Too Much Safety Seems To Yield Only

Is Education Possibly A Process Of Trading Awareness For Things Of Lesser Worth? The Goose Who Trades His Is Soon A Pile Of Feathers.

The Government Tells Us We Need Flood Control And Comes To Straighten The Creek In Our Pasture. The Engineer On The Job Tells Us The Creek Is Now Able To Carry Off More Flood Water, But In The Process We Have Lost Our Old Willows Where The Owl Hooted On A Winter Night And Under Which The Cows Switched Flies In The Noon Shade. We Lost The Little Marshy Spot Where Our Fringed Gentians Bloomed.

There Is Yet No Ethic Dealing With Man's Relation To Land And To The Animals And Plants Which Grow Upon It. Land, Like Odysseus' Slave-girls, Is Still Property. The Land-relation Is Still Strictly Economic, Entailing Privileges But Not Obligations.

There Are Men Charged With The Duty Of Examining The Construction Of The Plants, Animals, And Soils Which Are The Instruments Of The Great Orchestra. These Men Are Called Professors. Each Selects One Instrument And Spends His Life Taking It Apart And Describing Its Strings And Sounding Boards. This Process Of Dismemberment Is Called Research. The Place For Dismemberment Is Called A University.

It Is Part Of Wisdom Never To Revisit A Wilderness, For The More Golden The Lily, The More Certain That Someone Has Gilded It