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Green: Turtle Love
Jul. 9th, 2011 03:11 pmStephanie and Amos Byers are Floridians, living in a coastal area near Cape Canaveral during a time when rising waters are threatening all coastal homes. They’re decent people and very environmentally aware, witness their adoption of young twin girls from Guatemala (Jada and Janine, now 17) rather than having kids of their own and the fact that they own both a hybrid and an electric car. Though the billions of dollars invested in Cape Canaveral, which is still being used as a launch platform, justify its protection with a seawall, the couple’s house and those of their neighbors simply aren’t worth enough money for saving them to be economically justifiable for the government. So the government implements “eminent domain” on a historically unprecedented scale and forces the abandonment of millions of homes threatened by rising seas and other hazards, including theirs, and although it’s willing to pay homeowners the equity value of their homes, it won’t pay for the land. It’s a reasonable, if painful, form of triage when you can’t save everyone but still must still try to save what you can.
Stephanie works at a local university as a wildlife biologist, specializing in the local sea turtle species and researching ways to protect them from the rising seas. Turtles, like salmon, return to where they were born and if those beaches are submerged, the turtles may have nowhere to lay their egss; thus, Stephanie moves the eggs farther up the beach, to the estimated high-tide line in 20 years when the turtles will return. Amos works as a hydrological engineer for the Department of the Interior’s “Holland Corps”, so named because the engineering challenge of the century will be to wall off the U.S. from the rising seas by surrounding it with sea walls. He’s working at the Kennedy Space Center, abandoned after the manned spaceflight program was cancelled. (If that’s not a poke to get readers riled up and yelling at their elected officials, I don’t know what is.)
[Spoilers] As the story begins, Amos has received a threat letter from what appears to be a religious nut who sees in Amos “the face of the enemy” and someone who’s opposing God’s will. And as he and Stephanie arrive home from a foredoomed court appearance that fails to convince a judge to save their home, they find a “gutter” (someone who guts abandoned homes to sell the valuable materials) in their kitchen, already scoping out what’s worth salvaging after the couple leaves. He flees, but it’s a clear sign their home will soon be an abandoned wreck, stripped of anything salvageable by ordinary citizens, since the government doesn’t consider it economical to do so; all they’ll do is bulldoze the stripped remains of former family homes and other structures to turn them into riprap for the future seawalls.
The ending, in which the Department of the Interior offers both Stephanie and Amos new work on the west coast in a project to dam the Columbia River and create a massive reservoir that will sustain drier adjacent areas and that will employ Stephanie managing a seal preservation project, seems a bit pat. There’s certainly still plenty of work to do in Florida, and it seems likely there’s no shortage of equally qualified workers nearer to Washington and Oregon, so why move them across the country? It’s certainly possible that after more than a decade, Stephanie has grown tired of her turtles (thereby invalidating the story’s title), but it seems unlikely; most of the scientists I’ve known who persevered long to get their PhD were so passionate about their field that few would voluntarily switch subjects. Moreover, the couple’s teenage twins seem unlikely to accept the change as readily as they do; they’re right at the age when it becomes crucially important to retain the social group they’ve formed during the preceding decade.
This and related problems arise because the story arc is too shallow, largely because of Amos’ lack of affect as the POV character; he seems largely unmoved by events, including the series of progressively more aggressive death threats from his mysterious nemesis. Even the eventual attack from the would-be killer (who turns out to be Greg, Stephanie’s ex-boyfriend from many years ago), comes off as flat. Greg’s armed with a pistol but seems unready to use it; though shots are fired, nobody is harmed except Greg, who inadvertently shoots himself—unlikely, since we’re told he’s been a hunter most of his life and should handle a firearm better than that. Since we mostly see Stephanie through the eyes of Amos, her own emotional journey feels equally flat, even though the heart of the story is how she must pass through despair over the loss of her beloved home, one she’s lived in for much of her life, so she can emerge on the other side, ready to live in the new world. She succeeds, uplifted in part by the joy of watching her latest batch of turtles hatch and shepherding them past predators on their way down to the sea, where they’ll spend the next two decades growing large enough to return and lay their own eggs.
As is often the case, most of the decisions the government is making are based on economics, and such decisions inevitably benefit the rich over the ordinary citizens simply because the rich have a larger economic investment at stake. The point isn’t lost on Green, though he leaves it carefully implicit. The larger issue of the economics of simply abandoning homes seems unlikely; a government faced with the need to relocate—and house!—millions of its own citizens would need all the building materials it could get its hands on (as Green notes), and it would certainly be wiser to use citizens who lack other employment to legally extract those materials from the abandoned houses and move them to the areas of new construction. That’s particularly important for strategic materials such as copper that are increasingly expensive and therefore well worth recovering (enough so that there’s a thriving black market for the copper in stolen power lines). Green alludes specifically to such possibilities when he mentions that the nation’s prisons have been emptied of minor offenders in exchange for the kind of Public Works Administration projects Roosevelt used to keep hope alive through the Great Depression. Possibly this is just a cynical approach based on the notion that the government can buy these materials cheaply from the gutters on the black market, but that seems a stretch.
The larger question of whether the U.S. government has enough money to buy out millions of homeowners and fund such massive undertakings as the national “Save America” program is harder to answer. If the U.S. withdraws from its current trillion-dollar foreign adventures, that will free up an astounding amount of money to spend on its own citizens, despite an economy being rapidly marginalized by the explosive growth of China and the growing strength of the European Union. But as I was writing this review, the U.S. national debt was within a year of equaling the national GDP, one of the red flags most economists use to describe a country rapidly approaching national bankruptcy. Green ends with the observation that the government is raising taxes to fund all these efforts, largely without protest, but that seems both unlikely and inconsistent with statements earlier in the story about significant tax protests even before the new taxes were added. Green seems to believe that this utopian marshalling of the nation’s resources would create the same sense of shared purpose that existed during World War II, but that seems more like wishful thinking than a consistent extrapolation from the story’s premises.
The description of the consequences of global warming seem quite realistic: the crisis is becoming serious, though with no “Day After Tomorrow” special effects, and the government is finally taking action when even the deniers are having trouble claiming that the problem isn’t real. The solutions are also the kinds of things governments will have to seriously consider, and like all good SF, Green has some suggestions that will be well worth considering. Whether the people responsible for the seawall construction will do the job right is something that many people reading this review will live long enough to learn. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers certainly has the brains and expertise to do so, but as Hurrican Katrina proved in New Orleans, political interference and an unwillingness to spend the money required to do the job right are likely to undermine their efforts. I’d like to think they’ve learned from that experience, but I’m too cynical to assume they have.
On the whole, “Turtle Love” is skillfully written, with interesting protagonists, a well-described situation, and the optimistic message that the future won’t be a Mad Max scenario, but will instead feature people working together effectively during a crisis. But too many details seemed incompletely thought through, and the emotional tone seemed too flat to make those aspects of the story work as well as they could have. Not a bad story by any means, but one that needed more incubation and revision.
Stephanie works at a local university as a wildlife biologist, specializing in the local sea turtle species and researching ways to protect them from the rising seas. Turtles, like salmon, return to where they were born and if those beaches are submerged, the turtles may have nowhere to lay their egss; thus, Stephanie moves the eggs farther up the beach, to the estimated high-tide line in 20 years when the turtles will return. Amos works as a hydrological engineer for the Department of the Interior’s “Holland Corps”, so named because the engineering challenge of the century will be to wall off the U.S. from the rising seas by surrounding it with sea walls. He’s working at the Kennedy Space Center, abandoned after the manned spaceflight program was cancelled. (If that’s not a poke to get readers riled up and yelling at their elected officials, I don’t know what is.)
[Spoilers] As the story begins, Amos has received a threat letter from what appears to be a religious nut who sees in Amos “the face of the enemy” and someone who’s opposing God’s will. And as he and Stephanie arrive home from a foredoomed court appearance that fails to convince a judge to save their home, they find a “gutter” (someone who guts abandoned homes to sell the valuable materials) in their kitchen, already scoping out what’s worth salvaging after the couple leaves. He flees, but it’s a clear sign their home will soon be an abandoned wreck, stripped of anything salvageable by ordinary citizens, since the government doesn’t consider it economical to do so; all they’ll do is bulldoze the stripped remains of former family homes and other structures to turn them into riprap for the future seawalls.
The ending, in which the Department of the Interior offers both Stephanie and Amos new work on the west coast in a project to dam the Columbia River and create a massive reservoir that will sustain drier adjacent areas and that will employ Stephanie managing a seal preservation project, seems a bit pat. There’s certainly still plenty of work to do in Florida, and it seems likely there’s no shortage of equally qualified workers nearer to Washington and Oregon, so why move them across the country? It’s certainly possible that after more than a decade, Stephanie has grown tired of her turtles (thereby invalidating the story’s title), but it seems unlikely; most of the scientists I’ve known who persevered long to get their PhD were so passionate about their field that few would voluntarily switch subjects. Moreover, the couple’s teenage twins seem unlikely to accept the change as readily as they do; they’re right at the age when it becomes crucially important to retain the social group they’ve formed during the preceding decade.
This and related problems arise because the story arc is too shallow, largely because of Amos’ lack of affect as the POV character; he seems largely unmoved by events, including the series of progressively more aggressive death threats from his mysterious nemesis. Even the eventual attack from the would-be killer (who turns out to be Greg, Stephanie’s ex-boyfriend from many years ago), comes off as flat. Greg’s armed with a pistol but seems unready to use it; though shots are fired, nobody is harmed except Greg, who inadvertently shoots himself—unlikely, since we’re told he’s been a hunter most of his life and should handle a firearm better than that. Since we mostly see Stephanie through the eyes of Amos, her own emotional journey feels equally flat, even though the heart of the story is how she must pass through despair over the loss of her beloved home, one she’s lived in for much of her life, so she can emerge on the other side, ready to live in the new world. She succeeds, uplifted in part by the joy of watching her latest batch of turtles hatch and shepherding them past predators on their way down to the sea, where they’ll spend the next two decades growing large enough to return and lay their own eggs.
As is often the case, most of the decisions the government is making are based on economics, and such decisions inevitably benefit the rich over the ordinary citizens simply because the rich have a larger economic investment at stake. The point isn’t lost on Green, though he leaves it carefully implicit. The larger issue of the economics of simply abandoning homes seems unlikely; a government faced with the need to relocate—and house!—millions of its own citizens would need all the building materials it could get its hands on (as Green notes), and it would certainly be wiser to use citizens who lack other employment to legally extract those materials from the abandoned houses and move them to the areas of new construction. That’s particularly important for strategic materials such as copper that are increasingly expensive and therefore well worth recovering (enough so that there’s a thriving black market for the copper in stolen power lines). Green alludes specifically to such possibilities when he mentions that the nation’s prisons have been emptied of minor offenders in exchange for the kind of Public Works Administration projects Roosevelt used to keep hope alive through the Great Depression. Possibly this is just a cynical approach based on the notion that the government can buy these materials cheaply from the gutters on the black market, but that seems a stretch.
The larger question of whether the U.S. government has enough money to buy out millions of homeowners and fund such massive undertakings as the national “Save America” program is harder to answer. If the U.S. withdraws from its current trillion-dollar foreign adventures, that will free up an astounding amount of money to spend on its own citizens, despite an economy being rapidly marginalized by the explosive growth of China and the growing strength of the European Union. But as I was writing this review, the U.S. national debt was within a year of equaling the national GDP, one of the red flags most economists use to describe a country rapidly approaching national bankruptcy. Green ends with the observation that the government is raising taxes to fund all these efforts, largely without protest, but that seems both unlikely and inconsistent with statements earlier in the story about significant tax protests even before the new taxes were added. Green seems to believe that this utopian marshalling of the nation’s resources would create the same sense of shared purpose that existed during World War II, but that seems more like wishful thinking than a consistent extrapolation from the story’s premises.
The description of the consequences of global warming seem quite realistic: the crisis is becoming serious, though with no “Day After Tomorrow” special effects, and the government is finally taking action when even the deniers are having trouble claiming that the problem isn’t real. The solutions are also the kinds of things governments will have to seriously consider, and like all good SF, Green has some suggestions that will be well worth considering. Whether the people responsible for the seawall construction will do the job right is something that many people reading this review will live long enough to learn. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers certainly has the brains and expertise to do so, but as Hurrican Katrina proved in New Orleans, political interference and an unwillingness to spend the money required to do the job right are likely to undermine their efforts. I’d like to think they’ve learned from that experience, but I’m too cynical to assume they have.
On the whole, “Turtle Love” is skillfully written, with interesting protagonists, a well-described situation, and the optimistic message that the future won’t be a Mad Max scenario, but will instead feature people working together effectively during a crisis. But too many details seemed incompletely thought through, and the emotional tone seemed too flat to make those aspects of the story work as well as they could have. Not a bad story by any means, but one that needed more incubation and revision.