In The Culture of the Land series.

As our dependence on technology has increased precipitously over the past centuries, so too has the notion that we can solve all environmental problems with scientific explanations. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge proposes an alternative to this dangerous worldview. The contributing authors argue that our reliance on scientific knowledge has created many of the problems that now plague the globe and that our wholesale dependence on scientific progress is both untenable and myopic. They conclude that we must simply accept that our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge and always will.

Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson and a diverse group of thinkers, including Wendell Berry, Anna Peterson, and Robert Root-Bernstein, offer insights on the advantages of an ignorance-based worldview. Their essays explore the entire realm of this philosophy, from its origins and its essence to how its implementation can preserve vital natural resources for future generations. The Virtues of Ignorance argues that knowledge-based worldviews are more dangerous than useful and looks ahead to determine how humans can live sustainably on Earth.

Bill Vitek is associate professor of philosophy at Clarkson University. He is the author of several books, including Promising, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, and Applying Philosophy.

Wes Jackson is the president of the Land Institute and former professor at Kansas Wesleyan and California State universities. He is the author of several books, including Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, Becoming Native to This Place and Altars of Unhewn Stone.

"This is a bid to make ignorance an explicit and powerful underpinning of a new epistemology. It will attract widespread attention as a result, 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

"As 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

"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 Jacksons) advice."-Tumbledownfarm.blogspot.com