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

тАЬOh no sir, still out. Maybe stirring a littleтАФah! The thing is, if we donтАЩt address these issues now,
nothing else weтАЩre doing will matter. None of it will go well.тАЭ

тАЬThat sounds like alarmist talk to me,тАЭ the President said, an avuncular twinkle in his eye. тАЬLetтАЩs calm
down about this. YouтАЩve got to stick to the common sense idea that sustainable economic growth is the
key to environmental progress.тАЭ

тАЬSustainable, ah!тАЭ

тАЬWhatтАЩs that?тАЭ

He clamped down on a giggle. тАЬSustainableтАЩs the point! Sir.тАЭ

тАЬWe need to harness the power of markets,тАЭ Strengloft said, and nattered on in his usual vein,
apparently oblivious to CharlieтАЩs problem. The President however eyed him closely. Huge chomp.
CharlieтАЩs spine went electric. He suppressed the urge to swat his son like a mosquito. His right fingers
tingled. Very slowly he lifted a shoulder, trying to dislodge him. Like trying to budge a limpet. Sometimes
Anna had to squeeze his nostrils shut to get him to come off. DonтАЩt think about that.

The President said, тАЬCharles, weтАЩd be sucking the life out of the economy if we were to go too far with
this. You chew on that a while. As it is, weтАЩre takingbites out of this problem every day. Why, IтАЩm like a
dog with a bone on this thing! Those enviro special interests are like pigs at a trough. WeтАЩre weaning
them from all that now, and they donтАЩt like it, but theyтАЩre going to have to learn that if you canтАЩtlick them,
youтАжтАЭ

And Charlie dissolved into gales of helpless laughter.




C
alifornia is a place apart.

Gold chasers went west until the ocean stopped them, and there in that remote and beautiful land,
separated from the rest of the world by desert and mountain, prairie and ocean, they saw there could be
no more moving on. They would have to stop and make a life there.

Civil society, post-Civil War. A motley of argonauts, infused with Manifest Destiny and gold fever, also
with Emerson and Thoreau, Lincoln and Twain, their own John Muir. They said to each other, Here at
the end of the road it had better be different, or else world history has all come to naught.

So they did many things, good and bad. In the end it turned out the same as everywhere else, maybe a
little more so.

But among the good things, encouraged by Lincoln, was the founding of a public university. Berkeley in
1867, the farm at Davis in 1905, the other campuses after that; in the 1960тАЩs new ones sprang up like
flowers in a field. The University of California. A power in this world.

An oceanographic institute near La Jolla wanted one of the new campuses of the sixties to be located