x My title is borrowed from a school course, and I do not intend it entirely
in fun. Its redundancy seems to acknowledge that what passes now for economics, like what passes now for national defense,
has strayed far from any idea of home, either the world or the world's natural ecosystems and human households.
x What I write is always an extension of conversations between me
and the books I have read and the friends and strangers with whom I have talked.
p.4-5 To call the unknown by its right name, "mystery," is to suggest that
we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller
patterns... If we are up against a mystery, then we dare act only on the most modest assumptions. The modern scientific
program has held that we must act on the basis of knowledge, which, because its effects are so manifestly large,
we have assumed to be ample. But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient
program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance. Acting on the basis of ignorance, paradoxically,
requires one to know things, remember things - for instance, that failure is possible, that error is possible, that second
chances are desirable (so don't risk everything on the first chance), and so on.
p.7 What we call nature is, in a sense, the sum of the changes made by all the various creatures and natural
forces in their intricate actions and influences upon each other and upon their places.
p.84 This is simply the elemental trial... of human life: the necessity to proceed on the basis merely of
the knowledge that is available
