Then I sat on the bed and fished out the visiting card that Matthew Allenby had given me. I dialed Molly Tetterman’s number in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The phone rang four times, then an answering machine announced that Molly could not come to the phone right now so would I please leave a message. I gave my name and said I had come to America because Caspar von Rellsteb was supposed to be giving a speech at the Zavatoni Conference in Key West, and if the Genesis Parents’ Support Group had any observers at the conference I’d be very glad to meet them. I dictated the guest-house telephone number to Molly Tetterman’s answering machine, then, overcome by tiredness, I lay back on the bed’s pretty patchwork quilt and slept.
The next morning, a Monday, was the opening day of the Zavatoni Conference. I walked to the conference hotel where I discovered that Matthew Allenby had left my name with the registration desk in the entrance foyer. I also found that I was just one of hundreds of other delegates, which surprised me for I had somehow imagined that the event would be a small and rather obscure conference like those I had attended in Britain. The Zavatoni Conference was to be a full-blown celebration of the environment and of the efforts being made to preserve it. The tone was set from the moment I registered and was presented with a badge which read “Hi! I’m Tim! And I Care!” The badge was printed in a livid Day-Glo green. “It’s made from recycled plastic,” the friendly official reassured me, then directed me to a huge notice board that listed all the day’s attractions at the conference.
Most were the predictable fare of such conferences; I could see a film about Greenpeace’s work, or attend a lecture on the depredations of the logging industry in Malaysia, or catch a bus that would take delegates to see the endangered Key deer on Big Pine Key. Yet this was also a conference for political action, so there were axes being ground; a Swedish parliamentarian was lecturing on “Environmental Taxes: A Strategy for Fiscal Eco-Enforcement,” while the Women Against Meat-Eaters were caucusing with the Coalition for an Alcohol-Free America in the Hemingway Lounge. The European Proletarian Alliance Against Oil Producers was holding a multicultural symposium in the Henry Morgan Suite, where their guest celebrity was a British actress, and I wondered, for the millionth fruitless time, just why the acting profession labored under the misapprehension that trumpery fame gave its members the expertise to tell the rest of us how to conduct our lives.
I decided to give the actress, and all the other meetings, a miss, though I did avail myself of the exhibition in the Versailles Mezzanine where all the environmental groups who were officially represented at the conference displayed their wares. The exhibition ranged from a tableau vivant mounted by Mothers Against Nuclear Physics, which showed cosmetically scorched women holding half-melted plastic dolls in rigidly agonized post-disaster poses, to The Land Of Milk And Honey exhibit, which was neatly staffed by well dressed born-again Christian fundamentalists. Matthew Allenby’s organization had an intelligently sober exhibit, as did the Sierra Club and a score of other mainline pressure groups, but, despite Caspar von Rellsteb’s agreement to address the conference, there was no display illustrating the life and work of the Genesis community.
I went back to the lobby where I was accosted by a woman wearing a clown costume who solicited my signature for a petition demanding an end to offshore oil-drilling throughout the world. Other activists were attempting to ban nuclear power stations, sexism, fur coats, mercury in dental fillings, and pesticides. I signed the petition on fur coats, then spotted Matthew Allenby standing in the open doorway of a crowded room where he was listening to a lecture.
“I feel rather guilty for telling you about this conference,” he said. “I rather suspect I’ve encouraged you to waste a good deal of your money and time. There’s absolutely no sign of von Rellsteb, and I’m told it would be very typical of him to agree to attend but then not turn up.”
“It won’t be your fault if that happens,” I said. “Any parent would snatch at the smallest chance of finding his child, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes, of course,” Matthew agreed, though he still sounded dubious. We had wandered close to the hotel’s front door, outside of which a number of demonstrators angrily harangued arriving delegates. The anger was directed at anyone who arrived in a car, and thereby contributed exhaust fumes to global warming. “They’re from WASH.” Matthew gestured at the angry demonstrators.
“WASH?” I assumed it was a town I had never heard of, or else a contraction of Washington.
“It’s an acronym,” Matthew explained. “W.A.S.H., or the World Alliance to Save Humanity.” He grimaced. “For a time their British branch picketed my office.”
“Your office?” I said in astonishment. “What were they accusing you of?”
“They thought my organization should support their call for the abolition of private cars.” Matthew sighed. “The green movement is riddled with a holier-than-thou attitude, which means that the extremists are always trying to show how much purer they are than the mainstream groups. It’s all rather counterproductive, of course. If we cooperated and agreed on some specific goals then we could make real progress. We could certainly outlaw drift netting in the Pacific. We could probably end the use of CFCs in refrigerators and aerosols, we could seriously reduce carbon monoxide emissions, and we might even save what’s left of the rain forests. But what we can’t do is ban all cars from the road, and we don’t help our cause by saying that we can. Ordinary people don’t want to lose their cars, just as they don’t want to go cold in winter merely because they’re told that oil and coal power stations pollute the air, and nuclear power is unsafe. I know, because I’m an ordinary person and I don’t want to stop using a car, and I don’t want my children to be cold in winter. The problem with our movement, Mr. Blackburn, is that we’re always trying to ban things, but we don’t offer alternatives. And I mean genuine alternatives that will heat peoples’ homes and apply deodorants to their armpits and propel their automobiles. People will listen to us if we offer them hope, and they’ll even pay a few pennies more if they think the extra cost will help the planet, but if we offer them only doom, they’ll accept the doom and decide they might as well be comfortable as they endure it. It’s the primrose path syndrome; why be uncomfortable if you’re going to hell?”
I smiled. “You sound as if you ought to be giving the keynote speech.”
“I’ve been asked to do just that, but only if von Rellsteb doesn’t turn up on Wednesday night. Of course my speech won’t be as popular, because common sense never is as interesting as fanaticism. If von Rellsteb comes and rants about paying back pollution with violence, then he’ll make every newspaper in the free world, while my realism won’t even make two inches in the local paper.”
There was certainly a great deal of press and television interest in the conference. The numerous reporters were not required to wear the delegates’ Day-Glo green name badges, but instead had official-looking red press tags that, under their names, announced what newspaper or magazine they worked for. As Matthew and I stood by the entrance one such reporter arrived to run the gauntlet of WASH hatred. She was a pale and flustered-looking girl with something so disorganized in her looks and so fearful in her expression that I instinctively felt protective toward her. She was wearing a long yellow skirt which gave her a fresh, springlike appearance. She must have arrived by car or taxi for the WASH demonstrators were giving her a particularly hard time. “You can see,” Matthew said quietly, “just how easily fanaticism could spill into terrorism.”