Читать книгу Green Earth - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 18

California is a place apart.

Gold chasers went west until the ocean stopped them, and there in that remote and beautiful land, separated from the rest of the world by desert and mountain, prairie and ocean, they saw there could be no more moving on. They would have to stop and make a life there.

Civil society, post–Civil War. A motley of argonauts, infused with Manifest Destiny and gold fever, also with Emerson and Thoreau, Lincoln and Twain, their own John Muir. They said to each other, Here at the end of the road it had better be different, or else world history has all come to naught.

So they did many things, good and bad. In the end it turned out the same as everywhere else, maybe a little bit more so.

But among the good things, encouraged by Lincoln, was the founding of a public university. Berkeley in 1867, the farm at Davis in 1905, the other campuses after that; in the 1960s new ones sprang up like flowers in a field. The University of California. A power in this world.

An oceanographic institute near La Jolla wanted one of the new campuses of the sixties to be located nearby. Next door was a U.S. Marine Corps rifle training facility. The oceanographers asked the Marines for the land, and the Marines said yes. Donated land, just like Washington, D.C., but in this case a eucalyptus grove on a sea cliff, high over the Pacific.

The University of California, San Diego.

By then California had become a crossroads, San Francisco the great city, Hollywood the dream machine. UCSD was the lucky child of all that, Athena leaping out of the tall forehead of the state. Prominent scientists came from everywhere to start it, caught by the siren song of a new start on a Mediterranean edge to the world.

They founded a school and helped to invent a technology: biotech, Athena’s gift to humankind. University as teacher and doctor too, owned by the people, no profit skimmed off. A public project in an ever-more-privatized world, tough and determined, benign in intent, but very intent. What does it mean to give?