Mr. Smith said, “The risk of oil extraction—”
“No no no no no! The risk has been made so small,” Carlos exclaimed, squeezing his finger and thumb together till they went white, “so very small, as to be completely insignificant in the real world! This is what modern extraction technology allows, as we have explained to anyone prepared to listen. If we had not been bombed nothing bad ever would have happened. This isn’t the twentieth century after all. There has not been a significant oil spill in the last thirty years, and this is not because of chance, but because the technology and procedures employed by the oil industry have made them a thing of the past.”
“Panama Canal,” Mr. Smith said. “San Francisco. Djakarta.”
“Those were all sabotage!” Carlos cried, hopping up and down a little to try to contain himself. “These were spills because of your clients, not because of us!”
“My clients were involved in none of these incidents,” Mr. Smith said quickly.
“How can you be sure,” Wade asked, “if you don’t know who they are?”
“I asked them.”
“People like your clients,” Carlos went on, grimacing, “are people driving around the industrial North in their BMWs dreaming of killing tigers with their teeth and eating them raw and then telling the rest of us what to do, it is the most ridiculous fantasy possible, there are ten billion people on this Earth and half of them are starving, and it is not some rich well-fed aristocrat son-of-a-bitch hunter-gatherer Disneyland wilderness advocate that is going to feed those people or their children! We have to provide them with food and the energy to make food and shelter and clothing and schools and hospitals and you cannot do it with your deep-ecology wilderness dream. I hate your hypocrites for this holier-than-thou antihuman nonsense!”
Mr. Smith replied calmly, “Oil men always hate environmentalists. It means nothing except that your own brain has been overdetermined by your structured position in the global hierarchy. In fact you can’t sustainably provide energy and food and clothing, and the other means of existence, without the Earth. It is not the values of deep ecology that are causing the problem, but the exploitative economy of a world system in which a tiny aristocracy-of-the-wealthy stripmines the world’s natural and human resources, and retreats with the loot to its fortress mansions and islands, leaving the rest to survive as we may in the wreckage they have escaped. This is Götterdämmerung capitalism, this is our moment, and just as you say colonialism never ended, this feudalism has never ended, and it has nothing whatever to do with the so-called democratic values used to palliate the masses. Indeed all the armies of the world are now employed in enforcing this system against any group that takes the idea of democracy seriously.”
“There was nothing democratic about this sabotage,” Carlos said. “There are just a few of these ecoteurs, and most people condemn what they do, but they do it anyway. If they were for democracy they would have abided by the majority view on the matter, and people want electricity, they want light at night, they want refrigeration so their children don’t get sick from bad food.”
Mr. Smith pursed his lips, his most violent expression so far. “If sufficiency were the true goal then the world’s needs could be met and more, using current and emerging technologies. It’s economic growth and the enrichment of the feudalist-capitalist aristocracy that are the true goals of this society, and the masses do not truly go along with these goals which are against their own interests, but are rather intimidated to accept what they can in an unjust system, or else be fired or jailed or shot. Thus my clients encourage widespread democratic resistance to the current destruction of the Earth, in which a few hundred thousand people benefit excessively while billions suffer, and the coming generations handed a scorched and plundered world.”
“Speaking more particularly,” Sylvia suggested.
“Antarctica is the last clean wilderness,” Mr. Smith pounced. “As such it stands for what we could do if we lived in a right balance with nature.”
“Antarctica is clean because no one lives here!” Carlos said. “It’s easy to be pure when there are no people around. For the rest of the world, the best possible strategies have to be followed to keep people alive.”
“Gentlemen,” Sylvia said, looking hard at Carlos and Mr. Smith. “We could perhaps debate general principles forever. I’d like to hear what happens if we keep our discussion focused on Antarctica in particular.” She glanced at Geoff, hoping for some help there; but he was staring into infinity, deep in the Pliocene no doubt.
“But they are discussing Antarctica,” Ta Shu said. He had been watching the argument as if at a tennis match, head swiveling side to side, nodding at both speakers with what looked like complete and total approval. Now he said, “People here talk about the ice and the world. As if here we are not in the world. But this is not so. To speak of this place truly, we must bring in everything else. And so these gentlemen are not wrong to speak generally. What they say is simply the basic problem of our time—that the Earth must be allowed to live, while at the same time people must be fed. One emphasizes one, another emphasizes the other. But both must be done.”
“My clients are not just advocating park status for Antarctica,” said Mr. Smith. “The whole world must be treated as a wilderness in which we have to live, with minimum impact everywhere.”
“Like in Manhattan,” Carlos said.
“Even Manhattan can be made a wilderness of a certain kind.”
“And even Antarctica can be inhabited,” said a short old woman by the door.
“Mai-lis!” Sylvia said, surprised. “You’ve come to join us.”
Mai-lis walked into the room, into the circle of chairs. “Yes. I am Mai-lis,” she said. “My colleagues and I live in the Transantarctic Mountains.”
The people in the room stared at her, and she gathered their gazes calmly, like a storyteller readying her start by the fire at night. Sylvia extended a hand, as if to say Speak; and Mai-lis nodded.
“I am here to speak for my colleagues and friends, a group of Antarcticans who have decided to become indigenous to this place. Some call it going feral. It is a mixed-ideology project, in that we do it for different reasons, rising out of different value systems, and we do not always agree among ourselves. But in general terms, I can say that we take Antarctica to be a beautiful sacred landscape, worthy of sacred inhabitation, which is our word for a joyful or worshipful living in a land—to be the land’s human expression and part of its consciousness, along with the rest of its animal and plant consciousnesses.
“To do this in such a harsh climate, it is necessary to use techniques and technologies from many times and places, from the Sami and Inuit and other Arctic indigenous peoples, to the best of communal social theory, to the latest appropriate technologies. We take what seems right to us, from the paleolithic to the postmodern, and most of us do not worry too much about purity. We live democratically. We think it’s important to live off the land as much as possible, but sustainably, without harm to the land. In Antarctica this means keeping our numbers small, and helping the parts of the northern economies which we need to help us in turn. We regard our way of life as an experiment under extreme conditions. If it works here, it should work anywhere, as long as the number of people trying it is not too large for the land being lived on.”