22 - A Changing World
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NASA scientist James Hansen testifies about climate change to Congress in the summer of 1988.
The summer of 1988 would prove highly influential to the future of Jurassic Park.
Most of the staff on the islands was completely absorbed by the task of relocating a portion of the animals to Nublar, and making sure they acclimated themselves to their new enclosures - to the degree that this was even possible.
Construction also continued apace. At this point, most of Muldoon’s mandated enclosure system, with dry moats and ditches bordering electrified fences, was in place - certainly enough to host the initial wave of arrivals.
Inevitably, and in spite of the best efforts of the great talents involved, it was chaos. An overstretched and overworked skeleton crew who had been working virtually non-stop for years was being hastily redeployed to new, urgent tasks every few months.
“We’re one misstep away from a dire, costly mistake,” Muldoon wrote in his diary at the time. That’s certainly reflective of the atmosphere. No matter how awe-inspiring the abstract operation was, stress levels were starting to become unmanageable for InGen’s staff.
Time and again, Muldoon pressured Hammond into slowing down, and giving his employees a break. But Hammond sensed that a launch was not far - perhaps two or three years away. Anxious about his own age, he wanted to proceed at maximum speed.
Once the park launched, and the secrecy dropped, InGen could greatly expand its workforce, and the miracle-workers of Jurassic Park could enjoy a well-deserved rest. But until then, he expected his employees to go flat out.
The one part of the operation that enjoyed a bit of a lull that summer was Embryonics Administration. Left with a reduced population of animals on Sorna, mostly those not judged suitable for Jurassic Park, Weaver had to put further waves of cloning on hold for the time being.
Too much staff was being relocated all the time for the department to work at full capacity. No doubt egg fertilisation would soon begin apace - Wu’s staff already had plans for four further species to clone, and besides, Hammond wanted to get a head start on cloning the animals that would populate future parks.
But for a few blessed months, at least, Weaver and her fledgling staff could enjoy some downtime, and simply be with the animals - individual specimens with no major expectations placed on them for now, benched as they were.
It was a good time for Weaver to stop, think, and reflect on world events that weren’t immediately connected to Jurassic Park.
The summer of that year was, of course, taken by storm by the actions of NASA scientist James Hansen, who believed the time had come to take action. Thanks to a cleverly orchestrated campaign, built on past failures, he timed his congressional testimony to spectacularly coincide with a torrid heatwave. (1)
This time, unlike previous attempts, he got the attention of the press, who in turn began to stalk climatology conferences. At last, what scientists had been debating for years - the role of CO2 emissions in raising global temperatures, and the deadly threat this posed to human civilisation - was on every newspaper’s front page.
Weaver was no climatologist, but she eagerly sought more information on the subject, which instantly captured her imagination. Making use of InGen’s ferry system, she placed orders for specialised publications to read as much as she could into the subject.
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As her own writing from the time reported, she felt a weird and unexpected connection with Hansen and other climate-concerned figures from the scientific community. After all, Weaver worked on a daily basis with animals that came quite literally from a different world.
Or, rather more accurately, from many different worlds.
Over the 160 million years of their rule - a figure so large as to defy human imagination - dinosaurs had seen all sorts of climate and atmospheric transformations.
None were directly comparable with the speed of anthropogenic climate change, of course. They were of limited use in teaching about current transformations to the Earth’s climate. But in spirit, Weaver felt the connection was there. (2)
Together with a small circle of staffers who were increasingly becoming her clique, Weaver found herself philosophising about the nature of technological progress.
It seemed like such a contradiction to consider the devastating global impact of human carbon emissions, and the sheer wonder of the life InGen had reclaimed from extinction in Costa Rica.
More privately, and perhaps more darkly, Weaver considered the elements common to both phenomena.
Systemic perverse incentives clearly rewarded short-sightedness and greed. The disregard for the suffering of living beings went hand in hand with a myopic perception of future needs and even existential threats.
Avoiding the energy expenditure required by fundamental change seemed to be a priority over everything else, including safety from potentially apocalyptic consequences.
There can be no doubt that Weaver’s thinking made a quantum leap, in this phase. Her critique of InGen started to broaden, becoming a critique of the political, institutional, and financial environment that made InGen’s mistakes even possible.
Public opinion at the time held relative optimism about the ability of the world to come to terms with the threat of climate change. But Weaver, jaded by her years working on Jurassic Park, was far more pessimistic.
InGen, she concluded, was no anomaly, but an iteration of a much larger pattern. On Isla Sorna, just like in politics, Weaver felt that people with clear ideas and an agenda of change would perpetually run into the same obstacle.
This was, as she wrote in her private diary, the unsolvable opposition between “technically right” and “politically impossible”.
She didn’t share these reservations with her staff, no matter how close. At least, not yet. But it was clear to her that yes, InGen and the return of the dinosaurs would change the world - but so would other developments elsewhere that could no longer be ignored.
The present was quickly becoming unrecognisable, and ahead lay only uncertainty.
Down the line, Weaver’s musings about anthropogenic climate change would become a lot more significant. But for now, they were little more than a side interest to keep herself busy, while the rest of the staff completed the transfer of the animals to their new homes.
Footnotes:
(1) The story of how Hansen finally pierced the bubble, and got the politicians, the press, and the public to listen to him, is truly quite remarkable. I recommend giving it a read here.
(1) The reason why dinosaurs are less instructive is that their world was so different, not just from ours, but from what our world is liable to look like at the end of the century. The Miocene is a much better analogue.