Jordan Fisher-Smith
Jordan Fisher-Smith works as a park ranger in the northern Sierra Nevada. When we last spoke to him, he was investigating the death of a woman who had been killed and partially eaten by a mountain lion in the canyon of the Middle Fork American River.
— From June 1994Field Observations
An Interview With Wendell Berry
The first necessity is to teach the young. If we teach the young what we already know, we would do outlandishly better than we’re doing. Knowledge is overrated, you know. There have been cultures that did far better than we do, knowing far less than we know. We need to see that knowledge is overrated, but also that knowledge is not at all the same thing as “information.” There’s a world of difference — Wes Jackson helped me to see this — between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.
February 1994