Sublime

Harley had decided to give up on lawn care and go to work installing residential gas pipelines. There

The greatest good for the greatest number of people made Harley a justifiable casualty in the struggle against melting ice caps and rising sea levels wrought by climate change; against faraway despots bolstered by energy supplies; against a slump in American industry that left millions out of work, including her father.

Her neighbors’ opinions about Harley’s health often had less to do with the boy’s welfare and more to do with their positions on fracking. Few wanted to challenge the benefits. For the first time, the people of Amity stood to make money from the mineral wealth beneath their corn and wheat fields.

Still, Harrison believed in a key message: The transportation infrastructure of North America is vital to the well-being of the continent. Without freight railroads, the economy would be crippled, so why not make them the best? He was all about being the best. Why couldn’t everybody else be?

A bitumen mine is not a place you would let your child play, but it is excavated using equipment familiar to any four-year-old conversant in Tonka technology—and with a similar grandiosity of ambition. In order to access the bitumen, the forest above it must first be removed. In industry parlance, this living material is referred to as “overburden,

All Japan has been concreted over. The last forests are now discarded chopsticks, the Inland Sea is covered and declared a national parking lot, and where mountains once stood apartment buildings vanish into the clouds. When people reach the age of twenty their legs are amputated and their torsos are fitted with interfaces that plug directly into s