
handle: 1959.4/unsworks_77062
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.
anzsrc-for: 160403 Social and Cultural Geography, anzsrc-for: 440601 Cultural geography, 15 Life on Land, anzsrc-for: 4406 Human geography, anzsrc-for: 16 Studies in Human Society, anzsrc-for: 1604 Human Geography, anzsrc-for: 44 Human Society, 44 Human Society
anzsrc-for: 160403 Social and Cultural Geography, anzsrc-for: 440601 Cultural geography, 15 Life on Land, anzsrc-for: 4406 Human geography, anzsrc-for: 16 Studies in Human Society, anzsrc-for: 1604 Human Geography, anzsrc-for: 44 Human Society, 44 Human Society
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 11 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% |
