"Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)PART IIIPLANETHeat □ A range of minor mountains divides the city of Los Angeles. During the city’s carefree youth, great battalions of trucks streamed toward the little valleys between those hills, brimming with kilotons of urban garbage. In those profligate times every purchased commodity seemed to come inside its own weight of packing material. The average family generated enough waste each year to fill home and garage combined. Even earlier, during the fight against Germany and Japan, Los Angeles mandated limited recycling to help the war effort. Citizens separated metals for curbside pickup. Bound paper was returned to pulp mills; even cooking grease was saved for munitions. Those few who weren’t glad to help still complied, to avoid stiff fines. After the war, people found themselves released from decades of privation into a sudden age of plenty. With the crisis over, recycling seemed irksome. A mayoral candidate ran on a one-issue promise, to revoke the inconvenient law. He won by a landslide. The hills dividing L.A. had been formed as the Earth’s Pacific Plate ground alongside the North American Plate. As the two huge, rocky masses pressed and scraped, a coastal range squeezed out at the interface, like toothpaste from a tube. The Santa Monica Mountains and Hollywood Hills were mere offshoots from that steady accumulation, but they helped shape the great city that eventually surrounded them. Between the hills once lay little valleys of oak and meadow, where mule deer grazed and condors soared — ideal out-of-view spots for landfills. The regiments of trucks came and went, day in and day out. Hardly anyone noticed until quite late that all suitable and legal crevices would be topped off within a single generation. By century’s end flat plains stretched between onetime peaks, eerily lit at night by tiki torches burning methane gas — generated underground by the decaying garbage. Harder times came. New generations arrived with new sensibilities and less carefree attitudes. Pickup fees were enacted and expensive processes found to stanch the flow… to cut the flood of trash in half, then to a tenth, then still more. And yet that left the question of what was to be done with the plateaus between the hills. Plateaus of waste? Some suggested building there to help relieve the stifling overcrowding — though of course there would be the occasional explosion, and a house or two could be expected to disappear into a sudden mire from time to time. Some suggested leaving the sites exactly as they were, so future archaeologists could find a wealth of detail from the prodigal middens of TwenCen California. With an even longer view, paleontologists speculated what the deposits might look like in a few million years, after grinding plates compressed them into layers of sedimentary stone. It might have been predictable, and yet few saw the answer coming. In a later day of harder times, of short resources and mandatory recycling, it was inevitable that those landfills should draw the eyes of innovators, looking for ways to get rich. Claims were filed, mining plans presented and analyzed. Refining methods were perfected and approved. Excavation began between the ancient hills. Into a past generation’s waste, their desperate grandchildren dug for treasure. The garbage rush was on. |
||
|