Construal of land as blank slate made historical destruction pass for construction.

Evidence

Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation. But this seeming contradiction actually points to a deeper contradiction: of destruction (e.g., of ecosystems) framed as construction (e.g., of dams). Nineteenth-century views of progress, production, and innovation relied on an image of the land as a blank slate where its current inhabitants and systems were like so many weeds in what was destined to become an American lawn. But if we sincerely recognize all that was already here, both culturally and ecologically, we start to understand that anything framed as construction was actually also destruction. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 642

Categorization

• DEFINE: This reframes progress not as a preference for building but as a naming convention that reclassifies destruction as construction.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s defense of Odell against the withdrawal misreading; manifest dismantling as the counterpart to manifest destiny. — connects to: Builders destroyed the very natural features their subdivisions were named for — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 51