The E Utopia Project by Kudakwashe Muzira Read Free Book Online Page A

mountains.
    “Look how beautiful it is,” Sam
Cruz told Sopoaga and his eight companions. “Will you let mankind’s greed
destroy such a beautiful thing?”
    Sopoaga shook his head. “No,
I won’t. I will do whatever it takes to save the world.”
    “I will do whatever it takes
to save the world,” Captain First Grade Sopoaga echoed the words six years
later as he swam in zero gravity in his ship, leading his fleet to the jump zone.
He loved Sam Cruz’s plan. Cruz had given him the opportunity to punish the polluters
who had blighted the Pacific Islands with carbon emissions. Now Sopoaga’s
homeland, Tuvalu, had been swallowed by the sea and its ten thousand people had
been evacuated to Fiji. Soon, the rising seas would follow them to Fiji. Although
he knew that the oxygen harvesting had accelerated the sea rise that had
swallowed his homeland, Sopoaga felt no remorse. The milk runs had only
accelerated the inevitable. He had recruited many Tuvaluans into the E Utopian
movement and they were going to survive in the new world that the E Utopian
pioneers were creating. This was far better than the total genocide that
Tuvaluans faced at the hands of the world’s polluters.
    Commander Nuate was also
going down the memory lane. She hailed from the Ogoni tribe of Nigeria’s Niger
Delta, one of the world’s most oil-polluted places. Each year, oil companies
and oil pirates spilled a quarter of a million of barrels into the Niger delta,
contaminating land, water and air with carcinogenic hydrocarbons. Oil companies
recovered hardly any of the oil that their old pipes spilled into the world’s
third largest delta. The people of the Niger Delta lost an important source of
protein when fish populations were decimated by the toxic waste that oil
companies dumped into the Niger River. The pollution also affected the growth
of crops causing widespread malnutrition among Niger Deltans. Natural gas that
comes out when the companies drilled for oil was burnt in a process called
flaring, polluting the air to such an extent that rain began to fall as acid
rain. People could not safely drink ground water because it was contaminated
with chemicals and they could not safely drink rain water because it was
acidic. The government looked the other way although the pollution was causing
illness among the people and destroying the region’s diverse wetland ecosystem.
Government officials were only interested in extracting bribes from oil
companies.
    Nuate’s grandmother told her
of a time when her people lived peacefully—cultivating their crops, rearing
their livestock, fishing in the Niger River and breathing clean air—before the
government allowed oil companies to come to the Niger Delta. Many people were
chased off their land and those who were fortunate enough to remain on their
land were exposed to constant pollution.
    Nuate and many youths from
her area protested against the oil extraction but the government and most
Nigerians accused them of trying to halt the country’s economic progress. Even
some indigenous people from the delta, who had found employment in the companies,
accused the protesters of trying to foment chaos.
    Frustrated, Nuate and her
comrades decided to take up arms and sabotage the oil companies. An operative
of the IGM supplied them with arms. The Nigerian Army was called in after the
saboteurs attacked two offshore oil rigs.
    Some of Nuate’s comrades were
captured by the army and confessed, giving the authorities the names of the
ecoterrorists who were still at large. A warrant of arrest for Nuate was issued
and she would have been arrested had the IGM not whisked her and four of her
friends out of Nigeria.
    Hironori Yamaha, the ship’s engineer,
came from Japan’s Sendai that was home to Japan’s Sendai Nuclear Plant. He had
always been opposed to Japan’s nuclear energy program. He couldn’t understand
why a country that had suffered the heaviest nuclear catastrophe in history
risked the natural