“See nothing but beauty”: The shared work of making anthropogenic destruction invisible to the human eye

Abstract

The Florida Tampa Electric Company’s Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend power plant are separated by a narrow ship channel that serves as state and federal sanctuary for threatened Florida Manatees. As humans have destroyed much of their warm spring habitat, many manatees are forced to rely on power plant hot water effluent to survive during cold winter months. Visitors’ reactions to the MVC are every bit as incongruous as a massive greenhouse gas pollutant source enabling a wildlife reserve. Notwithstanding its inescapable presence, visitor reviews of the MVC nearly uniformly ignore the immense power plant. We offer this study of online reviews of the MVC to examine how and why everyday people’s interactions are fundamental to making dominant practices of anthropogenic ecological destruction unremarkable and, therefore, unfixable. Specifically, we argue the collective blindness reflected in the findings of this study exemplifies a broader sociocultural tendency to articulate and reinforce spaces of ecological “invisibility.” In such spaces, our quotidian practices and discourses play a central role in enabling collective environmental inattention and environmental inaction, especially when we are confronted with places in which the constructed binary between human and “natural” realms spectacularly collapses.