Awareness versus detail
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes the real differences between the left and right halves of the human brain. It's not simply "emotion on the right, reason on the left," but something far more complex and interesting.

(from the book's first chapter) Environmental enigmas such as global warming may pose too great a challenge for science as we know it. The worldwide climate change phenomenon has too many variables to be isolated in any laboratory simulation. These variables are constantly shifting, and therefore cannot serve for the verification of hypotheses in repeated experimentation. Climate instability cannot be simulated, even in the most powerful computers.

Wall Street, symbol of investment banking and the stock exchange.

The history of Wall Street institutions reveals a pattern of overconfident exploitation of financial advantages, followed by unexpected setbacks and investor panic. The pattern has characteristics in common with progress traps, most notably the ability of financiers to pursue their activities in a culture that is insulated from the world that lies beyond commerce. As it happens, that world is greatly affected by high finance, but financiers are not aware of their effect until panic sets in.

In A Green History of the World, Clive Ponting gives a sobering account of one society’s demise as a direct result of development. He relates in detail how the southern Pacific ocean’s Easter Islanders, remote from any other civilized society, slowly succumbed to the results of their ingenuity.