Lots worth thinking about in this piece: Soulbinding Like A State, which I came across via Sentiers. Much of it folds neatly in with a bunch of thinking about governance and politics, but I wanted to call out one thing that ran a bit tangential to that:
Scott details a pattern of disaster that repeatedly manifests around legibility. His opening example is from the late-18th century discipline of “scientific forestry”.
A natural forest is illegible. A tangle of plants. This is inconvenient from the standpoint of harvesting lumber. How do you quantify yield? Can you even make a meaningful map of this mess? Much easier to clear the forest and plant a legible “scientific” forest. Uniform rows of trees that produce good lumber. Now we can count the trees, make a map, track sustainable yield.
Illegible natural forest vs legible “scientific” forest (Scott, 1998, “Seeing Like a State” pp. 16-17)
What’s missing from our map? Everything else. The forest has been made legible to lumber production. In the process, the entire ecological web of trees, shrubs, birds, bugs, moss, soil microbiota are stripped away. They didn’t fit into our map.
By the second generation of planting, there is a noticeable decline in forest health. Within one century: Waldsterben, forest death, ecological collapse.
This is what I was angling at in The Bretton Oak, and connects back with the concept of externalities. Something like that tree is only legible to the state (in this case, the local council) through the specific vectors through which the state sees reality. Trees -- most non-human life, actually -- is not treated as having any intrinsic value. That is not visible to the state. (And, it must be said, the same problem applies to how the state sees human lives as well, too much of the time time.)
The state sees -- saw -- the Bretton Oak only in the ways through which a state can see. In this case, in terms of the (purported, possibly under-investigated!) damage it might have on human dwellings, and in terms of its own budgetary considerations. The life of the tree -- one which had lived, richly, for six centuries -- is an externality, invisible to the state. It does not meaningfully factor in to the calculation of how the state should act.
This is what I was trying to convey when I said:
And in this is the perfidy of the thing. I truly don't believe that anyone is sat there, twirling a moustache as their plan to kill a six-hundred-year old being comes to fruition. This is not just the outcome of individual decisions, but systems.
And what does that say about our systems? This is practically the definition of an externality problem -- the existence of the tree is not something neatly recognised by any of the human systems at work here, and it is the being in the loop that has no agency nor any 'standing' or material power. By the same token, destroying it -- killing it -- doesn't come with any real, manifest penalty in the contexts of those systems. So, through that lens, it makes complete sense that this is the outcome -- it's one that's essentially all upside with no downside from the point of view of the system -- and the blame is spread thinly, with everyone thinking like they've made the 'correct' proximal decision based on the situation that was presented to them.
This is also an illustration of how systemic harms can operate without necessarily the animus of any of the people involved in the chain of decisions. No one involved in making this happen has to regard the destruction of the tree as a good thing or desirable outcome in order for it to happen. Nor does the existence of these systemic mechanisms absolve them of their contributions.