Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [116]
“In the end, NSF is a small agency,” someone else said.
“That’s true too. But think of it as an information cascade. If the whole of NSF was focused for a time on this project, then our impact would hopefully be multiplied. It would cascade from there. The math of cascades is fairly probabilistic. You push enough elements at once, and if they’re the right elements and the situation is at the angle of repose or past it, boom. Cascade. Paradigm shift. New focus on the big problems we’re facing.”
The people around the table were thinking it over.
Diane never took her eyes off Frank. “I’m wondering if we are at such an obvious edge-of-the-cliff moment that people will listen to us if we try to start such a cascade.”
“I don’t know,” Frank said. “I think we’re past the angle of repose. The Atlantic current has stalled. We’re headed for a period of rapid climate change. That means problems that will make normal science impossible to pursue.”
Diane smiled tautly. “You’re suggesting we have to save the world so science can proceed?”
“Yes, if you want to put it that way. If you’re lacking a better reason to do it.”
Diane stared at him, offended. He met her gaze unapologetically.
Anna watched this standoff, on the edge of her seat. Something was going on between those two, and she had no idea what it was. To ease the suspense she wrote down on her handpad, saving the world so science can proceed. The Frank Principle, as Charlie later dubbed it.
“Well,” Diane said, breaking the frozen moment, “what do people think?”
A discussion followed. People threw out ideas: creating a kind of shadow replacement for Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment; campaigning to make the President’s scientific advisor a cabinet post; even drafting a new amendment to the Constitution that would elevate a body like the National Academy of Science to the level of a branch of government. Then also going international, funding a world body of scientific organizations to push everything that would create a sustainable civilization. These ideas and more were mooted, hesitantly at first, and then with more enthusiasm as people began to realize that they all had harbored various ideas of this kind, visions that were usually too big or strange to broach to other scientists. “Pretty wild notions,” as one of them noted.
Frank had been listing them on the whiteboard. “The thing is,” he said, “the way we have things organized now, scientists keep themselves out of political policy decisions in the same way that the military keeps itself out of civilian affairs. That comes out of World War Two, when science was part of the military. Scientists recused themselves from policy decisions, and a structure was formed that created civilian control of science, so to speak.
“But I say to hell with that! Science isn’t like the military. It’s the solution, not the problem. And so it has to insist on itself. That’s what looks wild about these ideas, that scientists should take a stand and become a part of the political decision-making process. If it were the folks in the Pentagon saying that, I would agree there would be reason to worry, although they do it all the time. What I’m saying is that it’s a perfectly legitimate move for us to make, even a necessary move, because we are not the military, we are already civilians, and we have the only methods there are to deal with these global environmental problems.”
The group sat for a moment in silence, thinking that over. Monsoonlike rain coursed down the room’s window, in an infinity of shifting delta patterns. Darker clouds rolled over, making the room dimmer still, submerging it until it was a cube of lit neon, hanging in aqueous grayness.
Anna’s notepad was covered by squiggles and isolated words. So many problems were tangled together into the one big problem. So many of the suggested solutions were either partial or impractical, or both. No one could pretend they were finding any great strategies to pursue at this point. It looked as if Sophie Harper was about to throw her hands