Fire and Knowledge

Obviously, we can work on a gigantic scale, but just as obviously we cannot foresee the gigantic catastrophes to which gigantic works are vulnerable, any more than we can foresee the natural and human consequences of such work. We can develop a global economy, but only on the conditions that it will not be loving in its effects on its human and natural sources, and that it will risk global economic collapse. We can build gigantic works of architecture too, but only with the likelihood that the gathering of the economic means to do so will generate somewhere the will to destroy what we have built.

–Wendell Berry, “Two Minds” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 105