De-industrialising society

It seem unnecessary to list the ills our world is suffering from or to demonstrate that they are getting worse, or that the measures undertaken by us to combat them are increasingly ineffective. It is important however, to determine why all this should be so.

The tendency, of course, is to blame our failure on mere technicalities, errors in the implementation of our policies, not on the policies themselves, for these are the only ones consistent with our world view, hence the only ones the society it gives rise to, or is capable of providing.

Let us begin by considering the main features of this world view. Implicit to it is the notion that the world we live in is imperfect. In the Middle Ages, the Cathars and other heretical sects also regarded the world as imperfect. Their reaction however, was to cut themselves off from it and live instead in a spiritual world of their own making.

We, on the other hand, have set out systematically to improve it. By means of science, technology, and industry, we have persuaded ourselves, it can be transformed into a veritable paradise, in which everyone will have at his or her disposal an extraordinary array of consumer goods and ingenious technological devices and in which vast specialised institutions will deal so 'scientifically' with all such problems as unemployment, homelessness, ignorance, disease, crime and delinquency, which are supposed to have afflicted us since the beginning of time, that these will be eliminated once and for all.

This transformation is referred to misleadingly as development and the direction it is leading us in is referred to as progress. It is thereby not surprising that any problems which arise are ascribed to underdevelopment, and that, to solve them, it suffices to invest in more scientific research, more technological innovation and more industrial expansion, i.e. in more development, to which-needless to say-our society is, in any case, committed.

In other words, rather than interpret our problems objectively (which is what science is supposed to do for us), we interpret them subjectively so as to make them appear amenable to the only solutions we can provide without radically altering our world view and the social behaviour pattern it gives rise to - the only solutions which, among other things, are at present economically viable and politically expedient.

Thus, for instance, we define poverty as a shortage of material goods, which justifies the production of more and more material goods. It does not occur to us that it might be more realistic to regard it as an aberrant situation in which more material goods are required than can actually be produced, for then the solution would be to create those socio-economic conditions in which less goods rather than more were required.

Or again, we interpret the housing problem as a shortage of houses, which justifies the building of more and more houses. It does not occur to us that it might be more realistic to regard it as an aberrant situation largely caused by the disintegration of the family, as a result of which, where there were eight to ten people per house, there are now two or three. This latter interpretation would be inconvenient, since though we know how to build houses, industrial society does not provide the means for restoring the integrity of the family unit.

In the same way, we regard the high crime rate as a sign that the police force is inadequate or that it is not sufficiently well equipped. It does not occur to us that it might be a symptom of social disintegration. This is because, though it has been up to now reasonably easy to engage more policemen, build more prisons, and manufacture more armoured cars and burglar alarms, there is no mechanism available to us for creating a sounder society without compromising the achievement of other goals to which we attribute a higher priority.

If our interpretation of these and all the other problems which face our society today was the correct one, then, on logistical grounds alone, one could state unhesitatingly, that they could never be solved, and that the future of man was very grim indeed. Fortunately, it is our interpretation that is wrong. Our problems are of a very different order and the correspondingly different solutions are much easier to apply. Let us look a little more closely at this process of 'development', or more precisely 'industrialisation' - its latest phase.

Firstly, it is not autonomous. It does not occur in a vacuum as is implied by modern economics. If the world were a lifeless waste, as is the moon, there could be no industrialisation. If it has occurred at all, it is that over the last few thousand million years the primaeval dust has slowly been organised into an increasingly complex organisation of matter - the biosphere, or world of living things - or the 'real world' as we might refer to it - which provides the resources entering into this process. Industrialisation is something which is happening to the biosphere. It is the biosphere, in fact - the real world - that is being industrialised.

In this way, a new organisation of matter is building up: the technosphere or world of material goods and technological devices: or the surrogate world.

This brings us to the second important feature of industrialisation: the surrogate world it gives rise to is in direct competition with the real world, since it can only be built up by making use of resources extracted from the latter, and by consigning to it the waste products this process must inevitably generate.

Let us see why this must be so. The actual building up of the surrogate world occurs in three steps:

1. Firstly, resources are extracted from the real world, which can only lead to its contraction and deterioration. Thus, to obtain timber, forests must be felled, causing soil erosion, a fall in the water table, the drying up of streams and increasing the incidence and severity of droughts and floods. To obtain other building materials such as stones, or clay for brick making, still more areas must be deprived of their trees and topsoil.
2. Secondly, so as to build up the surrogate world of cities, factories, motorways and airports, these materials must be organised differently elsewhere. Hence, the land must also be deprived of its trees and its topsoil before being covered with materials such as cement and asphalt which are random to the processes of the real world.
3. Thirdly, this process, like all others, must give rise to waste products. These become increasingly toxic as industrialisation proceeds (as synthetics take over from naturally-occurring materials). Unfortunately the processes of the surrogate world, being far more rudimentary than those of the real world, give rise to correspondingly more wastes, and as they are neither arranged in such a way, nor are they of the right sort to serve as the necessary raw materials for the further development of the surrogate world let alone for the restoration of the real one, they simply tend to accumulate as "randomness" vis-à-vis, both of these rival organisations of matter.

To illustrate this point, consider a modern city of a million inhabitants. Wolman has likened it to some vast beast with a very specific metabolism. Every day it must take in some 9,500 tons of fossil fuels, 2,000 tons of food, 625,000 tons of water, 31,500 tons of oxygen plus unknown quantities of various minerals while it must also emit, during the same period, some 28,500 tons of CO2, 12,000 tons of H20 (produced in the combustion of fossil fuels), 150 tons of particles, 500,000 tons of sewage, together with vast quantities of refuse, sulphur and nitrogen oxides and various other heterogeneous materials. [1]

If the beast is to keep alive, its metabolism cannot be stopped any more than can that of any other beast. This means that the resources must be extracted from somewhere, the wastes released somewhere else. The latter, as we saw in my article "Can pollution be controlled?", cannot simply be made to vanish.

Pollution-control simply consists in diverting pollutants to where they are likely to do the least harm or to dilute them in the atmosphere or in the seas. (The loss during the recycling process, in the case of most materials, is so great that this does not provide any long term solution). Pollution-control, in fact, is only possible when there are few such beasts around, impossible when there are a large number - for then pollution becomes global rather than local, there is nowhere to divert it to, and nothing left to dilute it in.

It must follow that all three steps involved in the process of building up the surrogate world give rise to a corresponding contraction and deterioration of the real one. Economic growth, in terms of which the former process is measured, is thereby biological and social contraction and deterioration. They are just different sides of the same coin.

Unfortunately, we are part of the real world, not the surrogate one. In fact, we have been designed phylogenetically (and at one time culturally, too) to fulfil within it specific differentiated functions. It would be very naive to suppose that its systematic destruction would not affect us in some way. To understand exactly how, we must consider the basic features of the real world. Unfortunately, these tend to be disregarded by most of today's scientists, who are more concerned with accumulating trivia than in understanding basic principles.

The most basic principle of the behaviour of the biosphere is that it is goal-directed as can be shown to be the case with all the behavioural systems which comprise it. The goal is stability, which is defined as the ability of a system to maintain its basic structure in the face of change - and hence its continuity - or, in the widest sense of the term to survive. Stability is not a fixed point in space-time but a course or trajectory which a system must adopt in order to remain stable. By doing so, oscillations or discontinuities are reduced to a minimum.

It can be shown that primitive societies were geared to precisely this goal. The main preoccupation of their members was to observe their traditional customs and to hand them down as intact as possible to their children and to their children's children. It is only a very aberrant society such as ours that is geared to systematic change in a given direction and one that can survive for but a very limited period of time.

The second aspect of the biosphere which concerns us here, is that it is self-regulating, as are all the systems which constitute it. Control is achieved by detecting data relevant to the system's behaviour pattern, and interpreting them in terms of a model of its relationship with its environment.

This, in the case of a society, corresponds to its 'world view', in terms of which its policies are mediated and monitored. This notion of self-regulation is so important to the achievement of stability, that the two are normally included in the same concept of 'homeostasis'. If self-regulation is impaired and the system comes to be controlled externally (asystemically) by an agent outside the system and random to it, then there is no longer any mechanism for keeping it on its course towards stability.

Self-regulation was indeed a basic feature of primitive societies which were in fact remarkably well governed by public opinion and without the aid of formal institutions. Ours, on the other hand, are increasingly governed by external or asystemic agencies, dictators or vast bureaucracies, which are not subjected to the control of the social-system as a whole, for the latter has largely disintegrated into a structureless mass which no longer satisfies the requirements of a self-regulating system.

A further consequence of replacing systemic controls by asystemic ones, is that the normal relationship between a system and its sub-systems is interfered with. In the case of a social system this gives rise to motivational problems.

A self-regulating system displays order. This means that its parts are differentiated to fulfil specialised functions. They are thereby no longer autonomous. Instead they have become dependent on each other to fulfil that constellation of functions required for their common survival. In other words, they must co-operate with each other and behave in that way that will satisfy the requirements of the system of which they are a part, and hence contribute to the latter's stability or survival.

This they do, not because pressure is applied upon them to do so by some external agent, but because they have been designed phylogenetically and ontogenetically to fulfil the requisite differentiated functions. It is by fulfilling them, in fact, that their relationship with the various constituents of their environment is the most stable-that they are thereby best adjusted to their environment-that their needs are in fact best satisfied.

The operation of this principle at the level of the family is quite evident. Parents fulfil their normal functions by behaving in a particular way towards their spouses and children and thereby ensuring the survival of the family, because it is by so doing that they best satisfy their basic physical and psychological needs. It will be shown that the same principle applies to behaviour within any self-regulating system such as a community or an ecosystem. I refer to this as the 'hierarchical co-operation principle', which could be stated thus: in a self-regulating system, behaviour which satisfies the needs of the differentiated parts will also satisfy those of the whole.

This principle no longer applies in a modern industrial society, in which behaviour either satisfies, however badly, the needs of the part or of the whole but never both at once. Hence, Garrett Hardin's famous allegory The Tragedy of the Commons, which simply could not occur in a self-regulating social system.

The reason is that once a society has disintegrated, it ceases to provide its members with the optimum environment, that in which they can fulfil adaptively the functions they were designed for by their evolution and their upbringing. Once the environment fails to satisfy the needs of its members, they will cease to behave in that way which will lead to the stability of the larger system of which they are a part, or what is the same thing, of the environment it provides them with.

In a disintegrated society it is thus very difficult to obtain the co-operation of its members for any enterprise which is not specifically designed to satisfy individual interests which - because of the society's disintegration - now conflicts with those of the society as a whole. We are now, in fact, faced with a motivational problem which could not exist in a tribal society which is a sell-regulating system. Their co-operation can only be obtained by offering people a financial reward or, if the enterprise in question appears to be too contrary to their immediate interests, by coercion.

In other words, when a society ceases to be self-regulating, its behaviour is no longer based on the exploitation of existing social forces. To ensure its day-to-day functioning, and hence its survival - in the broader sense of the term - it must exploit forces which are external and random to the system (asystemic), and this causes serious problems.

First of all, to do so presents serious logistical problems, for the work involved increases correspondingly. Thus, as we take over an increasing number of functions from the self-regulating mechanisms of nature, such as the control of pests, the fertilisation of the soil, the management of water resources and the government of human societies, our work load increases correspondingly.

What is more there is a limit to the workload we can undertake. Indeed, the signs are that we are already overstretched and that neither available capital, nor physical resources-to mention but two factors involved, can allow us to take over any more of the functions that are still fulfilled by nature's self-regulating mechanisms. As was pointed out in the SCEP report, were we to decide that the pollination of plants by bumble bees was old-fashioned and inefficient and that it would be advantageous for us to assume this function, even were we to have at our disposal the most ingenious technological devices, we could not do so for more than an insignificant period, for the logistical problems involved would be insuperable. [2]

To fully understand the extent of these logistical problems, we must consider just how rudimentary are our asystemic controls, when compared with the systemic ones of nature. As already pointed out, the biosphere, or real world, is an organisation. The importance of this notion of organisation cannot be over-emphasised.

Consider that human beings are made up of a small and very unimpressive array of raw materials. They are 80 per cent water and the market value of the chemicals used in their production is not much in excess of £1. However, 300 million years of evolutionary research and development have gone into organising them in such a way that they give rise to highly complex and sophisticated living creatures such as human beings. Now consider how unimpressive would be the most sophisticated human artefact which could be produced from the same materials.

It must follow that when one has at one's disposal a limited quantity of materials - which must be the case at the best of times, since our world is a closed system from the point of view of materials (though an open one from the point of view of energy) - it is incomparably more efficient to use them in such a way that they enter into the building up of the real world rather than of the surrogate one - and hence that they give rise to systemic rather than asystemic processes.

The problem multiplier

We have seen that in a self-regulating system, behaviour satisfies both the needs of the part and of the whole - in other words, it satisfies the needs of all the separate interrelated parts of the system. We have seen that this is no longer the case once a system has disintegrated. Responses now satisfy but a single need. Such responses must nevertheless affect in one way or another, the other different parts of a system.

As Garrett Hardin puts it, "You can't do only one thing", and since the things we are doing are random at best, damaging at worst, to the other parts of the system, they must cause a corresponding number of maladjustments. Asystemic processes and controls, thereby, have side effects. Systemic ones do not. All secondary effects are useful, indeed necessary. The former in fact, are problem multipliers, the 'Tatter solution multipliers'.

What is more, the maladjustments they all give rise to will tend to be cumulative, for as further asystemic controls are introduced, so must the surrogate world build up correspondingly, which in turn must cause our environment (made up of the shrinking real world and the growing surrogate world) to divert ever more radically from that to which we have been adapted phylogenetically and ontogenetically, and which must thereby constitute our optimum environment.

The same is true with regard to social problems whose incidence is becoming increasingly intolerable, such as crime, delinquency, alcoholism, drug addiction and vandalism. These are the symptoms of social maladjustment, caused by the disintegration of our social environment and the modification of its physical infrastructure, so that they divert ever further from the optimum - that to which we have been adapted phylogenetically, and are capable of adapting to ontogenetically.

It is also realistic to regard the increased rate of extinction of plant and animal species as the symptoms of ecological maladjustment. The corollary of this: the increased incidence and seriousness of population explosions among micro-organisms, leading to plant and animal epidemics (some of which are resulting in their extinction), and among plants and animals, in particular humans and their parasites also fall within this category, all are due to the increasing diversion of ecosystems from the phylogenetic norm, as a result of the ever increasing impact on them of the surrogate world.

Those inculcated with the world view of industrialism will object that in the case of humans, such maladjustments are not conceivable by virtue of their supposedly limitless capacity for adaptation. As Boyden points out, however, we only cherish this illusion because the term 'adaptation' has never been adequately defined. [3] Systemic processes are adaptive because they actually solve problems. Asystemic ones, in which category we must include the solutions we apply in our industrial society, can only 'solve' one problem at the cost of creating more and increasingly worse ones.

Quite apart from the fact that they do not work, as in evidenced by the fact that everywhere our problems are increasing, the capital and resources required in their application are ever less available. Boyden refers to them as pseudo-adaptations. They treat the symptoms, not the causes, and by masking them render the disease correspondingly more tolerable, thereby serving to perpetuate it. This is particularly the case with our state welfare system.

In reality, if the term 'adaptability' be used correctly, then it is clear that humans are no more adaptive than are other animals. In fact, they are considerably less adaptive than many micro-organisms - that is why waging chemical warfare against them is likely to do more biological damage to us than to the target species.

The solution

From the preceding analysis it should be clear that the problems facing the world today can only be solved by restoring the functioning of those natural systems which once satisfied our needs, i.e. by fully exploiting those incomparable resources which are individual people, families, communities and ecosystems, which together make up the biosphere or real world. Before we examine how this is to be done, let us first of all look into one or two of the many implications.

Clearly, this involves as it must do, moving towards a stable or steady-state society. This, however, has generally been associated with a stationary economy. However, though a society in which capital investment equalled depreciation, and births equalled deaths would be one of material equilibrium, it would not be a steady-state society. The impact of man's activities on natural systems - or "ecological demand", as it is referred to by SCEP, and in terms of which biological, social and ecological costs can be calculated, is cumulative (that is over and above the rate of natural recovery). This means that biological, social and ecological costs would continue to rise.

In a steady-state society, capital investment would equal depreciation, births would equal deaths, but the actual level of capital investment and births would be very considerably lower than at present - one that gave rise to an 'ecological demand' which could in fact be met, that is, one that was equal to the rate of natural recovery. In other words, what we must aim for is not growth, but negative growth, or economic and demographic contraction.

It may be argued that this is precisely what we are getting at the moment, since the oil crisis triggered off a world recession. Economic growth has, of course, resumed in the West, but the real standard of living has been falling in the USA since 1973. In Africa, per capita GNP has continued to fall each year. Economic contraction, however, must have a very different effect, in a society still effectually committed to economic growth - methodically nurturing those appetites whose satisfaction only growth can procure, from what it would in a society specifically geared to planned economic contraction.

The former situation must give rise to an ever-greater disequilibrium, the latter by adapting to inevitable realities, means systematically reducing it. One of the main barriers to the acceptance of such a programme is that economic contraction is viewed as synonymous with a reduction in 'wealth' and hence, in the 'standard of living'. If we believe this, it is once again because these terms have been so misleadingly defined. They are used as a measure of the benefits provided by the surrogate world, but not by the real world.

In our society the value of things is determined by the operation of the Law of Supply and Demand. Things only acquire value by being drawn into the economic system, and then by becoming scarce, for value in economics is marginal, not average, value. As Samuelson writes on this subject:

"The more there is of a commodity, the less the relative desirability of its last little unit becomes, even though its total usefulness always grows as we get more of the commodity. So, it is obvious why a large amount of water has a low price, or why air is actually a free good despite its vast usefulness. The many units pull down the value of all units." [4]

What is more, the contention by many economists that such "externalities" as clean air and uncontaminated water can be internalised, i.e. that they can be taken into account within the framework of modern economic theory would only be true if their real value were, in fact, quantifiable in money terms.

Money, however, is not the currency of nature, nor does nature obey the laws of modern economics. The benefits provided by the real world, such as clean air and uncontaminated water, are not obtainable in proportion to the amount of money spent on them. Money would only buy them if our technological controls were, in fact, effective, which we have seen they are not. Even if they were, money would only be useful once these commodities had been so depleted that they had thereby acquired a sufficient economic value to justify the appropriate expenditure on them.

If our notion of 'wealth' is so inaccurate, so is our notion of 'cost'. Only immediate monetary costs are taken into account by our economists. Damage done to societies and ecosystems is not taken into account. Yet these must at some later date become reflected in monetary costs-which explains in large measure the powerful inflationary trends of today (1975).

It is both ironic and frightening to think of the number of critical decisions taken today on the basis of cost-benefit analyses established by people who neither know what is a real 'cost' nor what is a real 'benefit'. In terms of real costs and benefits - those of the real world rather than of the surrogate one - a policy of de-industrialisation, it is easy to show, is the only one that can systematically increase our standard of living.

Population and consumption

It is maintained by some that because of our vast population, it is impractical to dispense with the industrial system. How would we feed so many people without industry, it is asked? This notion stems, partly at least, from the error of regarding food availability from the point of view of an isolated industrial country, rather than from that of the world as a whole.

An industrial country has so far been able to provide its inhabitants with more food than has been available to those of the so-called developing countries not because it produced more, but because it persuaded the latter to part with their food in exchange for manufactured goods - a process which is unlikely to be practicable for very much longer.

There is no reason to suppose that industrialisation permits increased food production, except perhaps in the very short term, for the inputs that it requires, apart from causing environmental damage which largely accounts for the diminishing returns encountered in their use, tire in limited supply, and their price must eventually become prohibitive. Already, no more than 10 to 15 percent of Indian farmers can afford artificial fertilisers.

On the contrary, industrialisation, i.e. the building up of the surrogate world, is only possible, as we have seen, at the expense of the real one from which our food is derived. The diversion from the latter of land, timber, water (which is particularly significant in tropical countries where it is often the limiting factor on food production) and, of course, labour (in particular in industrial countries), is seriously reducing food production, as has been shown in particular by Borgstorm. [5]

Seen in these terms, it must follow that the number of people the real world, taken as a whole, can support is inversely proportionate to its level of industrialisation. In fact, it is partly because of our massive population, rather than in spite of it, that de-industrialisation is our only possible course of action.

The individual as a resource

During the industrial age, it has become one of our principal preoccupations to use human labour as sparingly as possible, partly because it has become so expensive while other factors of production have been unrealistically cheap, partly too because we have come to value leisure, or non-work very highly, and to provide if has become one of the most generally accepted means of increasing a people's well-being.

Leisure, however, is only prized in those societies which share our notion of 'work' as distinct from other normal day-to-day activities. This notion does not exist in traditional societies, in which economic activities are carried out on a scale which makes them appear relevant to the business of everyday living. This tends to be confirmed by the fact that there is no word for 'work' in the language of tribal peoples.

It is important to note that our massive population provides us with a very considerable amount of non-polluting energy at no cost save in terms of the calories contained in the food which it would, in any case, probably consume. The principle that people must be made to work again with their hands and not just press buttons and pull levers has considerable implications. Let us not forget that most technological devices are needed specifically for the purposes of saving labour. Tractors, for instance, do not increase food production, they actually decrease it by compacting the soil and by depriving it of the dung which would otherwise have been provided by the horses and bullocks previously used in their place.

Herbicides are only useful because they save the labour involved in weeding. Other pesticides are largely necessary because our large expanses of monoculture provide such an excellent niche for pest populations and because by having abandoned rotation, the niche has become a permanent one. If we return to polyculture and crop rotation, we would need far fewer pesticides. I we also included legumes in our rotation and were energetic enough to spread cow dung on the fields rather than consigning it to the nearest waterway, we could largely dispense with fertilisers.

In hill areas, agriculture would benefit still more by labour-intensive methods, because terracing can only be maintained by human labour and without it, especially in tropical areas, the soil rapidly ends up at the bottom of the valley. A rough calculation suggests that it would suffice to increase the agricultural labour force in the UK by four or five times, to enable this country to forgo much of the input of machinery and chemicals which have been introduced over the last 30 years.

The consequent reduction in resources and hence the capital required, would have a solution multiplier effect. It would quite obviously be anti-inflationary. It would also create a vast number of new jobs. What is more, these would be much more stable ones than those available today in capital-intensive and hence non-sustainable, industrial enterprises. Our food production would also be put on a stabler basis. Its immense vulnerability to discontinuities of all sorts makes it only a question of time before a serious food shortage, if not starvation, actually occurs in one or more of the industrial countries of today. The same principle applies to manufacturing. By making it more labour-intensive, similar advantages can be obtained.

The family and the community

If individuals are organised in such a way that they constitute sell-regulating family and community systems, their value as a resource increases very significantly.

We have seen that all available labour must be fully exploited, but how do we pay for it? To give people a monetary wage would be no use unless it could be used to purchase consumer goods and services, many of which as we shall see, will have to be phased out. What then would they be working for? Their food and keep?

This smacks too much of slavery. If people cannot be given access to consumer goods and products as a reward for their work, they must be given something else in exchange. But what? There is only one possibility and that is satisfactions of a non-material kind. But what sort of satisfactions?

The answer is social ones. The satisfactions which are obtained by fulfilling one's functions as a member of a real family and community. This sounds absurdly idealistic in the materialistic world in which we live. It is, however, both practical and realistic. In terms of the hierarchical co-operation principle, behaviour in a stable system must satisfy the needs of both the parts and the whole. The former, as we have seen, fulfil those functions which will enable the latter to survive simply because it is in this way that their own needs are best satisfied. We have noted how this is the case in a stable family system and that it is also true in a community. What, however, are the practical implications?

The family in a stable society is an economic, as well as a biological and social unit. Polanyi and others have shown that in a traditional society, there is, in fact, no behaviour which could strictly speaking be termed 'economic' (designed to maximise the return on capital, or labour). [6]

The normal business of producing, manufacturing and selling things was done for social reasons such as to fulfil kinship obligations or to achieve prestige, which are people's dominant motivations in traditional societies. Specifically 'economic' behaviour is only a feature of a disintegrated society in which social considerations are subordinated to purely economic ones.

It is by increasing the scale of economic activities more than anything else that the family and the community have been so terribly disrupted. There is every reason to suppose that by reducing their scale so that they can be fulfilled at a family and at a community level, we could ensure the reintegration of the corresponding social systems.

This would have a key effect. Economic activity would once more be governed by the self-regulating mechanisms which were once built into the behaviour pattern of self-regulating families and communities. In other words people would no longer have to be paid and hence given access to vast quantities of consumer goods and services, which, as we shall see, will in any case no longer be available; or otherwise cajoled into fulfilling their economic tasks. These will be fulfilled automatically in the same way that people, even today, tend to fulfil those family functions that are required to assure the welfare of their families.

Even in recent times in the rural areas of our own industrial world, the value of work undertaken on a purely voluntary basis, largely as a means of acquiring social prestige, must not be underrated. In the UK many political and administrative functions are still fulfilled at a local level in this way, by unpaid Justices of the Peace, for example, and other local dignitaries.

To transfer these functions to a centralized bureaucracy has served no purpose other than to justify at vast cost our misguided notion of efficiency and social justice. The implementation of such a policy would have a solution multiplier effect of staggering proportions. Co-operation between the different members of a stable family would reduce very appreciably the following expenditures:

• Expenditure on domestic appliances and convenience foods, since all family members including children would be available to help with the household chores.
• Expenditure on housing, since one of the main causes of the housing shortage is the disintegration of the family unit, the number of people per house having fallen very considerably (in the UK by almost four times).
• Expenditure on education, since crèches and kindergartens would no longer be required, the family being in a position once more to undertake the earlier phases of their children's education. Educational costs would be significantly reduced with the reduction of emotional instability and delinquency, which are closely associated with family deprivation.
• Expenditure on medical services, in particular for old people who occupy an increasingly large proportion of hospital beds - not so much because they require medical treatment, but because the disintegration of the family unit means that there is nowhere for them to go.
• The cost of transport, let us not forget the enormous cost to the nation in terms of land wasted in building motorways and airports, in terms of the energy used to power our elaborate transport system; in terms of ecological damage done by the movement of livestock as well as people from areas where certain diseases are endemic, to other areas where the population - human and non-human - have not developed any resistance to the micro-organisms involved and vice versa.
• Expenditure on government, quite apart from the prohibitive costs of bad government, there is every reason to suppose that the only effective form of democracy is participatory rather than elective. It is an illusion to suppose that a society in which people's political obligations are limited to voting once every five years is self-governing except in name. Participatory democracy, in which all adult citizens take an active part in running their own affairs, is a different matter. This is only possible in a small community in which there is constant contact with other people, and in which public opinion is formed by the same cultural influences.

The ecosystem

The restoration of ecosystems to their original glory is quite clearly impossible. The impact of the world's massive population even with a radically lower level of consumption would be too great. To recreate its principal features is another question. To do so would radically reduce, among other things, expenditure on, and damage by, pesticides of all sorts.

In an untouched tropical forest, there are massive quantities of insects but there are no pests, for insect populations are controlled by self-regulating ecological mechanisms. To exploit the same principles of control in a much simplified agricultural ecosystem, it would suffice to reduce the size of fields, increase the amount of cover, plant many different crops instead of a single one, and adopt rotation. In this way variety, temporal as well as spatial, would be introduced, as in a natural ecosystem and with a similar stabilising effect.

Massive expenditure on unsatisfactory water development schemes could be replaced by replanting forests mainly in the watersheds of great rivers and along their banks, re-establishing marshlands and water-meadows all of which would increase the soil's capacity to retain water, prevent streams from drying up and assure optimum water levels. The best way of storing water is in the soil. Reservoirs are expensive, and they use up valuable agricultural land. In tropical areas they provide an ideal habitat for the vectors of infectious diseases like schistomosiasis and malaria, and much water is lost from them via evaporation. Also, by raising the water table they tend to give rise to waterlogging and salinity, both of which have seriously reduced agricultural production in many parts of the world.

In general, much of the poverty of the third world is the result of the terrible degradation of the natural environment as a result of deforestation and soil-erosion by wind and water. It can only be cured by a massive programme of re-afforestation and soil conservation, with the adoption of ecologically oriented agricultural techniques, together with the reduction of the scale of human economic activities, all of which would, as a result, have extensive solution multiplier effects.

Socio-economic decentralisation is a necessary condition for the reconstruction of the family and the community, but it is not sufficient. These basic units of social behaviour must be given once more the power and responsibility for dealing with problems that they have been designed biologically and culturally to deal with.

As we have seen, the family must be made responsible for dealing with what are specifically family problems. It must not export them, for instance by consigning children and old people to specialised state institutions. One cannot over-emphasise the role that has been played in the general deterioration of the world around us by individuals, families, communities and nations, systematically exporting their problems to each other. Legislative action, in many cases, would be required to prevent this from recurring, and to ensure that social systems at each level of organisation were responsible for the solution of their own problems.

One such problem is population growth-one of the most fundamental causes of the world's present plight. Our only method of dealing with it up to now has been to export surplus population to less populated lands. If this had not been possible, the Malthusian thesis would long ago have been vindicated. Ireland, for instance, has 3 million inhabitants, and already much poverty and unemployment. Imagine what it would be like today, if she had not exported such a large proportion of her population to the US - there are said to be 14 million Americans of Irish origin, while half the land area of the world, including Siberia, has been occupied by Europeans.

If we have got away with covering our best agricultural land with asphalt, it is because we have been able to persuade non-industrial countries to provide us with their food (which, they badly need themselves) in return for our largely superfluous manufactured goods. Thirty five per cent of India's exports are agricultural produce. We have thereby effectively exported to them our agricultural land, and so far it is they who have starved, and not us.

Pollution is another problem whose main solution, as we have seen, is to export it elsewhere. A good example is Britain, which prides itself on the fact that sulpphur dioxide levels have been falling, but this is only true because very high chimneys have been built which allow it to drift across the North Sea to Scandinavia where it is stunting the growth of crops and trees.

So long as social groups can get away with exporting their problems elsewhere, there does not appear to be any reason for them to make any effort to solve them.

It is also true that the real significance of the problems involved is not evident unless they are reduced to a scale that makes them appear relevant to the business of every-day living to which the preoccupations of the vast majority of people are confined.

This is one of the main reasons why important problems must be dealt with at the lowest possible level. A social group will only take the necessary action to control its population, to prevent the destruction of agricultural land, and to prevent other forms of pollution, when it fully realises that if it does not do so, nobody else will; its welfare, indeed its very survival depends entirely on its ability to fulfil these functions as effectively as possible.

But there is a corollary to this principle. If people are to accept responsibility for the solutions to their problems, these must be of their own creation and not of other people's. This means that central government can no longer impose any development plans on a local community, which can seriously affect their lives. If the government wishes to build a motorway or a power station, or if a commercial enterprise decides to put up a factory, this must first be accepted by the communities likely to be affected. It is to be noted that something approaching this system is already in force in Switzerland.

A further implication of the same principle, and one which we are likely to find still less acceptable in terms of the ideas of today, is that people are likely to be unwilling to make the effort required to control their population if, at the same time, more people come from the outside. If they are to be responsible for the measures necessary to reduce their own population, they must also be responsible for those which would increase it. This means that a community must be relatively closed - a principle which runs quite contrary to the most cherished ethical ideals of today.

Interestingly enough, this also is largely the case in Switzerland from whose decentralised political system we have so much to learn. It is, needless to say, the case in traditional rural societies in which the village a person belongs to, even if he or she no longer lives there, contributes to providing him or her with an identity, as does the family to which he or she belongs. (In India a man's full name consists of the name of his father, his village, his personal name, and that of his sub-caste.)

If a community is to be an effective social system, then its members must be closely associated with each other in a large number of different ways, so that the bonds required to assure its cohesion can be properly established. What is more, for these bonds to be truly effective, it is likely that they should have developed over a long period, preferably since childhood. An educational system, in a traditional human society (as in one of non-human animals) is designed to assure the socialisation of its members. Its object is to communicate to children those values which will enable them to fulfil their functions as members of their family and community (a principle which our educationalists have long ago lost sight of).

A community need not be totally closed, a certain number of 'foreigners' could be allowed to settle but again, as in Switzerland, they would not, thereby, partake in the running of the community until such time as the citizens elected them to be of their number.

It is only in this way that a decentralised society can be created, in which the extraordinary resources provided by self-regulating family communities and ecological systems are fully exploited to satisfy real human needs. The question is, how is the critical transition to such a society to be achieved? The answer is, only by the adoption of a carefully integrated programme, and we must assume, however unlikely it may be that it will be adopted by the government of a major industrial nation.

The programme, as we shall see, will have to be divided into distinct parts. These will all be initiated at the same time, though they will proceed at a different pace as they encounter different degrees of inertia. By its very nature, however, the programme would have to be stretched out over a considerable period of time. One cannot transform a society overnight in an orderly way. In addition, the programme would have to be accepted as a whole. One cannot phase out non-sustainable activities without causing all sorts of problems such as inflation and unemployment, unless at the same time one phases in, to replace them, other more sustainable ones. Nor can one phase in the latter without first phasing out the former so as to free labour and resources for this purpose.

For that reason, it is naive to suppose that a government elected for a five year period can implement anything more than a patchwork of short-term expedients. It is essential that it obtain from the electorate a mandate to implement at least the first part of the programme. To obtain such a mandate, it must first of all make the electorate clearly aware of the extreme gravity of the global situation and hence of its own national one-which so far, governments throughout the world have systematically played down.

The programme

If the programme is to be fully integrated it must be designed to reverse all the essential trends set in motion by the industrial process. This can be shown to consist of six functionally distinct stages (though it is not suggested that they actually occur in that order, since positive feedback would have caused them to be constantly affecting each other).

Let us consider the nature of these stages. The first stage is the development of the very specific world view, whose main features we have already described. As Weber was the first to point out, without such a world view, first entertained by the non-conformists and in particular the Quakers in England, there would probably have been no industrialization. [7]

A new world view must replace it. A study of the value-systems of traditional stable societies reveals that though they may vary in many details, their basic features are very similar. In fact it can be shown that, for society to remain stable, a number of basic principles must underlie the world view upon which is based its stable relationship with its social and physical environment.

Let us briefly consider the basic principles underlying the aberrant world view of industrialism, in order to see how they may be modified to give rise to an adaptive and hence stable social behaviour pattern.

• Humanism

  It is essential to the world view of industrialism that humans should not be regarded as an integral part of nature but rather as above it, and thereby largely exempt from the laws governing the behaviour of other forms of life on this planet. To justify this, one can postulate a number of abstract entities whose possession by humans is supposed to distinguish them from the other less fortunate forms of life. Thus only humans have a soul, they alone display consciousness, their behaviour is supposed to be intelligent, while that of other forms of life is said to be governed by "blind" instinct. Only human societies are supposed to be capable of cultural behaviour.

  Such notions are unknown among stable societies for whom nature is holy and cannot be disrupted without incurring the wrath of the gods. It is by de-sanctifying nature that it has become socially feasible to destroy it, and by sanctifying human progress in its stead that the process has been able to proceed at the present disastrous pace. For humanism we must substitute naturalism - respect for the natural world of which we are an integral but only a modest part.

• Individualism

  Individualism is the notion that a person's duties are primarily to him or herself. It is in keeping with our total ignorance of the nature of the natural systems of which we are a part: the family, the community and ecosystem and of how they are related to each other. For an individual to be a member of a community, his or her behaviour must be subjected to the appropriate set of constraints. A community is an organisation. As such it displays order, defined as the influence of the whole over the parts. This influence is achieved by subjecting the parts to constraints which will limit their range of choices by causing them to become differentiated.

  Individualism is another word for chaos. It is unacceptable in a stable self-regulating society, as it is in any stable self-regulating natural system. For individualism we must substitute oommunitarianism - the need to subject what may appear to be our individual interests to those of the community and the ecosystem.

• Materialism

  Materialism is closely related to individualism. In traditional societies people's goals are largely social. The accumulation of material goods plays no part in the strategy of their lives. Material goods only become necessary when they are required for the purpose of satisfying biological and social needs. Karl Marx was wrong when he referred to religion as the opiate of the people. People have always been religious. Religion is an essential part of their sociability which assures the stability of their social environment. It is not religion, in fact, but materialism that is the opiate of the people.

• Scientism

  Scientism is the notion that scientific knowledge can serve as the basis for social and ecological control. Let us not forget that there is no precedent for stable societies based on objective scientific information. Until now they have invariably been based on traditional and very subjective information designed to adapt a particular society to its specific environment, rather than all societies to all environments. It can be shown that only such cultural information satisfies basic cybernetic requirements.

  As this becomes generally realised, so must one develop increasing respect for the information organised into the cultural pattern of remaining traditional societies. This is essential to the task of social decentralisation. For scientism, in fact, we must substitute culturalism.

• Technologism

  The notion that there is a technological solution to all our problems is a myth closely associated with scientism, since the only solutions which scientific information can give rise to are technological ones. These, however can play no part in the strategy of nature. We must develop instead a quasi-religious respect for the natural systems that make up the biosphere, whose normal functioning provides the only lasting solution to such problems.

• Institutionalism

  This myth is also closely related to the preceding ones. If benefits are material and technological, then one must create the optimum conditions in which they can be dispensed. Such conditions do not exist in the home, or in a vernacular community. Therefore institutions are set up to provide them. Ignorance of social and ecological cybernetics leads to the essential self-regulating nature of natural systems being ignored, while it is assumed that their control can be more effectively assured by institutions, i.e. external or asystemic controls. For institutionalism we must also substitute a respect ft)r the self-regulating nature of natural systems-a key component of culturalism and ecologism, i.e. of ecosystems and society (like organisms and families) to themselves.

• Economism

  Economism is the notion that things must be done because they are economic, i.e. so as to maximise the return on capital or on other factors of production. This notion is totally consistent with the others. If all benefits are material, technological or institutional then this must be the means of maximising them and hence of best promoting human welfare. For economism must be substituted ecologism, the notion that things must be done to satisfy not a single end but all the basic and often competing requirements of the community and its natural environment.

Reform of the educational system would also be required to assure the general adoption of the new world view. It would have to become considerably more decentralised, and the curriculum would also be changed so that the accent might shift from the random accumulation of data to the acquisition of the cultural information favouring the appropriate socialisation process.

The second stage in the implementation of our plan is the development of the technology required for achieving its goals. What is required is a shift-from capital intensive industry to developing the 'appropriate' technology for decentralised living.

The third stage is the transformation of society so that instead of satisfying the requirements of the production-consumption process, it would once more be composed of people who are above all, members of families, communities and ecosystems, and whose behaviour is basically that required to satisfy the requirements of these systems and hence of the larger system of which they are a part, the biosphere. The process will come about automatically as society is decentralised and conditions are created in favour of the restoration of the family, the community, and the ecosystem, at which point economic activities will gradually become subordinated to social ones.

The fourth stage is to reverse the system of capital generation, by means of the production-consumption process. Some capital will undoubtedly be required to finance the early stages of the programme designed to prevent social and economic collapse, and to modify the infrastructure of society in such a way as to favour its decentralisation. Slowly the need for capital will be reduced as systemic resources replace asystemic ones.

The fifth stage is the reversal of the process which built up the surrogate world by radically reducing the scale of the production process and producing goods that are ever less destructive to the natural environment.

The sixth stage is the disruption caused by the fifth which, as we have seen, we interpret in such a way as to justify technological, material and institutional solutions which means further expanding the production process. This means reducing the scale of technological activities to permit the restoration of the self-regulating social systems which make up the real world, on the basis of whose normal functioning these problems could be solved.

The government should set up a separate department to supervise the implementation of each of the six stages of de-industrialisation, in line with the requirements of our programme.

Tactics

It is unlikely that any government will adopt such a programme until such time as the socio-economic system has still further deteriorated. Its first urgent task would be to prevent the collapse of the economy and also that of the society which has become its appendage. This calls for a considerable investment programme aimed at providing the necessary employment but designed to satisfy, at the same time, a number of other associated ends.

Thus this employment must be as labour-intensive as possible - it would probably have to be in any case, since there would not be the resources for capital-intensive employment. Available capital must be put at the disposal of the different ministries dealing with the six different stages of the de-industrialisation process so that their efforts may be synchronised.

The problem of energy will be a pressing one, though it will decrease as the programme gets under way and our need for asystemic energy will correspondingly be reduced. Investment on increased insulation of houses will be an obvious first step. Another will be the decentralisation of power generation. This will involve the dismantling of the grid system and its replacement by small total energy systems (designed to use waste heat for local heating purposes). MacKillop has suggested that 2MW generators producing as much as 4MW of heating capacity and catering for some 500 homes would be most appropriate. [8]

Investment in other marginal energy sources such as windmills, water wheels, and solar collectors will also be justified, regardless of whether such devices are economic initially. Although they would account for only a very small proportion of initial energy consumption they will be capable of producing a substantial proportion of the much lower energy consumption which we must aim for.

The general adoption of these new devices will play an important pad in changing attitudes to energy consumption, and to the values of industrialism in general. Already they have become the symbols of the new ecological sub-culture which is fast developing, rather as the charkha is the symbol of Gandhiism.

A further necessary investment is the separation of domestic from industrial waste. At present human sewage, which with labour intensive agriculture would be systematically returned to the land, tends to be polluted with industrial waste. By avoiding this, composting plants can be set up at village and town level, and compost can be made generally available to farmers and gardeners.

At the domestic level the composting lavatory would be introduced to replace that most iniquitous device, the flush toilet, thereby reducing domestic water consumption, making compost available for agricultural purposes, and preventing the pollution of waterways.

Phasing out labour-saving technology

In many cases, the phasing out of labour-saving technology will have to be undertaken as a matter of urgency, simply in order to prevent the collapse of key services, which can no longer be sustained on the present capital-intensive basis. The cost of the educational system in both the UK and the US has been rising much faster than GNP.

In the UK the point has now been reached where it has become seriously short of capital. Predictably the reaction is to reduce the number of teachers rather than abandon the use of the elaborate and totally unnecessary technological equipment (language laboratories, audio visual aids, computers, etc.) with which they have been equipped during the last decades. This extraordinary misguided set of priorities must be reversed. The equipment is expendable - schools without teachers just do not work.

The inputs to modern agriculture are not only increasingly costly, but their supply is particularly precarious. Shortages of fertilisers and pesticides are becoming increasingly common. Phosphates mainly come from Morocco and could be cut off at a moment's notice for political or other reasons.

The oil requirements of modern agriculture are notoriously high. It is variously estimated that 5-10 units of fossil fuels are required in the US to produce one unit of food energy. In the interests of avoiding serious discontinuities, agricultural machinery and chemicals must be phased out as rapidly as possible. This will of course have a solution multiplier effect by creating employment, restoring local communities and reducing pollution.

These processes will occur anyway, as the price of capital equipment becomes prohibitive. It is simply a question of accelerating them and synchronising them with those other measures which would make available the trained labour force together with the appropriate small-scale technology it would require to replace capital-intensive inputs.

Fiscal measures should be introduced to accelerate this trend. This would include two taxes proposed in A Blueprint for Survival. [9]

1. A raw materials tax. This would be proportionate to the availability of the raw material in question, and would be designed to enable our reserves to last over an arbitrary period of time, the longer the better, on the principle that during this time our dependence on such raw materials would be reduced.
2. An amortisation tax. This would be proportionate to the estimated life of the product, thus it would be 100 percent for products designed to last no more than a year, and would then be progressively reduced to zero percent for those designed to last 100 or more years. Obviously this would penalise short-lived products, especially disposable ones, thereby reducing resource utilisation and pollution. Plastics, for example, which are so remarkable for their durability, would be used only in products where this quality is valued, and not for single-trip purposes. This tax would also encourage craftsmanship and employment-intensive techniques in general.

In addition:

3. A transport tax would encourage the use of local products which are also likely to be less energy intensive and of a more renewable nature.
4. A legal amortisation rate for equipment that would have to be phased out as a result of the implementation of this programme could be appropriately raised.

The adoption of these measures would give rise to at least three problems:

1. Producers would experience difficulty in competing with foreign companies using more capital intensive methods. The solution lies in persuading other countries to adopt the same programme. This may not be so difficult because its adoption in one country would go a long way towards causing others to do likewise. In any case, a discriminatory import duty could be exacted on the produce of countries which had failed to adopt such a policy.
2. Prices are likely to rise because of the increased cost of production, though this is only true vis-a-vis what they once were, not what they would have been, had the programme not been adopted.
3. The consequent fall in output would make it no longer possible to pay people the same wage. Such a situation could provide an opportunity for initiating the phasing out of disruptive social services, to make people realize what these extremely inefficient over-centralized state services actually cost them and their families in terms of taxes they have to pay to finance them and the inflationary pressures they give rise to. It should not be difficult to persuade people to forgo their claims on such services in return for a cash payment which could be but a fraction of the per family cost (especially in view of the increasingly low quality of the services provided). This payment would partly at least compensate people for their reduced purchasing power. Providing people with more money in this way would not be inflationary, since, by the same token, we would reduce government expenditure by a greater amount.

At the same time, a considerable effort would be made to change the pattern of consumption so that money could be diverted from the purchase of capital-intensive goods and services to that of more labour-intensive ones. In an industrial society, consumer products are acquired less for the comfort and convenience they might procure than for reasons of social prestige. This being so, to bring about changes in this pattern of consumption, it would suffice to induce corresponding changes in the determinants of social prestige.

The advertising industry has perfected the art of obtaining the connivance of socially prestigious figures in bringing about changes in consumption patterns favouring the commercial success of particular wares. Their services could be obtained for bringing about in similar manner, changes to the present pattern of consumption which favour the success of our programme. The changes required are in any case those already under way as part of the growing reaction to the industrial way of life. Let us consider some of them.

In the last few years 'self-sufficiency' has become an 'in' word. More and more people grow their own fruit and vegetables. This trend could be radically accelerated. We could follow the example of Italy where 5 million urban dwellers still indulge in part-time agriculture. People could be encouraged to acquire small-holdings in rural areas. The current tendency toward favouring large agricultural enterprises fiscally and otherwise could and indeed must, be reversed. If this were generalised, it would have an impressive solution multiplier effect by leading people to identify themselves with rural communities.

It would also provide them with a new interest in life, a veritable new goal structure, all of which is of key importance to people lost in the anonymous world of large cities and increasingly deprived of any purpose in life. At the same time, more allotments must be created near city centres. They should be regarded as a high priority land us. More and more space could be allocated to this end, as the infrastructure of industrial society is gradually dismantled. All this could be encouraged in many ways. Gardening and agriculture could play an important part in the curricula of schools, and school time could be allocated to work on allotments or farms.

Also, as a reaction to industrially produced food, there is a growing interest in cooking, a creative and satisfying occupation, which should also figure prominently in school curricula. Cooking schools should also be opened for adults. Cooking skills could figure advantageously among the desirable social accomplishments of our post-industrial society, as indeed they did in the pre-industrial one. Another desirable accomplishment is the playing of musical instruments. An orchestra, however amateurish, makes a greater contribution to a festive occasion than does the most elaborate juke box or hi-fi set.

What is, in fact, required is the ritualisation of economic activity, in the sense in which aggression can be ritualised - that is to say by channelling it in those directions which cause the minimum damage to the social and physical environment. This means producing goods and services which are not only labour intensive, and make use of naturally occurring materials, but which have a largely aesthetic and ritualistic appeal, instead of those which are purely utilitarian and which are much more destructive, both directly and indirectly, by usurping functions that should be fulfilled by families and communities.

This principle, needless to say, goes quite contrary to the utilitanan ethic, which is so strong in such countries as the UK that anything that is aesthetically pleasing tends to be regarded as immoral. As our programme is implemented, conditions will increasingly favour the "ritualization of economic activity".

But what happens to those who are already unemployed and those who might lose their employment, in spite of the measures we would take to prevent it? The only solution that satisfies the other requirements of the programme would be to enrol them into a new organisation, which could be known as the 'Restoration Corps'.

Its role would be primarily to clean up the mess left by a century and a half of industrialisation - restore derelict land, replant hedgerows, restore forests, clean up tips where poisonous waste threatens ground water reserves.

The Restoration Corps would fulfil those uneconomic tasks necessary for the success of our programme, so that normal employment would not be adversely affected. It would be organised into local groups, each one responsible for work in its own home area. This is important, since more enthusiasm can be mobilised for cleaning up one's own locality than somebody else's and life in the Corps must be made as attractive as possible since the financial rewards would be minimal.

All unemployed people would automatically have to join the Restoration Corps, unemployment benefits being altogether eliminated. This is very important since unemployment is not merely a question of material but also of social deprivation, leading to loss of self-esteem, and causing demoralisation, broken marriages and social deviancy. In this way the welfare system could be further dismantled.

After graduating from the Restoration Corps, a young person would be made to serve in the Defence Corps, a militia equipped with light weapons only, and organised on a local basis, with periods of duty for several weeks each year, as in the Swiss Army. The present massive expenditure on armaments together with the growing role it plays in international trade, is one of the scandals of our time.

Heavy equipment is unnecessary for the defence of one's homeland. The Vietnam War saw the victory of people over machines. It showed that a peasant army, if its morale is high enough, can defeat an army equipped with the most sophisticated weaponry.

Both the local Restoration Corps and the local Defence Corps would help build up local patriotism and the spirit of public service which are quite essential for the effective decentralisation of society.

The phasing out of consumer products

As the programme is implemented, so would people have less money to spend on consumer products. This means that at the same time the need for consumer products must be correspondingly diminished, which, as we have seen, could only be done by restoring the functioning of those natural systems which once provided the benefits for which consumer products provide mere compensations.

One of the most important ways of achieving this is by removing such compensations in as painless a manner as possible. Thus, by reducing the number of consumer goods which people require, it would no longer be necessary for two members of the same family to go out to work.

It is also only in this way that small farms could conceivably survive, for although a small farm can provide a satisfying way of life, it cannot supply the financial surplus necessary to satisfy today's consumption pattern. The same principle holds good for artisans and small shopkeepers. The maintenance of today's consumption pattern is equally incompatible with the survival of the ecosystems which make up the real world.

The consumer goods we wish to phase out must simply be removed from the market. Taxing them is not sufficient, as they would possibly still be regarded as desirable acquisitions, while their growing inaccessibility would lead people to feel that without them their standard of living was correspondingly low. By removing them from the market, on the other hand, life styles would change to accommodate their absence and the cost of living would thereby be reduced.

Since consumer goods start off as luxuries and gradually become necessities, as life styles change to accommodate them, we would have to start off by phasing out luxuries which have not yet been transformed into necessities. In this category one can include colour television sets, private motor yachts, snowmobiles, large automobiles, videotape recorders, electric toothbrushes, electric carving knives, etc. From the point of view of the consumer this is unlikely to cause too great a hardship.

From the point of view of the producer, it would undoubtedly do so if other activities were not phased in to replace their manufacture. This, however, presents few problems, in view of the massive new investment programme, described above, in more desirable and sustainable enterprises.

To suggest that dish-washing machines and other domestic appliances should be phased out, would obviously meet with instant opposition. They may be needed in a family consisting of but two or three people and in which both husband and wife must go out to work. They would become quite unnecessary, however, once the family had become re-established and eight to ten people once more inhabited the same house, and also once each family required but a single wage earner for ifs support. The gradual phasing out of luxury consumer products would have a solution multiplier effect.

In all these ways we would slowly achieve the Gandhian ideal for a nation state as an association of "village republics" loosely organised into larger social groupings, and in which economic activities were carried out on the smallest possible scale, so as to interfere as little as possible with the social and physical environment.

What is particularly important is that popular enthusiasm should be aroused for the social philosophy which underlies this programme. At present there is considerable disenchantment with the benefits of modern industry, while conventional wisdom is losing much of its credibility. It is but a question of time for this disenchantment to yield to total disillusionment, and for conventional wisdom to become correspondingly discredited in the face of the ever more obvious failure of the expedients it prescribes for solving our worsening problems.

At some point, panic will set in and people will grope about frantically for an alternative social philosophy with an alternative set of solutions. The most attractive is likely to be the most radical-the one which provides the best vehicle for expressing the reaction to the values of industrialism. The ecological social philosophy best answers these requirements.

Right and left wing movements provide but alternative recipes for baking the industrial cake and alternative ways of distributing its slices. We would be offering a totally different cake, the only one whose ingredients are likely to be available, also the only one that can satisfy our real needs and those of society and the world of living things on which we depend for our welfare, indeed for our very survival.

References