"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

He checked in the car, robotted through the routines to get him on his plane to Dallas. Sat in a window
seat looking down at the view as the plane roared off. Point Loma, the ocean blue from up here, the
waves breaking on the coast, perpetually renewing their white tapestry. Bank, turn, Mount Soledad, up
through the cloud layer, fly up and east.

He fell asleep. By the time he woke up again they were descending into Dallas. It was strange to watch
the process of falling toward the Earth, the buildings and cars like toys at first, quickly growing to real
things that sped by. Then standing, disembarking into the big curves of the Dallas airport, on to its rail
shuttle, over to another arc, to sit and wait for the plane to D.C.

Grimly he watched America walk by. Who were these people who could live so placidly while the world
fell into an acute global environmental crisis? Experts at denial. Experts at filtering their information to
hear only what made it seem sensible to behave as they behaved. Many of those walking by went to
church on Sundays, believed in God, voted Republican, spent their time shopping and watching TV.
Obviously nice people. The world was doomed.

He settled in his next plane seat (on the aisle this time, because the view didnтАЩt matter), feeling more and
more disgusted and angry. NSF was part of it; they werenтАЩt doing a thing to help. He got out his laptop,
turned it on, and called up a new word processing file. He started to write.

Critique of NSF, first draft. Private to Diane Chang.

NSF was established to support basic scientific research, and it is generally given high marks for that.
But its budget has never surpassed ten billion dollars a year, in an overall economy of some ten trillion. It
is to be feared that as things stand, NSF is simply too small to have any real impact.

Meanwhile humanity is exceeding the planetтАЩs carrying capacity for our species, badly damaging the
biosphere. Neoclassical economics cannot cope with this situation, and indeed, with its falsely
exteriorized costs, was designed in part to disguise it. If the Earth were to suffer a catastrophic
anthropogenic extinction event over the next ten years, which it will, American business would continue to
focus on its quarterly profit and loss. There is no economic mechanism for dealing with catastrophe. And
yet government and the scientific community are not tackling this situation either, indeed both have
consented to be run by neoclassical economics, an obvious pseudoscience. We might as well agree to be
governed by astrologers. Everyone at NSF knows this is the situation, and yet no one does anything
about it. They donтАЩt try to instigate the saving of the biosphere, they donтАЩt even call for certain kinds of
mitigation projects. They just wait and see what comes in. It is aridiculously passive position.

Why such passivity, you ask? Because NSF is chicken! ItтАЩs a chicken with its smart little head stuck in
the sand like an ostrich! ItтАЩs a chicken ostrich (fix). ItтАЩs afraid to take on Congress, itтАЩs afraid to take on
business, itтАЩs afraid to take on the American people. Free market fundamentalists are dragging us back to
some dismal feudal eternity and destroying everything in the process, and yet we have the technological
means to feed everyone, house everyone, clothe everyone, doctor everyone, educate everyoneтАФthe
ability to end suffering and want as well as ecological collapse isright here at hand, and yet NSF
continues to dole out its little grants, fiddling while Rome burns!!!

well whatever nothing to be done about it, IтАЩm sure youтАЩre thinking poor Frank Vanderwal has spent a
year in the swamp and has gone crazy as a result, and that is true but what IтАЩm saying is still right, the
world is in big trouble and NSF is one of the few organizations on Earth that could actually help get it out
of trouble, and yet itтАЩs not. It should be charting worldwide scientific policy andforcing certain kinds of
climate mitigation and biosphere management,insisting on them as emergency necessities, it should be