76
of congestions, like its literary alter ego, the region of Arcadia in southwestern
Greece, which, from 370 BC had its capital in Megalopolis. The city’s theater sat
20,000 people. Today, the town’s population is under 6000 and it has essentially
been usurped by modernity. The A7 freeway completed in 2002 goes from Kalamata
to Athens, bypassing the ancient relic of Greek pastoralism.
More’s Utopia had to be an island, or a mountaintop, or inaccessible jungle, polar
outpost, or bastion of sand dunes. Because human geography in the early sixteenth
century was correlated strictly with a global cartography more unknown than
known. Most mainlands had been reached; even their “dark” interiors scoped out.
Only the most wild and dangerous distances yet to be crossed might be appropriated
in the imagination as some surrogate for the Garden(s) of Eden. In spite of his contradictory island/urban Utopia, More envisioned an implacable rule of law, a strange
but mostly human state of governance, not that More himself had much reason to
place his faith in any political system, given that he was martyred to one.
But in the United States it is a very short fuse indeed from the illusion of ecological freedom to a continuing history that encompasses all that oppression, genocide,
and a blatant record of environmental schizophrenia. Seconds before any picture
postcard might emerge, American sectors—energy, transportation, protected species, and habitats—implode, igniting a legacy of Superfund sites, CITES violations,
roadkill, pollution-related morbidity statistics, and outright warfare between locals
and wildlife. Her carbon footprint, per capita consumption of other animals, and
contribution to the global commons of plastics and chemical pollutants are
unprecedented.
Historic antidotes, like the formation of the National Park Service, can be viewed
in light of discriminating altruisms that have never swayed from the aggressive
exploitation of local, regional, and global natural capital, and all those deafening
matters of human encroachment and skewed distribution of assets—principally
echoed in the injustice to all those who were here long before the white supremacist
conquerors—that have literally obfuscated the American wildlands, even if the
purer aesthetic imagination is able to transcend such brutalities of modern life.
8.5 What Do We Know? What Do We Actually Perceive?
The ecological paradox that underlies all such destruction in the name of progress,
profit, and protein irrationality, correlates with a fallacy prophetically described by
the French economic thinker Frédéric Bastiat in an 1850 essay entitled “Ce qu’on
voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas,” referring to “that which we see and that which we don’t
see.” Break a window and the cost will be passed along to the economy at large in
the form of an expenditure, and somebody’s profit. Profits and losses are assumed,
under the many laws of averages, to ultimately reach a state of equilibrium, the
larger the economy. Even when a nation or corporation runs a deficit, needing to
borrow money, that state of affairs can be characterized as healthy, according to the
“broken-window fallacy.” Or as one economist has written, “Economic theory
8 Paradoxical Frontiers
of congestions, like its literary alter ego, the region of Arcadia in southwestern
Greece, which, from 370 BC had its capital in Megalopolis. The city’s theater sat
20,000 people. Today, the town’s population is under 6000 and it has essentially
been usurped by modernity. The A7 freeway completed in 2002 goes from Kalamata
to Athens, bypassing the ancient relic of Greek pastoralism.
More’s Utopia had to be an island, or a mountaintop, or inaccessible jungle, polar
outpost, or bastion of sand dunes. Because human geography in the early sixteenth
century was correlated strictly with a global cartography more unknown than
known. Most mainlands had been reached; even their “dark” interiors scoped out.
Only the most wild and dangerous distances yet to be crossed might be appropriated
in the imagination as some surrogate for the Garden(s) of Eden. In spite of his contradictory island/urban Utopia, More envisioned an implacable rule of law, a strange
but mostly human state of governance, not that More himself had much reason to
place his faith in any political system, given that he was martyred to one.
But in the United States it is a very short fuse indeed from the illusion of ecological freedom to a continuing history that encompasses all that oppression, genocide,
and a blatant record of environmental schizophrenia. Seconds before any picture
postcard might emerge, American sectors—energy, transportation, protected species, and habitats—implode, igniting a legacy of Superfund sites, CITES violations,
roadkill, pollution-related morbidity statistics, and outright warfare between locals
and wildlife. Her carbon footprint, per capita consumption of other animals, and
contribution to the global commons of plastics and chemical pollutants are
unprecedented.
Historic antidotes, like the formation of the National Park Service, can be viewed
in light of discriminating altruisms that have never swayed from the aggressive
exploitation of local, regional, and global natural capital, and all those deafening
matters of human encroachment and skewed distribution of assets—principally
echoed in the injustice to all those who were here long before the white supremacist
conquerors—that have literally obfuscated the American wildlands, even if the
purer aesthetic imagination is able to transcend such brutalities of modern life.
8.5 What Do We Know? What Do We Actually Perceive?
The ecological paradox that underlies all such destruction in the name of progress,
profit, and protein irrationality, correlates with a fallacy prophetically described by
the French economic thinker Frédéric Bastiat in an 1850 essay entitled “Ce qu’on
voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas,” referring to “that which we see and that which we don’t
see.” Break a window and the cost will be passed along to the economy at large in
the form of an expenditure, and somebody’s profit. Profits and losses are assumed,
under the many laws of averages, to ultimately reach a state of equilibrium, the
larger the economy. Even when a nation or corporation runs a deficit, needing to
borrow money, that state of affairs can be characterized as healthy, according to the
“broken-window fallacy.” Or as one economist has written, “Economic theory
8 Paradoxical Frontiers