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Just as it is important to keep morality in mind rather than letting profit and loss determine our view of the environment, I think we need to apply moral fortitude to the challenging process of educating ourselves about the environment. In reading this book you will learn, as I did in researching it, more than you might want to know about a lot of extremely unpleasant subjects. It is understandable to react with feelings of hopelessness, and I don’t pretend that I haven’t been deeply saddened by much of what I have discovered. But … [o]ur knowledge is still in the early stages—our knowledge, that is, of how the living world works as a whole, how its various hierarchies and feedback loops interact, and the nature of its self-corrections, adjustments, breakdowns and renewals. And we don’t have the big picture when it comes to unintended consequences and tradeoffs. We have to keep learning if only because we can’t afford to let fear and depression immobilize us. We can’t tell our children and grandchildren that the world is a hopeless mess. We can’t think that way ourselves if we mean to help our planet and those we love. Given the provisional nature of environmental science at this moment in history, despair must be converted to curiosity that will not only generate the research to help us survive, but that will break down the barriers of denial and obfuscation.
--V.B. Price, from the Preface (p. xii)
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Agriculture
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Church Rock
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photography
