Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [78]
Anna merely laughed at this.
One day the Things To Do list included a lunch meeting at a Crystal City restaurant with the four-star general who headed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a friendly and unassuming man named Arthur Wracke, “pronounced rack,” he said, “yes, as in rack and ruin.” White-haired, brown-skinned, grizzled. A strangely pixie grin. Unflappable; this, Frank saw, was what had gotten him his four stars. And along the way he had surely been in any number of political firestorms over major environmental interventions like the ones they were now contemplating at NSF.
When Frank expressed doubt that any major climate mitigation was possible, either physically or politically, Wracke waved a hand. “The Corps has always done things on a big scale. Huge scale. Sometimes with huge blunders. All with the best intentions of course. That’s just the way things happen. We’re still gung-ho to try. Lots of things are reversible, in the long run. Hopefully this time around we’ll be working with better science. But, you know, it’s an iterative process. So, long story short, you get a project approved, and we’re good to go. We’ve got the expertise. The Corps’ esprit de corps is always high.”
“What about budget?” Frank asked.
“What about it? We’ll spend what we’re given.”
“Well, but is there any kind of, you know, discretionary fund that you can tap into?”
“We don’t seek funding, usually,” the general admitted.
“But could you?”
“Well, in tandem with a request for action. Say you came to us with a request for action that would cost more than you have available. We could refer it up, and it would have to go to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get supplementary funding. Do even the Chiefs have much discretionary funding?” He grinned. “Sure they do. But not as much as you might think. They got into some trouble for what they called reprogrammed funding. Really, it all goes back to Congress. They control the purse strings. Even more than the president. So if they were to allocate funds, the Joint Chiefs would do what they’re told to with it, by and large.”
Frank nodded. “But if it was just the Pentagon. . . .”
“We’d have to see. But we could make your case, and if the funding’s there, we are good to go.”
“Major climate mitigation.”
“Oh heck yes. We like these kinds of challenges. Who wouldn’t?”
Frank had to laugh. The world was their sandbox. Castles and moats, dams and bulwarks . . . they had drained and then rehydrated the Everglades, they kept New Orleans dry, they had rerouted all the major rivers, irrigated the West, moved mountains. You could see all that right there on the general’s happy face. Stewardship, sustainability—fine! Rack but not ruin! Working for the long haul just meant no end, ever, to their sandbox games.
“No deep ecologists in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, I guess.”
“Ha ha.” Wracke’s eyes twinkled. “You give us a chance and we’ll become deep ecologists. We’ll go right down to the mantle.”
Driving back to the office Frank considered how interesting it was to see the way some people enjoyed becoming the avatar of the institution they worked for, expressing the organizational personality like an actor in a role they love. Most people played their institution’s personality with diligence but no particular flair; sometimes, however, he met good actors in a role well-matched to them. Diane was somewhat like that herself, though as Edgardo had noted, she was pushing the NSF character into realms it had never entered before, so the vibe she gave was not like Wracke’s evocation of the Corps, supremely at ease with his role, but rather that of a person in the midst of a great awakening, or coming into one’s own. Diane as Science, becoming self-aware. Maybe even unbound. Diane the prometheus.
In the last hour