Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [38]
After a while Art went back up the trail, and in the compound’s dining room he found the elderly workers back in the kitchen, flipping pancakes. After Art and the rest of the guests had eaten, yesterday’s driver led them upstairs to a large meeting room. They sat on couches arranged in a square. Big picture windows in all four walls let in a lot of the morning’s gray light. The driver sat on a chair between two couches. “I’m William Fort,” he said. “I’m glad you’re all here.”
• • •
He was, on closer inspection, a strange-looking old man; his face was lined as if by a hundred years of anxiety, but the expression it currently displayed was serene and detached. A chimp, Art thought, with a past in lab experimentation, now studying Zen. Or simply a very old surfer or hang-glider, weathered, bald, round-faced, snub-nosed. Now taking them in one by one. Sam and Max, who had ignored him as driver and cook, were looking uncomfortable, but he didn’t seem to notice. “One index,” he said, “for measuring how full the world is of humans and their activities, is the percent appropriation of the net product of land-based photosynthesis.”
Sam and Max nodded as if this were the usual way to start a meeting.
“Can I take notes?” Art asked.
“Please,” Fort said. He gestured at the coffee table in the middle of the square of couches, which was covered with papers and lecterns. “I want to play some games later, so there’s lecterns and workpads, whatever you like.”
Most of them had brought their own lecterns, and there was a short silent scramble as they got them out and running. While they were at it Fort stood up and began walking in a circle behind their couches, making a revolution every few sentences. Difficult! Art wrote. Continued?
“We now use about eighty percent of the net primary product of land-based photosynthesis,” he said. “One hundred percent is probably impossible to reach, and our long-range carrying capacity has been estimated to be thirty percent, so we are massively overshot, as they say. We have been liquidating our natural capital as if it were disposable income, and are nearing depletion of certain capital stocks, like oil, wood, soil, metals, fresh water, fish, and animals. This makes continued economic expansion difficult.”
“We have to continue,” Fort said, with a piercing glance at Art, who unobtrusively sheltered his lectern with his arm. “Continuous expansion is a fundamental tenet of economics. Therefore one of the fundamentals of the universe itself. Because everything is economics. Physics is cosmic economics, biology is cellular economics, the humanities are social economics, psychology is mental economics, and so on.”
His listeners nodded unhappily.
“So everything is expanding. But it can’t happen in contradiction to the law of conservation of matter-energy. No matter how efficient your throughput is, you can’t get an output larger than the input.”
Art wrote on his note page, Output larger than input— everything economics— natural capital— Massively Overshot.
“In response to this situation, a group here in Praxis has been working on what we call full-world economics.”
“Shouldn’t that be overfull-world?” Art asked.
Fort didn’t appear to hear him. “Now as Daly said, man-made capital and natural capital are not substitutable. This is obvious, but since most economists still say they are substitutable, it has to be insisted on. Put simply, you can’t substitute more sawmills for fewer forests.