Antarctica (62 page)

Except the world was still there, of course. Sylvia had been juggling calls from all over, now that communications were restored; most importantly from NSF’s head offices in Virginia, asking for a quick accounting of the last week, identification of the ecoteurs if possible, and, luckily for her, any recommendations she might have for avoiding such events in the future. Also, the home office clearly wanted to contain the problem as much as she did, to minimize it and declare it an isolated anomaly, a sport in biological terms, so that the military was not called back in for good, and the Antarctic taken out of NSF’s hands. All perfectly appropriate in Sylvia’s opinion; but one Navy plane had made it down already, at great risk, and a big task force would soon follow to investigate the ecotage, naturally; and what would happen then was anyone’s guess. The big storm (inevitably termed a superstorm in the U.S. popular press) had stalled all these outsiders in Christchurch, however, and so she had this little window of opportunity to conduct her own investigation.

Now here they were, filing into the big room. The ASL managers; Geoff Michelson and some of his colleagues, just returned from the Dry Valleys; several Kiwis from Scott Base; Ta Shu; Mr. Smith; Wade Norton; Carlos and X, and some of Carlos’s colleagues from the SCAG consortium; Val and some of her clients. Others were standing in the loft or in the offices off the main room. The Chalet had seldom seen such a crowd.

“Thanks for coming,” Sylvia said. “We’re here to discuss what’s happened in the past week, to see if we can make any recommendations to our various contacts in the north concerning where we might go from here, and how we can avoid any repetitions of this kind of thing. My notion is to conduct it like a small and informal scientific conference, with short presentations followed by questions and discussion, with the hope that at the end we could perhaps collaborate on a general statement. This of course will all be merely an addendum to the full official investigations, but I hope it will be useful. Ta Shu has suggested that for a meeting like this we should move our chairs into a circle formation, so that we can all see each other when we’re talking—among other no doubt valid reasons,” waving Ta Shu down, “and I think that’s a good idea, it will save us craning our necks to see who’s talking. So why don’t we do that first, and then begin.”

When they were rearranged in a rough circle, chairs all the way back to the walls, everyone able to see everyone else (it had been a good idea), Sylvia went on. “Mr. Smith here has arrived privately by boat, and he says he represents the, the ecoteurs who disrupted operations here and in various outlying camps. Without granting him priority, or in any way legitimating those attacks—in fact I condemn them here and now as criminal, dangerous, and useless—still I think we might start
by hearing what Mr. Smith has to say concerning their actions.”

Mr. Smith nodded and rose to his feet. “My clients are private individuals, allied in some senses with the Antarctic World Park Emergency Rescue Action, and with more than a hundred other mainstream and grassroots environmental groups concerned at the nonrenewal of the Antarctic Treaty and the flagrant violations of its principles in the last two years. Other than that my clients wish to remain anonymous. They undertook to temporarily impair certain of the most egregious examples of Treaty breaking, to protest these operations and draw the world’s attention to them. They wish no harm to anyone, they took great pains to ensure that no one would be injured or killed, and they were successful in that goal, for which they are thankful, aware that in Antarctic the destruction of property will always bring some risk to life.”

“That’s for damn sure,” someone said, among other various mutterings. There were a lot of fierce looks directed at Mr. Smith from Carlos’s contingent especially, but Sylvia kept her focus on him, and he looked at her as he continued, oblivious to the others.

“Now of course they are aware that they are the subjects of a vast manhunt on the part of governmental authorities, and this does not surprise them, but they would like to point out that this is typical of law enforcement, to pursue very vigorously individuals performing civil disobedience or other protest actions, while allowing hundreds or even thousands of corporate executives to comprehensively break the laws without obstruction, or even with so-called law enforcement’s help and protection. Corporations and governments from many countries have been despoiling this last wilderness continent in complete contempt for
international law, and so for the U.S. Navy and the FBI now to come here searching for my clients is a travesty, the equivalent of arresting the protesters of a crime while the criminals stand right at hand. It makes them not a police but rather a private security force, which might as well take its pay directly from the foreign governments and transnational corporations it is serving. As private security for corporations it makes sense to overlook gross malfeasance while brutally pursuing small individual protest actions, which to corporations are indeed the more dangerous of the two. The small spontaneous protests of individuals suggest after all that democracy might be a real thing, rather than just a cover story told to people to keep them in their places in the economic hierarchy. And of course the idea that democracy might be real is much too dangerous a notion to allow it to spread very far, for if it did, and if everyone acted on truly democratic principles, including protesting obvious crimes against the law, then social control would be impossible and the gross inequities of the current economic order, in which five percent of the world’s population own ninety percent of the world’s wealth, would be revealed for the hypocritical environment-devastating injustice that it is. Democracy in the United States and most of the rest of the industrial West is therefore a false front on a rich man’s mansion, a sham in which people are given a political vote but then clock in each day to an economic system in which their entire lives are regimented by a small group of executives busily downsizing whatever workplace rights people had gained in centuries of struggle. So people can vote, yes, but for politicians all funded by the corporations in control of the system, meaning you can either vote for the part of the owner class that believes in treating its employees well, or for the part that
believes in taking as much as possible from its employees, but in any case you have to vote for the continuation of the system and therefore of the owner class. So the right to vote is meaningless. And in such a situation, a nondemocratic situation, civil disobedience and direct nonlethal resistance are the only true options to co-optation within the owner system. And thus as the only true options for resistance these are of course ruthlessly extirpated by the authorities wherever they appear, with the idea of discouraging the spread of protest by rank intimidation. And in the past this has usually worked, for very few want their lives shattered in order to protest an injustice that is massively entrenched and made to appear the natural order of things, and unlikely to fall to any individual act.

“So the only answer at this point is to use modern technology to act at a distance, and with perfect anonymity. And that is the course my clients have taken. The way they have structured their action makes it impossible for them to be identified, and you can be sure that I will keep their confidentiality, not only as a matter of legal ethics but also from the practical consideration that I myself do not know who they are. I only know that they wish to announce to you that in the current state of materials science, and the balkanization of communication technology, the means now exist to act in ways that encrypt and sequester the identity of the actors so watertightly that no one will ever know who they were. And this will be true in future protest actions as well, if they happen. That being the case, the views of the disenfranchised are going to have to be listened to again, and the environment and the world’s disenfranchised people are going to have to be re-enfranchised by the dominant order, which is going to have to change, or else anonymous and untraceable
nonviolent protests and ecotage will crash the system. The last week in Antarctica is an announcement and demonstration of this fact.”

He paused to take a breath and Sylvia held up a hand. “Thank you, Mr. Smith! Perhaps we can give someone else a chance to speak now, in response perhaps for a moment or two, and then we’ll get back to you.”

“Fine,” Mr. Smith said, unperturbed. He sat down.

“Carlos? You and your colleagues in the Southern Club Antarctic Group were the people most affected by Mr. Smith’s clients’ ecotage. Would you like to make a response to Mr. Smith’s, um, remarks?”

Carlos popped to his feet. “My pleasure to speak! Contrary to what Mr. Smith has been saying, although there are some of his general remarks that I can agree with, there is no question that our oil and gas exploration, and the extraction of oil and methane hydrates from the polar cap, is both legal and environmentally safe!”

He waved a finger at Mr. Smith, who was a most unlikely-looking object of anyone’s scorn. “The Antarctic Treaty forbade mineral exploration, yes, but Japan and Russia never ratified the 1991 environmental protocol, and oil companies based in Treaty countries have looked for oil anyway. And now the Antarctic Treaty has expired and renewal has been held up, as everyone knows, mostly because of opposition to the Treaty from corporations based in the United States, using their allies in the American government to hold off approval of the Treaty until it has been altered to allow some exploration rights to
them
. So for the last two years we have been operating in a vacuum. And the Southern Club Antarctic Group, a group composed of nations in the southern hemisphere who never signed
the Antarctic Treaty, and were never invited to join the Treaty conferences—they decided unanimously to pursue the path of clean extraction of important resources, especially methane hydrates, whenever this was deemed technically possible without harming the Antarctic environment in any way. There has been some protest from environmentalist groups in the North about this policy, but these protests come from nations who are using up the world’s resources at five to twenty times the rate of the members of the Southern Club Antarctic Group, so I personally feel that it is very presumptuous for these people of the North to protest when in effect the North has historically conquered the South, taken everything portable back to the North with them, destroyed the southern landscape and left the people of the South in misery, thus prospering so greatly that they can afford to have an upper class at leisure to order the environmental ethics of the countries that they have so shattered and left behind! The hypocrisy of the North, on this as on so many other issues, is
endless
, and beyond defense. It has beggared our language. It is the major fact in the history of the world in the last five centuries, colonialism that has never really ended, but merely changed formats.”

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.”