Noah's Children: One Man's Response to the Environmental Crises a Novel

By Huck Fairman

NOAH'S CHILDREN tells the story of an individual who awakens to the many environmental
crises threatening our ways of life. While global warming, visible and documented in countless cases,
is the one great challenge to human existence as we have known it, a number of other developments
also threaten us, including extinctions, habitat loss, poisonings, over-fishing, environmental
degradation, loss of bio-diversity, consumption habits, and population growth.

So what can an individual do? This story, of a journalist/biologist and father, offers some ideas.
But ideas must include strategies for implementation, which require cooperation among many --
a requirement susceptible to the imperfections of the species.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450024556

Huck Fairman

ATHENA Parthenos/Promachus, is Huck Fairman’s fourth novel, following HYMN, TALES OF THE CITY, and NOAH’S CHILDREN. When not working on fiction, he has been active in the environmental movement (CITIZENS CLIMATE LOBBY, SIERRA CLUB, 350.org) seeking solutions to global warming and writing a guest column on local and national solutions in a local newspaper.

Book preview

Noah’s Children

One Man’s Response to the

Environmental Crises

A Novel

Huck Fairman

Copyright © 2010 by Huck Fairman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 07/26/2022

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

585098

Contents

Acknowledgements

Spring 2008

Part One

Prelude

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Scene IV

Scene V

Part Two

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Scene IV

Scene V

Scene VI

Scene VII

Part Three

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Scene IV

Scene V

For friends

of the Earth

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Ann Hayes for her invaluable,

insightful editing.

Thanks also to Chuck Kruger for his recommendations

and line editing.

Cover design: Melissa Ann Kelly

Cover photo: Richard Seaman

"The world is not cyclical, not eternal or immutable, but endlessly transforms itself, and never goes back, and we can assist in that transformation.

Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention."

Salman Rushdie

The Ground Beneath Her Feet

". . . When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the watery main,

Increasing store with loss and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay,

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That time will come and take my love away, . . ."

Shakespeare

SPRING 2008

PART ONE

PRELUDE

In the beaker of pond water nothing moves, neither his reflected eye nor anything within. Carefully he inhales, so as not to disturb the unseen—his sacrament. A chorus is heard, voices rising in requiem. The music bleeds into visual things, a whirring of images, of creatures inert and beyond count. He clamps his eyes shut, forcing his thoughts back to the beaker brought from the lake, which may hold further evidence of runoff, contaminants, from lawns, fields, roads, businesses, defusing, as ink clouds a water glass, poisoning protozoa, rotifers, nematodes, us, befouling everything.

His mottled hands push his pad aside; his fingers scratch for his address book and begin crawling past the Ns, the Ns of the World, the Ps, Packer, Packman, David Packer, friend and college dean, one of the gears the university employs to turn its wheels. Included in Dave’s duties, beyond the academic, are counseling and knowing things, student things, serving as go-between, holding his ear to the pulse. He calls. Packer invites him to drop by his office at six. They’ll cross the street, get a beer.

Hanging up, he rubs a finger along his unshaven jaw, feeling the growth as he might cactus spines in the western desert. He imagines conversation with Packer, discussing the town’s and university’s futures, but the chorus returns, a chant, and the tramping of feet. A single voice rises above, urging them all to, Get on! Get on. It’s no longer dawn! Picking up his pencil, he tries to decide how to begin, but his mind jams with data. Maybe just list the points. The university shares with the town many of the needs and problems of growth, as do polities generally over Jersey. All are pushed and pulled by influx and idealism, by vanity and myopia, by egoism, awareness, and greed. He sighs and closes his eyes, sees forests burning, flames leaping from branches into the sky, flood waters seeping around trunks in an unending, silent wood. Slowly his body is sinking through layers of an ancient bog.

SCENE I

OFFICE

Gathering form, an idea stirs him, lifts his head bowed over his office desk. Daylight, shaded by clouds and faintly swaying trees, plays on his eyelids. He shuts them, launches up blindly, overriding doubt and incipience, and heads in to Katherine.

Creaking floorboards interrupt her work, re-directing her eyes to him. Smiling distractedly as he approaches, she holds up a finger to request that he wait a moment while she finishes a memo. He falls back a step, faces away, collects his thoughts. The story they’ve been working on has lit a slow burn in him with its elements of science and irreverence. It has questioned the university, accustomed to praise, about where the Colossus will extend itself—an issue he had hoped would awaken the sleepy town. He wanted to pressure the administration to explain its short-sighted sale of undeveloped land near the lake, and forestall its elimination of other remaining woodlands; indeed he hoped the college would take the lead in preserving such tracts. He has been pursuing the science and university end of it, while she has been investigating the local politics and land deals. He envisioned a comprehensive story, detailing the impacts on several bodies of water, including one that is a source of local drinking water. Many of the last open-space acres east of the lake, acres of tranquility and grace, could disappear. It may already be too late, but he wants to raise the issues once more before chainsaws and bulldozers spread out across those fields and woods. A year ago, a few nearby residents protested but were ignored by the university as it went righteously ahead—this institution that is supremely rich and powerful, and sometimes indifferent. There has always been some ambivalence in attitudes which the town and college hold toward each other. He needs to continue investigating the decisions and local ecosystems, lay it all out. Similar issues have flared up across the country, reddening neighbors’ faces, baring teeth and tongue. Now it’s our turn, he murmurs to himself. But why is the university not more cognizant? . . . Because it’s grown into a huge, hydra-headed thing, a bureaucracy slippery and oversized, a prodigy raking in more gold than the Vatican and equally high-handed. With adrenaline flowing, he conjures a confrontation with this Goliath, slinging his small stone, sending the giant staggering back, sandaled heels gouging the ground, head accelerating beneath the clouds, crashing down upon its own lands spread to the horizon—this paragon and political beast, modern counterpart of Sir Thomas More, self-proclaimed protector of prerogative and belief.

Yes, Ham? Katherine inquires, now that she’s ready, sliding her papers aside.

As his gaze returns to her, he inhales deeply, carefully. Kath . . . while the article on the university lands is progressing well enough, and I have another interview this afternoon, it’s occurred to me that it’s really just such small potatoes we’re focused on—focused on the trees and not the forest.

At first she’s inclined to see where he will go with this, but then realizes she’d better remind him, "Ham, our paper is local, our scope is local; our focus is the trees . . . Uneasily she adds, All politics are local." A fleeting smile wavers uncomfortably in her cheeks, at the cliché, and remembering they’ve had this conversation before.

With an awkward jerk of his head, he acknowledges, yet feels compelled to restate the case: "But more and more studies are alerting us to climate change, to wild weather, habitat loss, extinction, and economic dislocation. A consensus of scientists warns we’re making it worse, if not causing it. By 2100 half of all species could be gone! Coasts may disappear; fish could be fished out; frogs, bees, and birds, our modern canaries in the mines, are turning up diseased, malformed, or are disappearing altogether.

"So finally it’s struck me that people need to act; each of us doing what he or she can, and what I can do is collect as many of these studies as possible, on the whole range of issues and views, and make them available at one site, under one roof, linking them with conclusions, predictions, overviews . . . . What d’ya think?"

She breathes and looks down at her notes from the preceding phone call on a Senior Housing proposal, another improvement turned mare’s-nest. She’s not unaware of the developments he’s alluding to, which are not without their uncertainties, but the question is whether their small paper, with its very small market, is the vehicle for these national, indeed global, issues. While I share your concern, I don’t think we’re the right publication to deal with this. How could we possibly do an adequate job? Who would we reach? How could I begin to justify expensing the research and time necessary?

We could enlist other publications, he offers. We’re all in it together. Yet he knows he has thrown this proposal to her without any real sense of its feasibility. Now he watches lines of concern and doubt converge in her brow. For some seconds she sits in thought, before her eyes rise and search across the room, out the window into the rain. It’s been raining for days. She draws in a breath, and finds him again. Yes, Ham, I agree that it’s too easy to forget about the wider world . . . but the world is not our subject here, not our province. She twists her lips and adds, Another problem I have is how fast this will possibly unfold. Do we know? Aren’t we talking about the next fifty to one hundred years?

No, many studies indicate warming and extinctions have begun. On every continent glaciers are retreating, the Southern Hemisphere in particular is heating up, species are dying off. Waiting fifty years to respond will be too late. The great majority of scientists call for action now.

Katherine ponders this, then looks slowly up at him. And what do you think?

Ice cores drilled up from the Greenland ice sheet and analyzed by the Scripps Institute tell us that 15,000 years ago, Greenland and the Northern Hemisphere suddenly warmed up 16 degrees Fahrenheit, in less than two decades—enough to end the last ice age. There are these periodic warmings naturally, but now we’re pouring out the greenhouse gases that may well accelerate and intensify the changes.

Again she studies him thoughtfully, then sighs and stares down at her desk as she attempts to weigh all of this. Why aren’t the major papers, The Times and Post, not trumpeting this?

The Times has been; it’s been printing reports of study after study.

But then what would our contribution be, assuming we could even afford it?

He tries to reign in his impatience, but that has never been his strong suit. We could create a single source that everyone and anyone could go to and find most of the studies, data, and arguments, on all sides.

Reluctantly her mind reaches ahead, considering costs. There’s no way we could do this alone . . . We don’t have the resources; we can’t afford it. How could we do an adequate job? It would be ineffective, pointless . . .

What then? Do we just sit and watch? he asks beneath an incredulous frown. Yet when he sees her wince, he realizes this was too blunt. We could find some partners, begin . . . Someone, somewhere needs to do it, he insists, feeling frustration bulging behind his brow.

She looks at him carefully, noting his mood, his certainty. . . . We would need someone to take it over.

Yes, fine . . .

She feels faint relief, that he accepts this much, but her reservations are real. The paper’s resources are limited, miniscule. ". . . It would be essential to find a partner or partners, arrange a syndication with other publications. That’s the only way . . . But isn’t there some organization . . . Worldwatch, that already does this?"

They’re not as comprehensive as our site would be. And they’re an advocacy group. Useful but not the same thing . . . . We could approach the university press, the state university press, or any number of others . . . and newspapers, maybe even The Times.

She nods as the names of other potential partners occur to her, before new questions raise their heads. Where do you see the research coming from, what sources, and who would do it? I assume periodicals, papers, scientific publications, and the internet could provide much of it, if they wouldn’t mind being listed . . . But I would think someone, possibly, should travel around, collect the latest thinking, talk to some of the researchers. There are always minority, dissenting opinions, hidden complications, new discoveries and interpretations.

He agrees, nodding emphatically. Absolutely. No question. All of that.

So who? . . . Who would do it? . . . You?

He returns her gaze. I could get the ball rolling.

Her eyes fall back to the pile of papers she must address, a pile never completely dispatched. She imagines the website and first reports, but other issues arise: How much of the research might be out-dated by the time it was collected and listed?

Some, certainly, as new studies and revisions are constantly being published . . . and yet many are corroborating predicted trends, while still others are finding the changes are accelerating, faster than the forecasts. They stare at each other through imagined repercussions. A heaviness presses her into her chair. Can it be true? Withering change likely, probable? . . . While she’s aware generally that the few reports she’s skimmed are based on measurable, verifiable data, still no one knows for sure. All that we have are probabilities . . . right? Yet visions of ravaged landscapes buffet her so that she must close her eyes and rub away the ache. Are not people beginning to act? . . . Beyond this, another problem occurs to her: Would anyone read it? Pay attention? React?

His gray eyes stare out unhappily from his nearly translucent face. It’s become . . . a matter of self-preservation.

She recoils a bit. For some moments both are silent, until another question presses her. But these issues are not new. There have been reports and predictions for years, decades . . . What’s to make a difference this time?

The gathering urgency . . . the shear mass and inclusiveness of the evidence . . . The accelerating trends.

Her forehead tightens. Consciously she must draw in a breath, even as another doubt presents itself: But is it more information we need, or is it leaders? . . . A Lincoln, a Washington, an F.D.R.? . . . Another Thomas Paine, or Nader, or more charismatic Gore to state the blunt truths and begin the bold steps . . . Her face brightens a bit. A Hillary . . . or Jean D’Arc?

His trembling gaze holds on her, as an inner voice volunteers that he would do it, if he could, if he had any ability at all, any charisma. But he doesn’t. Instead, he quotes distant proclamations, When in the course of human events . . . Let the word go forth . . .

Her attention returns to the office windows, their panes gray with overcast and a few silver raindrops. Ash and maple trunks, partially framed by the window, stand motionless, yet she knows that above and out of sight the branches may be awaking in the early Spring weather, pushing out their crimson buds. But from where she sits, she cannot clearly see them, nor has she taken the time to look; indeed she doesn’t know quite where they are in the season. She shivers from the damp cold. When will the clouds break? Can a few knowledgeable citizens awaken the rest? Would their small, local effort have any impact? As editor can she allow the paper to suffer from diverting time and money? Their margins already flirt with failure, bankruptcy . . . Nonetheless . . . she wonders if they can ignore, can side-step the developments taking hold. Perhaps he’s right; it may be their duty, may be the most important thing they can do. Other ideas begin to push into her mind, but first she must acknowledge: Okay . . . I’ll look into it. I’ll make some inquiries, to other papers and publications; see if there’s any interest, see if they’ll come in with us.

He feels his head wobble with relief, and yet in place of spirits lifting, the scope of the crisis, and its weight, descend upon his shoulders, driving them down. Head bowed, back bent, he turns and drags himself to his desk, there slumping into his chair.

For minutes he sits without moving, until he peers out into the gray light, now darker with rain. Some eddy stirs the blinds and nudges him. The blank white sheets of his notepad seem to ascend brainward, crowding, he imagines, the florets. He touches his eyelashes, the little brushes rimming his sight, surprisingly firm. Yes, he’s alive, and this is his life. But what’s he doing? . . . His head falls slowly forward, carrying his eyes past Darwin, the lime green caterpillar his daughter brought him, confined to a plastic terrarium. Darwin beached—wingless Icarus . . . Maybe the creature is happy inching along a curled rhododendron leaf, seeking an edible edge, tasting the variations. He wonders, not for the first time, if he should set Darwin free, but in place of an answer, he finds his attention dropping back to his own motionless hands, now increasingly marked by lines and spots—lichens living on the trunks of trees—and he shakes himself. Names of environmentalists and studies begin to filter into his mind, and taking up his pencil, he lists them to contact or re-read. Waiting for other names to surface, he taps his pencil on the pad, clustering dots, hatchlings of lead, the negative image of the Pleiades. Seven daughters dancing. What does he know of daughters? Or stars? Our Sun is a star; his daughter another, in his cosmos, his lone daughter, a seventeen-year-old source of joy, but also irritation and disagreement, ever gushing to the surface, and how she gushes! What energy, what willpower! She brings him life, purpose, but also sadness, deep sadness. Their clashes resemble super nova caught between mirrors and reflected back and forth in perpetuity. Who will blink? Who will bow and acknowledge responsibility; who will discover charity; who will change? . . . She is pure, unadulterated will, and while there are unmistakable resemblances—he too has always had his plans, views, ideas, imperfect though they have been—he wonders nonetheless where her personality came from. Was he so difficult a child? He has no memory of being so. Can she, then, with her volonté titanesque, really be his? Corrina, his once-sweet ex-wife, was never like that. So how did Ramona end up like this?

SCENE II

INTERVIEW

Through white corridors of blinding brightness, over glass-like polished marble, his closed-down senses track the clacking high heels of a secretary escorting him to his afternoon interview. Outside the sun has emerged, and behind the rapidly navigating assistant, his mind and body weave and sway through echo and light, through a rain of stimuli spawning images and associations, which compel him to clamp his gun-sight eyes, squeezing the brightness from all things, prominently her rhythmically marching legs, reduced to stroboscopic outlines. For seconds he floats in relative darkness and peace, until sunbeams, playing over his eyelids, again spark curiosity to crack them and invite in the dazzling light, transporting him, this time, across country to the Getty atop its acropolis, where hope ascends on the updrafts . . . before his now-blinded eyes flee back into the solidity of color, to the muscular curves of the tanned calves striding ahead of him, gracefully framed by the flapping hem of her beige skirt and green-gray high-heels—contours of beauty, health, and power which awaken dormant impulses—nature’s signals, embellished by mankind, ages up from single cell mitosis. He pictures Wallace Stevens’ swaying hemlocks, hears the cry of the peacocks rising through emerald trees, reaching into the black recesses of his mind, that crypt of random bits, and into the swelling cavity that contains his pouring heart, all darkly surrounded by crenellated walls, cathedral spires and bells deeply chiming—the inner and outer realities that make our layered existence, in this world without end, let us pray.

The secretary swerves into a carpeted anteroom and then into an inner office, where she pulls back a chair and pivots to him. He, head bowed, eyes half-shuttered, stops only as his nose dimples her white cashmere sweater, inhaling her lilac perfume. Tilting back and rapidly scuffing her heels under her, she invites him to have a seat until the director returns, which should be at any moment.

Reaching for the chair back to steady himself, he hears her offer a coffee, an invitation that cascades with other tumbling thoughts, so that he requires a moment to separate them, aware that she, waiting in time-ticking stillness, is beginning to stoop, as a beech is bowed by snow or clicking ice. He wonders if accepting would somehow relieve her, or would it impose? He imagines the coffee would most likely be thin, bitter, unsatisfying—another of the ever-present dichotomies between what could be and what is. And remembering that his purpose here is to gather information and that he has no need of caffeine, he quietly declines, Thank you, no. Her right cheek creases in practiced smile, prompting him to picture those same pellucid eyes presiding over her domain of white office phones, computers, printers, and fax with its correspondences protruding like tongues—the university’s business waiting for acknowledgement back through the wires—this university which has produced, down through centuries, a stream of men, and recently women, and endlessly paper, all absorbing and declaring the knowledge of and from mankind’s tenure. He hears the hemlocks creaking in the wind, remembers that they too will crack, crash, and sink seriatim back into the soil which fed them. Esto perpetua. Dum spiro, spero.

She withdraws, leaving him wondering if she ever questions the growth filling up and paving over the countryside around them. He wonders what she asks of life and what she lives for, wonders if she ever ponders where we’re all going. Most likely residing in a local apartment, unacquainted with the animals, birds, or land, and probably among the legions of recent arrivals thankful for their jobs, she would never doubt the growth burgeoning around her, nor compare the present to the past. Even he has only a sketchy understanding of earlier eras of untrampled fields and woods extending to the horizon, whose passing from this earth was mourned by a dear departed uncle. But then each generation has lamented the lands lost from its childhood.

Clearing his mind, he peers around at the décor which is distinctly modern, plainly not academic, lacking the requisite book-filled shelves and paper-piled tables. Pale paintings segment the white office walls, offering sun-bleached representations of fragmentary views—half a window peering onto a porch, a barn door ajar leading into shadow, a wooden fence disappearing behind a dune—asserting, perhaps, that life is partial in its views, and in its understandings. He wonders if the director reflects upon these themes, or assigns the paintings little more than face value. Paintings, he reminds himself, have long been records, in their stories, faces, landscapes, and beauty, of civilization, and yet how little he knows of them. His brain contracts with embarrassment, and this humility reminds him to control his too-often volatile opinions, his angry reactions. Be humble, Hamilton Warring, be understanding, be open . . . be wary.

Another set of rapidly clicking high heels announces the arrival of his quarry, the Director of Development for University Lands in Adjacent Townships, who closes the distance quickly and extends a hand. Two sharp pumps precede the absorbing of first impressions, and then she is sliding around the desk to her chair, and he is sinking through the cold mist of pessimism into his.

He begins to remind her that he’s from the town paper, but she holds up her palms, waves him off with a forced smile, and tells him she’s read a number of his articles. He searches for a reaction in her eyes, in vain, which probably reveals something in itself, then explains he’s here to gain a clearer picture of the university’s expansion plans.

Rearranging stapled documents on her desk, rebooting her expression, she acknowledges, Well yes, Mr. Warring, that was my understanding. Locking onto his unusual, gray eyes, her own emit pixels of impatience, as if she cannot comprehend why he would be concerned. And yet, as this is part of her job, she masters her qualms. I should be able to sketch the general thinking.

Her cool tone clangs vertebrae and nerves, triggers a spasm that nudges his head forward to where he can apprehend her more clearly. She too is human, he reminds himself, and he wonders if not for their adversarial roles, could they smile at one another or swim together in the Red Sea, where continents meet? After all, she is alert, attractive, exotically Mediterranean, or Middle Eastern, wearing her dark hair cleanly carved at the shoulders—a Cleopatra, queen of her peripheral kingdom, whose prominent arcing nose separates, like the Sierra Madre, the generous plains of her cheeks, and sits Sphinx-like above a wide, sensuous mouth, producing an overall impression of confidence, energy, carnality, wedded to the service of ambition. He feels his own vessel bobbing toward the rocks. Deploy the oars! Pull seaward, boys.

Gauging that small talk will loosen nothing, he gets right to it: Will the university’s plan to accommodate the projected ten percent increase in the student body reach beyond the current campus? And if so, where?

Reasonable and easily answered, she deems, faintly exhaling, lightly explaining: While no final plan has been approved, the university will try to keep within the existing campus.

What then, he asks in a grave tone, was the university’s thinking behind its purchase of the vast Eastern Nursery lands, only to sell them to a developer intent on high-density, commercial usage? . . . Surely the university must have seen that this would substantially impact the area’s several water ways, the levels of traffic, pollution, and noise, accelerate the loss of habitat, and would erode the peaceful mix of rural and suburban environment that drew many people here to begin with. Could you, or anyone, explain the thinking? Could anyone begin to justify it? . . . Ah! Damn! he breathes to himself. He’s gone too far, allowed emotion to run riot, let slip the dogs of war, and she understandably is recoiling. Oh flawed soul. He attempts to soften his assertions with a smile, but sees it does not in the least soothe her unhappy countenance.

Silently he breathes as she glances down at her outline to marshal her response. Already she must rue this interview, he thinks, even as he is not unhappy that she may have to abandon her pre-packaged presentation. He hears her asking if he understands the rationale behind the planned student expansion.

Why yes, he exhales, in fact I’ve heard several. But as with the president’s rationales for invading Iraq, one wonders which, if any, approach the truth.

A tremor of irritation betrays the calm she has chosen to display, before she begins spooning out the company line, The trustees have concluded that the very high quality education offered here should be made available to more students. She pauses, studying him, her eyes narrowing, then adds, A worthy goal, I would think you’d agree.

A brief nodding masks his misgivings, as he realizes there is no point in voicing them to her; she is only the messenger. It was the decision-makers’ methods, he tells himself, lifting a line from a favorite movie, which were unsound. Instead he asks, Was it the trustees who suggested the financing strategy?

That, I’m afraid, I couldn’t tell you, she replies. But obviously a sale of some assets would be a reasonable, though by no means sufficient, means of financing the expansion.

But . . . did they not foresee the environmental impact of that sale?

A frown slowly fills her face, as afternoon thunder clouds overspread the sky, and she stiffens, eliciting a twinge of guilt in him. Again, there’s no point in making her feel uncomfortable . . . Yet, too late. When she finds him once more, her expression and her rejoinder offer neither contrition nor understanding. You realize, Mr. Warring, that these lands are situated in two adjoining townships, do you not?

"I do, but they extend close to the canal, river, and lake and will be audible and probably visible from