Seen from the window of an airplane, the landscape between Louisiana and Texas showed all the promise and betrayal of that paradox. All the old oil towns along the coastline that had never really been a line, more like a place where dry land slowly morphed into ocean. Many of those towns had been taken back by nature now, but you could still see their remains from up at ten thousand feet, the scaffolds of industrial-scale chemistry sets poking out of the water, flare-offs long extinguished, but the product they once processed into the plastic comestibles of capital now being sucked back into the subsurface, the muck beneath the water that rose just a little bit more every day. He saw highways that ended in standing water at the edge of the wide brown-blue expanse. Where the waterways emptied into the Gulf, you saw the stains of the things they carried with them, the sediments and toxins of faraway farmlands trying to exorcise the artificial stimulants that had been used to make them make more grain to feed the machine. And the patches of swampy forest trying to come back where they had been razed. Those once-verdant wetlands were where Audubon’s greatest birds had made their home. More than half the species he documented were now gone.

It looked like a stop-motion hellscape out there, like a zone where the rubber suit monsters of his childhood matinees had been rampaging. And the thing was, it had always basically looked that way, even before they noticed, even before the climate started avenging itself. For all the time he spent mediating feuds between people and sometimes starting them, the real feud was between human beings and the land on which they lived. And maybe the real way to get people to stop doing shitty things to one another would start with getting them to stop doing shitty things to the Earth. Reground that relationship on a basis of reciprocity, of mutuality of exchange, of the kind of balanced principles that the law claimed to stand for, and maybe the other relationships would follow suit.

The Tributary was a start in the right direction, if an extreme one, and maybe too late to make any difference. But even in all his hard-earned cynicism about people, he couldn’t give up on them like Joyce had. Not when they included people like Percy, or those kids she taught.

America was Sparta and Atlantis at the same time. But it had meant to be something different entirely. Not a city on a hill, even. More like an archipelago of small towns in a vast ocean of green, blue, and gold. And as he looked out the window at the scarred and depopulated but still-resilient landscape, he could almost imagine a future that realized that vision, or that at least tried to incorporate its aspirations.

But then Dallas came into view.

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