In his dysptopian sci-fi thriller SHIP BREAKER, Paolo Bacigalupi introduces readers to a dark post-apocalyptic society in which the Gulf Coast has been ravaged by natural disasters and rising sea levels, and the poor --- including the book's teenage protagonist, Nailer --- are forced to scrape by stripping grounded oil rigs for sellable parts. Below, Paolo gives us a quick lesson on the harsh environmental challenges we're currently facing, which inspired the plot of this latest novel.
Whenever I think about the environment (Be green! Love Mother Earth! blah blah blah), I like to think of a family going out to a nice restaurant. Mom and Dad order a couple plates of pasta, but, for some reason, the kids don't get anything. Instead, the kids wait and watch while the parents gobble down dinner.
Mom and Dad eat the field-greens salad, the rosemary-infused bread, the sun-dried tomato farfalle, the veal piccata, and generally have a pretty great time. Maybe mom's wearing pearls, because, you know, it's a nice restaurant. Dad is definitely wearing a tie. He's classy that way. Mom and Dad probably order a couple glasses of wine, linger over dessert, maybe split a tiramisu, and then, when they're just about stuffed to the gills, they shove their picked-over and scraped-over plates down the table to their children, with the last bits of pasta and the runny lines of sauce, and some chewed-up bits of meat, and say, "Here kids, eat up!"
So the kids get the scraps, while their parents got the meal. And then, to top it all off, Mom and Dad get up from the table and walk out the door, leaving the kids to deal with the pissed-off waiter who just showed up saying that the credit card has been declined. So the kids end up washing dishes in the back, for the next couple hundred years to pay off the bill. Tough luck, kids, Mom and Dad had a show to catch.
That's Environment 101. The first person at the table gets the cheap energy, the clean water, the clean air and the open space, and has all the fun. The last person gets stuck with the cleanup and the bill. The last person is always going to be a kid. It's not personal. It's just the way we roll. Generational warfare is always more fun when you're a grown-up.
I was thinking about this when the Deep Horizon oil rig blew itself to pieces a week ago, and as it now continues to dump oil into the ocean, and prepares to coat the beaches of the Gulf. We were drilling more than a mile down to find oil, because all the easy close and cheap oil has already been used up. Oil that's more than a mile underwater? We call that scraps. My parents already got all the easy oil. Now my generation is going after the scraps. So what do you get?
You get an environmental disaster that will define the Gulf shores for years to come. You get the dead fish and the dead migratory birds and toxic beaches. But the really pathetic thing isn't that we've screwed up the Gulf. It's that we did it just so we could toot around in our cars, buy some plastic lawn chairs, and maybe manufacture a couple more Xboxes. It wasn't like we were going to cure cancer with that oil. We just wanted to keep the party rolling for a little longer. We wanted to have a little more fun, and we thought we'd just pass the global warming and the oil slicks on to you. Because, really, even though we say we love our children, we don't love them anywhere near as much as we love ourselves.
That's what the environment is really all about. We get the meal, you get scraps, and eventually the party ends. And after we've ruined everything, SHIP BREAKER begins. It's a place where oil is scarce, loyalty is scarcer, and scavenging the scraps of the Accelerated Age is the only way to stay alive.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi
