"Logically, in plenitude some things ought to be expendable. Industrial economics has always believed this: abundance justifies waste. This is one of the dominant superstitions of American history—and of the history of colonialism everywhere.

"Expendability is also an assumption of the world of efficiency, which is why that world leads so compulsively in percentages of efficacy and safety.

But this sort of logic is absolutely alien to the world of love.

"To the claim that a certain drug or procedure would save 99 percent of all cancer patients or that a certain pollutant would be safe for 99 percent of a population, love, unembarrassed, would respond, 'What about the one percent?'

"There is nothing rational or perhaps even defensible about this, but it is nonetheless one of the strongest strands of our religious tradition—it is probably the most essential strand...

"... according to which a shepherd, owning a hundred sheep and having lost one, does not say, 'I have saved 99 percent of my sheep,' but rather, 'I have lost one,' and he goes and searches for the one.

"if the sheep in that parable may seem to be only a metaphor, then go on to the Gospel of Luke ... where the sparrows stand not for human beings but for all creatures: 'Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?'

"And John Donne wrote, 'If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me.'"

—Wendell Berry, "Health Is Membership"