by applewood

It’s not just the imagery that’s stale. The framing and assumptions behind the whole enterprise are outdated, too. From the viewpoint of 2019, the simple optimism of 1975 seems quaint. O’Neill overlooked the complex tangles of unintended consequences that make ecosystem design far more intractable as a field than it seemed at first—problems pointed out a decade before him by the biologist, science writer, and cultural critic Rachel Carson. Bezos doesn’t grapple with those complexities and unknowns either. Even though political divisions are wider than they’ve been since the 1960s, and a climate crisis is upon us, we have so far not met these challenges with any meaningful concerted action.