“You have just dined and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I encountered this quote while reading:
Pollan, Michael. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. New York: The Penguin Press, 2013.

Then I was reading a terrific review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s book in the NYRB where the reviewer, Verlyn Klinkenborg, cites an essay by George Orwell, Down the Mine, where he makes the following claim:

Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or
indirectly dependent upon coal.

(Klinkenborg replaces coal with fossil fuels.)

Two good pieces for thinking about the costs of the decisions you make and for making the case about the necessity of a deep awareness of how things actually work. I will try the Klinkenborg with my students to see if I can get anyone excited about the possibility of reading Kolbert’s book.