DAMS, PART III

For us, it is a dam of tears. We don’t have water to drink, nor rice to eat. And we can’t eat tear drops.

Paw Lert, a villager displaced by the Bhumipol dam who helped launch the Thai anti-dam movement, and who because of that was murdered by an unknown gunman.¹⁶²

I ALREADY KNEW THAT. I IMAGINE YOU DID TOO. I DIDN’T NEED TO LEARN yet again that the system serves the economically and politically powerful and will only rarely—and then incidentally—do what is right for the natural world, including rivers (including humans). I just wanted to know whether taking out dams helped or harmed rivers.

I need to be clear on the logic. From the perspective of a river the main difference between legal and illegal dam removal is that the former has the possibility of being done in stages (I guess another difference is that the former happens so damn infrequently, but so, unfortunately, does the latter). I think we can all presume the police would not stand by while we cut successive grooves in the Glen Canyon Dam (although as mentioned previously the selective law enforcement officers have certainly stood by, winking, while illegal dams have been constructed). Here is the real question I’m trying to get at: From the perspective of a river, is a catastrophic dam failure better than no failure at all?

More clarity on logic. The system is destructive. It is possible that the system is destructive and it is coincidentally more harmful to rivers for dams to fail than stand. It is also possible that the system is destructive and it is coincidentally more harmful to rivers for dams to stand than fail. The latter variable—the relative destructiveness of dam removal—is independent of the former constant—the culture’s destructiveness.

That’s why reading Dam Removal was useless to me.

I scurried to the library, and also spent many hours scouring the internet, and I found almost no research on the effects of catastrophic dam failures on fish and wildlife habitat below. I later learned from fisheries biologists that my inability to find studies came not because I’m a lousy researcher, but because the studies don’t exist. “Every dam has a catastrophic failure review,” one said, “but that’s about humans. What happens to fish takes a back seat to how many bridges go out, and how many humans die.” He’s right. There are a lot of studies (many of them by our friends at FEMA) on the downstream effects of catastrophic dam failure on bridges and other pieces of infrastructure (of course, because the property of those higher on the hierarchy is always worth more than the lives of those below) revealing, no big surprise, that when a dam fails, towns below get flooded. But I found nothing detailing the effects on rivers. This is one of the most inexcusable, absurd, obscene lacks I have ever discovered. There are two million dams in this country, 75,000 of them over six feet tall. Every one of these dams will someday fail, yet before constructing these two million dams, nobody bothered to find out what would happen to the rivers when the inevitable happened.

What makes this even more inexcusable, absurd, obscene—evil—is that we can say the same thing about deforestation, the murder of the oceans, the manufacture of CFCs, the fabrication of plastics, the burning of oil, in fact all of civilization. Nobody bothered to find out what effects these would have on the natural world. The reason is clear: those who make the decisions don’t care.

If the entire culture is predicated on an unexamined self-assumed right to exploit everyone and everything around you, why should you bother to think about the effects of your actions on others? Does a rapist care about the devastation he leaves in his wake? How about a child abuser? How about a CEO? How about Ken Lay? How about those who served him, who helped steal from “Grandma Millie”? This culture systematically inculcates us not to care about the damage the system causes—indeed, not to notice the damage at all. So why should we expect dam builders and dam defenders to care about fish? We shouldn’t. It’s not only a horrible mistake for us to believe they do, but it’s a trap we fall into all too willingly, because it allows us to try to convince them, which means it allows us to play by the rules they set up, which means it allows us to pretend we are doing something while really we are doing what most of us do most of the time: protecting the abusers and maintaining an abusive social dynamic.

They do not care. If they did they would do something about removing the dams.

I care.

I called some fisheries biologists I’d heard care deeply about salmon. Mostly they worked for tribes whose lives have always depended on the fish, although some worked for the Park Service or Fish and Wildlife. I asked them all the same question: “If someone were to blow up a dam, what effect would that have on the river below?”

They all had the same response. They refused to answer. In retrospect I don’t blame them. They probably thought I was either a fed provocateur or a terrorist (non-governmental variety), and a stupid one at that. Had I a Middle Eastern accent somebody probably would have called the feds merely because I asked the question, and I would have won an all-expenses paid one-way trip to beautiful Guantanamo. As it was, I was fortunate enough to merely receive a lack of answers.

I had sensed, however, that the people I talked to really did care about the fish, and really did want to answer, if only I would phrase my question better, so that a) it let them know I really wasn’t as stupid and careless as this question, coming out of the blue, must have made me seem; b) it didn’t scare them; and c) it gave them deniability so that if the Iron Gate suddenly did collapse, allowing that stretch of the Klamath to again run free—and if I were caught and didn’t hold my mud—they wouldn’t receive a series of visits from Uncle John Ashcroft and his black-sunglasses boys demanding to know why they’d encouraged some lunatic to blow up a dam, then promising them a dog-run right next to mine at Guantanamo-by-the-sea.

Here’s the question as I eventually asked it: “I’m wondering if you can be very explicit about the damage caused to rivers by catastrophic dam failure, whether that failure is anthropogenic or natural. What are both short-term and long-term effects? How will the river be one day afterward, one year, one decade, fifty years, one hundred years? Are there gold-standard studies that have been done on this? To be clear: I want to know what precisely is the damage done by catastrophic dam failure.

“That leads to a thought experiment. One of the great things about being a writer is that I get to pursue all sorts of thought experiments to their endpoints (I guess we all get to do this, but it’s what I get to do all the time). For part of one book I delved as deeply as I could into the cultural and economic causes of slavery. For part of another book I asked how the processes of schooling destroy our creativity, and what would a schooling that nurtured creativity look and feel like. In yet another I explored the history and future of surveillance.

“One of the things I’m doing in my current book is playing out short- to mid-term future scenarios and trying to explore what would be the right actions to take in those circumstances.

“So, here’s the thought experiment: Pretend it’s 2015 and the oil economy has collapsed. This brought down with it the electrical infrastructure. I’m putting forward this possible scenario because a) world oil production has probably peaked (or will peak very soon, as will natural gas production), so it’s not unfeasible; and more to the point, b) I want to talk about community decision-making processes. In this scenario, the Corps of Engineers is no longer relevant. Nor is the U.S. government. Decisions affecting local rivers are made by those who live on these rivers (what a concept!). Under this scenario, dams are no longer useful for electricity or irrigation (for obvious reasons). Now, your community is going to decide whether to take out dams along this river. Because it is a communal decision, all humans along the banks of the river will be warned, so there will be no loss of human life. The people in your community ask you to speak for the fish and the other creatures of the river, for the river itself. The question for you is: Would it be in the interest of the salmon, lampreys, trout, and other river-based creatures (and the river itself) to remove the dam, even if it is done catastrophically, or would it be better to leave the dam standing, and to eventually let it fail on its own? Why in either case? Other stakeholders will discuss other perspectives on this, but community members really want to hear your interpretation, your understanding, of the river’s perspective.

“The next question is: Would your answer be different for big dams rather than little ones?

“The next question: Would your answer be different if there were threatened nonanadromous populations in the river?” [Anadromous fishes are those who spend all or part of their adult life in saltwater and return to freshwater streams and rivers to spawn.]

“If the choice is to remove the dam, when would be best?

“The reason I’m doing this thought experiment is that just like in any good experiment (I knew my degree in physics would be good for something) I’m trying to reduce the variables and examine one question at a time. The one question here has to do with the relationship between dams and rivers. Given what seems very clear about the transitory nature of the oil economy, these questions of what communities want to do about the rivers that are their lifeblood will soon no longer be theoretical, and I would like to have some of these questions begin to percolate into public discourse, to be discussed as deeply, intelligently, and passionately as we can, so that as things become increasingly chaotic, people and communities have some analyses that may help them to make decisions in the best interests of their landbases.”

It’s an odd and overwhelming indictment of the self-censorship that characterizes this culture’s discourse that I had to create this several-paragraph hypothetical frame simply to ask the first and in many ways only question that everyone who has ever been associated in any way with any dam anywhere in the world should ask at every moment, which is, “When this dam comes down, how will that affect the river?”

But creating this huge and in some ways ludicrous frame did get me answers. Did it ever!

The advocates for fish with whom I spoke were bursting to talk about the rivers they love, and how dams were killing the rivers. The words flowed in a rush, as though my mere rephrasing of the question to make it safe had allowed a dam to burst inside of them.

They in turn gave me that same gift, as the understanding I gained from these conversations burst cognitive and emotional dams inside me, destroyed old ways of seeing the world and made new ones. The conversations transformed me, made me stronger, more determined.

Maybe they will do the same for you.

Rivers live for millions of years. If we were able to see rivers as they are, we would know that they are in no way static, that instead they writhe like snakes. They abandon old channels, cut new ones, refind old ones again.

These rivers who live for millions of years—these rivers who dance, sway, move to rhythms we might be able to hear in our dreams or if we listen in the dreams of the soil and the rocks and the salmon and the snails and caddisflies—are not only the water between their banks. A river is its entire valley, and the entire valley is the river.

Insects live in aquifers, and fish swim through gravel, ten, twenty, thirty feet below the “bottom” of the river. Coho swim in tiny ponds far from the river, and when you come back you are certain they have been eaten by raccoons, but you come back again the next day and there they are. Where were they? Swimming among the cobbles.

Rock, water, salmon, bear, eagle, insect, aquifer. These all live together. They are all part of the river. And they are all in constant flux.

Sometimes the flux is violent. One fisheries biologist told me, “Many people are upset when a river shifts channels during floods and leaves one dry and tears through another. They notice that fish are stranded (but become available for animals). They do not however typically think about the mice and salamanders and insects who are drowned or crushed. Plants are ripped out and washed to the ocean. I think about all of the flora and fauna, feel for all of them, but I’ve evolved into acceptance of the devastation (change) that occurs in rivers during floods (the river I work with and love is a really dynamic river). Many people want to stop rivers from migrating but migration forms new productive habitats!

“Based on this experience, I’ve developed a philosophy that in some instances it’s better to remove a problem, accept the immediate impact to creatures, do what’s possible and necessary to mitigate that impact, and open up the habitat to the organisms (human and nonhuman people) who belong there. I especially think of anadromous fish, as their nutrient input to upland environments is critical to supporting huge numbers of other animals and plants. I always apologize to everyone who will be impacted. In other cases, passive restoration (of landslides or mass wasting hillslopes and channels) is more appropriate—letting trees grow back for hundreds of years without interference.”

Dams happen naturally. Landslides, lava flows, glaciers cover rivers. That happens. The problem is not that there is a dam on this or that river. The problem is that there are two million dams on almost every river and almost every stream.

And dams break naturally. It happens all the time. Witness the Missoula Floods, all forty of them. “Seventy thousand years ago,” another person said to me, “a volcanic dam filled the entire Shasta Valley. But the water eventually wore through. And because of that the river is very productive. Six thousand years ago, Mount Mazama blew up and buried Upper Klamath Lake and the Williamson River in ten feet of volcanic ash. Because of that the river is very productive. When you think about it in geologic terms, that’s how things happen. Streams and rivers get dammed, and then the water breaks through. That’s what rivers do. Habitat is destroyed, and then habitat is created. Floods aren’t really all that damaging to rivers, anyway. And that’s what any catastrophic dam failure would be: a big flood. If you want to know what will happen when a dam blows, your best bet is to look at natural cataclysms that are on par with what you’re talking about. Mount St. Helens closely mimics, although far exceeds, what would happen with a dam flood.”

Another said, “If you take out a dam, yes, that’s a major catastrophe, but you’ve got fish in the ocean who will come back in one, two, three, four years. And you’ve got fish who will reinhabit from other streams. If you don’t take out a dam, the salmon will not make it. If you do, the salmon will, so long as there is still a living ocean.”

And yet another, “Long term effects of dam removal: none. If the dams are going to come down eventually anyway, the river will eventually recover. That’s what happens. Then the salmon reinhabit. That’s what they did on the Columbia after the Missoula Flood. That’s what they’ll do here. About 2 percent of salmon don’t go back to their original river, but find new places to spawn.”

Yet another, “People don’t understand that if you provide animals with high enough quality habitat, they can live there. If you destroy their habitat, they will die. And forests and rivers are dying. Below dams there is a tremendous starvation for sediment,¹⁶³ and above dams a tremendous starvation of nutrients from the oceans. Salmon, sturgeon, rivers, and so on have survived millions of years of volcanoes, glaciers, and so on, but they have barely survived one hundred years of this culture. They will not survive another hundred. Probably not another fifty. Maybe not another twenty. The dams need to go.”

I asked them to speak for the fish and the other creatures of the river, to speak for the rivers themselves. I asked, “Would it be in the interest of the salmon, lampreys, trout, and other river-based creatures (and the river itself) to remove dams, even if done catastrophically, or would it be better to leave dams standing, to let them eventually fail on their own?”

They said, “Remove them,” and “Yes, take them down,” and “Yes, they need to come down now,” and “Yes,” and “Yes,” and “Yes.” They said, “If there’s no way to take out the dam gradually, then yes, just get it done and over with. The short-term damage to the fishery would be worth the long-term gains, absolutely.” They said, “Catastrophic dam removal can destroy short-term habitat and create long-term habitat.” They said, “From the perspective of a river the only case I can think of where you might not remove a dam would be if there is a small population of a rare species found nowhere else, then a dam failure could cause its final extinction. That might be the case with the Missouri River and the pallid sturgeon. But what is killing that sturgeon? Dams. So I think even then it’s not so much a question of not removing dams as it is just being more careful about when and how you do it.” And the people said, “Yes,” and “Yes,” and “Yes.” They said, “What we need to do is so very clear. People who oppose dam removal are shortsighted. They absolutely cannot see the long view.” And they said, “Those who oppose dam removal are small-minded people who haven’t thought about what and who these creatures are, and what these obstructions mean.” They said, “Those who oppose dam removal have no faith in the natural world. They have no faith in its resilience and will to live. They think that more management is necessary because humans—always humans—know what is best for rivers, who somehow won’t survive without our meddling. That’s nonsense. We need to set rivers free and then trust that rivers know how to take care of themselves.”

Here is what a Yurok Indian man said in a recent editorial about removing dams on the Klamath River.

“When we speak out on issues concerning life on the Klamath River, we speak with conviction for all people and creatures living in or near the lands the Creator gave to us to cherish and protect forever. This is our sacred mission and the purpose given to us. This purpose is enshrined in our Tribal Constitution. We are speaking now.

“We call upon PacifiCorp and ScottishPower’s shareholders to take a bold, historic step forward in the preservation of a great species on a great river, the Klamath River, and remove the dams. We believe that they are poised to do so and we call upon all of our friends on the North Coast of California to support them. Very few times in one’s life is there an opportunity to realize something truly great. I believe such a time is now. Together, the Yurok people and all the people who love and cherish this earth can help renew the strength and vitality of the salmon of this river.

“The existence of dams, these weapons of mass destruction, harms the life cycles of our salmon brothers. That’s right, I say ‘salmon brothers.’ It is our belief that before there were any people, we were all kindred spirits. Spirits became birds, mammals, reptiles or fish. No creatures are more or less important than the spirits who became people. Thus, we believe all creatures are related as brothers and come from the same Creator. It is hard for me to lift a fish out of the water that has been trapped in my net and not hear him call out to me for help. And with so few salmon in the river these days, it is always with great respect that he will be food for my family and my people. I thank him and the Creator for the sacrifice of his life so that we can eat.

“Lately, the heavy burden I feel as I lift up my nets is not the weight of the fish, but of the heavy sadness that so few of my salmon brothers return these days. Our people have noted the steady decline in the numbers of salmon returning each year. In the early 1900s, prior to the first dams being built, this once great river yielded hundreds of thousands of salmon and steelhead. More than a million came back to the river each year in their migration to their ancient spawning grounds upriver. Now, the return of salmon is measured in the tens of thousands. The salmon harvests on the river are so restricted we cannot meet the basic subsistence and commercial needs of our people. All North Coast sports and commercial fisheries have suffered along with us.

“Maybe I will quit catching fish for my family, I think, but this will not solve the problem. The threats to my salmon brothers must be removed. The water quality and streambed access for spawning salmon must be restored. The Yurok Tribe will protect our salmon brothers and we call upon all who love the earth and the river to join us, especially PacifiCorp and ScottishPower.

“Removal of these dams would be a historic step to restoring Klamath River fish populations. This is literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that can save our salmon. Let’s not allow this moment to pass and be lost along with the salmon forever.”¹⁶⁴

Rivers, Indians, salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, bears, eagles, and so many others have suffered so much because of civilization. If far distant corporations that control dams on the Klamath and that profit from the murder of the river do not do the right thing and bring down the dams, perhaps it is time for those of us among the civilized who have awakened, who care, to begin to pay our debt for these crimes, to begin to make things right.

I talked to someone who knows explosives. He’s a friend of a friend, vouched for by the person who introduced us. Had we actually been going to do something, I would of course have required far more proof before I would have trusted him. But all we were going to do is talk—it seems that’s all any of us ever do anyway—so this was good enough. We met at a baseball game. I’d like to say that had we been going to do more than talk we would have met somewhere more private, but it was at Olympic Stadium to watch the Montreal Expos, which I figured is about as lonely and private as you can get.

I thanked him for his offer to help me understand explosives, and asked him where he got his expertise.

He said, “Oh, it’s my pleasure to help in any way I can. I’ve thought about this a lot, and there are two very important reasons I want to do this. First, it’s crucial we take down civilization. If we’re to save anything at all, we need to give everything we can to this struggle. I feel so much rage and despair, even moreso because of the things I know my skills could enable me to do. But I’m also trapped, because to act would put my family in jeopardy. I would have to leave them, and I’m not sure they would be able to make it. So day after day I sit here and the rage and despair burns and burns and feels as though it’s eating up my soul. But I take some comfort in the sure and certain knowledge that soon, the sooner the better, the time will come to give this system the push that will topple it and free us all to begin to once again live as we should have all along.”

I said, “You know, don’t you, that we’re going to win.”

He nodded, then continued, “The second reason I want to help—and I know this might sound strange—is that the way I learned all this stuff also caused me to do many things that still eat at my soul, so if I am now able to put these skills to good use then I might feel a little less bad about that.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“In 1981 I joined the Army National Guard in an artillery unit that was also capable of firing tactical nuclear weapons. While I had nothing to do with that, I had to have a security clearance just to be in the unit. After graduating in 1982 and running out of money and basically being homeless, I joined the marines because they were the only ones that could take me immediately. I was an infantryman. Since I already had a security clearance they stuck me in an experimental unit. We spent the first ten months training, and when all was said and done we were supposed to be 80 percent special forces qualified. My formal explosives training consisted of a three-week course taught by the army at Fort Bragg . . .”

“Three weeks? That doesn’t seem very long.”

“Oh, it’s plenty long. To give you some perspective, that’s longer than it took them to teach us sky and scuba diving together.”

“What else did they teach you?”

“Besides sky and scuba diving there was mountain, desert, arctic, jungle, and temperate survival and warfare; rappelling; mountain climbing; sniper; booby traps; heavy weapons; guerilla tactics; intelligence gathering; counterintelligence operations; perimeter, interior and external security (including how to install and defeat animal, electronic, and mechanical security devices); long-range patrolling; reconnaissance; evasion and escape (this included things like hotwiring vehicles, breaking and entering, and so on); improvised weapons and explosive devices; battlefield first-aid, and finally the standard infantry tactical stuff.

“I have to say that while I have really conflicted feelings about the training I received and while I’m deeply disturbed, almost haunted, by the things I’ve done, I’m also glad I was taught these things that will ultimately help stop this madness that we live in.”

“What did you do?”

“We were first deployed to Africa for almost a year: Angola, the Congo, and elsewhere. Our job was to teach counterinsurgency tactics. We were then deployed to Asia—Thailand and Cambodia—for a year, where we did the same thing. These were all places that had active wars going on, and although we were technically only advisors we still found far too many chances to use what we had learned. After I got out I read several books on more technical aspects they didn’t touch in the Corps.”

We all have skills, I thought, and no matter where we learned them, we need to use them in the service of our landbase. This man clearly has important skills to use.

When I first read the editorial by the Yurok man, there was one sentence that bothered me. It was, “We call upon PacifiCorp and ScottishPower’s shareholders to take a bold, historic step forward in the preservation of a great species on a great river, the Klamath River, and remove the dams.” To “call upon” the corporations sounded too much like the same old begging to me. And by now we all know that begging abusers isn’t effective. Back to Bancroft, with just a few nouns changed: “You cannot get corporations and those who run them to change by begging or pleading. The only corporate (and political) decision makers who change are the ones who become willing to accept the consequences of their actions.”¹⁶⁵ Because the entire system is set up to protect exploiters from these consequences, it becomes incumbent upon us to force consequences onto them. Again: “You cannot, I am sorry to say, get a corporate or political decision maker to work on himself by pleading, soothing, gently leading, getting friends to persuade him, or using any other nonconfrontational method. I have watched millions of protesters and activists attempt such an approach without success. The way you can help him change is to demand that he do so, and settle for nothing less.”¹⁶⁶ And one more time: “The most important element in creating a context for change in one who is killing the planet is placing him in a situation where he has no other choice. Otherwise, it is highly unlikely that he will ever change his behavior.”¹⁶⁷ Also, given the way corporations and governments lie and delay, and given that so often scientists study to death all possible negative effects of any action that might actually help the natural world before allowing it to move forward while applying a distinct lack of rigor to actions that do great harm (witness the lack of studies on the effects of (inevitable) dam failure on rivers, the lack of prior studies on nukes, on burning oil, on pesticides, and so on, ad fucking nauseum), I’m reasonably certain that a best-case scenario would see an absolute minimum of fifteen or twenty years passing before the dams actually come down. Look how long it’s taking for the Elwha. And I don’t think the Klamath salmon have fifteen or twenty years to spare.

But I realized that the Yurok man’s statement is not necessarily begging. There is nothing wrong with explicitly calling for some action, even if to act in the way you are calling for would be out of an abuser’s character. You might just get what you want. But what differentiates effective action from codependence are the actions one takes when the abuser fails to relent.

If, in this case, the corporations and governments which provide the muscle for them do not relent, or if they begin to take longer than the salmon have, what do we do then? At that point, where do our loyalties manifest in action? Are we more loyal to the laws and the corporations for which they are made, or to the fish? Are we more loyal to processes designed to maintain abusive power structures, or to the river? If it comes down to this—and you know that in so many cases, in so many places, it already has—which do you choose?

The man said, “Onto the specifics. Buildings have points throughout them under relatively greater stress from gravity and other forces. This basic fact is well enough known and understood that when people design structures they take that into account and beef up stressed areas. Dams have two main points of stress that I’m aware of. The first is the farthermost point of the crescent, and the other is any place between sluice gates. These spots will be made stronger by making walls thicker or by reinforcing them with steel. Builders only reinforce as much as is necessary, and these places are jointed to normal sections of wall. Those joints are the places you want to attack, unless you have an infinite supply of explosives, in which case you always hit the points of greatest stress. The biggest thing here is that you have to know the details of the material used in construction, and if the builders used multiple types of material, you have to assume they used the strongest one throughout. This is all pretty basic stuff: demolition experts both within and without the U.S. military use this sort of analysis all the time.”

I couldn’t believe we were talking about this at a baseball game. The Expos were beating the Marlins 3-1, by the way.

He said, “To summarize, if someone were going to take out a dam that person would need: 1) Blueprints, or someone with enough related skills to be able to convey the same information: I’ve done enough of this that at this point for most dams I wouldn’t need blueprints but could probably find the stress points by looking: the key is to train yourself to see, and to see things whole; 2) Knowledge of materials used in construction; 3) Knowledge of special terrain considerations such as being in an earthquake or hurricane zone that would cause the structure to be reinforced. All of this would tell you: 4) how much of what sort of explosive agent you need to accomplish your goal. Once you have this the next step is: 5) a plan, how to gain entry, who does what, when, and where, and what sort of detonator you’ll use. Don’t overlook this one: if the dam generates electricity it may interfere with an electric timer or a remote control device.”

“Does it scare you to talk about this?” I asked. Not that it scared me. Not at all. Not in the slightest. I swear. And no, my voice didn’t shake. Oh, okay, maybe the tiniest bit. All right, damn it, I was pretty fucking scared. But excited too.

He said, “This information isn’t illegal. Like I said, this is Demolition 101, taught to tens of thousands of people at taxpayer expense in the military. If it’s illegal for me to talk about it, why wasn’t it illegal for them to teach me?”

“Because we’re talking about using it in the service of people and the planet, not so the rich can accumulate more power. Because we’re not talking about using it to hurt poor people all over the world.”

“Damn,” he said. “You’re right. In that case it’s probably illegal.”

Silence.

Finally he said, “Great game, huh?”

“Yeah.” It was 3-2 now.

He said, “You know, it just occurred to me: the military trains a lot of people in demolition, and a lot of these people understand how destructive civilization is.”

I looked at him out of the corners of my eyes.

He had a dreamy look on his face. He shook it off and said, “Once you’ve got your plan, and once you make sure you’ve taken into account every possible accident and screw up, then you’re ready for step six, which is that you need to practice doing not only your job but at least two others over and over until you and everyone else on your team is able to do it asleep. You don’t want to fuck up. You want to do it right.”

“Shit,” I said. “I’m scared.”

“Of course you are,” he said. “It’s scary stuff.”