Naomi Nesbitt struggles to establish herself as both a woman and a journalist, as she is pushed to cover a wide variety of stories for Manhattan Wildelife. These range from the mysterious discovery of foxes in Central Park, to the poisoning of a Chinese dissident painter at a Midtown gallery, to four successive murders in central Manhattan.
A Brand-New Way to Think
I couldn’t bring myself to do more than peek at Wen’s journal throughout the next week. Its pages invited a prayerful state of mind requiring at least a full morning free from ongoing deadline pressures. What I did see confirmed what Pearl had said—it was filled with thoughtful notes about politics, society, and art, but it wasn’t centered in Wen’s personal life. Nor did it contain, from what I could tell, any mention of his encounters with “the goddess who reaches out.”
On the other hand, early on Friday morning while still in my apartment, I took out Pearl’s paper with the two URLs and went onto YouTube to look at Wen’s installations in the Hutin Gallery. For “Games in Time”, I was greeted with a three-minute segment resembling a series of collages, much like those at Wen’s opening. But they were even more like film montages projected onto the gallery walls, with figures moving in gentle and affirming ways. Tang Dynasty lady game players were seated around a table playing Double Sixes, ancient scholars studied their books, and ducks in a cluster studied each other. All this over the faint voices of children laughing. It resembled a birthday celebration with images of party favors and confetti flavoring the background.
Gradually the light darkened, and bit by bit the heads and faces of China’s current crop of political leaders replaced the heads on the male scholars where Xi Jinping resided, the women game players, and the ducks. At first this was cute and even charming. But soon the party decorations exploded into stylized red hammers and sickles. Everyone’s heads began to spin, and the soundtrack switched to Leslie Gore singing, “It’s My party and I’ll Cry if I Want to”. I got the joke. It was about the Chinese Communist Party, and Xi Jinping in particular, demanding control of everything for himself, or else.
As the heads began to spin faster and faster the background brightened, and the music faded into the sounds of water lapping and the woosh of wind. The wind quieted, and a landscape described by Chinese brushstrokes emerged evoking the mountains of Sichuan Province and Tibet. Suddenly all the faces stopped spinning and turned into smiling Dalai Lamas. You got the sense of a lost spiritual presence on the one hand, and a possible future for China based on the best from its past, on the other hand.
I remembered that along with the Uyghurs and Hong Kong with the dark shadows it cast on Taiwan, Tibet had become one of Wen’s primary causes after he moved to the United States. He was one among many who called Beijing’s oppression in China’s Himalayan territories “cultural genocide.”
Then I recalled something Pearl told me about Wen’s attitude toward Xi Jinping just before the conversation turned to the spiritual: “Wen felt betrayed by China’s head of state. For a while he admired Xi, a man who loved the Chinese poet Tu Fu, and whose own sister died under the merciless reign of the Red Guards. He almost saw Xi as a brother. But when my husband watched him turn more and more authoritarian, Wen became angry. He called Xi a Legalist, which he viewed as fascist, and as the years passed, he became ever more outraged by Xi’s edicts.”
*
The second YouTube video, “Recreation”, which Elsa Toov told me was a stand-in for re-creation, had all four walls filled with people enjoying themselves at picnics, or on the beach, or leaning over a bridge and looking at fish. It was like gazing at a Disneyesque mural for a travel agency, except the figures moved in small, repetitive gestures.
Soon the words “Climatic Destabilization” floated across the landscape and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain blared out in eerie affirmation. Next the words “Control the Earth Before It Controls You” appeared—Frank Pace’s very slogan. The words flickered for only a second or two before hands began turning knobs in the clouds while blood red and pale yellow mixed in with the sky’s luminous blue and white. As the sky darkened further, a series of unpleasant scraping sounds erased Mussorgsky’s music. In the last ten seconds, all the people froze into skeletal versions of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”.
It wasn’t until after a conversation with Alan Johnson that I understood the full intended message—how interjecting sulfur into the atmosphere could change the earth into a tableau suggesting a futuristic version of “The Scream”, where grimacing faces confronted the loss of our natural order against a tainted sky.
Munch’s original title was “The Scream of Nature”. He wrote, “The sun was setting, and the clouds turned blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became ‘The Scream’.”
Elsa Toov told me that many scholars had pointed to Krakatoa’s eruption in interpreting Munch’s comments, since volcanic ash had cooled the planet and corrupted the colors of the sky. Others believed the source behind this impression was the presence of a nearby insane asylum. I could easily picture both scenarios inspiring Munch’s painting. But while reflecting on the power of Wen’s creation, Munch’s motives became footnotes. What mattered most was you were brought into a world where all of nature was screaming, and you had to scream along with her. Given the egregious impacts of our all-too-likely politicized future, you knew nature was screaming for her very soul.
*
On Monday, May 13, I took my first cab ride with Alan Johnson. Once again, I felt privileged. Here he was, the second-in-command at our magazine, sitting right next to me on our way to hear Frank Pace.
Johnson was and still is something of a jock. He played fullback at Baylor College in Texas before getting his graduate degrees at the University of Colorado. Black, husky, and handsome, he’s not only a titanic figure in shaping the direction of Manhattan Wildelife, he also has an ongoing relationship with the Earth Institute at Columbia University. And he recently published a book—Our Planet, Our Species, Our Cities—to excellent reviews.
Shortly after we left Manhattan Wildelife, he turned to me and delivered a mini lecture on Frank Pace’s upcoming talk.
“Frank’s approach is all about control and what control requires. When you apply this mindset to our relationship with the earth and all its flora and fauna, you get a linear equation applied to a non-linear problem. For the first time in the history of our planet, a single species critically impacts the entire ecosystem. Intentionally or not, we have already re-engineered the earth. And now we’re trying to re-engineer it again. As we do this, we have two fundamental options: one is to shamelessly celebrate our dominance at yet greater cost to the natural order; the other asks us to rediscover and revitalize that order and ourselves along with it. I hope you can join me in the latter category, and I trust you will soon agree Mr. Pace falls into the former.”
I didn’t say a word, as no word was needed. Instead, I merely nodded and looked out the window at the swirling chaos of New York traffic. A few minutes later we reached our destination, an elegant building which was once a hotel on lower Madison Avenue. The room for the keynote was cavernous. There must have been close to five hundred people in the audience, most of them men dressed in jeans and sports jackets. No one wore a suit, and only a handful wore ties, which surprised me given what I’d seen at Pearl Communications.
“They’ve turned the sixth floor here into a miniaturized version of a Vegas auditorium. But the Vegas halls are twenty times as big. Alternative energy had its own annual industry convention, and I flew out there, pre-COVID, until almost all the meetings became digital. The people here are a mix—technologists, politicians, businessmen, right-wing journalists, and just a few people like you and me who were invited for the appearance of balance. In other words, this is not an honest forum for debate. That’s why I plan to leave after Frank’s speech. He’s my only real interest. I can all too readily surmise the rest just by looking at the program.”
We were sitting at long tables spread across the hall to support notebooks and computers. It was something like a classroom on steroids.
“Who is he?” I pointed to a young face belonging to figure who didn’t seem to fit in with the rest. And yet he was sitting right beside Frank Pace, wearing a long-sleeved black shirt. The trimmed brown stubble around his chin left him looking unshaven, nevertheless he was well-proportioned and roughly handsome.
“His name is Ricky Pace. He’s Frank’s son. Frank finally took him in after his mother committed suicide.”
“Are you saying Frank’s wife took her own life?” I asked with a flicker of horror.
“She was never his wife. Frank had a brief affair with Carmen Morales, who overdosed on sleeping pills when Ricky was still just a boy. She worked as a waitress in a Latino restaurant in San Diego. Of course, Frank doesn’t like to talk about that. Instead, he brags about how Ricky went to Colgate and majored in English. Ricky got straight A’s, according to his father.”
I tried to ally this with what Arthur Strickland said about Ricky working at the Beautiful Cigar Shop, and how it might be good for him because of his “troubled life.” But watching him sit with a dark demeanor minutes before his father was about to speak, he seemed less like a son than a shadow waiting to emerge into a world of its own.
“Does Ricky do anything now besides work at his father’s cigar store?”
“So you know he’s something of a hired hand?” Alan looked surprised.
“Arthur Strickland, the gallery owner, told me.”
“True enough. But Ricky’s real passion is writing screenplays. Or screenplay ideas. I don’t think he’s finished any of them yet. Although he puts their summaries online. I was curious one day, so I peeked. Oddly enough, he created a world of vegetable beings who struck back at the human population for what we were doing to the planet. A contrarian parody of Frank’s vision of sulfur-driven geoengineering.”
All I could imagine were Disneyesque cartoons. “Were they comedies?”
“Not from what I read. There were strong elements of violence in all of them. Or at least violence was implied. I’d say fantasy-action is the more appropriate genre.”
*
Soon Frank Pace left his seat, the room darkened, and the stage exploded with a series of flashing blue and yellow lights. The speakers blared a jazzed-up version of the Neon Trees’ “Love in the 21st Century”. After about thirty seconds, the words “A BRAND-NEW WAY TO THINK” surfaced on the screen behind the stage, and Pace strode out to take the microphone with a swagger—this time wearing a gray plaid sports jacket, black jeans, and sneakers.
“Many of us are engineers in both our dreams and our lives. We explore. We solve problems. We invent. We are the makers. And we’re reshaping the world.”
Pace moved stroboscopically like he was on steroids. The crowd ate it up, applauding him at every possible moment while he strutted across the spotlight. Frank seemed to be immune from all the negative speculation about the Central Park murders. If anything, recent media attention only enhanced the allure of his presence on stage with the gathered audience.
Alan began to take notes avidly.
“Let’s look at the history of mankind—and womankind—” the audience laughed, “in technology!” The screen behind Pace showed an eighteenth-century quill pen, a typewriter from the late eighteen hundreds, a telephone from the early twentieth century, and a mobile computing device from the twenty-first.
“The speed at which technology is moving today is dwarfing all our progress from the past. Thanks to the cloud, new applications can be created at lightning speed. Thanks to mobility and the internet, entire populations are shopping, communicating, and living as they never were before. Thanks to advances in quantum computing and AI, we are privileged to enjoy an age of data and information dramatically exceeding anything from just a few decades ago. Any and all comparisons quickly become unreal.
“In parallel, the economic benefits have been enormous. We saw an eighteen-fold increase in the GDP between 1989 and 2019, and a doubling in individual productivity, thanks in large part to technology’s advances. Yet despite the recent pandemic, in fact partly because of it, I believe the next ten years will be the most innovative ever. And I’m not alone. That’s what some of our leading industry analysts also predict with more advances in AI and information sharing. We’re about to rise on the winds of a technology tornado unparalleled in history. So let’s make the most of it. Let’s open our arms and minds and begin to fly! All we need is a brand-new way to think!”
The room resounded with applause. A few people even stood up.
“Right-wing politicos,” Alan muttered under his breath. And with this group assembled, I began to suspect that the notion of heroes in high tech creating a more progressive world had become an illusion. Money seemed to be the number one driver. Money and control—much as in Frank Pace’s IoT motto ‘Discover, analyze, and optimize.’
“Now let’s talk about the earth. Mother Earth.” More laughter. “We all want to care for our mothers, but as one thinker explained, ‘Only when we get sufficiently rich can we afford the relative luxury of caring about the environment.’ Or as a recent president of the United States put it, ‘Americans did not fight and win the wars of the twentieth century to make the world safe for green vegetables.’”
“Not so recent,” Alan whispered in my ear. “It was George Bush, Senior. Although Richard Darman, one of his staff, came up with ‘safe for green vegetables.’ The ‘sufficiently rich’ quote is from Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish climate skeptic.”
Pace marched his way forward: “These statements may sound misguided to some of you, but I believe we can do both at once. We can care for Mother Earth while enjoying the natural forces of the marketplace and our accelerating windows of productivity. But we can only do this if we take control!” The room applauded. “And we can only do this if we don’t fall into the traps set out by some climatologists in their science of denial. Denial of progress. Denial of innovation. Denial of the free market and the values of competition.
“So how are we going to do it? How are going to counter what is grimly projected by some as a 7 degree rise in global temperatures by the end of our century? The answer, my friends, is solar geoengineering. As early as 1998, Wood and Teller—that’s Edward Teller, the physicist who helped us win the Second World War—promoted spraying aerosol into the atmosphere as a ‘simple and cheap counter to global warming.’ A fleet of jets could do the job, and we’d be able to enjoy our options for industrialized growth without stagnating limitations.
“Building on their wisdom and mine, the best answer to climatic destabilization is to lace our atmosphere with sulfur. Better even than brightening marine clouds or thinning cirrus clouds. Or building giant parasols. Or using balloons to disperse tiny reflecting particles in the atmosphere. All these options are mostly placeholders, but aerosol injections can scale sufficiently to turn the tide. As far back as 2006, Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen put a spotlight on the need to cool the climate by spreading sunlight-reflecting sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere. There’s no law against doing what we propose. All anyone should ask for is our plan’s credibility, which is here and waiting.”
*
The rest of the presentation went on to detail Pace’s approach leveraging his “IoT advances,” including a temperature-aware cloud-monitoring system. I tried to connect the dots between Wen Tengfei’s digital installation and what I was hearing on stage, but the interplay between the two soon became so disturbing I couldn’t wait to get out into the open air.
After the applause and the inevitable Q&A with largely sycophantic questions from the audience, Alan and I left rather hurriedly. As we walked toward the carpeted front entrance, Alan turned to me with an expression of disgust.
“Not all geoengineering is bad. Carbon geoengineering, or removing carbon from the atmosphere, can help address the root cause of climate change. And marine cloud brightening using materials like sea salt may have minimal side effects. But Frank Pace’s sulfur-based approach is an expression of both denial and megalomania. Almost all serious climate scientists reject it, and for good reason. The textures of our skies could well be lost to a perpetual whiteout, while our nights might become filtered and grim, while aerosols won’t do anything to prevent the absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans with rising levels of acidity and the widespread destruction of coral reefs. These are just a few of the knowns. There are quite a few unknowns. And once we begin infusing sulfur into our atmosphere, chances are we won’t be able to back out. The effects are likely very temporary, and to start and then stop might pull a trigger tripling the acceleration global warming. We could well be hooked for all eternity on the ill effects of sulfur, while our atmosphere and our oceans would continue to degrade.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“It was the wrong venue, the wrong crowd. I wasn’t in the mood to get shouted down.” Alan spoke with utter certainty. “The right venue is Manhattan Wildelife. I’ll write the review later this afternoon.”
