Nevada, USA

She determined that the only way this thing would come to any kind of a good conclusion would be if the following dynamic or mechanism emerged: Each time a "consumer" bought a "product," they would undergo a visceral experience detailing the pre-history and post-history of that product. Everything that was required for it to come into being and arrive into her hands and everything that would result from her having bought and consumed the product. Shatteringly, she would experience visions of horror and sprawls of misery merely upon buying a hamburger or a pair of pants made in Vietnam.

Her friends were occupying a place called Thacker Pass, in a remote part of Nevada, USA. They were there to prevent the construction of a vast lithium mine that would consume the landscape and all of its four-legged and winged and scaled and delicately carapaced and thorny and horned and climbing, running, leaping, whirring and soaring inhabitants who had been navigating the landscape since the last Ice Age.

If the dynamic she was envisioning were to manifest, a person buying an electric car would experience the crushing mastication and catastrophic death of a robust and infinitely complex landscape such as Thacker Pass as an unstoppable IMAX movie projected in their mind and experienced as an actual series of events in their body.

The woman thought that this is what it would take for all of it to stop. Thing is, she thought, we already have that capacity. We possess imagination. We possess feeling. Call it “the empathetic imagination,” she thought. But something more was needed, too. All that is hidden behind windowless walls and all that is dressed up into dazzling forms, in order to obscure our view of their true history, must be revealed.

This is what she thought, as the silence of the early morning expanded into sounds of birds speaking to each other in chirps and as solitary cars pushed down the asphalt streets in front of her house. The sounds of the rolling cars rose up and then dissolved, leaving only the bird song and morning silence to hear.