The Way the Future Blogs

 

In Montpelier, Vermont, the factory of the company called National Clothespin closed its doors for good in 2009. This is a pity, because it was the last of its kind. Now no one in America makes wooden-spring clothespins. So Americans must buy imported ones (if they can find them) or, alternatively, go to the home electric tumble-dryer or to the local Laundromat.

But, of course, you know that already, because, according to New Scientist, 80 percent of Americans already own a dryer, and most of the others keep Laundromats in business.

There are two troubles with that. The first is that doing laundry with electric help costs 10 percent more than the clothespin kind and adds the same amount to a household’s energy use. If we returned to the clothespin we could retire a few coal-burning power plants. And an electric dryer is one of the most dangerous appliances you can admit into your house, causing 15,000 household fires every year.

Progress is a wonderful thing. But sometimes what looks like progress ain’t.

Plant life at The High Line in New York City. (Photo by Ryan Somma.)

The Hydra Club’s Free Private Park That Could Have Been

Way back in the day, by which I mean in the years around 1950, the place to go in New York City, if you wanted to meet science fiction authors, was the Hydra Club. (One of these times I’m going to try to write a little piece about the Hydra Club. This, however, is not yet that time.)

Anyway, the club didn’t have a home of its own. Our members-only gatherings were usually in someone’s apartment; for more elaborate events, we rented space from a hotel or from one of the city’s membership clubs. A few of our members were unhappy with that arrangement, wishing we had a permanent home to call our own, so we could keep things in it. What kind of things? Oh, maybe furniture. Or books. Anyway, things. And at one of the members-only gatherings somebody — if I remember correctly, which is not guaranteed, it may have been Charley Dye, Katherine MacLean’s husband — came up with a suggestion. He knew of a neighborhood where there were a whole bunch of apartments for rent for practically nothing, so if we wanted to sing, or if Fletcher Pratt wanted to give us a drum recital, around some midnight, we wouldn’t be disturbing anybody, because nobody lived there to disturb.

We checked it out and found it was true. So we rented one of the apartments, I believe a three-roomer, for something (memory says) under $20 a month. And we found out why they were so cheap, and so vacant. The apartments lined both sides of an avenue running somewhere south of 14th Street. Down the middle of that avenue, though, ran a one-way stretch of elevated railway line, and along that line, at odd hours of the day and night, now and then ran a locomotive pulling a few refrigerated freight cars full of beef and pork carcasses connecting the butchering headquarters of the city, south of Canal Street, with the nation’s rail network at about where Lincoln Center is now.

Deterred by the noise, and the dirt, and the general ugliness of the thing, not to mention the problems in driving and parking on that avenue, nobody wanted to live there, and hardly anybody did.

I cannot imagine why some billionaire developer didn’t see the possibilities and make a few billion more. For that matter, I can’t see why none of us did; surely there was a way to make quite a lot of money out of the situation. But we didn’t. We stayed there for a few months, and then the nay-sayers among us won out. The apartment was hard to get to. It got dirty between meetings, from that soot and ash that inhabits big-city air, and no one wanted to clean it. And, perhaps most telling point of all, after a meeting broke up at somewhere around midnight, nobody really enjoyed walking through those dirty, dark and apparently unpoliced streets. So we gave up our little home from home and returned to the life of gypsies.

And time passed.

 
Time passed, and the city wove its magic. You might not expect much from that magic, because the major ingredients it had to work with were only soot, fly ash and bird poop. But they were enough.

There were no trains on that elevated railway any more. Much of the railway itself was gone because smaller-minded developers had seen the possibilities here, or at least small fractions of them, and most of the elevated structure north of somewhere around 23rd Street was torn down, the outgoing animal carcasses, and the returning chops and steaks, then transported by trucks.

Okay now, it’s quiz time.

Q. What happens to any flat surface left exposed to the air in New York?

A. It gets dirty.

Q. What happens to that dirty layer if you don’t clean it up?

A. It accumulates more layers of dirt.

Q. What happens to those accumulated layers?

A. Birds flying overhead poop onto them.

Q. What constituent of bird poop has evolved to make that a way of reproducing itself?

A. Plant seeds.

And so it was. The plant seeds, well supplied with fertilizer, watered by the next rain that comes along, grow. That’s just about inevitable, but nobody seems to have anticipated it.

What did happen was that the City Council at last decided to get rid of that remaining stretch of elevated railway, so they sent people to those apartments to give the very few tenants who lived there the good news that they were going to tear it down. And the word the people sent back was, “Like hell you are! We’re hiring a lawyer.”

And then the emissaries climbed up to the top of the structure, and what they saw took their breath away. A riot of wildflowers twenty blocks long, where the seeds transported in bird intestines had germinated and grown into the absolute best wildflower display in North America. It had been the little secret of the people who lived along that stretch of roadway, and they were not going to let it be destroyed. And it hasn’t been.

 
Well, it’s been changed some now. The city fathers weren’t going to ruin this self-starting wonder. They weren’t going to preserve it for just a few local families and their most trusted friends alone, either. They’ve civilized it. There’s a broad footpath that runs the length of it now, with drinking fountains and Porta-Potties and exhibits of quite nice local art and all that sort of thing, all kept spanking clean, and what they’re now calling The High Line has become one of the city’s tourist attractions most relished by the cognoscenti. And nobody built it. It built itself.

And ain’t nature grand, if you just leave it alone to do what it does best?

 
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Oil slick around Mississippi Barrier Islands (NASA E0-1 Satellite photo).

 
Years ago, in collaboration with Isaac Asimov, I wrote a book on the environment called Our Angry Earth. It wasn’t particularly successful. I have to admit that it wasn’t quite as good a book as I could have wished, either. Isaac got sick almost at the very moment we agreed to do it, and so he wasn’t able to do anywhere near as much of the writing as I had expected — to the detriment of the book.

But there were several parts of the book that were all mine and had always been intended to be so. One of those was the section that demonstrated that many of the problems associated with pollution and environmental damage were simply a matter of bad bookkeeping.

For example. Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric dumped some 1.3 million pounds of extremely toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), waste products from the manufacture of electronic devices in two of its factories, into the upper reaches of the Hudson River. GE did this because, although safe disposal of the PCBs was quite possible, it would have added significantly to the manufacturing cost of the devices. Dumping the PCBs in the river cost General Electric little more than the charge for trucking them to the river’s edge.

This is not to say that there were no costs involved in the dumping. There were many costs, and some of them were quite high. The pollution of the river made its fish inedible, causing the cash loss of a commercial fishing industry. The restrictions on even sport fishing meant that fewer vacationers spent their summers there, to the loss of tourism. The health of people living nearby was compromised, at an incalculable cost. Real estate prices dropped as the area lost some of its attractiveness. Put them all together and there were real costs amounting to millions of dollars for the dumping. All those costs, though, were what accountants call “externals.”

That means that they were costs that General Electric didn’t have to pay, because the bills went directly to the rest of the world.

Proper accounting procedures, on the other hand, would have immediately tacked them onto the manufacturing costs — thus making it better business to dispose responsibly of the pollutants.

And thus, if it were common practice to make enterprises pay for their externals, many of the problems relating to industrial pollution would simply disappear. (It is true, however, that the courts finally ordered GE to pay for a partial cleanup of the river. That didn’t heal all the damage done, but at least it was something, and it showed a dawning awareness that externals should not be neglected indefinitely.)

 
It is not only manufacturers that foist their external costs off on the public. The extractive industries, among others, are at least equally blameworthy if not more so. In the oil and coal industries we have only to look at the Gulf of Mexico to see what external costs British Petroleum has imposed on the nearby population. (It is true that President Obama is forcing them to pay billions of dollars in restitution, but it is impossible to make some of the losses whole. Even BP doesn’t have that much money.)

And, of course, the Gulf oil spill is only one, if so far the most severe, among many such disasters. Some of us will recall the Exxon Valdez back in 1989, but in fact there has been at least one major spill — “major” meaning at least tens of thousands, and all too often tens of millions, gallons of oil spilled — somewhere in the world almost every year.

Major oil spills in waterways, last five years, as supplied by Infoplease:

• 2010: BP, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf of Mexico
• 2010: Tanker Eagle Otome, Port Arthur, TX
• 2009: MV Pacific Adventurer, Queensland, Australia
• 2008: Barge, Mississippi River, New Orleans, LA
• 2007: Tanker Hebei Spirit, off coast of South Korea
• 2006: Calcasieu River LA, waste oil spill
• 2006: Israeli navy bombing Jieh coast power station
• 2006: Tanker sinks in deep water, still there leaking oil, Guimaras, Philippines
• 2005: 7 million gallons oil spilled during Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, LA

(Before that, the list is very long.)

All the same, it’s obvious that the costs of an oil well blowing out dwarf other oil spills. BP’s Deepwater Horizon’s oil spill — so far — is estimated at over 160 million gallons. The only other spill that came even close was the Ixtoc. of 1979, also in the Gulf of Mexico. That one spilled 140 million gallons over the three months before it got stopped — by drilling a relief well next to it And there too the party responsible for the disaster was an oil company, Mexico’s Pemex.

So much for oil. What about coal?

The coal companies are, if anything, perhaps a little more rapacious than the oil companies. In the United States, their main unmet external costs are floods, landsides, the conversion of beautiful mountain areas into open-pit mines … and dead miners.

And how do these giant companies get away with it?

The answer is simple: money. The officials you and I vote for to protect our interests are sometimes all too willing, for money, to sell their votes to the very people we most need protection against.. It’s not really a matter of party, either. The Republicans are traditionally a little more friendly to big business than the Democrats, yes. But there are some eight Democratic Senators who are known, for obvious reasons, as the Coal Democrats. And at least one commentator does not believe that in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico there is a single legislative or judicial candidate of either party who has not received substantial money from Big Oil.

That’s the main other contribution I tried to make in Our Angry Earth. We individuals do not have anywhere enough muscle to deal with thee giant corporations. Only government can protect us from their worst excesses.

And what is the key to controlling government?

It’s called politics. If those among us who would like to see less corruption and misconduct among elected officials would get even a little bit involved there would be wonderful changes.

What do you have to do to get a little bit involved?

You give up Dancing with the Stars for one evening and go to the next League of Woman Voters-sponsored candidates’ debate scheduled in your neighborhood. (They’re listed in your local paper. If you can’t find one, call up the League yourself and ask them what they’ve got.

When you see a candidate you’d like to vote for, introduce yourself and ask if he needs a volunteer to stuff envelopes or the like now and then. Then, if later on, you decide you don’t like it, or don’t like the candidate, you can always just walk away. It’s a free country, after all.

And the more you do of that sort of thing, the more you help to keep it that way.

Those among us who don’t want to be active in politics because it’s a dirty game just help to make it dirtier.

U.S. Rep. Joe Barton

When we started this register of the offensively clownish behavior of so many of our most powerful legislators, the only claim to fame we knew of for the Texan Republican Joe Barton was that he was generally considered the most successful member of Senate or House of Representatives at collecting money from the oil companies. But then, on June 17th, the CEO of British Petroleum, Tony Hayward, was called to account for the BP disaster in the Gulf by high-ranking American Congressmen. Hayward explained that, although he was BP’s top executive, he really didn’t know anything about what his corporation had been doing in the Gulf. This drew scorn from most of the legislators, but when it came Barton’s turn he took a completely different tack.

His first words to Hayward were, “I apologize.” He went on to clarify his remarks by saying, “I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is — again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown. So I apologize.”

Not everyone could successfully untangle Barton’s syntax, but no one failed to understand that an American official was offering an apology to the man in charge of the company that had delivered the most damaging blow to American interests since the destruction of the World Trade Center. Suddenly Barton had no friends left. Even the leaders of his own party were demanding he retract his remarks, so the next day he apologized to the world for his apology to British Petroleum.

By the way, although Barton was the chief beneficiary of BP’s scattering cash, he was by no means the only one. It has been said that there is hardly a judge or a legislator in the states around the Gulf of Mexico that hasn’t taken money from Big Oil — which perhaps explains something about how the oil companies got away with watering down government regulations and even, in the George W. Bush days, letting the oil companies rewrite them.

A few weeks ago, I responded to a comment by a viewer who signs himself TJIC to say, among other things, that there was a species of penguin in Antarctica which is steadily moving its breeding grounds farther and farther south. The reason it does this is to migrate to colder latitudes in order to try to avoid the warming which messes up their oceanic ice.

That much of what I said appears to be true, but then I went on to say that if the penguins went on migrating in that direction they would sooner or later reach a point so far south that the Sun would never rise at all and it would be eternally dark.

That’s ridiculous. There’s no such place. Simple geometry proves that.

I had misunderstood something my source said — I now suspect that it was something about no longer having any ice to worry about because they were now in the middle of the Antarctic continent — and written it down wrong. So now to all of you I bare my throat and say I’m sorry.

 
There’s one other thing in that dashed-off answer that needs a little elucidation. What I said was, “… at one point in history (the scientific) community believed that the Sun went around the Earth and then, not all that much later, reversed their opinion…”

That’s not exactly wrong. It’s incomplete, though. It’s not just that the world’s scientists habitually look at any two theories presented to them, the old and the new, and say, oh, yeah, that new one is more complete, more accurate and more useful than the old one, so from now on I’m with the new.

That does happen, but it’s only part of the process. The other part is that a number of scientists cling to the old theory until they die, evidence be damned. But then they do die, and the generation of new scientists that follow them grow up with that new theory already embedded in their minds.

So it’s true that at one time almost all scientists believed that the Sun orbited around the Earth, and at a later time almost all scientists believed that the Earth orbited around the Sun. But they weren’t the same scientists.

Emperor penguins in Antarctica.

If you’ve seen me lately, you might have noticed a good-looking blonde hanging around. That’s my wife, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Hull, who may soon be famous as the editor of what I think may be close to the best science-fiction anthology ever published, but is already locally well known as a woman who has gone swimming in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. It happened on two trips, several years apart, but I’ll tell you what I learned about the two remotest sections of our world now.
 

Betty Anne and me.

The Antarctic is said to be very cold, but when we were next to the Palmer Station on the Antarctic peninsula the air temperature was 37 degrees F. When we left Chicago, the temperature at O’Hare had been –4.

Antarctic ice comes in several pretty colors, It is blue or green if it has been at the bottom of some heavy layers of other ice and the air has been squeezed out of it, rarely reddish or yellowish if it has picked up a load of algae or something and — everybody’s favorite — the rest of the time most of it is the whitest white you ever saw.

The principal visible inhabitants of Antarctica are penguins. There are more than a dozen brands of penguins, but which brand any given penguin belongs to is of real concern only to another penguin. I can tell the difference, but only if they’re fairly close and I have the guidebook in my hand.

A pretty sight is to see several Buick- to bungalow-sized ice floes sailing by, each one with a penguin catching a free ride by sitting on its top.

Penguins live on land but have to return to the ocean if they want to catch anything to eat. This makes quite a problem for them because on the other side of one of those holes in the ice that they use to let them get into the water may well be one or more hungry seals, who are swimming around down there, waiting in the hope of catching a penguin for the same purpose. That is why you see the number of penguins parked next to a hole growing until, at last, one of them dives in and the rest follow pretty much all at once. If there is a single famished seal waiting there he’ll catch one of the penguins, all right, but the rest are home free.

Penguins don’t exactly swim. They sort of fly through the water and are very good at it.

Ice floes come in all shapes and sizes, some like castles with towers and minarets, some like craggy mountain ranges, some like huge, flat, square-cut pizza boxes, some like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Most of a berg or floe is under water with a lot of mass and jagged edges. Consequently every once in a great while one of them holes a ship, and then there’s big trouble. One small cruise ship did go down a few years ago, with I believe two people trapped inside.
 

While on the other end of the planet —

 
The Arctic Ocean contains no continent (though it is bounded by several) and very few islands (although one or two new ones are being discovered as the ice melts away).

When we sailed north toward the Pole, we hit lucky on the weather. It was fair and not very windy, thus giving us only gentle waves. As we approached the Arctic ice cap there was at first only a vague blur on the horizon. Then abruptly it transmuted itself to what looked a wide bay that we were entering. The closer we got, the more it began to look like — wow! — a tropical island that we were approaching, with a narrow beach of white sand, lacking only some palm trees and a central mountain to resemble Bora Bora or Moorea.

Actually, that whole scene was composed of nothing but size-sorted bits of floating ice. We were almost on top of it before I could see that the “beach” part was made up of a gazillion tiny ice bits, more or less marble-sized, next to a band composed of larger strawberry-to-baseball sized pieces, then one band after another, each band’s pieces getting bigger and bigger as you headed Poleward. Each separate piece of ice was jigging independently up and down in the gentle waves but they all kept to their spots within the group. (I developed a theory that there was a feeble northward current around there, perhaps a straggling fragment of the dissipating Gulf Stream, pushing on the surface waters to line the ice fragments up so neatly, but never found an oceanographer to tell me how all wet I probably was.)

Then the captain took us right into the ice, all the thousands of tons of our cruise ship, until we were more than a quarter mile from open water and getting a bit close to some biggish ice floes. The captain stopped the ship so we could all take pictures. (And, gee, I wish I had.) And then he carefully backed us out of the ice, staying within the liquid-water lane we had opened on the way in.

 
There aren’t any penguins in the Arctic. What they do have there is the local knock-off of the same general design, the auk, only they don’t have many of them anymore because 19th-century sailors found them quite tasty. We didn’t see any, anyway. Other Arctic creatures we didn’t see include polar bears, Arctic foxes and various aquatic and semi-aquatic forms.

We did see some whales.

 
Oh, and listen, those waters in the Arctic and Antarctic that I said Betty Anne had gone swimming in. Did I mention that they were the swimming pools located on the upper decks of our cruise liners?