The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (Culture of the Land) - Tapa blanda

""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" -- ""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" -- ""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" -- ""The Virtues of Ignorance is at once subversive, deeply wise, and enormously significant." --Charlene Spretnak, Resurgence" -- ""Virtues of ignorance, such as respect and humility, find eloquent and persuasive elucidation in these pages." --Choice" -- ""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" -- ""Utterly fascinating." --Earth Justice In Brief" -- ""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" -- ""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" -- ""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" --

The relationship between a town and its local institutions of higher education is often fraught with turmoil. The complicated tensions between the identity of a city and the character of a university can challenge both communities. Lexington, Kentucky, displays these characteristic conflicts, with two historic educational institutions within its city limits: Transylvania University, the first college west of the Allegheny Mountains, and the University of Kentucky, formerly "State College." An investigative cultural history of the town that called itself "The Athens of the West," Taking the Town: Collegiate and Community Culture in Lexington, Kentucky, 1880--1917 depicts the origins and development of this relationship at the turn of the twentieth century. Lexington's location in the upper South makes it a rich region for examination. Despite a history of turmoil and violence, Lexington's universities serve as catalysts for change. Until the publication of this book, Lexington was still characterized by academic interpretations that largely consider Southern intellectual life an oxymoron. Kolan Thomas Morelock illuminates how intellectual life flourished in Lexington from the period following Reconstruction to the nation's entry into the First World War. Drawing from local newspapers and other primary sources from around the region, Morelock offers a comprehensive look at early town-gown dynamics in a city of contradictions. He illuminates Lexington's identity by investigating the lives of some influential personalities from the era, including Margaret Preston and Joseph Tanner. Focusing on literary societies and dramatic clubs, the author inspects the impact of social and educational university organizations on the town's popular culture from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. Morelock's work is an enlightening analysis of the intersection between student and citizen intellectual life in the Bluegrass city during an era of profound change and progress. Taking the Town explores an overlooked aspect of Lexington's history during a time in which the city was establishing its cultural and intellectual identity.