When the Water Is Gone, There’ll Be Nothing Left but Fences, woodcut and letterpress on paper, 12 x 16 in, 2019 Edition of 8. Joseph Glidden’s durable and cheap design, dubbed by some in the 1870s as the “greatest invention in the world”, led to the widespread use of wire fencing across North American rangelands. It brought order to range rights holders and made it cheap to enclose land, cheaper than cowboys. The wild West was tamed by a thin steel wire. Over a century later, cheapness is getting humankind in all kinds of environmental trouble. Our relentless thirst to own, fracture and exploit land is only cheap when the destruction of soils, along with the loss of biodiversity, are abstracted.