73
levels of consumption which, in turn, can be separated out, bio-computed, into all
the same adulterants as if those tourists had lived there. In the case of Giethoorn,
hundreds of thousands of those tourists come from China, at great carbon cost.
While Mont Saint-Michel’s 50 or so residents recently endured a decade of controversy as 52 French environmental directives were debated with respect to maintaining the religious epicenter’s maritime character in the face of 2.5 million pilgrims
each year.
16
Such discordant voyeurism in the name of pleasure, aesthetics, human curiosity
surely combats all those qualities embraced by landscape architect and environmental historian Randolph T. Hester in his groundbreaking work on “applied ecology
and direct democracy”.
17
16 See “Mont Saint-Michel’s Lost Causeway Stirs Local Passions,” re-printed from Le Monde in
The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/15/france-conservation, Accessed
February 2, 2019.
17 See Hester’s Design for Ecological Democracy, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
2006, p.5.
Fig. 8.3 Free-grazing bovines in the central Netherlands. (Photo © M.C. Tobias)
8.2 Ecosystem-Scaled Paradox
levels of consumption which, in turn, can be separated out, bio-computed, into all
the same adulterants as if those tourists had lived there. In the case of Giethoorn,
hundreds of thousands of those tourists come from China, at great carbon cost.
While Mont Saint-Michel’s 50 or so residents recently endured a decade of controversy as 52 French environmental directives were debated with respect to maintaining the religious epicenter’s maritime character in the face of 2.5 million pilgrims
each year.
16
Such discordant voyeurism in the name of pleasure, aesthetics, human curiosity
surely combats all those qualities embraced by landscape architect and environmental historian Randolph T. Hester in his groundbreaking work on “applied ecology
and direct democracy”.
17
16 See “Mont Saint-Michel’s Lost Causeway Stirs Local Passions,” re-printed from Le Monde in
The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/15/france-conservation, Accessed
February 2, 2019.
17 See Hester’s Design for Ecological Democracy, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
2006, p.5.
Fig. 8.3 Free-grazing bovines in the central Netherlands. (Photo © M.C. Tobias)
8.2 Ecosystem-Scaled Paradox