Afterword for "Planet Of The Sealies"
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As promised, this week I'm posting another afterword for the next story in "Long Eyes," but be warned! This one is especially, tantalizingly full of spoilers!
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Like a lot of my stories, "Planet of the Sealies" began with the setting. First I had a place. Then I added people and problems.
This bleak future was the offspring of a very simple chore combined with yard work. We live on a good-sized lot with mature mulberry trees, which I trim myself, partly to save the money, partly because I enjoy the exercise and working with my hands, and mostly because — at least in California — the most prevalent philosophy toward mulberry care is to cut them back every fall. I mean all the way back.
Personally I think this is a scam invented by pruners in order to generate more work for themselves. Yes, mulberries are fast-growing trees, but I see mulberries that have never been trimmed, and they look like trees. That's nice. Alas, the original owners of our home bought into this scam. For decades, they had their trees shaved year after year. By the time we moved in, the mulberries were barely more than thick, six-foot stumps. Of course they grew in a bushy mess! No one ever allowed them to shape into trees, and there was nothing left on top but scar tissue.
Over ten years, I've encouraged the trees to become trees again and reach for the sky, but it's involved some careful work, sort of like banzai training, except with the judicious application of a chainsaw. Occasionally I've had to clear out large parts of their branches in order to make room for the larger upward growths.
Then I hauled truckloads of biomass to the dump.
The dump was a fascinating place. It was miles wide, like a strange, endless prairie where the bulldozers roam and seldom was heard a living sound except the scavenger birds. Maybe more interesting, there are no prairies on the California coastline. We live near the eastern, inland shores of the San Francisco Bay Area, where the waterline is surrounded by dry, rolling hills, gullies, and watersheds.
So where did this prairie come from? I started to do some research. Back in the 1950s, when the region really began to boom after World War II, guess where the city and state governments realized would be the easiest, cheapest places to use as landfills?
The low spots.
See, what you do is find a good hill where you can bring trucks and throw the garbage down the hill. Keep doing this until the low spot fills in. Bulldoze it to pack it down. Keep filling. Then move on to the next low spot.
And those watersheds that happen to be downstream of the gullies you've just filled? Heck, those birds, fish, frogs, raccoons, and squirrels won't care! Oh, wait, the watersheds flow into the ocean next. And the toxins that leak into the Bay will swirl around and end up on the beach where the people go with their children…
The blind stupidity of the situation bothered me. Yes, a technological civilization will generate refuse. Understood. You can't recycle or burn it all. But you don't shit where you eat, especially not when that old saying can be meant literally.
The dumps aren't only full of inert junk like plastic. They also become the home of everything we throw into our household garbage — cadmium, copper, nano silver, mercury — and the feces of our babies and our elderly. Yes, there's a small, growing movement toward cloth diapers, which have their own problems with increased electrical and water use, not to mention adding to water treatment demands, but do you realize how many disposable diapers a child goes through from birth to two- or three-years-old? Have one. You'll find yourself up to your elbows in poo on an hourly basis, my friend.
All those diapers, thousands of them each year, combined with millions of batteries and old appliances and light bulbs… that kind of mess wasn't something I could leave alone. So I sent Joanna Löw and her clone sisters underground to investigate.
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