Status Updates From Greyhound: A Memoir

The four ‘natural environments’ which Yi-Fu Tuan believes ‘have figured prominently in humanity’s dreams of the ideal world’ are ‘the forest, the seashore, the valley, and the island’. Although suburbia tried to combine the forest, seashore and valley, it ended up recreating only the island… one that was cold, empty and isolated.

de Beauvoir: Gand Canyon or Niagara Falls: the most ingenious efforts have been made to transform a natural marvel into a kind of amusement park..… The tourist is offered every possible artificial means of taming this exuberantly natural spectacle. In the same way, people in America consume “conditioned” air…. Americans are nature lovers, but they accept only a nature inspected and corrected by man.

Rorty :In Detroit…one sees the bare bones of the cultural nightmare we Americans have dreamed for ourselves, believing, in our greedy haste, our barbaric innocence, that it was a thing we could live by and with; that human life could flourish as a kind of parasitic attachment to an inhuman, blind, valueless process, in which money begets machines, machines beget money, machines beget machines, money begets money.