So they drove to the end of a dirt road, into an obscure car camping site, and they got out and jogged into the bush. The Sierra foothills are very tough to hike cross-country in, especially at night, but his companions had a route worked out, and they came down a slope onto the planned course of the new road, and began to sneak around like primeval hunters, using night glasses and running like silent maniacs once or twice to avoid patrols; and they pulled up stakes, and cut down flags, and sprayed graffiti dissolvers on the painted tree trunks; and in that one night, three weeks’ work by the logging company was wiped out.
Of course the logging company could repeat the work, his companions told him in the dawn ride back down to the Bay Area. No doubt they would. But their costs would rise. Logging was only profitable at the margin, and the bean-counters on Wall Street would look at the P and L statements and logging wouldn’t look as good to them, wouldn’t get the same kind of investment. The megacorporations that owned the logging companies might get disenchanted and sell; like the loggers they were only extraction companies anyway, they strip-mined their subsidiaries’ resources and then they were redundant; and it could be that the megacorporation executives considered the forests of the world basically extracted already, at least in their most profitable phases. So that they might lose interest, and it all might collapse back to a need-for-wood basis, rather than a need for liquidated assets.
And there were other ecoteurs out there, pouring sugar into gas tanks, cutting ditches, rolling boulders onto roads, introducing computer viruses; all invisible, nonviolent, nonorganized, nonpublicized. Never hurt anybody, never brag, never talk at all. Ego radical or eco radical. Let the Greenpeace-style organizations do the PR work, play to the media and do theater for the Earth; that was important too, but it wasn’t their job. What they did was done at night, by people, mostly men, who wanted to do something to save the world, who wanted also those nights of adrenaline terror and accomplishment. It was somewhat like the Brits who had created the crop circles at the end of the last century, doing something beautiful in the wild night to combat the meaninglessness of modern civilization. But this was better yet. This was resistance to the mindless evil of the world’s economic regime.
So he had found his cause. It made him calmer. He got a relatively low-paying job in a Berkeley law firm, spending his time fighting SLAPPs, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, and arguing social issues for the residual progressive culture in the area, and also for the poor, because really it was the poor who bore the brunt of the environmental collapse. And then he did everything he could to erase his environmentalist past. He got less neurotic, less guilty. He gave up cigars. When he worked he worked, he did his best, he did pro bono; but then when he wasn’t working, he relaxed. He said Fuck it and went out for a run. He climbed on vacations, in the Arctic and elsewhere around the world. It used jet fuel but what the hell. No martyrdom of virtue anymore, just fight the good fight. He saw the Himalayas, in a series of glorious treks. And a few times a year he went out with friends he never otherwise saw or talked to, except on Telegraph Avenue, on certain holidays; and they went through intensities of ecotage that made the rest of life seem like a pale dream.
Eventually, he recruited some climbing friends to the movement himself. He began to pay attention to the Federal Register and other sources of public information, to plan ecotage raids of his own. He did more and more of them; and no one knew.
And then on one of his vacations, he joined an adventure travel group in a climb of Mount Vinson, the highest peak in Antarctica. Like the Himalayas, it was an overwhelming experience for him; the purest wilderness he had ever seen. He came home in love with the place. Life in Berkeley seemed harder to bear after that, somehow. He still drank a bit too much. He started cigars again, occasionally. He fell in and out of relationships, sometimes painfully, sometimes perfunctorily. He was thirty-four years old.
Reading the news became a kind of self-flagellation. Things looked so dire. The world’s population was over ten billion and the Dow Jones average was over ten thousand. Global average temperatures were ten degrees higher than a century before, and extreme weather events were a weekly occurrence, causing untold destruction and suffering. About four billion people had no access to electricity, while at the same time whole bioregions were already collapsing; and still the ruthless extraction of the world’s natural resources continued apace. One of his eco friends with experience in the markets laughed blackly one night as he railed at this destruction, and explained to him what was happening. Say a company owned a forest that it had harvested selectively for generations, delivering its shareholders a consistent ten percent return. Meanwhile the world financial markets were offering bonds with a fifteen percent return. Lumber prices dropped, and the company’s returns dropped, so the traders dropped it and its shares plummeted, so the shareholders were angry. The management, on the edge of collapse, decided to clear-cut the forest and invest the profits from that lumber sale immediately into bonds that yielded a higher return than the forest had. In effect the money that the forest represented was more valuable than the forest itself, because long-term value had collapsed to net present value; and so the forest was liquidated, and more money entered the great money balloon. And so the inexorable logic of Götterdämmerung capitalism demolished the world to increase the net present values of companies in trouble. And all of them were in trouble.
His friend stared at him, laughed at the no doubt sick look on his face, lifted his hands; that’s the way things were. That was the explanation for the Götterdämmerung; not suicidal murderers in high places, but simply the logic of the system.
He had walked home through the smog and traffic noise, unaware of any of it. Seeing the world in his mind’s eye, all falling apart.
Then one day he was reading the news again, helplessly, using print newspapers picked up in coffee houses so that his reading could not be monitored by any hypothetical surveillance, and he came across a long article on the current situation in Antarctica. The Senate’s hold-up of the renewal of the Antarctic Treaty was causing a circling for advantage among the Treaty nations; and some Southern Hemisphere nations, never party to the Antarctic Treaty, had seen this happening and recently formed a consortium called the Southern Club Antarctic Group, to begin oil explorations all over Antarctica. They were going to do it there too. The last pure wilderness on Earth.
When he walked out of the coffee house he went to the university library to use a public monitor, with the knot back in his stomach, and the Berkeley noise and smog like some final conflagration. The last pure wilderness in the world, fouled and wrecked, and for nothing more than the hope of perhaps five more years of the world’s oil consumption; and, more importantly, many billions of dollars.
He read up on the situation. The USGS estimated that Antarctica held perhaps fifty billion barrels of oil; only a couple more decades’ worth, at current consumption rates. But at twenty dollars a barrel, that was a trillion dollars. Which was only a year of the U.S. government’s budget, and only a year of the world’s military budgets; but more than enough to pay off all the debts that had the southern nations lashed to the harshest austerity programs the World Bank and IMF could devise. He could see how the logic of the system might drive them to it.
He walked over to the house of one of his ecoteur friends, the one who had introduced him to the movement, and who coordinated a cell about the same size as his. Look, he said to his friend. Something’s got to be done. There are no locals down there to defend the place. We need to do something a bit out of the ordinary this time. Something that might stop them for good.