Subject: Viridian Note 00023: The World is Becoming Uninsurable, Part 3 Key concepts: insurance costs, weather violence, Involuntary Parks Attention Conservation Notice: This is the last of a three-part series. It is long, highly speculative, and has practically no facts of any kind. Links: http://www.munichre.com/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/warnings/waterworld Entries in the "Big Mike" Viridian Design Contest: http://www.pinknoiz.com/viridian/logos.html http://www.spaceways.de/BigMike/Mike.html http://weber.u.washington.edu/~r1ddl3r/bigmike.html http://powerbase-alpha.com/bigmike http://rampages.onramp.net/~jzero/ http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades http://www.57thstreet.com/viridian/ http://www.ioc.net/~bini/bigmike.htm http://www.pcnet.com/~thallad/mike.htm http://www.golden.net/~eli/viridian/ Bruce Sterling remarks: The invisible loss in climate change, that terrible loss which cannot show up on the Munich Re books, is the loss of natural areas. Genuine climate change renders moot the 20th century's many struggles to preserve and conserve the wilderness. There can be no true "wilderness" in a Greenhouse Earth. All creatures great and small are under the same gray sky, from aardwolf to zebu. There can be no refuge, nothing can go untouched. "Nature" is over; there is no sanctity left to defend; all that breathes is breathing unnatural air. But though the next century may have no Nature, that does not imply that it will have no savagery. On the contrary, large and growing areas of the planet will have lost their value for technological instrumentalism. Abdicated as profit centers, they are too unstable for settlement and development. They might become slums, as surmised in Note 00022. Or they could make good carbon-dioxide sumps. Consider the following scenario. Outflanked by rapid climate change, rain forests and national wildernesses will be badly damaged by floods, and periodically on fire. Natural areas may even begin adding to the global CO2 load, as a recent computer model suggests. But the difference between a half-meter-rise and a ten-meter rise in sea level, is the difference between pain and the collapse of civilization. The carbon is a terrifying menace, and has to be put somewhere. Nature is beaten and no longer fit for the job, so mankind must step in. We can therefore envision a strong, interventionist "Bismarck scenario," in which a harshly paternalistic and authoritarian government begins reshaping the dwindling landscape wholesale. Not all governments have the ability or inclination to do this. However, economic collapse is the bonanza of regulators, and war is traditionally the health of the State. The situation could conceivably give rise to various carbon-dioxide Ration-States with zealous blood-and-soil ideological overtones. Because the Motherland is visibly imperilled; therefore, whole populations are cybernetically drafted, for the moral equivalent of People's War. Global, laissez-faire techno-development has never lacked critics. However, it's hard to imagine a more devastating critique of American-style, global liberal capitalism than nation-states sinking underwater. Catastrophe is a strong argument for a very different course. The new course would not look very American. So: the seas rise. Massive deportations of population, internal visas, and lebensraum issues become political commonplaces. A wrist-mounted cellphone with satellite tracking is no longer a yuppie gizmo, but state- mandated for security reasons. The smoking remains of wilderness, and the newly drowning areas, are nervously patrolled by immigration authorities, who hunt poachers and illegal aliens with infra-red and DNA sniffers. Since they can't be financially exploited, the Uninsured Areas are deliberately overgrown, by government fiat. This makes sense, for, the faster they can suck up carbon, the slower they will sink. The continent's imperilled rims therefore become a new kind of landscape, the Involuntary Parks. They bear some small resemblance to the twentieth century's national parks, those government-owned areas nervously guarded by well-indoctrinated forest rangers in formal charge of Our Natural Heritage (C) (TM). They are, for instance, very green, and probably full of wild animals. But the species mix is no longer natural. They are mostly fast-growing weeds, a cosmopolitan jungle of kudzu and bamboo, with, perhaps, many genetically altered species that can deal with seeping saltwater. Drowned cities that cannot be demolished for scrap will vanish wholesale into the unnatural overgrowth. The idea is farfetched, but not without precedent. Here are some contemporary examples of Involuntary Parks: A. The very large and slightly poisonous areas downwind of Chernobyl, which have been reported to feature wild boars and somewhat distorted vegetable and insect forms. B. The Korean Demilitarized Zone, which is about a mile wide and stretches entirely across the Korean Peninsula. It is festooned with deadly landmines, and rumor says it has tigers. C. The Green Line between Turkish Cyprus and Greek Cyprus. Intruders are shot or arrested there, and in the many years since the unrecognized Turkish secession, the area has become reforested; wildfires there are considered a public hazard. D. Abandoned military test ranges. E. Very old and decaying railroad lines in the United States, which, paradoxically, contain some of the last untouched prairie ecosystems in North America. F. Aging toxic waste dumps, whose poisons legally discourage humans but not animals. Involuntary Parks are very Viridian. They are not representatives of untouched nature, but of *vengeful* nature, of natural processes reasserting themselves in areas of political and technological collapse. An embarrassment during the 20th century, Involuntary Parks could become a somber necessity during the twenty-first. A world map of Involuntary Parks would be an interesting and perhaps enlightening addition to new maps of our newly uninsurable world. Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com)