“Carol, I want you to walk across the street, go into the Oval Office, and tell him what has to be done.”
“Kevin, it’s not that easy.”
“Why the hell not? He’s not that much of a dunce, is he?”
“He occasionally has a different point of view, and the oil companies are being very clever about this. Look at their proposal,” she said, tapping the report on the table. “They promise to indemnify the entire operation, to put up a billion dollar bond in case something goes wrong for God’s sake, Kevin, they even offer to let the Sierra Club be on the council to oversee their environmental protection programs!”
“And be outnumbered there by their own cronies! Be damned if they’ll co-opt us that way!” Mayflower snarled. “I won’t let anyone from my office be a part of this rape, and that’s final!”
“And if you say that out loud, the oil companies will call you an extremist, and marginalize the whole environmental movement-and you can’t afford to let that happen, Kevin!”
“The hell I can’t. You have to stand and fight for something, Carol. Here is where we stand and fight. We let those polluting bastards drill oil in Prudhoe Bay, but that’s it!”
“What will the rest of your board say about this?” Dr. Brightling asked.
“They’ll goddamned well say what I goddamned tell them to say!”
“No, Kevin, they won’t.” Carol leaned back and rubbed her eyes. She’d read the entire report the previous night, and the sad truth was that the oil companies had gotten pretty damned smart about dealing with environmental issues. It was plain business sense. The Exxon Valdez had cost them a ton of money, in addition to the bad public relations. Three pages had been devoted to the changes in tanker safety procedures. Now, ships leaving the huge oil terminal at Valdez, Alaska, were escorted by tugs all the way to the open sea. A total of twenty pollution-control vessels were on constant standby, with a further number in reserve. The navigation systems on every tanker had been upgraded to beyond what nuclear submarines carried; the navigation officers were compelled to test their skills on simulators every six months. It was all hugely expensive, but far less so than another serious spill. A series of commercials proclaimed all of these facts on television-worst of all, the high-end intellectual cable/satellite channels, History, Learning, Discovery, and A&E, for whom the oil companies were also sponsoring new shows on wildlife in the Arctic, never touched upon what the companies did, but there were plenty of pictures of caribou and other animals traversing under the elevated portions of the pipeline. They were getting their message out very skillfully indeed, even to members of the Sierra Club’s board, Brightling thought.
What they didn’t say, and what both she and Mayflower knew, was that once the oil was safely out of the ground, safely transported through the monster pipeline, safely conveyed over the sea by the newly double hulled supertankers, then it just became more air pollution, out the tailpipes of cars and trucks and the smokestacks of electric power stations. So it really was all a joke, and that joke included Kevin’s bitching about hurting the permafrost. At most, what would be seriously damaged? Ten or twenty acres, probably, and the oil companies would make more commercials about how they cleaned that up, as though the polluting end-use of the oil was not an issue at all!
Because to the ignorant Joe Six-pack, sitting there in front of his TV, watching football games, it wasn’t an issue, was it? There were a hundred or so million motor vehicles in the United States, and a larger number across the world, and they all polluted the air, and that was the real issue. How did one stop that from poisoning the planet?
Well, there were ways, weren’t there? she reflected.
“Kevin, I’ll do my best,” she promised. “I will advise the President not to support this bill.”
The bill was S-1768, submitted and sponsored by both Alaskan senators, whom the oil companies had bought long before, which would authorize the Department of the Interior to auction off the drilling rights into the AAMP area. The money involved would be huge, both for the federal government and for the state of Alaska. Even the Native American tribes up there would look the other way.
The money they got from the oil would buy them lots of snowmobiles with which to chase and shoot the caribou, and motorboats to fish and kill the odd whale, which was part of their racial and cultural heritage. Snowmobiles weren’t needed in the modern age of plastic-wrapped USDA Choice Iowa beef, but the Native Americans clung to the end-result of their traditions, if not the traditional methods. It was a depressing truth that even these people had set aside their history and their very gods in homage to a new age of mechanistic worship to oil and its products. Both the Alaskan senators would bring down tribal elders to testify in favor of S-1768, and they would be listened to, since who more than Native Americans knew what it was like to live in harmony with nature? Only today they did it with Ski-Do snowmobiles, Johnson outboard motors, and Winchester hunting rifles …. She sighed at the madness of it all.
“Will he listen?” Mayflower asked, getting back to business. Even environmentalists had to live in the real world of politics.
“Honest answer? Probably not,” Carol Brightling admitted quietly.
“You know,” Kevin observed in a low voice. “There are times when I understand John Wilkes Booth.”
“Kevin, I didn’t hear that, and you didn’t say it. Not here. Not in this building.”
“Damn it, Carol, you know how I feel. And you know I’m right. How the hell are we supposed to protect the planet if the idiots who run the world don’t give a fuck about the world we live on?”
“What are you going to say? That Homo sapiens is a parasitic species that hurts the earth and the ecosystem” That we don’t belong here?”
“A lot of us don’t, and that’s a fact.”
“Maybe so, but what do you do about it?”
“I don’t know,” Mayflower had to admit.
Some of us know, Carol Brightling thought, looking up into his sad eyes. But are you ready for that one, Kevin? She thought he was, but recruitment was always a troublesome step, even for true believers like Kevin Mayflower ….
Construction was about ninety percent complete. There were twenty whole sections around the site, twenty one-square-mile blocks of land, mainly flat, a slight roll to it, with a four-lane paved road leading north to Interstate 70, which was still covered with trucks heading in and out. The last two miles of the highway were set up without a median strip, the rebarred concrete paving a full thirty inches deep, as though it had been built to land airplanes on, the construction superintendent had observed, big ones, even. The road led into an equally sturdy and massively wide parking lot. He didn’t care enough about it, though, to mention it at his country club in Salina.
The buildings were fairly pedestrian, except for their environmental-control systems, which were so state-of-the-art that the Navy could have used them on nuclear submarines. It was all part of the company’s leading-edge posture on its systems, the chairman had told him on his last visit. They had a tradition of doing everything ahead of everyone else, and besides, the nature of their work required careful attention to every little squiggly detail. You didn’t make vaccines in the open. But even the worker housing and offices had the same systems, the super thought, and that was odd, to say the least. Every building had a basement-it was a sensible thing to build here in tornado country, but few ever bothered with it, partly out of sloth, and partly from the fact that the ground was not all that easy to dig here, the famous Kansas hardpan whose top was scratched to grow wheat. That was the other interesting part. They’d continue to farm most of the area. The winter wheat was already in, and two miles away was the farm-operations center, down its own over-wide two-lane road, outfitted with the newest and best farm equipment he’d ever seen, even in an area where growing wheat was essentially an art form.
Three hundred million dollars, total, was going into this project. The buildings were huge-you could convert them to living space for five or six thousand people, the super thought. The office building had classrooms for continuing education. The site had its own power plant, along with a huge fuel-tank farm, whose tanks were semi buried in deference to local weather conditions, and connected by their own pipeline to a filling point just off 1-70 at Kanopolis. Despite the local lake, there were no fewer than ten twelve-inch artesian wells drilled well down into-and past-the Cherokee Aquifer that local farmers used to water their fields. Hell, that was enough water to supply a small city. But the company was footing the bill, and he was getting his usual percentage of the total job cost to bring it in on time, with a substantial bonus for coming in early, which he was determined to earn. It had been twenty-five months to this point, with two more to go. And he’d make it, the super thought, and he’d get that bonus, after which he’d take the family to Disney World for two e family to Disney World for two weeks of Mickey and golf on the wonderful courses there, which he needed in order to get his game back in shape after two years of seven-day weeks.