California SciFi author takes Gulf oil spill to space

I came across an interesting press release from Canada’s Engage Books today, announcing the publication of Planet Janitor by California author Chris Stevenson (I think this is his Website here).

Planet Janitor explores the idea of what it would take to clean up an environmental disaster in space. Here is an excerpt from the press release:

What if an experienced crew of trained professionals were on-hand to plug the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and clean up the ocean? In his new science fiction book , “Planet Janitor: Custodian of the Stars ,” author Chris Stevenson poses the pertinent question of how we will solve environmental disasters in the future. How would we handle an oil spill in space that threatens to enter our atmosphere?

Stevenson says that we have other environmental problems that are just too big for current technology to handle. According to NASA, there are 19,000 objects larger than four inches in Earth’s orbit, just waiting to hit a satellite or spacecraft. In fact, the National Academy of Sciences calculated that the International Space Station has a one in five chance of being hit by rogue debris within a ten-year period.

Clearly, this is a timely topic that hits home in the wake of the Gulf oil spill, which may have generated more direct government economic intervention (in terms of replacing jobs lost to the disaster) than the $700 billion financial stimulus bill. Although tens of thousands of businesses were affected by the oil spill, more than 8,000 vessels were employed in managing the disaster and nearly 50,000 workers were directly employed on cleanup/management projects.

These jobs were temporary and they don’t make up for the income 10s of thousands of people have lost due to the disaster, but Stevenson’s book considers the possibility of an elite industry of environmental cleanup specialists who take on all sorts of bizarre environmental jobs.

We do have environmental experts and cleanup teams around the world today, but we don’t actually have a commercial industry built around the need for massive environmental cleanup. Not yet, anyway.

In July, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell announced the creation of the Marine Well Containment Company, a joint-venture that BP has now announced it will also join. The new company will maintain systems, equipment, ships, and full-time crews ready to spring into action for large-scale environmental clean up in the Gulf of Mexico.

How long do you think it will be before that combination of expertise and resources will be called upon to help in other parts of the world? It’s not every day you get to see an entirely new industry spawned. And even though environmental clean up has been around for a long time, the staggering scale on which it was conducted this year is without precedent. The Marine Well Containment Company is a pre-emptive measure, a risk management strategy, that is no doubt intended to minimize the impact of future oil well disasters in the Gulf of Mexico. Hopefully, they’ll develop the technology and resources to help cap deep-water wells that get out of control quickly.

The BP Gulf oil spill disaster showed us that science fiction isn’t always so far off from reality. That is what makes science fiction so resonant for many of us — it literally “could be” but for a handful of factors. There have been environmental disaster movies (even a TV show) in the past. There have been other books speculating about what might happen if the Earth were devastated by an asteroid or a space-borne plague. But we really haven’t explored the potential of creating an industrial base devoted to managing the environment in the wake of a disaster.

And now, just as someone comes out with a book that sort of looks at that topic, we find that the future is here already.