Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [157]
The Small Delivery people out there with Frank were sanguine about all this. They did not think there would be a problem. They said the trees were not in danger. They said that even if some trees died, it would only be a bit of negative feedback to counter the carbon drawdown that was already working so well. If a certain percentage of trees also took on lignin so fast they split their trunks, or had roots rupture underground, or others were suffocated by the lichen growing over the budding points of the new needles, then that would slow any further runaway growth of the lichen. Things would then eventually reach a balance.
Frank wasn’t so sure. He did not think this was ecologically sound. Possibly the lichen could go on living on dead trees; certainly it could spread at the borders of the infestation to new trees. But these were not the people to talk to about this possibility.
The new lichen started out khaki, it appeared, and then caked itself with a second layer that was the dull bronze that eventually dominated. Like the cructose lichen of the high Sierra that you saw everywhere on granite, it was quite beautiful. The little bubbles of its surface texture had an insectile sheen. That was the fungus. Frank recalled a passage in Thoreau: “The simplest and most lumpish fungus has a peculiar interest to us, because it is so obviously organic and related to ourselves; matter not dormant, but inspired, a life akin to my own. It is a successful poem in its kind.”
Which was true; but to see it take over the life it was usually symbiotic with was not a good thing. It looked like the parts of Georgia where kudzu had for a time overgrown everything.
“Creepy,” Frank remarked, scraping at an individual bubble with a finger-nail. These were the tiny plutons of a different kind of batholith.
“Yes, it is kind of, isn’t it?”
“How do the roots look?”
“Come see for yourself.” They took him to an area where the soil had been removed from beneath some sample trees. Here they saw both before and after roots, as some trees had been girdled and killed and their roots exposed later, to give them baseline data. Near them some still living trees, or trees in the process of being killed by the root exposure, were standing in holes balanced on their lowest net of fine roots, leaving most of the root balls exposed. The root balls were still shallow, in the way of evergreens, but the lichen-infested trees had roots that were markedly thicker than the uninfested trees.
“We started by treating an area of about a thousand square kilometers, and now it’s about five thousand.”
“About the size of Delaware, in other words.”
Meaning some tens of millions of trees had been affected, and thus in the neighborhood of tens of millions of tons of carbon drawn down. Say a hundred million tons for the sake of thinking—that was about one percent of what they had put into the atmosphere in the year since the lichen was released.
Of course if it killed the forest, a lot of that carbon would then be eaten by microbes and respired to the atmosphere, some of it quickly, some over years, some over decades. This, Frank’s hosts assured him, given the situation they were in, was a risk worth taking. It was not a perfect nor a completely safe solution, but then again, none of them were.
Interesting to hear this reckless stuff coming from the Russians and the Small Delivery Systems people about equally, Frank thought. Who had persuaded whom was probably irrelevant; now it was a true folie à deux.
He had stood a thousand feet tall on the floor of the Atlantic; now it looked like he had been miniaturized, and was threading his way through a forest of mold in a Petri dish. “Really creepy,” he declared.
Certainly time to declare limited discussion. It was impossible to tease out the ramifications of all this, they depended so heavily on what happened to the various symbioses feeding each other, eating each other. There would need to be some kind of Kenzo modeling session, in which the whole range of possibilities got mapped,