Browse Topics
Climate Change
Field Observations
An Interview With Wendell Berry
The first necessity is to teach the young. If we teach the young what we already know, we would do outlandishly better than we’re doing. Knowledge is overrated, you know. There have been cultures that did far better than we do, knowing far less than we know. We need to see that knowledge is overrated, but also that knowledge is not at all the same thing as “information.” There’s a world of difference — Wes Jackson helped me to see this — between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.
February 1994When A Tree Falls In The Forest
An Interview With John Seed
But let me give an example of the scale of the destruction that’s going on. We know that the amount of solar energy necessary to sustain the hydrological cycle in the Amazon jungle — the energy necessary to lift that water into the atmosphere — is equivalent to the energy put out by two thousand hydrogen bombs a day. The vegetation that grows there captures that much energy. It creates a huge heat engine that drives the winds of the world, those winds that the ancient mariners knew, and the same winds that deliver moisture regularly and predictably to North America and to Europe. Those winds don’t simply exist — they’re continuously being created and maintained by large biological systems. The Amazon is one of the vital organs of the living planet.
January 1993Looking At Trees
The pressing issue for us Westerners, the famously alienated, is that our relationship to the world is that of master to slave. We think we’ve solved slavery in the human realm by turning iron shackles into low paychecks. But the shackles on nature grow tighter. In Brazil, a chain stretched between two Caterpillar tractors mows down forests.
November 1992
