Fire and Knowledge

[C]ompetitiveness, as a ruling principle and a virtue, imposes a logic that is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to control. That logic explains why our cars and our clothes are shoddily made, why our “wastes” are toxic, and why our “defensive” weapons are suicidal; it explains why it is so difficult for us to draw a line between “free enterprise” and crime. If our economic ideal is maximum profit with minimum responsibility, why should we be surprised to find our corporations so frequently in court and robbery on the increase? Why should we be surprised to find that medicine has become an exploitive industry, profitable in direct proportion to its hurry and its mechanical indifference? People who pay for shoddy products or careless services and people who are robbed outright are equally victims of theft, the only difference being that the robbers outright are not guilty of fraud.

–Wendell Berry, “Two Economies” in Home Economics (1987), p. 72

Half of all the offices and malls standing in America today have been built since 1980.

–Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods (1998), p. 104

The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), p. 31

For years [Gatlinburg] has prospered on the confident understanding that when Americans load up their cars and drive enormous distances to a setting of rare natural splendor what most of them want when they get there is to play a little miniature golf and eat dribbly food. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most popular national park in America, but Gatlinburg—this is so unbelievable—is more popular than the park.

–Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods (1998), pp. 102

Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), p. 7

I’ve updated the recommended reading page and added the following books and essays:

• The Elements of Style (4th Ed.) by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser
• The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
• "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
• Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition by Wendell Berry

What is to be the fate of self-control in an economy that encourages and rewards unlimited selfishness?

–Wendell Berry, “Two Economies” in Home Economics (1987), p. 68

The [U.S.] Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing the word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no—though that was the original plan….

In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication. Show them a stand of trees anywhere and they will regard it thoughtfully for a long while, and say at last, “You know, we could put a road here.” It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of the next century.

The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees…. By the late 1980s—this is so extraordinary I can hardly stand it—it was the only significant player in the American timber industry that was cutting down trees faster than it replaced them. Moreover, it was doing this with the most sumptuous inefficiency. Eighty percent of its leasing arrangements lost money, often vast amounts. In one typical deal, the Forest Service sold hundred-year-old lodgepole pines in the Targhee National Forest in Idaho for about $2 each after spending $4 per tree surveying the land, drawing up contracts, and, of course, building roads. Between 1989 and 1997, it lost an average of $242 million a year—almost $2 billion all told, according to the Wilderness Society.

–Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods (1998), pp. 46-48