrenched, and they don’t really care about the people who go hungry.”

“With all due respect, Sara, isn’t the lifestyle you personally lead quite comfortable?”

“I do all I can to avoid unnecessary waste. Better to do what you can than not try at all.”

Detlef pondered the unnecessary waste in his own lifestyle.

“Lots of people,” Sara continued, “say that feelings aren’t part of the scientific enterprise, but actually all scientists can do as scientists is try to determine what’s true and what isn’t. They can’t tell us what the right choices are. I want to be a person who can offer the decision-makers better choices instead of avoiding all these thorny ethical issues by invoking ‘professional neutrality’ or some such hypocrisy. As long as the human population stops growing, and we change our way of life, there’ll be no need to extract methane ice.” Sara’s red hair was swelling in the ocean breeze, like the only flaming thing in a pale blue fog.

“Do you know why this place is called Storegga?” Sara tried to clear the air by changing the subject.

Detlef shook his head.

“In Norwegian it means ‘the Great Edge.’ Have you heard of the Storegga Slide? It happened thousands of years ago, and in the past few years it’s happened again. For the past several decades, with the acceleration of global warming, hydrates in the shelf frost layer have been melting and bubbles forming. The resulting crystal decomposition has increased sedimentary instability, causing a massive slide of a layer two hundred and fifty meters high and several hundred kilometers wide, practically half the distance from Norway to Greenland. It’s changed the whole coastal ecology. Geologists initially argued that this sort of slide occurs once every hundred thousand years, in synchrony with the Ice Age cycle. You think it’ll be a hundred thousand years before it happens again?”

“Hard to say.”

“Right, it’s hard to say.” Sara gathered her windblown hair and said, “Probability theory isn’t much use for the prediction of this kind of catastrophe, because there are only two outcomes: either it happens or it doesn’t. To me, if the shelf frost collapses again someday, I wouldn’t want it to be because people have been digging around in the earth. If it happens naturally, I won’t have anything to complain about, because it’s none of my business and out of my control. Whatever happens, I just don’t want it to be because of us. We’re everywhere! Why do people reproduce to the point that we cover the entire planet? Enough already! I don’t have a child and won’t consider having one, either, so I’m not thinking about these issues for the sake of my own offspring.”

Detlef gazed at Sara’s eyebrows, which were just as fiery red as her hair, and at her brown eyes beneath. The signals were clear: he was enchanted by those eyes. He wanted to deny it, but the truth was irrefutable.

Actually, Sara had been paying attention to the Trash Vortex for quite some time, ever since oceanologists started observing and arguing about it at the end of the twentieth century. She applied to Norway’s National Science Academy for a grant to study the potential impact of the vortex on Taiwan’s coastal terrain, but as the grant was still under review when the edge of the vortex hit the east coast, Sara decided to pay her own way. What hurt the sea hurt her personally. Now Detlef had an excuse for a return visit: it was only logical that he would take Sara to an island he’d been to himself many years before.