Slide Mountain: Or the Folly of Owning Nature. - book reviews

Theodore Steinberg. University of California Press, 1995; 212 pp. ISBN 0-520-08763-1 $24 ($27 postpaid). California/Princeton Fulfillment Services, PO Box 10769, Newark, NJ 07193; 800/777-4726

Theodore Steinberg has written a marvelous history of the American drive to own every imaginable aspect of nature, from underground water, to thin air, to the moon itself As the next wave of technological change sweeps over the physical world, reworking it with tiny nano-engines, changing its genetic structures, perhaps even launching orbital billboards (visible from earth), it behooves us to remember that each new ability to transform nature has triggered another rush for the light to do so.

* Now if property is founded on possession and if modern technology makes it easier to control and thus to passess nature, then certainly this development must have affected the meaning of ownership.

* Six Mile Lake is in southern Louisiana's Atchafalaya basin. It is part of North America's largest river basin swamp, bigger even than the famed Okefenokee. .. Imagine more than three-quarters of a million acres of such life and death, think for a moment about those twisting, mist-enveloped bayous, and you will soon understand the mix of beauty, terror, and mystery that surrounds this place. But of all the mysteries one finds here, perhaps the most persistent concerns two bodies of water, Grand and Six Mile lakes. These are not average lakes. Some people had trouble believing they were lakes at all. To the unbeliever they were something altogether different, rivers or streams maybe, but not, let me repeat, not lakes. Why, one might ask, should anyone care what name was used? Because a great deal of property and money rested on the name.

* According to one report, 90 percent of the letters sent to Coles indicated that buyers realized he was jesting.... An acre in Copernicus Crater, wrote Ken Wagner in the American Mercury, was "the perfect gift for people who have everything." It was also the perfect scheme for a culture that, given the opportunity, wanted to own everything.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Point Foundation
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