Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“But the problem with going it alone,” Lalitha said, “was that we were either looking at a much smaller park, too small to be a stronghold for the warbler, or at making too many concessions to the coal companies.”

“Which really are somewhat evil,” Walter said.

“And so we couldn’t ask too many questions about Mr. Haven’s money.”

“It sounds like you’ve got your hands full,” Katz said. “If I were a billionaire, I’d be taking out my checkbook right now.”

“There’s even worse, though,” Lalitha said, her eyes strangely glittering.

“Are you bored yet?” Walter said.

“Not at all,” Katz said. “I’m frankly a little starved for intellectual stimulus.”

“Well, the problem is, unfortunately, that Vin has turned out to have some other motives.”

“Rich people are like little babies,” Lalitha said. “Fucking little babies .”

“Say that again,” Katz said.

“Say what?”

“Fucking. I like the way you pronounce it.”

She blushed; Mr. Katz had gotten through to her.

“Fucking, fucking, fucking,” she said happily, for him. “I used to work at the Conservancy, and when we’d have our annual gala, the rich people were happy to buy a table for twenty thousand dollars, but only if they got their gift bag at the end of the night. The gift bags were full of worthless garbage donated by somebody else. But if they didn’t get their gift bags, they wouldn’t donate twenty thousand again the next year.”

“I need your assurance,” Walter said to Katz, “that you won’t mention any of this to anybody else.”

“So assured.”

The Cerulean Mountain Trust, Walter said, had been conceived in the spring of 2001, when Vin Haven had traveled to Washington to participate in the vice president’s notorious energy task force, the one whose invite list Dick Cheney was still spending taxpayer dollars to defend against the Freedom of Information Act. Over cocktails one night, after a long day of task-forcing, Vin had spoken to the chairmen of Nardone Energy and Blasco and sounded them out on the subject of cerulean warblers. Once he’d convinced them that their legs weren’t being pulled—that Vin was actually serious about saving a non-huntable bird—an agreement in principle had been reached: Vin would go shopping for a huge tract of land whose core would be opened to MTR but then reclaimed and made forever wild. Walter had known about this agreement when he took the job as the Trust’s executive director. What he hadn’t known—had discovered only recently—was that the vice president, during that same week in 2001, had privately mentioned to Vin Haven that the president intended to make certain regulatory and tax-code changes to render natural-gas extraction economically feasible in the Appalachians. And that Vin had proceeded to buy large bundles of mineral rights not only in Wyoming County but in several other parts of West Virginia that were either coalless or had been mined out. These big purchases of seemingly useless rights might have raised a red flag, Walter said, if Vin hadn’t been able to claim that he was safeguarding possible future preserve sites for the Trust.

“Long story short,” Lalitha said, “he was using us for cover.”

“Keeping in mind, of course,” Walter said, “that Vin really does love birds and is doing great things for the cerulean warbler.”

“He just wanted his little gift bag also,” Lalitha said.

“His not-so-little gift bag, as it turns out,” Walter said. “This is still mostly under the radar, so you probably haven’t heard about it, but West Virginia’s about to get the shit drilled out of it. Hundreds of thousands of acres that we all assumed were permanently preserved are now in the process of being destroyed as we sit here. In terms of fragmentation and disruption, it’s as bad as anything the coal industry’s done. If you own the mineral rights, you can do whatever the fuck you want to exercise them, even on public land. New roads everywhere, thousands of wellheads, noisy equipment running night and day, blazing lights all night.”

“And meanwhile your boss’s mineral rights are suddenly a lot more valuable,” Katz said.

“Exactly.”

“And now he’s selling off the land he was pretending to buy for you?”

“Some of it, yeah.”

“Incredible.”

“Well, he is still spending a ton of money. And he’ll be taking steps to mitigate the impact of drilling where he still owns the rights. But he’s had to sell a lot of rights to cover some big expenses that we were hoping not to have, if public opinion had gone our way. The bottom line is, he never intended the true cost of his investment in the Trust to be as big as I’d originally thought.”

“In other words, you got played.”

“I got played, a little bit. We’re still getting the Warbler Park, but I got played. And please don’t ever mention any of this to anyone.”

“So what does this mean?” Katz said. “I mean, besides my having been right about friends of Bush being evil.”

“It means that Walter and I have become rogue employees,” Lalitha said with her strange glittering look.

“Not rogue,” Walter corrected quickly. “Don’t say rogue. We’re not rogue.”

“No, in fact, we are fairly rogue.”

“I like the way you say ‘rogue,’ too,” Katz remarked to her.

“We still really like Vin,” Walter said. “Vin’s one-of-a-kind. We just feel like, since he wasn’t entirely straight with us, there’s no need for us to be entirely straight with him.”

“We have some maps and charts to show you,” Lalitha said, digging in her briefcase.

The early crowd at Walker’s, the van drivers and the cops from the precinct house around the corner, were filling the tables and laying siege to the bar. Outside, in the durable late-winter light of a February afternoon, streets were clogging with Friday tunnel traffic. In a parallel universe, dim with unreality, Katz was still up on the roof at White Street, flirting purposefully with nubile Caitlyn. She seemed hardly worth the bother now. Although he could take or leave nature, Katz couldn’t help envying Walter for taking on Bush’s cronies and trying to beat them at their own game. Compared to manufacturing Chiclets, or building decks for the contemptible, it seemed interesting .

“I took the job in the first place,” Walter said, “because I couldn’t sleep at night. I couldn’t stand what was happening to the country. Clinton had done less than zero for the environment. Net fucking negative. Clinton just wanted everybody to party to Fleetwood Mac. ‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow?’ Bull shit. Not thinking about tomorrow was exactly what he did environmentally. And then Gore was too much of a wimp to let his green flag fly, and too nice a guy to fight dirty in Florida. I was still halfway OK as long as I was in St. Paul, but I kept having to drive all over the state for the Conservancy, and it was like having acid thrown in my face every time I passed the city limits. Not just the industrial farming but the sprawl, the sprawl, the sprawl. Low-density development is the worst . And SUVs everywhere, snowmobiles everywhere, Jet Skis everywhere, ATVs everywhere, two-acre lawns everywhere. The goddamned green monospecific chemical-drenched lawns.”

“Here are the maps,” Lalitha said.

“Yeah, these show the fragmentation,” Walter said, handing Katz two laminated maps. “This one is undisturbed habitat in 1900, this one’s undisturbed habitat in 2000.”

“Prosperity will do that,” Katz said.

“The development was so stupidly done, though,” Walter said. “We still might have enough land for other species to survive if it wasn’t all so fragmented.”