Department of Environmental Consistency

The Department of Environmental Consistency is the Tower body charged with the authorization of Environmental Stasis Fields, the declaration of Environmental Contingencies, and the oversight of the Environmental Control Ordinances. It occupies floors 214 through 219 of the western spiral, together with a detached records annex on floor 217-A that is reached, by standing arrangement, through the wrong door. The Department answers to no Concordance directly, a position it has occupied since the Concordance of Provisional Authority was allowed to lapse and was never formally replaced.

It is the only body in the Tower empowered to declare that conditions on a floor are no longer to be described as weather. That distinction, though it appears technical, underlies nearly every dispute in which the Department has ever been named.

Mandate

The Department's statutory authority is stated in three places, none of which agrees with the others. The Ordinance of Environmental Control confers on it "primary and unshared jurisdiction over the state of the air, its contents, its movements, and its description." The Concordance of Provisional Authority, in an annex drafted after the Ordinance, instead names the Department as "first among equals" in environmental matters, without ever naming the equals. The Third Concordance is silent on the Department except to note, in a marginal hand, that it is "presumed to continue."

In practice the Department exercises its authority through the monitoring and adaptation procedures set out for Environmental Inversion, through the standing arrangements recorded under Environmental Monitoring, and through its custodianship of the Register of Declared Conditions, a bound volume in which every environmental declaration made in the Tower is entered in order of declaration rather than in order of floor. Clerks consult it by date. Visitors are advised to consult it by date.

Environmental Contingency and the Winter of 226

An Environmental Contingency may be declared only by the Department, and only on the sworn testimony of two monitoring clerks whose readings differ by more than four degrees of drift. The procedure exists because of the winter of 226, when the eastern spiral reported a sustained frost across floors 300 to 306 while the western spiral reported nothing at all. The Department declared no Contingency, on the grounds that the discrepancy was within tolerance, and the frost was consequently classified as a local condition of no general interest. Three hundred and eleven residents of floor 302 subsequently petitioned for reclassification. The petition was granted in 231; the frost itself had not been asked.

"A condition does not become general by being widely felt. It becomes general by being declared. The Department regrets any inconvenience arising from the order of these two events."

— Ordinance of Environmental Control, Annex 9, clause 2

Since 231 every Contingency declaration has carried a marginal note confirming that the Department has considered the alternative. The note is not required to state what the alternative was.

Dustfall and the Composition Question

The Department has furnished the Tower with its only authoritative account of the composition of Dustfall particulates, published as Schedule 14: Particulate Composition and amended eleven times without the schedule number changing. The most recent amendment records the particulates as "chiefly mineral, partly fibrous, and in no part attributable to any floor above 400." This last clause was added on the instruction of the Panel of Harmonization and has been disputed by the Office of Acoustic Consistency, which maintains that certain Dustfall deposits carry a resonance more readily explained from above than below.

The Department has declined to reopen the question. Its position, recorded in a memorandum of 264 and repeated verbatim in every subsequent reply, is that the composition of a substance is a matter for the Department, whereas the sound of it is a matter for the Office, and that a substance which sounds like something else remains, compositionally, itself.

The Stasis Field Authorizations

Environmental Stasis Fields are authorized floor by floor, and the Department keeps the only seal that may be affixed to an authorization without a countersignature. The seal, known as the Second Cutting, was cut in 198 after the first was mislaid during an audit of the western spiral. The first has never been recovered. The Department has declined to search for it, noting that a seal found under uncertain circumstances cannot be relied upon to close anything.

Stasis authorizations are granted for a fixed term and lapse automatically. Holders of a lapsed authorization who continue to maintain a field are liable to a fine of nine marks and a formal notation in the Register. In the whole of the Department's history the fine has been levied four times and the notation entered on every occasion.

Relations with Other Bodies

The Department works alongside the Environmental Stewards of the Annex in matters concerning the outer fabric of the building, and has delegated to them the physical inspection of shafts recorded under Ventilation Amp Environmental Shafts. It shares with the Department of Ambiance Amp Inclemency a long and undignified boundary dispute over floors 240 to 246, where the two bodies have each claimed authority to describe the light. The dispute was referred to the Panel of Harmonization in 259 and remains before it. Both Departments continue to describe the light.

Relations with the Department of Cataloguing Consistency are cordial but precise. The Department files its declarations under the Cataloguing Protocol like any other body, and has twice been reminded by that Department that a declaration is not a description and must not be cross-anchored. The reminder is displayed in the Department's reading room.

Records and Access

The Department's records are open to any Librarian of the fourth grade or above, on presentation of a floor number. The number need not correspond to the floor on which the request is made. Requests are received at the annex door on floor 217-A, which is not marked, and which the Department has declined to mark on the grounds that a door found without difficulty is not necessarily the correct door.

The Register of Declared Conditions is kept under continuous supervision and may not be photographed, traced, or copied by hand. It may be read. Readers who wish to consult an entry must know its date, as the Department has found that knowing what one is looking for tends to produce findings.