Noah's Children

Huck Fairman

Description

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.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 26 janvier 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781450024556
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Noah’s Children
One Man’s Response to the Environmental Crises A Novel
Huck Fairman

Copyright © 2010 by Huck Fairman.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2010900520
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-4500-2454-9

Softcover
978-1-4500-2453-2

eBook
978-1-4500-2455-6
 
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 sear