Suzannah Lessard

“a federal government given land-use powers would be manipulated by the mercantile barons to their own ends, to the detriment of the common people.”
― Suzannah Lessard, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

“we have not yet figured out how to govern ourselves effectively enough to become good custodians of nature. That is perhaps the darkest feature of this despair, and yet there is also hope in it: the answer lies within ourselves. It’s natural to want to protect ourselves, so it doesn’t seem foolish to hope that we will. But our relationship to nature is not the only instance in which we are unable to respond in a self-protective way to a self-made situation that reflects our brilliance, and even power, but could also doom us, reflecting our helplessness before ourselves in the same fateful way. The coordinates of our nature problem are almost exactly the same as those created by the Cold War, while molecular biology may well present us with a similar paradox of triumphant achievement and boundless disaster in the future. Who among us”
― Suzannah Lessard, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape