Are We Living in a Novel Age? etting oil out of the lithosphere is a messy business. To do it properlysthat is, with minimal (if not zero) environmental impactsrequires more research than has been done to date. ES&T calls for that research: our Editor-in-Chief’s July 1 Comment (Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/es101727m); commentary by Danny Reible (Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/es1020372); and related topics like this issue’s cover Feature on natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale (Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/es903811p). I cannot remember being more conscious of an environmental disaster than I am of the BP oil spill. Everywhere I turn, that black miasma is spewing into my consciousness (and I do not even watch TV that does not come in DVD form!). Even relaxing to music the other day, I heard the lyric “And then the rigs begin to drill/Until the drilling goes too far/Things can go bad/And make you want to run away” (Jack Johnson, “The Horizon Has Been Defeated”, from On and On, Universal Records, 2003). Well, maybe I’ve had this feeling before. Chernobyl in 1986. Exxon Valdez in 1989. But those were one-offs, not this ongoing gushing of the aortic lifeblood of the global economy. Back in the late 1980s, I discovered the escapism of science fiction. It mostly promised a better future and seemed to prognosticate correctly now and again. Jules Verne imagined a moon shot, and Arthur C. Clarke promulgated the potential of geostationary communication satellites. Granted, both entertained flights of fancy, but in that free thinking there was reason for optimism. At one point, I came across astrophysicist-cum-novelist David Brin’s “Uplift” series, which is a lengthy yarn (now seven books long) of an intergalactic society that holds environmentalism and information archiving in its highest moral code. In this world, fertile planets beget presentient species that can be genetically “uplifted” by advanced cultures to continue galacto-political society. Species that destroy ecosystems are summarily dispensed for the greater good. This far-future science fantasy was all fine and good, but Brin’s Earth, set a mere 50 years ahead of its publication date (1990), might properly be called science satire, with equal helpings of prognostication and fancy. He used the well-timed hook of microscopic black holes (A Brief History of Time having adorned airport stacks since 1988), but it was his vision of the coming Information Age in an environmentally ravished world that made it most compellingsand still engrossing 20 years on. In my teenaged idealism, Brin’s “World Net” was a fantastical prospect (Tim Berners-Lee’s “World Wide Web” debuted in 1991). Brin also envisioned “data plaques” (that now seem less like Star Trek since the
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iPad debut in April 2010). But surely the environmental strife was too dystopic to imagine in 1990, despite the recent experiences of Chernobyl and the Exxon Valdez, as well as acid rain and ozone depletion. Yet Brin’s imaginings seem ever more plausible: Bangladesh washed away and many of its citizens swept into the nomadic Sea State; cultist Sun worshippers’ daily sacrifice of their skin to melanomic lesions; plants and animals shored up in Arks so desperate biotechnologists can salvage their genetic codes before it’s too late; a U.N. force devoted to hunting down poachers and environmental criminals. Science fiction is often dismissed out of hand, as it does not predict everything or the right things at the right time: Clarke got satellites right; he guessed at free long distance calling by 2000; but we hardly went to Jupiter in 2001 (though, that did require an absent-todate alien Monolith). But it is not the line-item predictions of Brin’s tome that still resonate: it is the sense that his 2038 arrived due to continual seepage, perhaps accumulating by a magnitude, occasionally spiked with sensationalistic one-off calamities. Today, when I look at the Gulf of Mexico, I see a queasy confluence of worst-case scenarios, both imagined and real. There are the robot submersibles from James Cameron’s The Abyss showing us the pitch-black geyser for all to see over Brin’s Net, as Kevin Costner brings his Water World flotilla to bear above. That oft-mentioned video feed shows a disaster steady and rapid, monotonous and captivating, stark and otherworldly. Much commentary in recent weeks has waxed philosophical on our addiction to oil: That society will drive itself to doom if we continue to grasp for more unsustainable power; That we are in a haze of our own making, constantly sleepwalking through our dark reality, trying to wash away the damned spot. “Looking back” on all this in his novel, Brin “quotes” a book published in 2035: Given their declining petroleum reserves and the side effects of spewing carbon into the atmosphere, why were twentieth century Americans so suspicious of nuclear power? Essentially, people were deeply concerned about incompetence. sDavid Brin, Earth, Bantam Spectra, 1990. I’d say it’s about time for that Monolith, unless we’re truly ready to keep fiction at bay.
Darcy J. Gentleman Managing Editor*
[email protected]. August 1, 2010 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 9 5677
