When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.
One of the most irresponsible things we can do is eat in ignorance, without any awareness of what our eating is doing to the world or to other species.
I don't like writing as an expert. I like writing as an amateur. I like writing as an idiot. It's much more fun to start in ignorance.
