New World settler societies loosen moral accountability from the powerful constraints of place and time. In detaching people from place these societies enable action to escape feedback from the place. Settlers imagine themselves free to depart, indeed many of us make a virtue of departing, and both geographical and economic mobility are fueled by people’s efforts to escape the results of their actions, to search yet again for that better future. In detaching people from continuity in place they also loosen people from the feedback of time. Founded in disjunction (‘new’ worlds), settler cultures posit an endless overcoming in which the present is always already about to be superseded. Detached from organised moral accountability in two of the most fundamental domains of human life, New World settler societies generate catastrophe.

– Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country (2004), p 5-6.