Green Earth. Kim Stanley Robinson
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of fields among them could become part of its “broader impacts,” and thus an advantage: NSF judged proposals on intellectual merit and broader impacts, the latter to count as twenty-five percent of any evaluation. So it mattered what the project might do in the world.
She searched the web further. USGCRP, the “US Global Change Research Program,” two billion dollars a year; the South Asian START Regional Research Centre (SAS-RRC), based at the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi, stations in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Mauritius … INDOEX, the Indian Ocean Experiment, also concerned with aerosols, as was its offspring, Project Asian Brown Cloud. These studied the ever-thickening haze covering South Asia and possibly making the monsoon irregular, with disastrous results. Certainly Khembalung was well situated to join that study. Also ALGAS, the “Asia Least Cost Greenhouse Gas Abatement Strategy,” and LOICZ, “Land Ocean Interaction In the Coastal Zones.” That one had to be right on the money; Khembalung would make a perfect study site. Training, networking, biogeochemical cycle budgeting, socioeconomic modeling, impacts on the coastal systems of South Asia. Bookmark the site, add to the e-mail. A research facility in the mouth of the Ganges would be a very useful thing for all concerned.
“Ah shit.”
She had overflowed the milk bottle. Not the first time. She turned off the pump, poured off some of the milk from the full bottle into a four-ounce sack. She always filled quite a few four-ouncers, for use as snacks; she had never told Charlie that most of these were the result of her inattention.
As for herself, she was starving. It was always that way after pumping sessions. Each twenty ounces of milk she gave was the result of some thousand calories burned by her in the previous day, as far as she had been able to calculate; the analyses she had found had been pretty rough. In any case, she could with a clear conscience (and great pleasure) run down to the pizza place and eat till she was stuffed. Indeed she needed to eat or she would get lightheaded.
But first she had to pump the other breast at least a little, because letdown happened in both when she pumped, and she would end up uncomfortable if she didn’t. So she put the ten-ouncer in the little refrigerator, then got the other side going into the four-ouncer, while printing out a list of all the sites she had visited.
She called Drepung.
“Drepung, can you meet for lunch? I’ve got some ideas for how you might get some science support.”
“Yes, thanks. I’ll meet you at the Food Factory in twenty minutes, I’m just trying to buy some shoes for Rudra.”
“What kind are you getting him?”
“Running shoes. He’ll love them.”
On her way out she ran into Frank, also headed for the elevator.
“What you got?” he asked, gesturing at her list.
“Some stuff for the Khembalis,” she said.
“So they can study how to adapt to higher sea levels?”
She frowned. “No, it’s more than that. We can get them a lot of infrastructural help.”
“Good. But, you know. In the end they’re going to need more. And NSF doesn’t do remediation. It just serves its clients.”
Frank’s comment bugged Anna, and after a nice lunch with Drepung she went up to her office and called Sophie Harper, NSF’s liaison to Congress.
“Sophie, is there any way that NSF can set the agenda, so to speak?”
“Well, we ask Congress for funding in very specific ways, and they designate the money for those purposes.”
“So we might be able to ask for funds for certain things?”
“Yes, we do that. To an extent we set our own agenda. That’s why the appropriations committees don’t like us very much.”
“Why?”
“Because they hold the purse strings, and they’re very jealous of that power. I’ve had senators who believe the Earth is flat say to me, ‘Are you trying to tell me that you know what’s good for science better than I do?’ And of course that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell them, because it’s true, but what can you say? That’s the kind of person we sometimes have to deal with. And even with the best of committees, there’s a basic dislike for science’s autonomy.”
“But we’re only free to study things.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Anna sighed. “I don’t either. Listen Sophie, thanks for that. I’ll get back to you when I have a better idea what I’m trying to ask.”
“Always here. Check out NSF’s history pages on the website, you’ll learn some things you didn’t know.”
Anna hung up, and then did that very thing.
She had never gone to the website’s history pages before; she was not much for that kind of thing. But as she read, she realized Sophie had been right; because she had worked there so long, she had felt that she knew NSF’s story. But it wasn’t true.
After World War Two, Vannevar Bush, head of the wartime Office of Science and Technology, had pushed for a permanent federal agency to support basic scientific research. He argued that it was basic scientific research that had won the war (radar, penicillin, the bomb), and Congress had been convinced, and had passed a bill bringing the NSF into being.
After that it was one battle after another, mostly for funding. Many administrations and Congresses had feared and hated science, as far as Anna could see. They didn’t want to know things; it might get in the way of business.
For Anna there could be no greater intellectual crime. It was incomprehensible to her: they did not want to know things! And yet they did want to call the shots. To Anna this was crazy. Even Joe’s logic was stronger. How could such people exist, what could they be thinking? On what basis did they build such an incoherent mix of desires, to want to stay ignorant and to be powerful as well? Were these two parts of the same insanity?
She abandoned that train of thought, and read on to the end of the brief history. Throughout the years, NSF’s purposes and methods had held fast: to support basic research; to award grants; to decide things by peer review rather than bureaucratic fiat; to hire skilled scientists for permanent staff; to hire temporary staff from the expert cutting edges in every field.
Anna believed in all these, and she believed they had done demonstrable good. Fifty thousand proposals a year, eighty thousand people peer-reviewing them, ten thousand new proposals funded, twenty thousand grants continuing to be supported. All functioning to expand scientific knowledge, and the influence of science in human affairs.
She sat back in her chair, thinking it over. All that basic research, all that good work; and yet—thinking over the state of the world—somehow it had not been enough. Possibly they would have to consider doing something more. What that might be was not so clear.
Primates in the driver’s seat. It looked like they should all be dead. Multicar accidents, bloody incidents of road rage. Cars should have been ramming each other in huge demolition derbies, a global auto-da-fé.
But they were social creatures. The brain had ballooned precisely to enable it to make the calculations necessary to get along in groups. These were the parts of the brain engaged when people drove in crowded traffic. Thus along with all the jockeying and frustration came the satisfactions of winning a competition, or the solidarities of cooperating to mutual advantage. Let that poor idiot merge before his on-ramp lane disappeared; it would pay off later in the overall speed of traffic. Thus the little primate buzz.
When things went well. But so often what one saw were people playing badly. It was like a giant game of prisoner’s dilemma, the classic game in which two prisoners are separated and asked to tell tales on the other one, with release offered to them if they do. The standard computer model scoring system had it that if the prisoners cooperate with each other by staying silent, they each get three points; if both defect