Human dependence on technology has increased exponentially over the past several centuries, along with the notion that environmental problems can be solved with scientific applications. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge proposes an alternative to this hubristic, shortsighted, and dangerous worldview. The contributors offer profound arguments for the advantages of an ignorance-based worldview. Examining the relationship between the land and the future generations who will depend on it, they propose that, while we cannot improve upon nature, by putting this new perspective to work in our professional and personal lives we can live sustainably on Earth.
About the Author :
Bill Vitek, professor of philosophy at Clarkson University, is the author of several books, including Promising, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, and Applying Philosophy. He lives in Postdam, New York.Wes Jackson, president of the Land Institute and former professor at Kansas Wesleyan and California State universities, is the author of several books, including Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, Becoming Native to this Place, and Altars of an Unhewn Stone. He lives in Salina, Kansas.
Review :
""A refreshing read... The Virtues of Ignorance is an exciting book, for both the questions it attempts to answer and for the new questions it inevitably raises... It's a book that opens your eyes to how much you really can't see." --Lexington Herald-Leader" --
""Demonstrating that knowledge-based worldviews are more dangerous than useful, the book looks closely at the relationship between the land and the future generations who will depend on it." --Abstracts of Public Administration, Development, and Environment" --
""Every now and again you come across a read you feel certain will shift the landscape of thought in unpredictable ways. The Virtues of Ignorance is likely to raise a few eyebrows in the scientific community and the fallout is likely to be both stimulating and positive." --Claude Stephens, Forest Echo" --
""If we want to avoid a tumbledown fate for our planet, one that equals the tumbledown state of our farms, we would do well to heed [Vitek and Jackson's] advice." -- Tumbledownfarm.blogspot.com" --
""The questions raised throughout the book encourage a pause for reflection -- on what we think we know and the implications our knowledge has on the world around us." --International Journal of Illich Studies" --
""The Virtues of Ignorance is at once subversive, deeply wise, and enormously significant." --Charlene Spretnak, Resurgence" --
""The Virtues of Ignorance provides an excellent foundation for environmental reflection, research, and action.... I have little doubt that [the book] will also raise provocative questions about the nature of knowledge, the subject of one's research, the style of one's teaching, and the methods of one's ethics for other Worldviews readers who necessarily engage with uncertain, limited, and changing knowledge." --Sarah E. Fredericks, Worldviews" --
""The Virtues of Innocence succeeds in bringing together authors from a diverse range of backgrounds to form a coherent and compelling argument for a worldview that acknowledges and works with the limits to human knowledge.... The new ground opened by [the book] deserves further examination and discussion, and this collection serves as a strong introduction to current thinking about the role of ignorance in human understanding." --Edmund M. Harris, Agricultural Hum. Values" --
""This is a bid to make ignorance an explicit and powerful underpinning of a new epistemology. It will attract widespread attention and potentially be one of those books that show up in citations for decades to come." -- Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future" --
""Utterly fascinating." --Earth Justice In Brief" --
""Virtues of ignorance, such as respect and humility, find eloquent and persuasive elucidation in these pages." --Choice" --
""When peak oil, climate change, and other imminent events impose themselves on our industrial economies and begin to undermine the fundamental premises of our culture, I believe that The Virtues of Ignorance will rapidly become a crucial part of the literature of our changing paradigm and will likely be a cornerstone of our new way of being in the world for several decades." -- Frederick Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow, Leopold Center, Iowa State University" --
