Antarctica (7 page)

He joined them and fought the good fight. They won some and lost some. He developed some diseases of civilization: he drank a bit too much, he smoked cigars sometimes, he couldn’t seem to stay in relationships for more than a year; the women he connected with wanted more than policy, and many of them were not much interested in spending their precious vacation time ice-climbing in the Yukon or on Baffin Island. There seemed no one quite on his wavelength, even in the WDC. They were all neurotic; and so was he. The discrepancy between his beliefs and his life was nearly too much to bear.

Then he was assigned to work on the latest shameless
assault on wilderness, coordinated by the timber lobby and the U.S. Forest Service, that implacable enemy of wilderness in general and forests in particular—a plan to inventory all federal lands and assess what could be opened up to new logging, now that all the land previously opened to logging had been clear-cut. The Forest Service claimed that all future logging would be done according to their new integrated forest management plan, and that this plan was ecologically sound, and that therefore many heretofore unlogged regions could be opened up to the newly enlightened “selective cut” timber industry. The timber lobby went at the Congress, which as always was the best that money could buy, campaign finance reform having once again mutated into campaign finance recomplication; and timber had the relevant subcommittees sewed up, and the chances of stopping them looked poor indeed. But all the big environmental groups opposed the opening of the new land, which amounted in the Forest Service’s first proposal to some hundred million acres scattered all over the United States, and they pooled their resources to fight the plan in the courts.

So he worked sixteen-hour days, now, and eighteen-hour days, engaged in the fight of his life, consumed by it. Nothing else mattered. They had to defeat this proposal.

Then another factor intervened. The President had visited Alaska’s North Slope, and now he was in favor of establishing the wilderness and wildlife refuge that had been proposed so long ago, there on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, which would in effect lock up a large oil and gas reserve. Oil prices were getting higher since the Siberian field’s troubles and the general rapid depletion of all the world’s known supergiant fields, and the President’s proposal was controversial, but in the capital
the machinations of the various players ground it into the equation; and all that wildlife out on the open tundra was very photogenic, and very far away; and all the memberships of all the big environmental groups supported the idea of the park enthusiastically. The President’s staff entered into the negotiation process, and they and the Congressional staff and the big environmental groups and the timber lobby and the oil lobby all had their say, and in the end a compromise was worked out: the Arctic slope would become a national park, with a special provision for oil extraction in case of national emergency; and to balance this “concession to wilderness,” ninety percent of the hundred million acres were to be opened up to the new “environmental logging.” And the environmentalist groups all went along.

He had opposed this compromise every step of the way. But the process was a lot bigger than he was. Indeed the Wilderness Defense Club was one of the major supporters of the compromise, having advocated the Arctic slope park for decades. So not only did his superiors in the organization not listen to his protests, he was on the contrary assigned to go back to California and make sure that the local grassroots organizations in Humboldt County and the Sierra foothills did not challenge the new logging plan in the courts, so that the entire compromise package would be able to go ahead as planned without impediments that possibly would derail the whole delicate agreement.

So he went back to California; but as a private citizen, having quit the Wilderness Defense Club in rage and disgust. He had no job, he had no home. He spent most of a year living off his savings and climbing the great granite walls of Yosemite, which was cheap entertainment compared to some. His home was the ledge on
the Lost Arrow Wall called the Jefferson Airport. His diseases of civilization got a bit worse. He told all his climbing partners about his experience in Washington D.C., told the story of the Arctic compromise sell-out again and again, bitter and ranting. But each retelling only made him feel angrier.

Then one group of climbers based in Tuolumne took him with them on a long winter ski trip down the length of the Muir Trail, stopping to dig up caches of food and climbing rope, to make winter ascents of the best of the peaks they passed. It was a wild trip, his companions wild men. And one night when they were camped at a low enough altitude to make them comfortable with burning wood for a campfire, they sat around the flames into the depth of the night, telling stories. And he told his D.C. story again, and they laughed at him. You should have known, they told him. Reform will never work. It’s just another form of collaboration.

But you have to do something! he protested.

Of course, they said. But you have to do something that works. And nothing works but direct action.

Direct action?

They looked at him over the firelight, their eyes glittering.

Over the remainder of the trip he learned what they meant. They were part of a group they laughingly called ecotage internationale. It was not a public group with any formal organization of any kind; that was just an invitation to repression. That was the mistake Earth First! had made, they said; publish a newsletter and go public and you only made it easier for the powers that be to sic the FBI on you, like an insane police Rottweiler going for your throat. Or even worse, the private security forces of the timber and mining industries,
which were counter-insurgency-type organizations trained by the CIA or by Third World secret services, silent and deadly.

No. It was crucial to stay underground, unknown, unheard of, unorganized, unrecognized. They had no name. They had cryptographers working the internet for them, they had ecotage experts working on methodologies. Anonymity was crucial. They had no management, no lawyers, no war chest, no public relations. They did have members, however; several thousand of them, as far as anyone could tell, grouped in clandestine and nearly independent cells. No infiltration was happening because no one knew to infiltrate them. They were very, very careful about whom they told about the group. Nevertheless it was a growing group, because the condition of the Earth was worsening right before their eyes, and as a result radical environmentalism was attracting more people to it.

And they thought he might be interested.

For the first time in over ten years, a knot in his stomach began to untie a bit. Near the end of his trip, up on the Diamond Mesa south of Forester Pass, they spent one short silvery winter afternoon moving shards of granite into a goldsworthy, as they called it, a new work of environmental art, created to welcome him into the fold of ecotage internationale; essentially a little thigh-high Stonehenge in the Sierras, with a center stone symbolizing his location in the group; his and everyone else’s. They all were at the center of the world, they said; and they danced around the stones in the sunset, howling, drumming on their pots, drinking whisky and throwing rocks at the moon.

The next morning they knocked over the stones and moved on. And the next spring two of that clandestine group drove by his Berkeley apartment one night, and
asked him to join them on an expedition. They drove up into the Sierra foothills, where environmental forestry was being extensively practiced. Even environmental forestry needed some logging roads, however, and a new network was being cut into the land north of Highway 80. Private security police were protecting it, as had become standard practice. But it was the dark of the moon, and the road system was at that vulnerable point where it had been surveyed and marked out with plastic flags and spray paint, but not yet cut and dozed.

So they drove to the end of a dirt road, into an obscure car camping site, and they got out and jogged into the bush. The Sierra foothills are very tough to hike cross-country in, especially at night, but his companions had a route worked out, and they came down a slope onto the planned course of the new road, and began to sneak around like primeval hunters, using night glasses and running like silent maniacs once or twice to avoid patrols; and they pulled up stakes, and cut down flags, and sprayed graffiti dissolvers on the painted tree trunks; and in that one night, three weeks’ work by the logging company was wiped out.

Of course the logging company could repeat the work, his companions told him in the dawn ride back down to the Bay Area. No doubt they would. But their costs would rise. Logging was only profitable at the margin, and the bean-counters on Wall Street would look at the P and L statements and logging wouldn’t look as good to them, wouldn’t get the same kind of investment. The megacorporations that owned the logging companies might get disenchanted and sell; like the loggers they were only extraction companies anyway, they strip-mined their subsidiaries’ resources and then they were redundant; and it could be that the megacorporation executives considered the forests of
the world basically extracted already, at least in their most profitable phases. So that they might lose interest, and it all might collapse back to a need-for-wood basis, rather than a need for liquidated assets.

And there were other ecoteurs out there, pouring sugar into gas tanks, cutting ditches, rolling boulders onto roads, introducing computer viruses; all invisible, nonviolent, nonorganized, nonpublicized. Never hurt anybody, never brag, never talk at all. Ego radical or eco radical. Let the Greenpeace-style organizations do the PR work, play to the media and do theater for the Earth; that was important too, but it wasn’t their job. What they did was done at night, by people, mostly men, who wanted to
do something
to save the world, who wanted also those nights of adrenaline terror and accomplishment. It was somewhat like the Brits who had created the crop circles at the end of the last century, doing something beautiful in the wild night to combat the meaninglessness of modern civilization. But this was better yet. This was resistance to the mindless evil of the world’s economic regime.

So he had found his cause. It made him calmer. He got a relatively low-paying job in a Berkeley law firm, spending his time fighting SLAPPs, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, and arguing social issues for the residual progressive culture in the area, and also for the poor, because really it was the poor who bore the brunt of the environmental collapse. And then he did everything he could to erase his environmentalist past. He got less neurotic, less guilty. He gave up cigars. When he worked he worked, he did his best, he did pro bono; but then when he wasn’t working, he relaxed. He said Fuck it and went out for a run. He climbed on vacations, in the Arctic and elsewhere around the world. It used jet fuel but what the hell. No
martyrdom of virtue anymore, just fight the good fight. He saw the Himalayas, in a series of glorious treks. And a few times a year he went out with friends he never otherwise saw or talked to, except on Telegraph Avenue, on certain holidays; and they went through intensities of ecotage that made the rest of life seem like a pale dream.

Eventually, he recruited some climbing friends to the movement himself. He began to pay attention to the
Federal Register
and other sources of public information, to plan ecotage raids of his own. He did more and more of them; and no one knew.

And then on one of his vacations, he joined an adventure travel group in a climb of Mount Vinson, the highest peak in Antarctica. Like the Himalayas, it was an overwhelming experience for him; the purest wilderness he had ever seen. He came home in love with the place. Life in Berkeley seemed harder to bear after that, somehow. He still drank a bit too much. He started cigars again, occasionally. He fell in and out of relationships, sometimes painfully, sometimes perfunctorily. He was thirty-four years old.

Reading the news became a kind of self-flagellation. Things looked so dire. The world’s population was over ten billion and the Dow Jones average was over ten thousand. Global average temperatures were ten degrees higher than a century before, and extreme weather events were a weekly occurrence, causing untold destruction and suffering. About four billion people had no access to electricity, while at the same time whole bioregions were already collapsing; and still the ruthless extraction of the world’s natural resources continued apace. One of his eco friends with experience in the markets laughed blackly one night as he railed at this destruction, and explained to him what was happening.
Say a company owned a forest that it had harvested selectively for generations, delivering its shareholders a consistent ten percent return. Meanwhile the world financial markets were offering bonds with a fifteen percent return. Lumber prices dropped, and the company’s returns dropped, so the traders dropped it and its shares plummeted, so the shareholders were angry. The management, on the edge of collapse, decided to clear-cut the forest and invest the profits from that lumber sale immediately into bonds that yielded a higher return than the forest had. In effect the money that the forest represented was more valuable than the forest itself, because long-term value had collapsed to net present value; and so the forest was liquidated, and more money entered the great money balloon. And so the inexorable logic of Götterdämmerung capitalism demolished the world to increase the net present values of companies in trouble. And all of them were in trouble.

His friend stared at him, laughed at the no doubt sick look on his face, lifted his hands; that’s the way things were. That was the explanation for the Götterdämmerung; not suicidal murderers in high places, but simply the logic of the system.

He had walked home through the smog and traffic noise, unaware of any of it. Seeing the world in his mind’s eye, all falling apart.

Then one day he was reading the news again, helplessly, using print newspapers picked up in coffee houses so that his reading could not be monitored by any hypothetical surveillance, and he came across a long article on the current situation in Antarctica. The Senate’s hold-up of the renewal of the Antarctic Treaty was causing a circling for advantage among the Treaty nations; and some Southern Hemisphere nations, never
party to the Antarctic Treaty, had seen this happening and recently formed a consortium called the Southern Club Antarctic Group, to begin oil explorations all over Antarctica. They were going to do it there too. The last pure wilderness on Earth.