Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [141]
The technical challenge of this was not the issue; as Nadia pointed out to her friends at the conference, Martian technology had been highly robotic from the very beginning. In this case, thousands of small robotic cars would wander Mars on their own, looking for good deposits of carbon, sulfur, or fluorite, migrating from source to source like the old Arab mining caravans on the Great Escarpment; then when new feedstocks were found in high concentrations, the robots could settle down and construct little processing plants out of clay, iron, magnesium, and trace metals, providing the parts that could not be constructed on-site, and then assembling the whole. Fleets of automated diggers and carts would be manufactured to haul the processed material in to centralized factories, where the material would be gassified and released from tall mobile stacks. It wasn’t that different from the earlier mining for atmospheric gases; just a larger effort.
But the most obvious deposits had already been mined, as people were now pointing out. And surface mining couldn’t be done the way it used to be; there were plants growing almost everywhere now, and in many places a kind of desert pavement was developing on the surface, as a result of hydration, bacterial action, and chemical reactions in the clays. This crust helped greatly to cut down on dust storms, which were still a constant problem; so ripping it up to get to underlying deposits of feedstock materials was no longer acceptable, either ecologically or politically. Red members of the legislature were calling for a ban on just this kind of robotic surface mining, and for good reasons, even in terraforming terms.
It was hard, Nadia thought one night as she shut down her screen, to be faced with all the competing effects of their actions. The environmental issues were so tightly intertwined that it was hard to tease them out and decide what to do. And it was also hard to stay constrained by their own rules; individual organizations could no longer act unilaterally, because so many of their actions had global ramifications. Thus the necessity for environmental regulation, and for the global environmental court, already faced with a caseload running out of control. Eventually it would have to rule on any plans coming out of this conference as well. The days of unconstrained terraforming were gone.
And as a member of the executive council, Nadia was restricted to saying that she thought increased greenhouse gases were a good idea. Other than that she had to stay out, or appear to be impinging on the environmental court’s territory; which Irishka was defending very vigorously. So Nadia spent time visiting on-screen with a group designing new robot miners that would minimally disrupt the surface, or talking to a group working on dust fixatives that might be sprayed or grown over the surface, “thin fast pavements” as they called them; but they were proving to be a knotty problem.
• • •
And that was the extent of Nadia’s participation in the Sabishii conference that she herself had initiated. And since all its technical problems were enmeshed in political considerations anyway, it might have been said that she hadn’t missed it at all. Not a bit of real work had been done there, by her or anyone else. Meanwhile, back in Sheffield, the council was facing any number of problems of its own: unforeseen difficulties in instituting the eco-economy; complaints that the GEC was overstepping its authority; complaints about the new police, and the criminal justice system; unruly and stupid behavior in both houses of the legislature; Red and other types