Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  However, because Antarctica is such a delicate environment, individuals like countries should be required to adhere to the principles of the Antarctic Treaty in its current form, and to respect the continent’s status as wilderness. This adherence and respect puts severe limits on the number of indigenous animals that can be legally killed under international convention and law; thus the natural carrying capacity of the continent for human beings is very low. People interested enough in Antarctica to consider living there should keep this in mind, and a scientifically established “human carrying capacity” should be ascertained for Antarctica and for its local bioregions, and the human population of the continent and the bioregions should not exceed carrying capacity. Current preliminary calculations of the human carrying capacity of the continent suggest it is on the order of three to six thousand people, but human carrying capacity in general is a notoriously vexed topic, and estimates of capacities both local and global range over many orders of magnitude, depending on the methods used; for instance, for Antarctica figures have been cited ranging from zero to ten million. Possibly work on this issue in Antarctica could refine the concept of human carrying capacity itself.

  5. If people do decide to try to become indigenous to Antarctica, special care will have to be taken to avoid polluting the environment, because the Antarctic serves as a benchmark of cleanliness for studies of the rest of the world, and in the cold arid environment many forms of pollution are very slow to break down. Some would wish to add that as sacred space, cleanliness of treatment is our obligation to this place.

  Again the entire continent must be considered a site of special scientific interest, in this case becoming an ongoing experiment in clean technologies and practices, including sufficiency minima, recycling, waste reduction and processing, etc. The goal should be a zero-impact lifestyle, and the reality cannot stray very far from that goal.

  The Treaty’s ban on the importation of exotic plants, animals, and soils means that any local agriculture attempted by inhabitants will have to be conducted hydroponically or aquaculturally, in hermetically sealed greenhouses and terraria or in well-controlled aquaculture pens containing only indigenous sealife. This constraint will be one aspect of the carrying capacity calculations, and suggests also that self-sufficiency for any indigenous Antarctic society or societies would be impractical and risky for the environment, and should not be considered a goal of such societies. The reliance on outside help should be acknowledged as a given.

  Anthropogenic reintroduction of species that used to exist in Antarctica is an issue that we leave to further discussions elsewhere.

  6. The achievement of clean appropriate zero-impact lifestyles in Antarctica is not merely a matter of the technologies employed, but of the social structures which both use these technologies and call successor technologies into being, as a function of the society’s desires for itself. This being the case, all inhabitants of Antarctica should abide by the various human rights documents generated by the United Nations, and special attention should be given to cooperative, nonexploitative economic models, which emphasize sustainable permaculture in a healthy biophysical context, abandoning growth models and inequitable hierarchies which in Antarctica not only degrade human existence but also very quickly impact the fragile environment.

  7. In such a harsh environment all attacks against person or equipment constitute a threat to life and cannot be allowed. All those interested enough in Antarctica to come here must forswear violence against humanity or its works, and interact in peaceable ways.

  8. What is true in Antarctica is true everywhere else.

  Back into the antique interior of a Herc, like something out of Jules Verne, rocketing them back in howling vibration to planet Earth, twenty-first century. Out the bathyscaphe windows the endless blue sea and its scrim of white cloud, thirty thousand feet below and closing fast. A very big world. Wade slept through what he could.

  As he slept he dreamed of his last conversation with Sylvia, the dream’s day residue in this case only a slightly skewed replay or continuation of their quiet talk, there in her office looking out at Beeker Street. He had told her about his conversation with Sam, and described his plan, and she nodded thoughtfully. Two bureaucrats, deciding the fate of a continent. An empty continent of course, the least significant of the continents; but still. A continent ruled by scientists, Sylvia said. Bound not to last. Scientific government. Trying to catch neutrinos. We try to study things, she said. Do what’s best for the long haul. The ferals, the oil people—both look to the scientists for their answers. Both use the scientists’ mode of being in Antarctica as their ideal. A way of living on the land. Wanting nothing from it but questions to be asked. Maybe it will work, Wade said again in his dream, maybe technocrats have taken over the world, maybe scientists have taken over the world. Maybe the highest, dryest, coldest, least significant of the continents would show the way. We’ll see, Sylvia said. The weather has cleared. The FBI is on its way, and past the point of safe return. We are all past the point of safe return.

  Then an image of Val in her long underwear lighting a Coleman stove knocked him awake. Reluctantly he looked around at the other sleeping passengers in their heavy parkas, heads on strangers’ shoulders, knees enjambed for balance, bunny boots thrust unceremoniously between other people’s legs. Antarctica had crushed them together and made them all family, body space abolished as a concept, all sleeping together in the Victorian roar like cubs in a litter.

  Then the plane’s crew were walking through, waking people, gesturing at seat belts. They were landing. There was some kind of trouble again, someone shouted in Wade’s earplugged ear: the wheels wouldn’t come down, or the skis wouldn’t come up, he couldn’t hear which. In any case they were going to have to land on the skis.

  Wade groaned. The passengers looked at each other, rolling their eyes. Landing on skis on a concrete runway did not sound good. But what could you do. They were in a Herc, anything could happen. Wade rose up a little to look out the window above him one last time: blue ocean, white cloud. Descending to Earth.

  Presumably they were lubricating the runway with that emergency foam. Planes had bellied down on that stuff without problems; skis no doubt would be fine. Piece of cake. If they had been here the Kiwi helo crew would be cackling. They even had flaps this time. Could fly in like a stunt plane no doubt.

  Touchdown, bounce, down again, run out. No taxiing afterward, but other than that, no different than any other landing. People grinned, made the thumbs-up gesture. The family had survived another Herc trip. Wait your turn to get out.

  Then out, into the shocking heat of a spring day in Christchurch. Maybe fifty degrees Fahrenheit, even sixty—incredible. Standing on the runway. They had indeed foamed it. A bus to take them over to the airport buildings. They had their own building, and no one was there to tell them what to do.

  Wade followed the others as they hauled their orange bags through the building, then down the road to the Antarctic Centre. He was sweating as he walked. The smell of grass, so strong. The greens everywhere, so vivid. Low clouds which were clearly made of liquid water. Coming at him were children, laughing. A little girl in a blue dress, her older brother teasing her. Their high voices in the humid grassy air.

  Inside the clothing center Wade stripped off his Antarctic gear, inspecting it item by item as he dropped it on the floor: the glove with the ripped finger seam which had made that finger colder than the rest everywhere he went; the parka zipper that would not zip all the way up past the throat. Shimmery blue overalls, red parka, his springy white bunny boots. All piled on the concrete floor, as he slowly pulled on the street clothes he had left behind, his limbs sticky with sweat. That life was over. A young Kiwi checked off all his gear and gave him a pink receipt. Back in the world.

  NSF had him scheduled for a flight home the next day. So he checked into the airport hotel, and sat there vibrating on the bed for a while, thinking things over. Back to Washington; back to hi
s life.

  He got on the phone and called Phil Chase.

  “Hello, Wade! Where are you now?”

  “Christchurch.”

  “Good flight back?”

  “It was interesting.”

  “Good. Hey I got the report you sent on the ecotage, also those protocols, I thought those were great. Those could be made into a more global program very easily, I’m very excited, I’d like to try to do something further with those. I see your hand in that document, Wade.”

  “Only in asking for it, and that was you. It was mostly Sylvia’s doing. With input from everybody, of course. She got the most help from Ta Shu, I’d say.”

  “Whatever. She may have made her mark with that, though, I’m telling you.”

  “I think she just thinks of it as a report.”

  “Doesn’t matter what she thinks. It’s out of her hands now.”

  This struck Wade as a more general truth, and he did not reply.

  “So, Wade, you sound tired. You’re back from your big adventure.”

  “Yes. But listen, Phil—I think it’s your turn.”

  “My turn for a big adventure? That’s my whole life, Wade. It’s just one big adventure after another.”

  “I know that. But this time you’ve got to try something new. You’ve got to go to Washington.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “No I mean it. The time is right. Listen, you know the ferals in Antarctica had a helper in the American security community, right? A satellite photo analyst who gave them information, and covered for them a bit up there, you know.”

  “That’s right, I think I remember you telling me that. You kept calling me when I was asleep.”

  “Well I’ve been talking to him. He’s a split position between NOAA and one of the security agencies, and a hard man to reach, but I had introductions from both Mai-lis and Sylvia, so he agreed to talk to me.”

  “He knows Sylvia too?”

  “He’s the same photo analyst she was using.”

  “Is this good?”

  “Definitely good. I had a long talk with him, and he was very interesting. He has solid photographic evidence that he would be willing to forward to us, that the Southern Club’s oil group has not been the only party down in Antarctica looking for oil this season. He says he can prove without a doubt that some of the big American-based companies have been down there as well. They’ve been using the southern cartel as a cover, basically, counting on them to distract attention and take the heat, while they’re down there too, very unobtrusively, making quick spot checks to look for the supergiant field rumored to be in the Bransfield Strait or the Weddell Sea. And one of them is Texacon.”

  “Uh huh. Are we surprised at this, Wade?”

  “No no, of course not, but it’s not known, it’s been hidden, and this guy is offering us proof. And you know Texacon is one of Winston’s biggest campaign contributors.”

  This had been a seven-hour wonder in Winston’s last campaign; despite the latest campaign finance recomplication campaign, The Washington Post had managed to publish an exposé identifying overlarge contributions to Paul Winston from Texacon, among several other major corporations. It was true that the contributions had been laundered sufficiently to be in compliance with the recomplication, and Winston’s poll ratings had climbed rather than dropped after the exposé, but the allegations were there, and Winston himself had never denied them.

  “Hmmmm,” Phil was humming, “hmmm, hmmmmm, and so you’re saying?”

  “Winston gets big campaign contributions from Texacon, only marginally legal. He blocks Antarctic Treaty reratification in committee. The Treaty’s ban on mineral extraction goes into limbo. Then Texacon is found down in Antarctica drilling for oil!”

  Phil started to laugh. He interrupted himself: “You know there’s no linkage there, Wade, you know that. They’re totally innocent. Winston is blocking the Treaty because he wants to harass the President, and Texacon contributed money to him because he’s the kind of guy they like to support. And they’re drilling in Antarctica because they drill everywhere. I’ll bet no one on either side of that equation is explicitly working a quid pro quo. It’s just business as usual, guys on the same team doing their thing.”

  “But the appearance.”

  “Yeah sure. Big favors for big money. Bribery, we’ll call it. I’ll say that right on the floor of the Senate. I can press that issue hard being so clean myself. All my contributions come in coin rolls.”

  It was true that Phil had once financed a campaign by asking all his supporters to send the coins piling up in their houses, a move that had brought in a lot of money as well as sparked a million jokes and political cartoons about spare change, etc., all the more pointed in that Phil had indeed in one of his OWE stints spent three months living as a street beggar.

  “It gives you a crowbar to pry at him with,” Wade said.

  “Yes.” Silence as Phil thought it over. “Bad timing though I must say, given how busy I am here.”

  “You need to go to Washington with this,” Wade said firmly. “You need to drop into town like a bomb and take it to Winston, see if you can use this oil stuff to put the heat on enough to get him to let the Treaty out of committee. Hell, maybe even drive him out of the chair. Maybe even out of the Senate!”

  “Fat chance.”

  “But it is a chance! The Ethics Committee might go chaotic and swerve and throw him out. The moment is here, Phil, and it’s important.”

  “What I do out on the road is important too.”

  “Of course, Phil, of course! But you wouldn’t have to stay off the road for long. Depending. I mean if you picked up some momentum, then maybe you would want to stay. Things are riding in the balance here,” Wade finding it oh so easy to read back some of Phil’s midnight rambling, “we’re at an unstable moment in history, the teeter-totter is wavering there in the middle, co-opification versus the Götterdämmerung, they’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers! The time is ripe, Phil, ripe for you to come falling down out of space onto our side of the teeter-totter and catapult them out of there!”

  “Hmm, yes, well. It would be nice to stick a pin in Winston anyway, at least.”

  “It sure would! That bastard. Pop him like a balloon.”

  “Indeed. Hmm, yes—but I’ve got a lot of commitments out here. I don’t know what I could do about that.”

  “I’ll represent you where I can, Phil. I’m thinking of staying in New Zealand a while longer, try to tie up some of the loose ends of this Antarctic business, see what I can do. After that I could cover for you out on the road, and of course keep track of this Antarctic situation for you, and I can keep making reports to you, be your eyes for you so to speak, like I’ve been doing here, while you kick their ass in Washington.”

  “Hmm, yes … So you’ve got solid evidence Texacon has been drilling in Antarctica since the last campaign?”

  “Photos in color, Sam said. Photos from space that read their phone numbers off the screens on their wrist phones.”

  “Cool. Interesting. Drop back in like a bomb. Blow their minds. That would be fun, wouldn’t it? Might even get the Antarctic Treaty ratified. That would be a coup. Although it’s funny—if it works, then you’ve got to say it was those ecoteurs that did it—they found the right part of the system and gave it a whap, it’s admirable in a way.”

  “Don’t say that on the floor of the Senate.”

  “You don’t think I should?”

  “Lawmakers endorsing law-breaking? No. It’s unseemly.”

  “Obscene? Come on, Wade. Its lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.”

  “Just don’t say that on the floor of the Senate.”

  “We’ll see. I never know for sure what I’ll say when the moment comes. But just between you and me, I admire those ecoteur guys.”

  “Because they took action.”

  “Okay, Wade, okay. I’ll
go to Washington. I’ll talk to Glen and Colleen here, and John back at the office, we’ll try to set it up. Get those photos to me, and we’ll work from there.”

  “They’re on their way. I sent them to the office.”

  “I’m in Samarkand, Wade. Send them here too. And try to call during business hours. Call me tomorrow, and we’ll continue this.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Wade sat on his hotel bed, feeling himself vibrate. He liked Phil Chase; he wanted to keep working for him. And co-opification was going to be a long hard campaign. But if he could keep Phil convinced that he was on the edge of winning, or at least in the heart of the battle, then Phil would stay in Washington, and Wade would have to be out on the road, serving as his eyes. Which meant that Wade was going to have to keep finding things big enough to keep Phil in Washington in order to be able to stay out on the road, with the chance of occasionally coming to Christchurch. In short, making Phil save the world in order to create the off chance of returning to Antarctica. It almost made sense.

  After a while, feeling time suddenly heavy on his hands, he went out and took the shuttle bus into downtown Christchurch. He looked out the windows at the trees and the low clouds, stunned by the greens and the warm wet air. Sixty Fahrenheit, they said. He couldn’t imagine what D.C. would feel like. Oh but it was October. It would be cold in D.C. Cold, well—it would be cool.

  In downtown Christchurch he wandered, overwhelmed at every turn. Smells of coffee, food cooking, Kiwi voices. The faces from Masterpiece Theatre. Next to the Avon River, a statue of Scott, in concrete forever, wearing what Wade saw now was ridiculous gear. On the pedestal: to search, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Tennyson’s immortal concrete. Ta Shu had told him that right around the time Scott had died, his two-year-old son had rushed into his mother’s bedroom in England and said “Daddy’s not coming home.” You could be immortalized in concrete, or see your kid grow up. Better a live donkey than a dead lion, Shackleton had said. Scott hadn’t agreed. But which would the world choose? What story did they like better?