Part 4 (2/2)
”Marriage counseling?” Art said.
Many of the rumors about Fort's seminars turned out to be true, which Art found amazing. At San Francisco International he got on a big powerful private jet with six other men and women, and after takeoff the jet's windows, apparently double-polarized, went black, and the door to the c.o.c.kpit was closed. Two of Art's fellow pa.s.sengers played at orienteering, and after the jet made several gentle banks left and right, they agreed that they were headed in some direction between southwest and north. The seven of them shared information: they were all technical managers or arbitrators from the vast network of Praxis companies. They had flown in to San Francisco from all over the world. Some seemed excited to be invited to meet the transnational's reclusive founder; others were apprehensive.
Their flight lasted six hours, and the orienteers spent the descent plotting the outermost limit of their location, a circle that encompa.s.sed Juneau, Hawaii, Mexico City, and Detroit, although it could have been larger, as Art pointed out, if they were in one of the new air-to-s.p.a.ce jets; perhaps half the Earth or more. When the jet landed and stopped, they were led through a miniature jetway into a big van with blackened windows, and a windowless barrier between them and the driver's seat. Their doors were locked from the outside.
They were driven for half an hour. Then the van stopped and they were let out by their driver, an elderly man wearing shorts and a T-s.h.i.+rt advertising Bali.
They blinked in the sunlight. They were not in Bali. They were in a small asphalt parking lot surrounded by eucalyptus trees, at the bottom of a narrow coastal valley. An ocean or very big lake lay to the west about a mile, just a small wedge of it in sight. A creek drained the valley, and ran into a lagoon behind a beach. The valley's side walls were covered with dry gra.s.s on the south side, cactus on the north; the ridges above were dry brown rock. ”Baja?” one of the orienteers guessed. ”Ecuador? Australia?”
”San Luis Obispo?” Art said.
Their driver led them on foot down a narrow road to a small compound, composed of seven two-story wooden buildings, nestled among seacoast pines at the bottom of the valley. Two buildings by the creek were residences, and after they dropped their bags in a.s.signed rooms in these buildings, the driver led them to a dining room in another building, where half a dozen kitchen workers, all quite elderly, fed them a simple meal of salad and stew. After that they were taken back to the residences, and left on their own.
They gathered in a central chamber around a wood-burning stove. It was warm outside, and there was no fire in the stove.
”Fort is a hundred and twelve,” the orienteer named Sam said. ”And the treatments haven't worked on his brain.”
”They never do,” said Max, the other orienteer.
They discussed Fort for a while. All of them had heard things, for William Fort was one of the great success stories in the history of medicine, their century's Pasteur: the man who beat cancer, as the tabloids inaccurately put it. The man who beat the common cold. He had founded Praxis at age twenty-four, to market several breakthrough innovations in antivirals, and he had been a multi-billionaire by the time he was twenty-seven. After that he had occupied his time by expanding Praxis into one of the world's biggest transnationals. Eighty continuous years of metastasizing, as Sam put it. While mutating personally into a kind of ultra-Howard Hughes, or so it was said, growing more and more powerful, until like a black hole he had disappeared completely inside the event horizon of his own power. ”I just hope it doesn't get too weird,” Max said.
The others attendants- Sally, Amy, Elizabeth, and George- were more optimistic. But all of them were apprehensive at their peculiar welcome, or lack of one, and when no one came to visit them through the rest of that evening, they retired to their rooms looking concerned.
Art slept well as always, and at dawn he woke to the low hoot of an owl. The creek burbled below his window. It was a gray dawn, the air filled with the fog that nourished the sea pines. A tocking sound came from somewhere in the compound.
He dressed and went out. Everything was soaking wet. Down on narrow flat terraces below the buildings were rows of lettuce, and rows of apple trees so pruned and tied to frameworks that they were no more than fan-shaped bushes.
Colors were seeping into things when Art came to the bottom of the little farm, over the lagoon. There a lawn lay spread like a carpet under a big old oak tree. Art walked over to the tree, feeling drawn to it. He touched its rough, fissured bark. Then he heard voices; coming up a path by the lagoon were a line of people, wearing black wetsuits and carrying surfboards, or long folded birdsuits. As they pa.s.sed he recognized the faces of the previous night's kitchen crew, and also their driver. The driver waved and continued up the path. Art walked down it to the lagoon. The low sound of waves mumbled through the salty air, and birds swam in the reeds.
After a while Art went back up the trail, and in the compound's dining room he found the elderly workers back in the kitchen, flipping pancakes. After Art and the rest of the guests had eaten, yesterday's driver led them upstairs to a large meeting room. They sat on couches arranged in a square. Big picture windows in all four walls let in a lot of the morning's gray light. The driver sat on a chair between two couches. ”I'm William Fort,” he said. ”I'm glad you're all here.”
He was, on closer inspection, a strange-looking old man; his face was lined as if by a hundred years of anxiety, but the expression it currently displayed was serene and detached. A chimp, Art thought, with a past in lab experimentation, now studying Zen. Or simply a very old surfer or hang-glider, weathered, bald, round-faced, snub-nosed. Now taking them in one by one. Sam and Max, who had ignored him as driver and cook, were looking uncomfortable, but he didn't seem to notice. ”One index,” he said, ”for measuring how full the world is of humans and their activities, is the percent appropriation of the net product of land-based photosynthesis.”
Sam and Max nodded as if this were the usual way to start a meeting.
”Can I take notes?” Art asked.
”Please,” Fort said. He gestured at the coffee table in the middle of the square of couches, which was covered with papers and lecterns. ”I want to play some games later, so there's lecterns and workpads, whatever you like.”
Most of them had brought their own lecterns, and there was a short silent scramble as they got them out and running. While they were at it Fort stood up and began walking in a circle behind their couches, making a revolution every few sentences. Difficult! Difficult! Art wrote. Art wrote. Continued? Continued?
”We now use about eighty percent of the net primary product of land-based photosynthesis,” he said. ”One hundred percent is probably impossible to reach, and our long-range carrying capacity has been estimated to be thirty percent, so we are ma.s.sively overshot, as they say. We have been liquidating our natural capital as if it were disposable income, and are nearing depletion of certain capital stocks, like oil, wood, soil, metals, fresh water, fish, and animals. This makes continued economic expansion difficult.”
”We have to continue,” Fort said, with a piercing glance at Art, who un.o.btrusively sheltered his lectern with his arm. ”Continuous expansion is a fundamental tenet of economics. Therefore one of the fundamentals of the universe itself. Because everything is economics. Physics is cosmic economics, biology is cellular economics, the humanities are social economics, psychology is mental economics, and so on.”
His listeners nodded unhappily.
”So everything is expanding. But it can't happen in contradiction to the law of conservation of matter-energy. No matter how efficient your throughput is, you can't get an output larger than the input.”
Art wrote on his note page, Output larger than input- everything economics- natural capital- Ma.s.sively Overshot. Output larger than input- everything economics- natural capital- Ma.s.sively Overshot.
”In response to this situation, a group here in Praxis has been working on what we call full-world economics.”
”Shouldn't that be overfull-world?” Art asked.
Fort didn't appear to hear him. ”Now as Daly said, man-made capital and natural capital are not subst.i.tutable. This is obvious, but since most economists still say they are are subst.i.tutable, it has to be insisted on. Put simply, you can't subst.i.tute more sawmills for fewer forests. If you're building a house you can juggle the number of power saws and carpenters, which means they're subst.i.tutable, but you can't build it with half the amount of lumber, no matter how many saws or carpenters you have. Try it and you have a house of air. And that's where we live now.” subst.i.tutable, it has to be insisted on. Put simply, you can't subst.i.tute more sawmills for fewer forests. If you're building a house you can juggle the number of power saws and carpenters, which means they're subst.i.tutable, but you can't build it with half the amount of lumber, no matter how many saws or carpenters you have. Try it and you have a house of air. And that's where we live now.”
Art shook his head and looked down at his lectern page, which he had filled again. Resources and capital nonsubst.i.tutable- power saws/carpenters- house of air. Resources and capital nonsubst.i.tutable- power saws/carpenters- house of air.
”Excuse me?” Sam said. ”Did you say natural capital?”
Fort jerked, turned around to look at Sam. ”Yes?”
”I thought capital was by definition man-made. The produced means of production, we were taught to define it.”
”Yes. But in a capitalist world, the word capital capital has taken on more and more uses. People talk about human capital, for instance, which is what labor acc.u.mulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the cla.s.sic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.” has taken on more and more uses. People talk about human capital, for instance, which is what labor acc.u.mulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the cla.s.sic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.”
”Unless you count slavery,” Art said.
Fort's forehead wrinkled. ”This concept of natural capital natural capital actually resembles the traditional definition more than human capital. It can be owned and bequeathed, and divided into renewable and nonrenewable, marketed and nonmarketed.” actually resembles the traditional definition more than human capital. It can be owned and bequeathed, and divided into renewable and nonrenewable, marketed and nonmarketed.”
”But if everything is capital of one sort or another,” Amy said, ”you can see why people would think that one kind was subst.i.tutable for another kind. If you improve your man-made capital to use less natural capital, isn't that a subst.i.tution?”
Fort shook his head. ”That's efficiency. Capital is a quant.i.ty of input, and efficiency is a ratio of output to input. No matter how efficient capital is, it can't make something out of nothing.”
”New energy sources...” Max suggested.
”But we can't make soil out of electricity. Fusion power and self-replicating machinery have given us enormous amounts of power, but we have to have basic stocks to apply that power to. And that's where we run into a limit for which there are no subst.i.tutions possible.”
Fort stared at them all, still displaying that primate calm that Art had noted at the beginning. Art glanced at his lectern screen. Natural capital- human capital- traditional capital- energy vs. matter- electric soil- no subst.i.tutes please Natural capital- human capital- traditional capital- energy vs. matter- electric soil- no subst.i.tutes please- He grimaced and clicked to a new page.
Fort said, ”Unfortunately, most economists are still working within the empty-world model of economics.”
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