Wild Thing: A Novel (38 page)

November 1979–January 1981. Iran takes sixty-six Americans hostage during the Carter administration, and doesn’t release them until six minutes into the Reagan administration
,
^*
thereby convincing a lot of Americans that a slick corporate tool selling sham “morning in America” optimism was somehow an improvement over a (granted) kook who, despite taking money from oil interests himself, at least
said
he wanted to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. As environmentalists, Reagan’s appointees—such as EPA head Anne Gorsuch, who didn’t believe the federal government should
have
an environmental policy, and became the first agency director in history to be charged with contempt of Congress—were actually worse than those of George W. Bush.

This is another strong possibility. Until 9/11, the Iranian hostilities
were the biggest hint Americans got of what happens when the oil industry drives politics. That their response was to flee into shortsighted denial continues to define American politics today.

Plus, as a year, 1979 has other things going for it. Like that it was the year Saudi billionaires Salem bin Laden (cousin of Osama bin Laden) and Khalid bin Mahfouz (brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden) provided startup funds for Arbusto, George W. Bush’s first business venture. And that David Koch (see above) ran for vice president, an experience said to have convinced him and his brother to seek political change covertly rather than overtly.

November 1962. Report commissioned by JFK from the Committee on Natural Resources of the National Academy of Sciences / National Resource Council predicts that endless clean energy from fusion will be achieved “possibly within a decade but more likely within a generation,”
thereby (the argument goes) convincing the Kennedy administration and subsequent administrations to ignore conservation or environmental protection.
^*

Serious climate nerds often choose this one, but mostly so they can identify each other at conferences. Personally I’m not that into it. If you’re going to believe that anyone read this report, took it seriously, and based policy decisions on it, then you have to assume the same people read—but completely ignored—sentences in the report like this one:

Man is altering the balance of a relatively stable system by his pollution of the atmosphere with smoke, fumes, and particles from fossil fuels, industrial chemicals, and radioactive material; by his alteration of the energy and water balance at the earth’s surface by deforestation, afforestation [i.e., planting of new forests—not sure this one’s turned out to be that big of a
problem], cultivation of land, shading, mulching, overgrazing grasslands, reduction of evapotranspiration [i.e., the vital part of the water cycle where plants evaporate water off the tops of their leaves to produce suction, which draws nutrients up through their circulatory systems], irrigation, draining of large swamp lands, and the building of cities and highways; by his clearing forests and alterations of plant surface cover, changing the reflectivity of the earth’s surface and soil structures; by his land-filling, construction of buildings and seawalls, and pollution, bringing about radical changes in the ecology of estuarine areas; by changes he effects in the biologic balance and the physical relocation of water basins through the erection of dams and channel works; and by the increasing quantities of carbon dioxide an industrial society releases to the atmosphere.

And besides, the idea that people knew this shit in 1962 and didn’t do anything about it is, even for me, too depressing to dwell on.

1953. Public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, on behalf of the tobacco industry, devises the strategy of “constructing controversy,”
by which corporations pay crackpots to dispute scientifically proven concepts, then accuse the press of partiality if their shills aren’t given equal time with people who know what they’re talking about.

This is actually a very strong contender, in my opinion. The practice is in wider use than ever (the term “false equivalency” has become a popular way to describe it), and it’s been modified by the understanding that—up to the point where the media won’t tolerate it, which has yet to be located—the more extreme your manufactured dissent, the further you can push the “centrist” position from the truth.

1895. Henry Ford, then an executive of the Edison Illuminating Company, dedicates himself to researching gasoline engines
. Alternately:
1870 (first mobile gasoline engine), 1860 (first mass-produced internal combustion engine), 1823 (first internal combustion engine to be used industrially), etc.

I don’t like calling inventions and discoveries disasters. Technology’s not evil; it just evolves quickly and without clear goals or ethics, requiring us to constantly defend a place for humanity in the world it makes. What causes technology to
behave
like it’s evil is corporate greed. Like General Motors establishing a special unit in 1922 to buy and dismantle functioning electric public transportation systems across America. Or Congress making that kind of thing easier for GM and other companies to do by passing the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935.

1879–83. The War of the Pacific
. This is not a cause, but it
is
a pretty egregiously missed lesson. The war was over deposits of bat and seagull shit in the Caribbean, which had been discovered to be an ideal source of fertilizer, and had enabled a boom in agricultural output—with resulting booms in population and urbanization.
^*
Bat and seagull shit are renewable in the sense that bats and seagulls continue, where available, to shit, but the deposits in the Caribbean had taken millions of years to form and were depleted within sixty years of being found. If petroleum hadn’t been discovered to replace them, there would have been a population crash
then
.
^*

It’s a great illustration of the human tendency to quickly exhaust resources that took what paleontologists call “geologic time” to form, but there are a lot of those.
^*

Fifth century BC. Consolidation of the Book of Genesis
, with its claim, no doubt useful for the political demographics of the time,
^*
that “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it…. I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.’ ”

Now, there are several messages you can imagine taking from this passage. One of the more obvious is that God wants us to be vegetarian. Another is that, once the earth
has
been filled and subdued, God might want us to fucking
stop overbreeding
. I mean, most people who read “lather, rinse, repeat” don’t keep doing it until their scalp is a chunky mess of gore. They just can’t seem to apply the same logic to the Bible.
^*
The message they insist on seeing is that God for some reason wants us to pursue maximal reproduction until it kills off us and most of His other non-insect creatures.

But people will interpret
anything
in self-serving ways, so it’s hard to blame what ended up being the Bible. Give people a genetics
textbook, and when they read that they’re going to pass on only half of their unique genes to their kids, and only a quarter to their grandkids, and only an eighth to their great-grandkids, at least some of them are going to say
“Damn—it says I need to have eight kids.”

If I had to choose
, I’d go with Reagan / Carter / Iran 1979–80. It was the great turning-away from reality, and it happened the same year William R. Catton’s
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
was published.

Because
that
was such an effective warning.

Easy. First: plant ten billion trees. Then: Rubik’s Vagina. Same pass rate as the cube, only
with
using the guidebook.

It’s my idea, but you can have it for free.

This book is a work of fiction. While the sources mentioned below have been helpful in conceiving it, the book does not necessarily reflect those sources’ findings or opinions with any accuracy. Nor is it intended to. That said, and strictly for people who care about this kind of thing:

My understanding of what it’s like to be a doctor in
the cruise ship industry
owes thanks to the doctors and patients who have shared their experiences with me personally (MW in particular) and those who have seen fit to share them publicly, such as Gary Podolsky, John Bradberry, and Andrew Lucas, not all of whom perceive the industry in a negative light. For background I am indebted to
Devils on the Deep Blue Sea: The Dreams, Schemes and Showdowns That Built America’s Cruise-Ship Empires
, by Kristoffer A. Garin, 2006 (including for information
about the 1981 strike),
^*
and the Cruise Lines International Association guidelines for medical facilities.

The figure of approximately $7,000 a year for some cruise ship employees is from the “Policy Guidelines Governing the Approval of ITF [International Transport Workers’ Federation] Acceptable CBA’s [collective-bargaining agreements] for Cruise Ships Flying Flags of Convenience,” aka the ITF Miami Guidelines, 2004,
^*
which to my knowledge have not been updated, and which
suggest
a minimum monthly basic wage for cruise ship workers of $302, rising to $608 when combined with overtime and leave. In “Sovereign Islands: A Special Report; For Cruise Ships’ Workers, Much Toil, Little Protection,” by Douglas Frantz, the
New York Times
, 24 Dec 1999, Frantz writes that “for laboring as long as 18 hours a day, seven days a week, most galley workers are paid $400 to $450 a month.” Details on some of the expenses of cruise ship workers are from Garin, above. Note also that the flag-of-convenience registry for Liberia is run by a private company in Virginia.
^*

The best piece of writing that I know of on the industry from the perspective of a passenger, even if you include
The Poseidon Adventure
, is the title essay of
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
, by David Foster Wallace, 1997. Wallace’s essay is remarkable for how much behind-the-scenes information he was able to intuit even as it was hidden from him.

As far as I know there is no cruise ship with a Nintendo Dome, but if there is I hope it’s called the
Mario D’Orio
.

What Violet Hurst describes as
catastrophic paleontology
is primarily the mix of sociology, anthropology, and ecology that was pioneered by
William R. Catton Jr. in the 1970s, and that is sometimes called either environmental sociology or human ecology. (Catton himself is a sociologist who has concentrated on environmental issues for most of his career.) Obviously the observation that human population growth tends to check itself in unpleasant ways goes back at least to Malthus, and books like
The Forest and the Sea
, by zoologist Marston Bates,
^*
1960, and
Silent Spring
, by marine biologist Rachel Carson, 1962, laid immediate groundwork for Catton. But as far as I know it was Catton who first applied concepts and technical terms from wildlife management, like “carrying capacity,” to human populations. His book
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
, 1980, remains definitive. One particularly elegant descendant of
Overshoot
is
A Short History of Progress
, by Ronald Wright, 2004, which in fact everyone on earth should read, and which has been particularly helpful to me here. I have also consulted Wright’s other two books,
Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes
, 1993, and
What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order
, for information about Native American populations. (See below.)

For information on a potential
oil crash
, I am indebted to Richard Heinberg, particularly his books
The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies
, 2003, and
Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis
, 2009. See also the 2008 cable from the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia to the CIA, U.S. Treasury, and U.S. Department of Energy that says “A series of major project delays and accidents… over the last couple of years is evidence that Saudi Aramco [the Saudi national oil company] is having to run harder to stay in place—to replace the decline in existing production.”
^*
For more on
government subsidies
to oil companies
see, for example, “As Oil Industry Fights a Tax, It Reaps Subsidies,” by David Kocieniewski, the
New York Times
, 3 July 2010.

The idea that the
melting of the methane hydrate shelf
, by which is generally meant the East Siberian Shelf, might cause an irreversible climate change loop is to my knowledge most closely associated with the work of Natalia Shakhova, PhD, of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. See, for example, “Methane Hydrate Feedbacks,” by NE Shakhova and IP Semiletov, in
Arctic Climate Feedbacks: Global Implications
, Sommerkorn and Hassol, eds., 2009.

For a
counter-argument
(granted, pre-Fukushima)
saying nuclear power
will
become a viable replacement for oil
, see
Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy
, by Gwyneth Cravens, 2007. For a
counter-counter argument
I recommend the chapter on Three Mile Island in
Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology
, by James R. Chiles, 2002, which is a great book anyway and introduced me to Karl Weick and “cosmology episodes.” For moral support and ongoing updates I am thankful to the weekly feature on nuclear power on Harry Shearer’s radio broadcast,
Le Show
.