See nothing but beauty

The shared work of making anthropogenic destruction invisible to the human eye

Bibliographic Data

ID8115124
AuthorsJohn Carr (0000-0002-5587-5512, UNSW Sydney, corresponding author), Tema Milstein (0000-0002-4954-7045, UNSW Sydney)
Year2021
Volume122
Pages183-192
Publication date2021-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeoforum (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-7185 • E-ISSN: 1872-9398
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.04.013
OpenAlexW3157259272
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited52

The Florida Tampa Electric Company’s Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend power plant are separated by a narrow ship channel that serves as state and federal sanctuary for threatened Florida Manatees. As humans have destroyed much of their warm spring habitat, many manatees are forced to rely on power plant hot water effluent to survive during cold winter months. Visitors’ reactions to the MVC are every bit as incongruous as a massive greenhouse gas pollutant source enabling a wildlife reserve. Notwithstanding its inescapable presence, visitor reviews of the MVC nearly uniformly ignore the immense power plant. We offer this study of online reviews of the MVC to examine how and why everyday people’s interactions are fundamental to making dominant practices of anthropogenic ecological destruction unremarkable and, therefore, unfixable. Specifically, we argue the collective blindness reflected in the findings of this study exemplifies a broader sociocultural tendency to articulate and reinforce spaces of ecological “invisibility.” In such spaces, our quotidian practices and discourses play a central role in enabling collective environmental inattention and environmental inaction, especially when we are confronted with places in which the constructed binary between human and “natural” realms spectacularly collapses

Beauty · Environmental ethics · Political science · Power (physics · Recreation · Sociology · Visitor pattern · Wildlife · Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research · Ecology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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