Antarctica

2 Science in the Capital

Wade Norton had just solved the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony when his boss Senator Phil Chase called. It was late on a very hot September evening in Washington D.C., part of a heat wave in fact, the temperature 115°F. with humidity near a hundred percent, the roar of the city outside the window damped down as all parts of the metropolis went into Turkish-bath mode, stewing as they waited out the latest EWE, or extreme weather event. Torrential floods, blistering droughts, record highs and lows, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, assorted other superstorms; this year, like all the last several years, had seen everything.

Wade had been sitting before his overmatched air-conditioning unit, conducting the Fifth for a few hours. He had been working on this version during his snippets of spare time for eight months, studying the score and recording bar by bar, struggling especially with the finale, using the latest Maestro program to manipulate all possible aspects of pitch, tempo, dynamics, color, intonation, vibrato and so forth, all down at the level of the individual soundwaves on the oscilloconductor, working mostly with synthetically generated sound but occasionally with the instruments in a base performance recorded for Maestro by the Vienna Philharmonic. And now he had the version he wanted. And it had been no easy thing, because the last movement was, as Brahms had noted to Tchaikovsky after hearing a performance in Hamburg, somewhat of a mess structurally. In his usual insecure way Tchaikovsky had immediately agreed with Brahms, and it had taken him a couple of months to rally and decide that it was not his Fifth that was deficient but Brahms himself, whose music Tchaikovsky said was “the pedestal without the statue,” a riposte which still made Wade smile, and had even given him a clue to conducting the Fifth, which was to treat it as a statue without a pedestal, floating in the air like a tone poem, the beauty of each component passage different in kind from the other passages; then turn the variously awkward junctures as best he could, exploiting things the Maestro could do that living orchestras would find hard. The home-conducting subculture was of course mostly uninterested in these overplayed warhorses of the concert hall, exactly the material from which computer conducting had freed them; and indeed Wade was coming to this piece from several years’ work on unrecorded music in the opuses of D’Indy, Poulenc, and Martinu; but recently there had been movements, obviously related, to explore both “sensuous surface” and the neglected warhorses, and Wade felt that this performance he had put together was perhaps good enough to justify sending it out, at least to the Tchaikovsky crowd, the finale of the Fifth being somewhat in the nature of Fermat’s last theorem, to which his version might be the Wiles proof.

But there was the phone beeping. And of course it was Phil, Senator Philip Krishna Chase of California, his boss and friend, calling from the other side of the world and uncertain of the time difference as always. Phil had two years before lost the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and was often spoken of as passé following the Republican retaking of both Senate and House that year; he had seldom been in Washington since (not that he had been here all that often before), and he appeared intent on proving that as the great telesenator he could do his job while on a more-or-less permanent junket/global pilgrimage (depending on who was characterizing it). The pundits were convinced he was wrong, and there were weekly calls for Phil to get back to his job and put his nose to the grindstone like everyone else, etc.; and back home in California Chase had the highest negatives and the highest positives ever recorded. But he had won his last reelection by twenty-three percent, and as Phil often said, California had led telecommuting from the very beginning, even before the technology was there, and most Californians were proud of their senator’s work among the many troubled, overcrowded, starved, flooded, and drought-stricken countries of the developing world which Phil made his specialty—proud also of the breakthroughs he had made in telecommuting itself, working the Senate from all over the world and introducing legislation to make it even easier for people to do likewise on their jobs. So with his power base secure Chase continued to walk and paraglide around the world, pitching in to help local relief work and employee-owned eco-businesses, and doing his Washington work by phone, fax, proxy, an active staff, and the occasional spaceplane blitz on the capital.

So Wade was used to punching the button on the phone and hearing “Wade! Wade! Time to work!”

“Hi, Phil.” Wade hit save on the Maestro and reached for a notepad. Typically these conversations would last for half an hour to an hour, and include a dozen commands, two dozen suggestions, and three dozen reflections; he took notes so he would not forget anything in the deluge. “Where are you tonight?”

“It’s morning, Wade, it’s tomorrow where you are, and I’m in Pakistan, walking up to the sixteenth tee, five under handicap and shooting with the wind all the way home, but let’s get to the point, Wade. I hear that you are the staff expert on Antarctica.”

“Antarctica?”

Phil had a wild laugh; it was said to have won him his first election. “Yes, John tells me you had to work it up as part of your Southern Club studies.”

“Yes, but that was just an overview.”

“I know, I have it right here onscreen. ‘Complications Attendant on the Non-Renewal of the Antarctic Treaty, an Overview.’ By WN.”

“Yes.” Wade had researched the Antarctic Treaty System (a complex of treaties, protocols and agreements) the previous year, when Senator Winston, Phil’s replacement as Chair, had directed his majority on the Foreign Relations Committee to vote to sit on the ratification of the Treaty’s scheduled renewal, which had been in negotiation the previous three years. It had seemed clear to Wade that the blockage of the ratification, aside from being part of a general strategy of obstruction of the President on all fronts, had to do with Senator Winston’s ongoing battle with the Southern Club, and for that matter with the southern hemisphere in general, home in Winston’s mind of all ungodly sloth and indolence. Also the renegotiated treaty continued to contain the bans on oil, mineral, and other resource extraction that it had had since the 1991 environmental protocol had been attached; of course Wall Street had been unhappy about that, as it did not fit with their ongoing campaign to dismantle all remaining global environmental regulations and any other constraints to the full exercise of the free market, etc.

All part of the ordinary contemporary political battlefield, in other words; and interesting in that respect; but the idea that Wade was therefore an expert on Antarctica was laughable, as Phil was proving at this very moment. Wade had learned what he had needed to know the way one crams for a test, and afterward retained the usual portion of knowledge from such efforts. Antarctica! as he and the staff had often proclaimed at that time—the highest, coldest, driest, iciest, windiest, and least significant of the continents!

Through Chase’s last chuckles he said, “I didn’t learn that much about it, Phil. I like my ice in Bloody Marys.”

“You’re very wise in your modesty, Wade. Here, wait a second while I make this drive. Ooh. But you’re my staff expert on the place, Wade, and there’s been some things come up in the last month that I want you to look into for me. It appears the absence of a ratified treaty is beginning to wreak some havoc down there, and if we can find out anything that we could use against Winston, naturally it would be a good thing. Of course I’d go myself to have a look around, it sounds great, but I have—ah come on!—business in Kashmir that can’t wait.”

“What have you heard?” Wade asked cautiously.

“Well, some funny stuff has been going on down there. I’ve got friends who’ve been telling me about it, and it looks funny to me. Something’s going on down there. Get the NSF rep on site to give you a full report, I’m not sure I’ve heard it all yet anyway. But if we can get something to use against Winston and his gang, it would be good. That guy is really beginning to get on my nerves, just between you and me—”

“And the rest of humanity.”

“—screwed the population planning, the foreign aid, the debt-for-nature, the UN payments, really this guy has to be stopped, he’s like leading the Götterdämmerung. He’s riding all four horses at once, that’s why he’s so bowlegged. We’ve got to see if we can find some kind of crowbar to whap him on the knees a little, straighten those legs up so to speak, and send him packing. I swear I cannot understand why the American people elect guys like him, it’s absurd. Congress from one party and President from the other, they do it more often than not, what can they be thinking? All it does is make it impossible to do anything!”

“That’s the point. That’s what they’re hoping for.”

“But why hope for gridlock? No one likes to see it in traffic.”

“They’re hoping that if the government can’t do anything, then history will stop happening and things will always stay just like they are right now.”

“What’s so great about right now!”

“Not much, but they figure it can only get worse. It’s a damage-control strategy. They can see just as clearly as anyone that the globalized economy means they’re all headed for the sweatshop.”

“True, that’s what I say all the time, but there are better ways to deal with it than gridlock in Washington!”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure! There sure as hell should be anyway.”

“Should be. But right now the voters have to go with what they have. Stop history and hang on. Hope for the best.”

“Well, I find that very sad. They’re waiting for something, Wade. They’re waiting for us to pick up the ball and run with it.”

“From out of the gridlock.”

“Exactly! So okay, that’s what we’re doing here now, that’s why you’ve got to go to Antarctica. I’ll send you what I’ve got on the situation so you can read it on your way.”

“On my way?”

“Yeah. There’s National Transportation Safety Board people going down, you can join them.”

Wade had written on his notepad To Do: and under that, Break Gridlock, and under that, Go to Antarctica. He stared at the page, at a loss.

Phil laughed again. “What’s the matter, Wade, don’t you like the cold?”

“Not that much.” In fact Wade had grown up in Hemet, California, and he began to shiver when the temperature dropped below ninety. Even with the global warming he considered Washington a cool place.

“Well, I hear it’s not that cold down there anyway.”

“In Antarctica?”

“It’s spring down there, right?”

“Early spring. Actually two weeks away. The coldest time of year there, as I recall.”

“See, you are my expert! Ah, ha ha ha! You’ll get used to it. Hold on a sec, Wade, I’m going to putt.”

Chase often relaxed from his humanitarian efforts by playing in working foursomes, with the other players telecommuting like himself so that they played in semidetached realities, and did not converse a great deal; but this time Wade could hear a lot of banter in the background, and guessed this was a more social round. It was possible Pakistan did not have as many telegolfers as the States, where the courses routinely had modem jacks and fax machines next to the ball cleaners. “So, Wade, go down there and find out what’s going on and how we can use it. There’s a flight leaving from LA for Auckland tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Do we have a bad connection, Wade?”

“No.”

“All right then, get to it and let me focus on this next drive. I envy you this opportunity, Wade, and I’ll make it down there next time, so I want you to learn everything so you can tell me where to go. And I’ll want a daily report, you can tell me everything and it’ll be almost like I’m there, you’ll be my eyes and ears like you always are in D.C., only this will be more fun for both of us. We’ll talk soon, I have to visualize this drive now, bye.”

He grew up near Redlands, California, in a region still covered by orange and lemon groves, and avocado orchards. But the inexorable metastasizing of Los Angeles rolled over his home when he was a boy, and he watched mute and uncomprehending as over the years of his childhood and youth the groves were cut down and replaced by freeways, malls, condominium complexes, and gated suburban communities. And when he went off to Berkeley to go to college, and began to think about what had happened to his childhood home, it made him mad.

He transferred to Humboldt State to study forestry. He hiked, he learned to climb, he learned ice craft. He moved to Alaska for a year. He went back down into the world to go to law school, to learn environmental law in order to better fight for the wildernesses he had come to love, wildernesses that were everywhere being overrun by the insane proliferation of human beings and their excesses. He saw more clearly every day that the big slogan-ideas like democracy, free markets, technological advancement, scientific objectivity, and progress in history, were all myths on the same level as the feudal divine right of kings: self-serving alibis that a minority of rich powerful people were using to control the world. Modern society, like all the societies before it, ever since Sumer and Babylon, was a giant fake, a pyramid scheme in which the wealth of the world funneled up to the rich; and its natural environment was laid waste to bulk the obscenely huge bank balances of people who lived on private islands in the Caribbean.

He got his law degree and took a job with the Wilderness Defense Club’s big office in Washington, D.C., figuring that to make the biggest impact he had to be in the heart of the beast, doing battle over the big laws. The WDC was one of the biggest environmentalist groups in the world, and its Washington office had won several of the most important victories for the environmental movement in the last decade. They were a tough smart gang of committed lawyers, they made it seem like more than a rearguard action, they worked fourteen-hour days and then talked through the Georgetown parties all night long.

He joined them and fought the good fight. They won some and lost some. He developed some diseases of civilization: he drank a bit too much, he smoked cigars sometimes, he couldn’t seem to stay in relationships for more than a year; the women he connected with wanted more than policy, and many of them were not much interested in spending their precious vacation time ice-climbing in the Yukon or on Baffin Island. There seemed no one quite on his wavelength, even in the WDC. They were all neurotic; and so was he. The discrepancy between his beliefs and his life was nearly too much to bear.

Then he was assigned to work on the latest shameless assault on wilderness, coordinated by the timber lobby and the U.S. Forest Service, that implacable enemy of wilderness in general and forests in particular—a plan to inventory all federal lands and assess what could be opened up to new logging, now that all the land previously opened to logging had been clear-cut. The Forest Service claimed that all future logging would be done according to their new integrated forest management plan, and that this plan was ecologically sound, and that therefore many heretofore unlogged regions could be opened up to the newly enlightened “selective cut” timber industry. The timber lobby went at the Congress, which as always was the best that money could buy, campaign finance reform having once again mutated into campaign finance recomplication; and timber had the relevant subcommittees sewed up, and the chances of stopping them looked poor indeed. But all the big environmental groups opposed the opening of the new land, which amounted in the Forest Service’s first proposal to some hundred million acres scattered all over the United States, and they pooled their resources to fight the plan in the courts.

So he worked sixteen-hour days, now, and eighteen-hour days, engaged in the fight of his life, consumed by it. Nothing else mattered. They had to defeat this proposal.

Then another factor intervened. The President had visited Alaska’s North Slope, and now he was in favor of establishing the wilderness and wildlife refuge that had been proposed so long ago, there on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, which would in effect lock up a large oil and gas reserve. Oil prices were getting higher since the Siberian field’s troubles and the general rapid depletion of all the world’s known supergiant fields, and the President’s proposal was controversial, but in the capital the machinations of the various players ground it into the equation; and all that wildlife out on the open tundra was very photogenic, and very far away; and all the memberships of all the big environmental groups supported the idea of the park enthusiastically. The President’s staff entered into the negotiation process, and they and the Congressional staff and the big environmental groups and the timber lobby and the oil lobby all had their say, and in the end a compromise was worked out: the Arctic slope would become a national park, with a special provision for oil extraction in case of national emergency; and to balance this “concession to wilderness,” ninety percent of the hundred million acres were to be opened up to the new “environmental logging.” And the environmentalist groups all went along.

He had opposed this compromise every step of the way. But the process was a lot bigger than he was. Indeed the Wilderness Defense Club was one of the major supporters of the compromise, having advocated the Arctic slope park for decades. So not only did his superiors in the organization not listen to his protests, he was on the contrary assigned to go back to California and make sure that the local grassroots organizations in Humboldt County and the Sierra foothills did not challenge the new logging plan in the courts, so that the entire compromise package would be able to go ahead as planned without impediments that possibly would derail the whole delicate agreement.

So he went back to California; but as a private citizen, having quit the Wilderness Defense Club in rage and disgust. He had no job, he had no home. He spent most of a year living off his savings and climbing the great granite walls of Yosemite, which was cheap entertainment compared to some. His home was the ledge on the Lost Arrow Wall called the Jefferson Airport. His diseases of civilization got a bit worse. He told all his climbing partners about his experience in Washington D.C., told the story of the Arctic compromise sell-out again and again, bitter and ranting. But each retelling only made him feel angrier.

Then one group of climbers based in Tuolumne took him with them on a long winter ski trip down the length of the Muir Trail, stopping to dig up caches of food and climbing rope, to make winter ascents of the best of the peaks they passed. It was a wild trip, his companions wild men. And one night when they were camped at a low enough altitude to make them comfortable with burning wood for a campfire, they sat around the flames into the depth of the night, telling stories. And he told his D.C. story again, and they laughed at him. You should have known, they told him. Reform will never work. It’s just another form of collaboration.

But you have to do something! he protested.

Of course, they said. But you have to do something that works. And nothing works but direct action.

Direct action?

They looked at him over the firelight, their eyes glittering.

Over the remainder of the trip he learned what they meant. They were part of a group they laughingly called ecotage internationale. It was not a public group with any formal organization of any kind; that was just an invitation to repression. That was the mistake Earth First! had made, they said; publish a newsletter and go public and you only made it easier for the powers that be to sic the FBI on you, like an insane police Rottweiler going for your throat. Or even worse, the private security forces of the timber and mining industries, which were counter-insurgency-type organizations trained by the CIA or by Third World secret services, silent and deadly.

No. It was crucial to stay underground, unknown, unheard of, unorganized, unrecognized. They had no name. They had cryptographers working the internet for them, they had ecotage experts working on methodologies. Anonymity was crucial. They had no management, no lawyers, no war chest, no public relations. They did have members, however; several thousand of them, as far as anyone could tell, grouped in clandestine and nearly independent cells. No infiltration was happening because no one knew to infiltrate them. They were very, very careful about whom they told about the group. Nevertheless it was a growing group, because the condition of the Earth was worsening right before their eyes, and as a result radical environmentalism was attracting more people to it.

And they thought he might be interested.

For the first time in over ten years, a knot in his stomach began to untie a bit. Near the end of his trip, up on the Diamond Mesa south of Forester Pass, they spent one short silvery winter afternoon moving shards of granite into a goldsworthy, as they called it, a new work of environmental art, created to welcome him into the fold of ecotage internationale; essentially a little thigh-high Stonehenge in the Sierras, with a center stone symbolizing his location in the group; his and everyone else’s. They all were at the center of the world, they said; and they danced around the stones in the sunset, howling, drumming on their pots, drinking whisky and throwing rocks at the moon.

The next morning they knocked over the stones and moved on. And the next spring two of that clandestine group drove by his Berkeley apartment one night, and asked him to join them on an expedition. They drove up into the Sierra foothills, where environmental forestry was being extensively practiced. Even environmental forestry needed some logging roads, however, and a new network was being cut into the land north of Highway 80. Private security police were protecting it, as had become standard practice. But it was the dark of the moon, and the road system was at that vulnerable point where it had been surveyed and marked out with plastic flags and spray paint, but not yet cut and dozed.

So they drove to the end of a dirt road, into an obscure car camping site, and they got out and jogged into the bush. The Sierra foothills are very tough to hike cross-country in, especially at night, but his companions had a route worked out, and they came down a slope onto the planned course of the new road, and began to sneak around like primeval hunters, using night glasses and running like silent maniacs once or twice to avoid patrols; and they pulled up stakes, and cut down flags, and sprayed graffiti dissolvers on the painted tree trunks; and in that one night, three weeks’ work by the logging company was wiped out.

Of course the logging company could repeat the work, his companions told him in the dawn ride back down to the Bay Area. No doubt they would. But their costs would rise. Logging was only profitable at the margin, and the bean-counters on Wall Street would look at the P and L statements and logging wouldn’t look as good to them, wouldn’t get the same kind of investment. The megacorporations that owned the logging companies might get disenchanted and sell; like the loggers they were only extraction companies anyway, they strip-mined their subsidiaries’ resources and then they were redundant; and it could be that the megacorporation executives considered the forests of the world basically extracted already, at least in their most profitable phases. So that they might lose interest, and it all might collapse back to a need-for-wood basis, rather than a need for liquidated assets.

And there were other ecoteurs out there, pouring sugar into gas tanks, cutting ditches, rolling boulders onto roads, introducing computer viruses; all invisible, nonviolent, nonorganized, nonpublicized. Never hurt anybody, never brag, never talk at all. Ego radical or eco radical. Let the Greenpeace-style organizations do the PR work, play to the media and do theater for the Earth; that was important too, but it wasn’t their job. What they did was done at night, by people, mostly men, who wanted to do something to save the world, who wanted also those nights of adrenaline terror and accomplishment. It was somewhat like the Brits who had created the crop circles at the end of the last century, doing something beautiful in the wild night to combat the meaninglessness of modern civilization. But this was better yet. This was resistance to the mindless evil of the world’s economic regime.

So he had found his cause. It made him calmer. He got a relatively low-paying job in a Berkeley law firm, spending his time fighting SLAPPs, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, and arguing social issues for the residual progressive culture in the area, and also for the poor, because really it was the poor who bore the brunt of the environmental collapse. And then he did everything he could to erase his environmentalist past. He got less neurotic, less guilty. He gave up cigars. When he worked he worked, he did his best, he did pro bono; but then when he wasn’t working, he relaxed. He said Fuck it and went out for a run. He climbed on vacations, in the Arctic and elsewhere around the world. It used jet fuel but what the hell. No martyrdom of virtue anymore, just fight the good fight. He saw the Himalayas, in a series of glorious treks. And a few times a year he went out with friends he never otherwise saw or talked to, except on Telegraph Avenue, on certain holidays; and they went through intensities of ecotage that made the rest of life seem like a pale dream.

Eventually, he recruited some climbing friends to the movement himself. He began to pay attention to the Federal Register and other sources of public information, to plan ecotage raids of his own. He did more and more of them; and no one knew.

And then on one of his vacations, he joined an adventure travel group in a climb of Mount Vinson, the highest peak in Antarctica. Like the Himalayas, it was an overwhelming experience for him; the purest wilderness he had ever seen. He came home in love with the place. Life in Berkeley seemed harder to bear after that, somehow. He still drank a bit too much. He started cigars again, occasionally. He fell in and out of relationships, sometimes painfully, sometimes perfunctorily. He was thirty-four years old.

Reading the news became a kind of self-flagellation. Things looked so dire. The world’s population was over ten billion and the Dow Jones average was over ten thousand. Global average temperatures were ten degrees higher than a century before, and extreme weather events were a weekly occurrence, causing untold destruction and suffering. About four billion people had no access to electricity, while at the same time whole bioregions were already collapsing; and still the ruthless extraction of the world’s natural resources continued apace. One of his eco friends with experience in the markets laughed blackly one night as he railed at this destruction, and explained to him what was happening. Say a company owned a forest that it had harvested selectively for generations, delivering its shareholders a consistent ten percent return. Meanwhile the world financial markets were offering bonds with a fifteen percent return. Lumber prices dropped, and the company’s returns dropped, so the traders dropped it and its shares plummeted, so the shareholders were angry. The management, on the edge of collapse, decided to clear-cut the forest and invest the profits from that lumber sale immediately into bonds that yielded a higher return than the forest had. In effect the money that the forest represented was more valuable than the forest itself, because long-term value had collapsed to net present value; and so the forest was liquidated, and more money entered the great money balloon. And so the inexorable logic of Götterdämmerung capitalism demolished the world to increase the net present values of companies in trouble. And all of them were in trouble.

His friend stared at him, laughed at the no doubt sick look on his face, lifted his hands; that’s the way things were. That was the explanation for the Götterdämmerung; not suicidal murderers in high places, but simply the logic of the system.

He had walked home through the smog and traffic noise, unaware of any of it. Seeing the world in his mind’s eye, all falling apart.

Then one day he was reading the news again, helplessly, using print newspapers picked up in coffee houses so that his reading could not be monitored by any hypothetical surveillance, and he came across a long article on the current situation in Antarctica. The Senate’s hold-up of the renewal of the Antarctic Treaty was causing a circling for advantage among the Treaty nations; and some Southern Hemisphere nations, never party to the Antarctic Treaty, had seen this happening and recently formed a consortium called the Southern Club Antarctic Group, to begin oil explorations all over Antarctica. They were going to do it there too. The last pure wilderness on Earth.

When he walked out of the coffee house he went to the university library to use a public monitor, with the knot back in his stomach, and the Berkeley noise and smog like some final conflagration. The last pure wilderness in the world, fouled and wrecked, and for nothing more than the hope of perhaps five more years of the world’s oil consumption; and, more importantly, many billions of dollars.

He read up on the situation. The USGS estimated that Antarctica held perhaps fifty billion barrels of oil; only a couple more decades’ worth, at current consumption rates. But at twenty dollars a barrel, that was a trillion dollars. Which was only a year of the U.S. government’s budget, and only a year of the world’s military budgets; but more than enough to pay off all the debts that had the southern nations lashed to the harshest austerity programs the World Bank and IMF could devise. He could see how the logic of the system might drive them to it.

He walked over to the house of one of his ecoteur friends, the one who had introduced him to the movement, and who coordinated a cell about the same size as his. Look, he said to his friend. Something’s got to be done. There are no locals down there to defend the place. We need to do something a bit out of the ordinary this time. Something that might stop them for good.