Fiction River: How to Save the World Read online

  “Thank you, Martin, for that very optimistic assessment.” Gordon put his empty glass down on the table. “But if you really believe that, then why are you here?”

  Martin grinned. “I’m not perfect. I’m hoping someone here is smart enough to prove me wrong.”

  “Well,” said Gordon. “We don’t start our serious brainstorming until tomorrow morning, but the free-for-all discussions can be just as useful.” He turned to Betty, “You made a point earlier, something about Buckminster Fuller—?”

  She nodded. “It was almost a hundred years ago. Fuller organized a thing called ‘The World Game.’ How do you make the world work? They decided to start with ending hunger. At that point, two thirds of the world’s population went to bed hungry. They gamed it out. What’s the problem? Not enough food? No, there was plenty. The planet was producing more than enough food, but too much of it was going to waste. The food was in the wrong place. Too much here, not enough there. The problem wasn’t just transportation, it was also processing, storage, and refrigeration. When they took a step back from there, how do you solve those problems, they realized that there wasn’t enough electricity to manage the food resources. That’s as far as they got then, they decided the world needed to create more energy. But—” She shook her head. “—that was short-sighted too. The production of electricity creates its own ecological problems. Pollution, habitat destruction, and so on. They needed to keep that game going, they needed to dig deeper.

  “Another fellow, Werner Erhard created a thing called the Hunger Project. His thesis was that hunger could be ended by the year 2000 if you could raise the consciousness of a critical mass of people. If you did that, it would create the political will. He was right about that, but it didn’t happen. Circumstances got in the way. The movement faltered too soon and the political will didn’t get created.

  “But the Hunger Project, and many other ventures working toward the same discovered that there are a lot of little things that cumulatively can make a big difference. When you teach women how to grow their own small gardens, when you help villages build windmills for wells, when you empower people with inexpensive, low-tech solutions, you create sustainable improvements that they can build, share, and maintain themselves.

  “Here’s one. Take a ceramic pot, put it inside another pot. Fill the space between them with sand and pour as much water into that sand as you can. As the water evaporates, the food in the inner pot is cooled, as much as twenty degrees cooler. No, it’s not a real refrigerator, but it helps keep food fresh longer. Here’s another. Take a sheet of plastic wrap. Stretch it over an angled frame, something you can even build out of sticks. The morning dew collects on the underside and flows down into a catch trap. Fresh water every day. Plastic cones will accomplish the same thing. There are hundreds of little things like that make a big difference—”

  “That might be fine for an African village,” said Martin. “But that doesn’t address the unsustainability of Joe Sixpack’s lifestyle—burning three gallons of gas a day to push a Belchfire Six ten miles to work and back. And Mrs. Sixpack burning another four gallons schlepping the kids to and from school, doing the shopping, driving into town for a sale so she can spend $5 to save $2. That kind of economic blindness guarantees we’re still sliding down the razor blade of destiny—”

  “Yes, you’re right. But on the plus side, we have hybrid automobiles. We have solar power, bio-fuels, wind power, wave power, geothermal, thorium reactors, pebble-bed reactors, energy towers, energy from garbage reclamation. We’re fish-farming, growing protein in tanks, and we’re replanting a million trees a year—”

  “Stopgap solutions,” said Martin. “We’re still on the downslope—”

  “There’s no shortage of answers,” said Elephant. “History is a list of people with answers. Not all of them good ones.”

  “If I might interrupt—?” A tall man standing at the edge of the group. Several of them looked up.

  “Doctor, of course!” Elephant started to heave himself up, but the tall man waved him back down.

  “Please, don’t call me Doctor. That’s an illusion of authority created by television. It’s also an illusion of familiarity. And besides, you knew me when I was just Willy.”

  “Right. Pull up a chair.”

  The tall man shook his head. “I need to stand. I was jammed into an airline seat for nine hours, much too long for these legs. And I flew economy, wearing a beard and sunglasses.” He held up a hand. “But let me make my point before I forget it. The project has run the simulations. Over and over. You’ve all seen them. They’re no secret. It goes back to that thing Betty said earlier, about a well-informed population. Well, this group has been putting the information out from dozens of different sources all over the world. And yes, it’s all been a useful push in the right direction, but it’s still not creating a big enough dent in the public consciousness, so we’re still not getting the political movement we need to make a difference.

  “We’ve got an army of lobbyists, not just in this country, but in the forty leading economies. We’ve sat with Congressmen, Senators, Presidents, Governors, Ambassadors, Prime Ministers, Sheiks, dictators, and more. We’ve appealed to three Popes. We’ve talked to the highest Elders of the Latter Day Saints. We’ve schmoozed with a thousand rabbis. We’ve met with the Dalai Lama. We’ve met with Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims and more Christian leaders than I care to think about. We’ve applied our leverage to the publishing industry, broadcast and cable television, movies, the news media, and the internet. We’ve changed the context of advertising for almost every company we have control over. We’ve funded whole genres of conscientious awareness. Even science fiction isn’t what it used to be.

  “In the past twenty-three years since this group was formed, we’ve spent a hundred and twenty billion Euros, and it still hasn’t been enough. As Martin has so eloquently pointed out, we’re still on track for disaster. Maybe not quite as fast, but that’s bad news, too, because all of our efforts have only prolonged the disaster, exacerbating the suffering for everyone.”

  “And—?” prompted Gordon.

  “You’ve already said it,” said Willy. “Education isn’t enough. People don’t want to give up their beliefs. That’s the polite way of saying it. They don’t want to give up their hatred. They don’t want to give up their arrogance. They don’t want to give up being right about how wrong the other guy is.

  “The result? Political ideologies based on dominance, not partnership. Religious ideologies even more so. Governments are in gridlock and economies are paralyzed. This is why communism didn’t work. There’s no personal advantage. That’s what we’ve been missing. You cannot save the world until you address the real reason we’re headed for collapse—”

  “Which is—?”

  “The reason we’re headed for collapse is that we keep forgetting to include human nature in the equation. You said it at the beginning, Gordon. Greed. Selfishness.”

  “I’m surrounded by pessimists,” remarked Betty.

  “Realists,” corrected Willy.

  Betty smiled gently. “Have you heard David speak on partnership?”

  Several people nodded. So did Willy. “Yes, it’s an impressive speech. It’s great for team-building. He talks about the difference between partnership and adversary and uses World War II as an example. The allies created a partnership to defeat Germany. The United States provided resources, Britain provided a staging area for D-Day, and the Russians provided the manpower for the eastern front, keeping Germany surrounded and Hitler’s attention divided. It makes for a great story—if you leave out the part that Churchill’s war plans were based on reestablishing the global power of the British Empire, Roosevelt wanted to end the miseries of colonialism that the British had helped foster, and neither of them trusted Stalin’s intentions in Eastern Europe, so both Roosevelt and Churchill were happy to let the Russian people carry the largest burden of personal suffering and sacrifice. Yes, that partnersh
ip. Even where there’s partnership, you can’t eliminate the essential human question.”

  “And that is—?”

  “‘What’s in it for me?’” Willy grinned. “And that includes us. Me too. Yes, I’m here to make a difference—but I’m also here because my participation gets me a TV show, a million-dollar book deal every year, and a first class ride everywhere I go. And if the world collapses tomorrow, I have a ticket to Sanctuary.” He looked around at everyone else seated. “See? That’s the issue. What’s in it for me? What’s in it for each of you?”

  The members of the group looked at each other, those who had spoken and those who had not. Some looked embarrassed, others just smiled expectantly, as if it were another of Willy’s philosophical exercises, with the punch line still to come.

  “You’re waiting for me to give you the answer, aren’t you?” Willy asked. He looked from face to face, grinning. “You missed it. I already did.”

  A long moment of uncomfortable silence followed. Several people replayed the conversation in their minds. Others frowned, puzzled. One or two made as if to speak, then stopped themselves.

  “What’s in it for me?” repeated Willy. “That’s the key to the whole thing. You can spend another hundred and twenty billion Euros inspiring people with the larger vision of saving the future—but unless you show them an immediate practical gain in their wallet, in their standard of living, in something that they can take home, you’re just going to keep spinning your wheels.

  “We’ve got twelve billion people on this planet. This group, this gathering—allegedly the best and the brightest—is looking at everything so rationally and so compassionately and so arrogantly that we’re forgetting that our ability to take a global view is a privilege.

  “Half of our twelve billion brothers and sisters are below average—and the average is set so low anyway that I can’t be optimistic about the half who are above average. So this isn’t about intelligence or education or even vision. It isn’t even about us figuring out how to save the world from itself—because that assumes that we know what’s best and that we have some self-appointed authority to implement it.

  “I think that’s the largest part of the problem—our attitude about the problem. We’re being arrogant and elitist. We should stop thinking about what’s best for them. And we should recognize that they’re really not interested in what we think about how they should live their lives anyway. We should start thinking about what’s best for us. We want to live in a better world. So how do we create a sustainable system for maintaining the needs of twelve million iterations of chimpanzee DNA? Clean air, clean water, healthy food, shelter, and the possibilities of positive emotional interactions?”

  He looked around. “I think that’s the question we should ask. How do we make creating a sustainable planet profitable?” He held up a hand. “And by the way—whatever the physical problems might be, jobs, education, climate, clean air, clean water, and everything that follows when those challenges aren’t met, poverty, hunger, disease, famine, whatever—the economics of implementing the solution will always be the largest part of the question. If we can make it profitable, we can make it inevitable—but even that isn’t a complete answer. How do we make it happen without concentrating an inordinate amount of wealth in the pockets of a privileged minority?

  “You’ve all seen that simulation, too. 90% of the wealth must be available to 90% of the people. So we not only have to create a profit, we have to pass that profit onto those who help create it. And that means a redesign of the economic system, too.” He paused to waggle his empty beer bottle at a distant waiter.

  “You have a plan?” asked Gordon.

  “Of course,” said Willy. “You’re it. My plan is that we create a different economic mechanism. You’re the design team. If you accept the conditions of the problem, what mechanisms do you create to address it?”

  Gordon leaned back in his chair. “All right—” He steepled his hands in front of his face, thinking while the waiter brought Willy another beer. He waited until the waiter left. “Off the top of my head. Let’s start with the Solar-Cal model.”

  “What’s that?” asked Martin.

  “Solar-Cal was a company that installed solar roofs. You paid a token installation fee. Usually just the cost of the labor. A team came out and re-roofed your house or building with solar panels, cones, mini-windmills, whatever was appropriate for the site. After that, your electricity was free. Solar-Cal sold the excess power to the local grid—that’s where they made their money. You got free power, and they averaged fifty dollars a month off every client. They had a thousand subscribers in six months. Fifty thousand a month in cash-flow. After that, it was all about expansion. Hire more installers, buy panels in volume at wholesale prices. Reduce the installation fee. They had ten thousand installations in three years. Their only limit was the availability of solar panels, but they were banking six million a year, putting most of it into building their own factories for production of more panels. Had they survived to the six-year-mark, they could have been netting a hundred million a year in free money.”

  “I remember that,” said Martin. “They went belly up. Some kind of fraud at the top? There was an SEC investigation, wasn’t there?”

  “Too much money concentrated in the hands of too few. They ended up making some bad financial decisions. But that wasn’t all of it. All that money pissed off the wrong people. That’s inevitable.” Gordon stared off into the past, remembering. “It was a great plan, but they only solved half the problem—like you said, Willy, they forgot the human part of the equation. The more money they made, the more the homeowners felt they were being cheated. They were getting their electricity free for renting their roofs, but when they heard that Solar-Cal was making a million dollars a month, they resented it. They thought they deserved a share of that, too. It was their roofs, their sunlight, wasn’t it? Then Solar-Cal made a bad decision. To keep up with the competition, they started offering a percentage of the income for all new installations, but they didn’t offer it for any previous installations. They said they needed that cash-flow to keep expanding. And that’s when all kinds of bovine, equine, porcine, and fowl excrement struck the blades of various rotating air-moving devices. The whole solar energy business was tainted for years. It still hasn’t recovered to where it could have been.” Gordon looked up to Willy. “So yeah, I see your point. They failed the ‘What’s in it for me?’ test.”

  “And you would fix that how?”

  Gordon said, “In retrospect, it’s obvious. Pay each homeowner fifty percent of whatever profit comes in from his installation—and give him a share of stock for each panel, too. Make them shareholders, not just customers.”

  “Why?” said Willy.

  “You know why,” said Gordon.

  “Yes, I do. But explain it for everyone else.”

  “It’s the partnership thing again. When the homeowners thought they were being taken advantage of, they united against the company. Give them shares of stock, they become partners in its success and unite behind it instead.” Warming to the idea, Gordon leaned forward. “All right, I see it. You can extend that idea to other businesses as well. Automakers could pay not just a salary, but shares as well. Businesses are built by labor—give labor a share in ownership, and it has an increased stake in the success of the business. When ownership is shared among the people with actual hands-on experience in how to make the company work, then ‘What’s in it for me?’ gets kicked up to a higher level. Instead of an adversarial situation between management and labor, you establish a genuine partnership.”

  “Okay, I see it,” said Martin, finally speaking up again. “Make it profitable to do the right thing. Problem solved, right?”

  Others nodded, and a low murmur of agreement began.

  “Not quite.” An older man, white-haired and portly, held up a hand. “You’re cutting back the profit margin for investment capital. And that’s going to affect the availability of cap
ital. Speaking as someone with a little bit of insight in that area—” He waited until the laughter subsided. “—speaking as someone with a few honestly earned scars, and a couple of dishonestly-earned scars as well, I want to own the company, not share it. If I’m paying for the cake, I want the biggest piece.”

  “Fair enough,” said Gordon. “But which would you rather have? A big piece of a small cake, or a small piece of an incredibly large cake?”

  “Which is bigger?”

  “See—there’s the difference between you and too many others. You just asked the right question.”

  “But you haven’t asked the next question,” said the white-haired man.

  “And that is—?”

  “Ninety-three percent of the world’s wealth is now under the control of one percent of its population. How do you propose to change that distribution? Without starting a class war? Tell me—how are you going to make it profitable for people to give up power and wealth?”

  Gordon didn’t answer. Neither did Willy.

  “And how many of you—?” The white-haired man looked around the small group of billionaires. “How many of you would give up your wealth and power to save the world?”

  No one answered. Some were considering it. Others plainly did not like the question.

  The white-haired man added, “And that’s without any guarantee that it would work.” He glanced around. “That’s the problem you have to solve.”