Rebecca Solnit, on the California gold miners of the 1870s: “…they worked feverishly to acquire what could be hoarded—notably the tons of gold dug out of the mountains—and for it they paid with what couldn’t be hoarded and didn’t belong to them, the clear streams and rivers filed up with miners’ mercury and dirt, the salmon runs already starting to fail in their time, the forests chopped down for smelters, the California grizzly extinct everywhere but the state flag by 1922, the languages and stories of the tribes devastated by violence and by disease in this place that was blank and unborn to the miners. It was this acquisitiveness and its increasingly sophisticated new technologies that came to extract more and more wealth from the wild and remote places of the world to empty them out, filling up banks with more money than could ever be spent, more than there are thing to buy. Now the scarcity is real, and growing.”

Questions of place, of disappearance, of former abundance, of old lifeways rendered unable to persist, of money, money, money.