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Go shoppingLike anyone else I have a few regrets in life. Really, I wish I’d tried harder at piano lessons when I was a kid. I also feel bad about being the man credited with making polar bears extinct. But then sometimes you have to be philosophical about things. I’ve had my successes too.
You have to remember that back then the world was a different place. The polar ice caps were melting, the sea levels were rising and low lying land and islands were at risk of being destroyed. No-one knew what to do. I even heard that the people of the Maldives had given up and started hunting around for somewhere else to live. They thought they were going to become the 21st century’s Atlantis.
[private]At the same time central Africa continued to experience droughts. Millions of people were suffering famine. There was more water sloshing around than the world had seen for millennia, but the people who needed it couldn’t get access to it.
It’s hard to believe, but back then people thought they could save the planet by recycling their rubbish. That was the best we’d come up with. For some reason it took a landscape gardener to think about things a bit differently. I suppose I had a bit of a head start on everyone else – except maybe all the other landscape gardeners.
I’d done a job installing an artificial lake in the grounds of a stately home owned by a rich banking family. They wanted a lake with a little island in the middle of it. We dug out the land, reinforced the bottom and filled it up with water. Hey presto. A lake. It took a bit more than that, to be honest, but that was the principle. Good old Mother Nature did her bit too. Rain keeps the water level topped up quite nicely. Or at least it does in England.
That was the basis of my idea. It seemed so simple. Too much water in the oceans: not enough in Africa. Why had no-one else thought of just digging a big hole and filling it up with all the excess water?
Apparently the answer was that it was a completely stupid idea. I was told this in no uncertain terms by the science correspondent of the broadsheet newspaper I wrote to with my suggestion about how to save the planet. It got me a bit of exposure but only as a crank. Scientists informed me (and the rest of the world) there was no way to transport the water to the desert, that the water would evaporate and that even if it worked it would have an unpredictable and potentially devastating effect on global weather systems.
These were good points. Being a landscape gardener I had little to offer in the form of a reasoned response. All I knew was that I’d built a lake with little more than a spade and a hose pipe. If it seems like it makes sense, I said, then maybe it does. You only need a map and an imagination to see that Africa and South America fit together like pieces of a jigsaw. It’s not much of a leap of logic to conclude that maybe they once did. The science community came up with a lot of reasons why that didn’t make sense either. They were wrong then too.
Things really took off when one of the big oil companies had an environmental disaster. It was a familiar story of a wrecked stretch of coastline, the victim of a slick of oil washed in by the tide. The company’s reputation was mud at a time when people were getting really excited about the environment. To get back a bit of credibility as a “good company” the oil firm offered prizes for the best ideas to save the planet. I won third prize. No one remembers who won gold and silver, or what their ideas were. That’s because their bright ideas didn’t work.
In actual fact my first bright idea didn’t work either. I said we just needed to move the water from the ocean to the desert. Some bright spark pointed out that the water would be salty. A saline lake would look pretty but famine-hit Africa needed fresh water.
That was probably why I only won third prize. It was still a good prize though. In all they gave me £200,000 (which was a lot of money back then), some shares in the company and the opportunity to work with people who could help make it happen. Actual scientists. Not that they were much help.
My real inspiration came from a bartender in Goa. My wife and I spent some of our prize money on a lavish holiday at a luxury hotel there. I was in the bar drinking a gin and tonic and I got talking to the bartender. He said that back in colonial times they couldn’t make the ice cubes for drinks in India. They didn’t have the technology. No-one did. What they did was amazing. They literally cut off a chunk of polar ice up in Canada or somewhere like that, put it on a boat and sailed it half way around the world to the tropics. The chunk of ice in the hold was so big it didn’t melt. Or at least most of it didn’t melt. That was the start of refrigeration apparently. You could store fresh goods on the ships carrying the ice and they would stay fresh for much longer.
It made me think. If the polar ice caps are melting, why not just move them before they melt?
“The polar bears need the sea ice to hunt for seals,” snapped my wife. I think she was getting pretty fed up with the whole venture by this time.
“We could chip big chunks of ice off the poles, get it on tankers and ship it over to Africa.”
“The Sahara desert is landlocked,” she said.
The science community made the same point. There was only so far you could get the ships. But it looked like it might be possible to get smaller vessels down some of the river arteries like the Nile and the Niger and so I didn’t give up hope. In actual fact the Chinese had already solved the problem for me. A few years earlier they’d found metal deposits in the desert and begun mining, but they needed a sophisticated rail and shipping network to get the commodities out. This meant two things. Firstly it provided a means to get the ice into the desert. Secondly, once we got it there, there were gigantic quarries to fill up. We didn’t even need to dig a hole.
Against my wife’s wishes I spent some of the prize money on buying the land around the Chinese quarries. I bought an area the size of France for the same money it would take to buy a nice sports car. I bought a nice sports car too to calm her down.
A few things then happened which, and this is no understatement, changed the course of human history. They also sealed the fate of the poor old polar bear too.
There was another huge environmental disaster. This time it was in the Arctic. Some deep water drilling went wrong and gallons of oil spewed out of a hole in the ground and no-one could do anything about it. We all watched on helpless as a vast area of natural habitat was destroyed. Never again would the world be able to stomach that sort of environmental damage. Deep sea oil exploration was over. The value of shares in oil plummeted. For some reason I took a chance, I bought a ton of shares because I had faith that the value would bounce back. I was wrong. The hydrogen revolution was about to begin.
The Chinese were the first to pioneer the technology successfully. Before long they had fleets of functioning motor vehicles working on pretty much fresh air. Some of the early prototypes had a habit of exploding, but after that not too much went wrong. I guess people these days think it’s weird that we used to power cars with the remains of sea creatures that had liquefied in pools underground. I suppose it was weird, really. Anyway, that did for the value of my shares and, more to the point, for the oil companies.
After some insolvencies and restructurings I found myself as the majority shareholder in a subsidiary that had been cast adrift from the rest of the organisation. It was a so-called “not-for-profit company” which no-one wanted. All it employed were scientists and all it did was indulge me, a landscape gardener, in my bid to create a lake in the middle of the Sahara.
We hired a few of the engineers from the bust oil company to help us out. They had years of experience of pipelines, drilling and shipping of oil. As it happened they were just the people who could help us take water (or ice) from A to B. But it would take years before the infrastructure was in place to make it happen.
In the mean time we carried on transporting the first loads of polar ice by train across Africa. It’s hard to get across what an amazing journey that was. Liberia at that time wasn’t the package holiday destination it is today. It was a war-torn failed state headed up by a dictator more famous for blood diamonds and bloodshed than anything else. Then we turned up in Monrovia with a boat full of ice! The Liberians couldn’t get over the fact that what looked like a huge ice cube had just arrived in their port. This was a poor country – and a hot one. Not many people had much first-hand experience of frozen water. Crowds gathered to watch the shivering stevedores unload the cargo and get it onto the Chinese trains in big chunks. Then on we went through tropical jungle, into gold territory and then onwards into the vast Sahara to the Chinese mines.
As you know, the water level in Lake Sahara is now regulated by a highly sophisticated mechanism put in place by the old oil engineers. Back then, we had to make it up as we went along. For a few days after the first of the ice had been unloaded we just waited for it to melt. Every so often someone would grab a rock and throw it down the deep, dark mine shaft. You can imagine the celebration when we heard the first splash. It meant the ice had melted and the water had stayed put, just like it did in the banker’s garden back in England many years before.
We managed to fill three mine shafts before we started to run out of money. The project looked like it was about to run its course. I spent the last of the company’s funds buying even more land around the old mine sites. We bought an area the size of Western Europe to add to the land I already owned personally. Then an amazing thing happened. It rained.
Meteorologists said it was impossible. I told you scientists get it wrong. It didn’t rain for long but it actually topped up the water levels and, incredibly, flooded two adjacent shafts so that a lake was formed between them. That was the start of Lake Sahara. It wasn’t long before speculators and real estate agents came out to have a look at the oasis in the desert. Shares in my company shot up overnight as the world at large finally started to share my dream. I signed deals for hotels and airports to be built and watched in awe as civilisation came to the wilderness and we grew rich. For a while we forgot why we’d set up the whole project in the first place. We were trying to lower the water levels in the oceans.
In that respect someone else had stolen a march on us. An American consortium had been trying to pioneer similar large scale environmental solutions. They took a lot of our ideas and concepts and applied them in a different way. They went out to one of the small islands in Indonesia where a volcano had come back from the dead after having been extinct for hundreds of years. They shipped in some polar ice and had a team of helicopters haul what looked like an iceberg into the air and then drop it right into the middle of the volcano. It gave off a hell of a lot of steam. But they kept on going and eventually all that was left was a stable pool of water at the top of a mountain. They had tamed nature by cauterising the hole, or so they thought. Three days later there was a massive eruption at another volcano on a neighbouring island. All they’d done was push the problem elsewhere.
So we were careful. Slowly but surely we transported the polar ice and slowly but surely sea levels stabilised. The low lying areas of the world were saved from what had long been seen as an inevitable flood. The water we took from the poles saturated a huge area of previously inhospitable land and created a paradise; a clean slate where only best-practice agriculture and eco-tourism were allowed to go on. Lake Sahara is a wonderful place and I’m the man responsible, a mere landscape gardener.
It’s just such a shame about the polar bears.[/private]
Ruben Connell is a fiction writer with a sideline in corporate finance. His time is generally spent behind desks or on trains between London and his current base in Yorkshire where he grew up. A first novel is due for completion some day soon.
