what everyone knows is not always true, we must reject the conventional wisdom in our quest for fact. this system is unsustainable, the water and power and land bought at too high a cost. for instance, in the constant searching for and claiming and trapping of water in California, only one of the seventeen rivers that flow from the Sierra into the valley is not dammed, our faucets filled with snowmelt from hundreds of miles away. and while everyone knows that the Great Wall of China is the only manmade structure visible from space, that must be because they don’t count the irrigation canals of the valley, also visible from space, but then we might have to notice the difference between a river and an aqueduct. it’s more than just a matter of trees.