A few months ago I traveled through the Scottish Highlands, and I was not alone. Scotland attracted so many tourists this summer that it made headlines, with The Guardian quoting a delighted industry representative who said: “We hope and suspect that we’ll see more European visitors given the climate conditions.” When it comes to the yearnings of European tourists, rain is the new sunshine. Yet what we marvel at today as Scotland’s natural beauty—the spectacular barren mountain ridges covered in lush green scrub against a backdrop of deep blue ocean and cloudy skies—is, in fact, a theater of destruction.

To see the landscapes of the Highlands for what they truly are, it helps to read Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History alongside Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. From Becker’s angle, appreciating Scotland’s beauty without noting its scars is an instance of “naturalising capitalism.” He maintains that “capitalism has imprinted our world so deeply that it is even possible not to notice it.” Fressoz adds to this a way of seeing history “from the perspective of the trees.”