"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Yes. It’s getting to be that way for a lot of the big mammals especially. We’re in
the last moments already for a lot of them.
No more tigers.
That’s right. No more lots of things. So…most of the scientists I know seem to think
we ought to limit the extinctions to a minimum. Just to keep the lab working, so to
speak.
The Frank Principle.
(Laughs.) I guess. Some people at work call it that. Who told you that?
Drepung tell me. Saving world so science can proceed. The Frank Principle.
Right. Well—it’s like Buddhism, right? You might as well try to make a better
world.
Yes. So, your National Science Foundation—very Buddhist!
Ha ha. I don’t know if I’d go that far. NSF is mostly pragmatic. They have a job
to do and a budget to do it with. A rather small budget.
But a big name! National—Science—Foundation. Foundation means base, right?
Base of house?
Yes. It is a big name. But I don’t think they regard themselves as particularly big.
Nor particularly Buddhist. Compassion and right action are not their prime
motivation.
Compassion! So what? Does it matter why, if we do good things?
I don’t know. Does it?
Maybe not!
Maybe not.



BY THE TIME PHIL CHASE WAS ELECTED president, the world’s climate
was already far along the way to irrevocable change. There were already four
hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and another hundred
parts would be there soon if civilization continued to burn its fossil carbon—and at
this point there was no other option. Just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected
in the midst of a crisis that in some ways worsened before it got better, they were
entangled in a moment of history when climate change, the destruction of the natural
world, and widespread human misery were combining in a toxic and combustible
mix. The new president had to contemplate drastic action while at the same time
being constrained by any number of economic and political factors, not least the
huge public debt left deliberately by the administrations preceding him.
It did not help that the weather that winter careened wildly from one extreme to
another, but was in the main almost as cold as the previous record-breaking year.
Chase joked about it everywhere he went: “It’s ten below zero, aren’t you glad you
elected me? Just think what it would have been like if you hadn’t!” He would end
speeches with a line from the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley:
“O, Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
“Maybe it can,” Kenzo pointed out with a grin. “We’re in the Youngest Dryas, after
all.”
In any case, it was a fluky winter—above all windy—and the American people were
in an uncertain state of mind. Chase addressed this: “The only thing we have to fear
,” he would intone, “is abrupt climate change!”
He would laugh, and people would laugh with him, understanding him to be saying
that there was indeed something real to fear, but that they could do something about