Jignesh Darji

“What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Evolution is the sadistic headmaster of the Succeed-or-Die School of Invention, motto: Disce aut consumere!—“learn or get eaten!” It is sad and sometimes ugly when a species fails in this school, especially ugly if the change they are confronted with is caused by human thoughtlessness. Sometimes the two happen in tandem and ugliness can create unexpected beauty. New railway lines are notorious for the havoc and destruction they can bring to a landscape, impacting both natural and artificial environments. However, the need to keep general human traffic away from the iron dragons that pass along these new lines has created a new habitat and led to a renaissance in rare wildflowers in some areas. But perhaps the most surreal and ironic example of this is the fact that many naturalists now support the military’s habit of firing big explosive shells at landscapes. Exploding ordnance falling from the sky has the dependable effect of keeping humans away and, consequently, firing ranges have accidentally created some of the most healthy ecosystems in Britain. Naturalists and the military are now working more closely, and this unlikely partnership is becoming less accidental and more deliberate.”
― Tristan Gooley, How to Read Nature: Awaken Your Senses to the Outdoors You've Never Noticed

“Of course banks are greedy! Of course corporations are selfish, and Wall Street is wily! Blaming a financial crisis on these qualities is like blaming a flood on the wetness of water. A twenty-first-century economist pointed out that if Wall Street greed caused financial crises, we’d have a crisis every week. The important question at the time—and, indeed, the question we should always be asking—is: How can we design a monetary system that channels that greed and selfishness and wile toward socially useful ends, and limits the potential harm inherent in finance”
― Jacob Goldstein, Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing

“In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest Service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication. Show them a stand of trees anywhere and they will regard it thoughtfully for a long while, and say at last, “You know, we could put a road here.” It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of the next century. The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service’s 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third—49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio—is available for logging. It allows huge swathes of land to be clear-cut, including (to take one recent but heartbreaking example) 209 acres of thousand-year-old redwoods in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail