The map was spread on her coffee table: East of Alaska's Prudhoe Bay was a piece of tundra, over a thousand square miles of it, and geologists for British Petroleum and Atlantic Richfield - the two companies that had largely exploited the Alaskan North Slope, built the pipeline, and therefore helped cause the Exxon Valdez disaster-had made their public pronouncement. This oilfield, called AARM, was at least double the size of the North Slope. The report, still semi classified in the industrial sense, had come to the White House a week earlier, with confirming data from the United States Geological Survey, a federal agency tasked to the same sort of work, along with the opinion of the geologists that the field extended farther east, across the Canadian border-and exactly how far it extended they could only guess, because the Canadians had not yet begun their survey. The conclusion of the executive summary posited the possibility that the entire field could rival the one in Saudi Arabia, although it was far harder to transport oil from it-except for the fact, the report went on, that the Trans-Alaska pipeline had already been built, and the new fields would only need a few hundred miles of extension on the existing pipeline, which, the summary concluded arrogantly, had produced a negligible environmental impact.
"Except for that damned tanker incident," Dr. Brightling observed into her morning coffee. Which had killed thousands of innocent wild birds and hundreds of sea otters, and had sullied several hundred square miles of pristine seacoast.
"This will be a catastrophe if Congress lets it go forward. My God, Carol, the caribou, the birds, all the predators. There are polar bears there, and browns, and barren-ground grizzly, and this environment is as delicate as a newborn infant. We can't allow the oil companies to go in there!"
"I know, Kevin," the President's Science Advisor responded, with an emphatic nod
"The damage might never be repaired. The permafrost-there's nothing more delicate on the face of the planet," the president of the Sierra Club said, with further, repetitive emphasis. "We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our children-we owe it to the planet. This bill has to be killed! I don't care what it takes, this bill must die! You must convince the President to withdraw any semblance of support for it. We cannot allow this environmental rape to take place."
"Kevin, we have to be smart about how we do this. The President sees this as a balance-of-payments issue. Domestic oil doesn't force us to spend our money buying oil from other countries. Worse, he believes the oil companies when they say they drill and transport the oil without doing great environmental damage, and that they can fix what damage they do accidentally. "
"That's horseshit, and you know it, Carol." Kevin Mayflower spat out his contempt for the oil companies. Their goddamned pipeline is a bleeding scar on the face of Alaska, an ugly, jagged steel line crossing the most beautiful land on the face of the earth, an affront to Nature Herself and what for? So that people could drive motor vehicles, which further polluted the planet merely because lazy people didn't want to walk to work or ride bicycles or horses. (Mayflower didn't reflect on the fact that he'd flown to Washington to deliver his plea instead of riding one of his Appaloosa horses across the country, and that his rented car had been parked on West Executive Drive.) Everything the oil companies touched, they ruined, he thought. They made it dirty. They sullied the very earth itself, removing what they thought of as a precious resource here, there, and everywhere, whether it was oil or coal, gashing the earth, or poking holes into it, sometimes spilling their liquid treasure because they didn't know and didn't care about the sanctity of the planet, which belonged to everyone, and which needed proper stewardship. The stewardship, of course, required proper guidance, and that was the job of the Sierra Club and similar groups, to tell the people how important the earth was, and how they must respect and treat it. The good news was that the President's Science Advisor did understand, and that she did workin the White House Compound, and did have access to the President.
"Carol, I want you to walk across the street, go into the Oval Office, and tell him what has to be done."
"Kevin, it's not that easy."
"Why the hell not? He's not that much of a dunce, is he?"
"He occasionally has a different point of view, and the oil companies are being very clever about this. Look at their proposal," she said, tapping the report on the table. "They promise to indemnify the entire operation, to put up a billion dollar bond in case something goes wrong for God's sake, Kevin, they even offer to let the Sierra Club be on the council to oversee their environmental protection programs!"
