Synopsis
Book by Jacobs Jane
Extrait
From Chapter One: Damn, Another Ecologist
"Hortense and Ben have broken up," said Armbruster, waving a fax at Kate as she slid into the booth, balancing her cup of coffee.
"I'm sorry but not surprised," said Kate. "Remember how Ben used to gloat over industrial disasters? He thought everything industrial or technological was unnatural and that everything unnatural was bad."
"He meant well," Armbruster said. "We need Jeremiahs, but it must have been depressing for Hortense to live with one. It seems the breakup happened some time ago and she's gotten over it. She's interested in a new man. Mind if I finish this fax? I only got it as I was leaving the house."
In late morning they were sitting in an almost-empty coffee shop on lower Fifth Avenue, not far from Armbruster's Gramercy Square apartment. It was an unappealing restaurant in a stretch of New York rapidly going upscale. Armbruster liked it as his morning hangout because its well-deserved unpopularity guaranteed seats for acquaintances dropping by. He lived alone, and since his retirement from a small book publishing company, he missed his work and its daily give-and-take with colleagues.
"Damn, Hortense has found another ecologist," Armbruster grumbled as he continued reading the fax.
"That's not surprising, either," said Kate. "She's an environmental lawyer, so those are the people she talks to, consorts with. Those and other lawyers."
"But listen to this: His name is Hiram Murray IV. The Fourth! What an affectation."
"He's not to blame if his family ran out of names."
"You drop off the numbers when they die. I dropped off my Junior when my father died. Only kings and popes hang on to numbers."
"Maybe the other three are still alive—you don't know."
"Let's see," Armbruster mused aloud. "Number two would be his grandfather, and number one—" His eyes widened, exaggerating his customary owlish expression. "Good heavens, Hortense is fifty. You don't suppose—"
"No, I don't think Hortense is running around with a kid. Read on."
"Well, well, she's planning to come back from California," Armbruster read on. "He has a house in Hoboken. What's an ecologist doing in Hoboken? She says I'll like him and she's bringing him over a week from Thursday unless she hears otherwise, and so on."
"May I come too?" Kate asked. "It'll be wonderful to see Hortense again. And remember, Armbruster, I'm a fringe ecologist myself."
When Kate was denied tenure a few years previously in the biology department of the Long Island university where she taught and did neurobiological research, she found a job on a prospering science newsweekly, partly on the strength of her editing experience on Systems of Survival, a dialogue she and Armbruster had put together from conversations and reports by a little group Armbruster had got up to explore the different moral systems appropriate to different kinds of workers—such as police, legislators, clergy, and others holding positions of public trust, on the one hand, and manufacturers, bankers, merchants, and others in commercial pursuits, on the other. Hortense, who was Armbruster's niece, had been one of the group. During her first several months in her unfamiliar work on the weekly, Kate had frequently asked Armbruster for help and advice with her editing. After she no longer needed his guidance, she continued to drop in on him from time to time out of friendship.
A week from the following Thursday, at Armbruster's small apartment—crowded with books and signed photographs of authors on walls and tabletops—Hortense and Kate greeted each other affectionately and Hortense introduced Hiram. At tedious faculty meetings, Kate had learned to pass the time by imagining childhood versions of her colleagues' faces. Now, in Hiram, she saw a well-brought-up, thin-faced, eager boy grown into a good tweed suit and a receding hairline, his eagerness still intact.
As Hortense sat down on the sofa, Hiram remained standing, distractedly patting his jacket pockets. Kate glanced around the room in puzzlement. "Did you lose something, or mislay it?" she asked him.
"No, why—oh." He dropped his hands and smiled sheepishly. "I quit smoking five weeks and four days ago, and I still keep hunting for a cigarette." Hortense, Armbruster, and Kate, reformed smokers all, smiled sympathetically and Hortense patted his hand as he sat down beside her.
Knowing that Armbruster would be itching to deal with Hiram's dynastic pretensions, as soon as they were settled with drinks Kate remarked offhandedly to Hiram, "That Four after your name is unusual. Not unheard-of, of course, but unusual."
Hiram made room between a book and a photograph on an end table and set down his drink. "My father's a splendid old man, but he insists on being Three, so I have to be Four. He's an economist and he would've liked me to be an economist, too, but after a try I dropped it for environmental studies. Most people I knew—this was thirty years ago—thought that it was like majoring in canoeing or bird-watching, but Pop took what I was doing seriously. I just mention this to show how minor his crotchet about the numbers is. 'Live and let live' runs both ways. But I did draw a line. My own son is named Joel."
"What do you do as an ecologist?" asked Armbruster. "Rally people around to save the woods and punish polluters?" Hortense and Kate exchanged glances, as if to acknowledge Armbruster's implicit, not very kindly, reference to Ben.
"No, although saving forests and reducing pollution are important. I'm a fund-raiser and facilitator. Specifically, I give organizational advice and help find grants for people— scientists—most of whom are trying to develop products and production methods learned from nature. Biomimicry, that approach is called. There's a book about it by that name. I'll get you a copy if you're interested. Two copies," he added, turning to Kate.
"Oh, I have it. I reviewed it," said Kate. "It's a good book, Armbruster. Broadly speaking, the aims are to make better materials than we manufacture now, but to make them at life-friendly temperatures and without toxic ingredients, like the filaments spiders make or the shell material abalones construct, for instance. Ideally, by imitating the chemistry of nature, we should be able to make materials and products by methods that are benign and, at the end of their lives as products, return them to earth or sea to degrade benignly."
"So many other possibilities are being explored," said Hortense. "Think of the energy, soil, artificial fertilizer, and chemicals such as weed killers that could be saved if grain fields didn't require annual plowing or planting—if wheat or rye could grow like perennial grasses in prairies. All green plants capture sunlight, but it's a puzzle and wonder how duckweed captures sunlight so effectively and uses it so efficiently. That's worth learning from. You get the idea, Armbruster?"
"Interesting," Armbruster replied, "but it sounds like just another way for us to exploit nature—trying to get out of technological messes with more technological messes."
Kate suppressed a snicker at Armbruster's mischievous adoption of Ben's persona and glanced at Hortense to catch her reaction. Hortense, who usually remained cool and elegant under provocation, uncharacteristically bristled. "No! This isn't exploiting nature! It's learning from nature, with the object of undoing damage and getting along with nature more harmoniously. Biomimics are the last people deserving thoughtless dismissal, Armbruster. You have no idea how difficult these puzzles are, how hard and complicated it is to learn the way prairies manage to replenish themselves year after year. What's gotten into you? You didn't use to be so negative and glib. You sound like Ben!"
"Just curious. You've put me in my place. But if these endeavors are so difficult, they may not be practical."
When neither Hortense nor Kate replied, Hiram spoke up again, rubbing his forehead thoughtfully. "Biomimicry is a form of economic development. So caring about biomimicry requires caring about economic development—hoping it continues vigorously. Otherwise, we can't hope for better products and safer methods. How else can we get them? Thinking about development has made me realize how similar economies and ecosystems are. That's to say, principles at work in the two are identical. I don't expect you to believe this just because I say so, but I'm convinced that universal natural principles limit what we can do economically and how we can do it. Trying to evade overriding principles of development is economically futile. But those principles are solid foundations for economies. My personal biomimicry project is to learn economics from nature."
"Bravo!" said Armbruster, sensing a book in the making. His eyes shifted to the tape recorder on a shelf.
"Uh-uh, Armbruster," said Hortense. "No symposium; no reports. Not again. Can't we have a conversation without that recorder? Can't we just talk? Can't you forget about trying to produce a book? There are so many other interesting things you could do, now that you have time." Kate caught Hortense's eye and, waggling her eyebrows, signaled to Hortense to pipe down.
"Producing a book never crossed my mind," Armbruster lied. "But it did cross my mind that I'd like a tape. Economic development interests me, too. What harm?"
"I don't mind if Kate and Hortense don't," said Hiram. He finished the last of his drink and set down his glass, with a questioning s...
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