What interests me the most about ignorance is the kind that The Land Institute is willing to embrace as we think about building an agriculture based on the way a natural ecosystem works.
I think I can help you understand by reading from an Aldo Leopold essay called “The Last Stand.” It describes a forest in the Alps that had produced quality timber since the 1600s by selective harvesting. A contiguous forest of the same kind of timber was clear-cut in the 1600s and never recovered despite intensive care. Here’s what Leopold says:
Despite this rigid protection the old slashing now produces only mediocre pine while the unslashed portion grows the finest cabinet oak in the world; one of those oaks fetches a higher price than a whole acre of the old slashings. On the old slashings the litter accumulates without rotting stumps and limbs disappear slowly natural reproduction is slow. On the unslashed portion litter disappears as it falls stumps and limbs rot at once natural reproduction is automatic. Foresters attribute the inferior performance of the old slashing to its depleted microflora meaning that underground community of bacteria molds fungi insects and burrowing mammals which constitute half the environment of a tree.
The existence of the term microflora implies to the layman that science knows all the citizens of the underground community and is able to push them around at will. As a matter of fact science knows little more than that the community exists and that it is important. In a few simple communities like alfalfa science knows how to add certain bacteria to make the plants grow. In a complex forest science knows only that it is best to let well enough alone.
What we are acknowledging here is the integration of nature’s life forms over a long evolutionary history and that the entropy law has forced the efficiencies inherent to those natural integrities. We can’t keep track of this. We have not even named most of the fungi or bacteria. To plow this information-rich world and simplify it and then treat it as though there’s only phosphorus potassium manganese iron calcium and so on and then presume you can just keep on is acting as though knowledge is adequate to run that world.
[url=http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/10/03/42c0db19e37f4]The Land Institute – Toward An Ignorance-Based World View[/url]