We had these books as kids, and would sit for hours absorbing strange locales from around the world. Now we…

We had these books as kids, and would sit for hours absorbing strange locales from around the world. Now we increasingly all just travel there. Because we don’t understand place, we have no conception of the violation this is. 1/6 https://t.co/lLAfTl8Mki

If we admire people, for example, we might look at them in the pages of magazines, or online. We admire them, from afar. If we camp outside their home to get a more ‘authentic experience’ of them, what’s that called? Stalking. 2/6

A violation of them. And yet we don’t see how exactly equivalent travel is, for place. Travel is geographical stalking, a violation of others’ homes. We have no right to invade other places to satisfy some need we have to be ‘there’. 3/6

Place can and should be admired from afar, from within places we make beautiful ourselves - our own homes and landscapes. These books weren’t just a precursor to a more authentic relationship with place. They *were* that more authentic relationship. 4/6 https://t.co/yJC8LyMLBQ

They respected place, the right of others to have their own places, and to not stalk them to satisfy our old imperial need for domination and possession. We don’t know how to make place any more, so travel to try to fill that void by consuming others’ places. 5/6

It destroys them. Like quantum theory, what we go to ‘see’ is fundamentally changed by us being there to see it. And then when everybody else does it too, that change becomes destruction, of that place. /end