“What was it like when the walls weren’t packed with insulation, when ‘white noise’ meant crickets? I search for the answers, but all I find is novelty. The city uses nature as window dressing, a means to an end to bring beauty to an otherwise dead and lifeless environment. The advertisers tell us to tromp our SUVs over the National Parks—nature is just a weekend getaway, a morning ride. We cannot say that we know the Earth in an authentic way. Moreover, we cannot even say that we could know the Earth in an authentic way. It’s not so much that we have severed ourselves from the Earth, but that we have taken the extra step to remove our ability to reconnect. The commercial use of nature and the way that we see it as some foreign other, only suitable for day trips—this drives a wedge between us and where we are. RVs, loggers, garbage, yuppies…does capitalism have any psychological boundaries?”

-Fixion, University of Southern California; Adbusters