Chapter One

The Map

Now nothing of this place is unknown.

—Susan Griffin,
Woman and Nature

Spectator, spectacle, specimen!

—Robert Romanyshyn,
Technology as Symptom and Dream

Empire originates in the perception of place. Maps are the tools of perception, charting land, sea, and sky—just as they map our imaginations.

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The very first map I study is an immense depiction, painted during World War II, that leans up against the playroom wall. It is a children's map, and I am a child. In it the land of North America is colored a faded mustard-yellow. Festooned upon its plains and mountains are tiny sheaves of wheat, little steel mills puffing plumes of smoke, miniature ears of corn, cows spotted black and white. Amid rows of orange trees, southern California sports a Mickey Mouse—eared movie camera. The map is a child's paradise, very much like Robert Louis Stevenson's Land of Counterpane, like a dollhouse empire.

    I sit, accompanied by my Winnie-the-Pooh books, and I trace my finger from the bucktooth beaver above the Great Lakes, south through the oil wells in Oklahoma, to leaping silver tarpon off the Gulf Coast. The map tells me how to regard things. The world is a magical place, it pronounces, producing all the resources we Americans need: oil for our cars springs from the ho