b'We are a nation of the mobile and the absentee, 8the first people on earth who have no need of our neighbors:Borne on cheap oil, our food arrives as if by magic from a great distance (typically, two thousand miles). If you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can order most of what you need and have it left anonymously at your door. Weve evolved a neighborless lifestyle. 9This is the American Dreams mythic shadow. Opportunity, equality and self-improvement, the dream; seflishness, inequality and restless-ness, the shadow. We pursued Two Cars in Every Garage and a Chicken in Every Pot. We went whole hog for supermarkets, superhighways, supertankers and superstores. We did not resist as commerce trumped culture. We did not resist as food moved from farm and kitchen to restaurant, corpora-tion and factory. We did not resist as, cut off from roots, money accelerated, harmlessly at first, then insidiously, becoming ever more distant from fact and fiction. 8 Thorstein Veblen put the issue of absentee ownership squarely in our sights back in 1923: It may be said, of course, and perhaps truthfully, that the absentee owners of the countrys industrial equipment come in for a disproportionate share of the national dividend, and that they and their folks habitually consume their share in superfluities; but no urgent moral indignation appears to be aroused by all that. Absentee Ownership, Thorstein Veblen (Transaction Publishers, 1997), New Brunswick, New Jersey, p. 10 [Originally published in 1923 by B.W. Huebsch Inc./Viking Press]9 Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben (Times Books, New York, 2010), p. 13356'