A Proper Stewardship

Keith MacLeod

1990

Published in:

The Northwest Technocrat, 3rd quarter 1990, No. 320
This article is adapted from a public lecture.

Technocracy had its beginning just after the conclusion of the First World War with a group of people who helped direct the war industries of World War I. Some fifteen men and one woman, in the winter of 1918-19 in New York city, were led by Howard Scott, a young engineering scientist in his 20's, into organizing what became known as the Technical Alliance. Those engineers, mathematicians, architects, foresters, statisticians, educators, physicists, chemists, physicians and others, had been working in their professional capacities directly or indirectly, for the federal government during World War I. To name a few: Dr. Charles P. Steinmetz, the wizard of the General Electric company; Dr. Richard Tolman, physicist, and during World War II, chairman of the National Research Board. Leland Olds, who President Roosevelt made chairman of the Federal Power Commission during the 1930s and 1940s. There was the president of the American Institute of Architects, the Chief of the Bureau of Chemistry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dr. Alice Barrows Fernandes, who became Chief of the Division of Design of school buildings for the United States for the office of Education, and Professor Thorstein Veblen, an economist. Those people, and others who worked with them, were not a group of wishful thinking philosophers, but, instead, were a nucleus of trained professionals. Those trained professionals had recognized what could be accomplished in coordinating the nation's resources for war, and under Howard Scott's leadership they set out to investigate the possibility and feasibility of coordinating the nation's resources in peace time. They wanted to understand what was needed in order to eliminate waste, increase technical efficiency, mechanize industry to reduce man-hours and multiply production so that a higher standard of living could be provided for everyone, not just the favored few. That was how the idea of Technocracy got its start.

From time immemorial, all the things that had to be done were accomplished by human muscle power plus a few domesticated animals. Meanwhile, a few innovative minds were thinking that there must be a better way, an easier way, to accomplish work. And, over a long period of time, those inventive minds produced the where-with-all that allowed man to elevate himself above the other animal species of the world.

Now, among the ecological associations of the world, man is the most dominant animal species, except in a few areas where he has not penetrated in large numbers. Although man has been a component part of the balance of nature, it was not until quite recently in his history that he became a disturbing influence to that balance. Because of his greater innate intelligence and his inventiveness, as well as his social organization, man was able to tilt the dynamic balance more and more in his favor.

The invention of weapons and tools, the use of fire, the development of language as a means of communication and social memory gave man a decided advantage in the struggle for survival over other animals of comparable or even larger size. The domestication of plants and animals and other technological developments accelerated this advantage through the centuries until, now, man has become almost everywhere the most dominant species in the environment, if not in numbers at least in the effect which he has produced. During ninety-eight percent of man's seven thousand years of civilized existence on the earth, this technological process was so slow that the disturbance of the ecological balance was only of a minor magnitude and only local in its effect. But the last two percent of that time, the last 140 years, tells a far different story.

During this time man has become a plague upon the earth. He has exterminated and exhausted many species which roamed the earth, flew the sky or swam the waters by the hundreds of millions. He has ploughed up the sod and slashed away at the plant growth until many areas which were once verdant with forests and grasses are now desolate. The ecological environment in which man as a species can flourish is now shrinking because of his own careless behaviour. Man has also let his population increase to the point where it has become self-destructive. He must not only combat the other elements of the environment in order to survive, he must battle within his own species to determine which individuals and which groups are to survive.

No matter how one tries to rationalize the value of human life, one cannot escape the conclusion there are just too many human beings on the earth. As a result of this over-burden of population, the destruction of forests and other organic life which is consumed in the process of human living is, in many instances, greater than the replacement of the particular species involved. For example, over-grazing of the rangeland in the western United States has so reduced the edible plants and so eroded the soil that the rangeland will not support more than a fraction of the livestock it did several decades ago, and the people of North America are cutting down the forests faster than they are being replenished. Even certain species of life in the ocean are becoming exhausted, not only the great whales, but certain species of shell-fish and true-fishes used for food.

It is not only organic factors of the environment that are being disturbed by man's recent activities on the earth, but the disturbance extends to the inorganic elements as well. Through millions of years, the earth has been saturated with water below a certain level. This level is known as the water table. Man has disturbed this ground water in a great many places. He has instituted drainage to remove surplus water from the surface which has resulted in a lowering of the water table. He has destroyed the plant cover in many areas, and this permits a more rapid run-off; hence less water seeps into the ground. He has drilled wells and pumped water out of the ground at a faster rate than it has been replaced by natural means. He has diverted many lakes and streams and underground flows into the water mains of large cities and increased the population of the cities beyond the capacities of the water to supply their needs. Thus, in many areas where there was adequate water to supply a moderate population on a long-term basis, there is now a deficiency of water because of the uncontrolled increase of the population and the short-sighted exploitation of the water resources.

Another inorganic factor which man is misusing is the arable soil of the earth. It is estimated that about a fourth of the original area having arable soil has been ruined, with a large part of the remainder damaged. On the basis of suitable land area alone there are already six hundred million more people on earth than the soil can feed with a decent diet -- but the population is increasing at the rate of more than 98 million per year.

During his industrial growth, and motivated by the wasteful practices of business exploitation, man has become profligate in the use of many minerals. A number of these most critical minerals are nearing the state of deficiency and some are rapidly approaching exhaustion. For example, the United States can no longer meet its own internal consumption in some strategic minerals and must import, in some cases, from sources that may not remain friendly. What was once the most handsomely endowed land area anywhere on this planet, is rapidly approaching the status of being a have-not area. We have exported our know-how; we have exported our technology, and the developing world is now installing the most up-to-date technological equipment that is turning out finished products far cheaper than our own internal obsolescent equipment can even approach.

It is of little moment, in the long run, whether the human species of this Continent can maintain its present industrial pace for another ten years or another hundred. The important thing that we are attempting here is a long-range projection of man's ecological trend, especially as it pertains to the North American Continent. This much we can say for sure: man will not be able to live on the North American Continent for the next generation as he has lived for the past generation. He has been far too prodigal with his heritage; this has left him in the position of being repudiated by his environment. The people of North America cannot continue for even a few more years at their present magnitude of free enterprise operation. The environment will not supply the raw materials for this type of human onslaught for long. What the future of the people living on the Continent will become is something fearful to contemplate, yet the North American citizen, instead of acknowledging the facts and recognizing the trend, is blindly and blatantly going ahead to increase the very factors which are contributing most to the downfall of this vaunted civilization. Man, under his present mode of operation, may not long be the climax species in the environment. He is a transitional species for he is taking more from the environment than is being replaced. He is scheduled therefore, in the course of events, to lose his dominant position in the environment, perhaps to be superceded by something else. Whether that something else is insect or rodent or weed does not much matter once man succumbs. The same factors that are pointing in a downward direction on the North American Continent also apply in a greater or lesser degree to other parts of the world.

A few students of human affairs recognize what is happening and make a fairly accurate analysis of the situation. Their prescriptions are clear. Their analyses of the prevailing trends and appraisals of the danger leave no doubt as to the probability of dire consequences, and their warnings are almost hysterical. But when it comes to giving a synthesis for survival most of their suggestions are puerile or fantastic. They lack the realism and boldness of concept the analyses demand.

And it is a very sad commentary on the intelligence of the human species that it is not able to plan adequately for its own survival. Now that civilized man has become dominant in the organic world and has every advantage, it seems paradoxical that he should be headed pell-mell for oblivion.

The picture might indeed be bleak except for the thinking of one man. One man had the intelligence, the strategical genius and the integrity to develop an idea for human survival that is in harmony with the facts and with the social needs of man. Howard Scott worked out a strategy for a social operation that could be blueprinted into a social plan for the North American Continent. His idea, in time, became known as Technocracy.

Technocracy repudiates the assertion that man is incapable of a proper stewardship of this planet. Technocracy maintains that it is possible for man to remain the dominant species on earth and at the same time enjoy a high standard of living for many centuries to come. It is possible for him to be the climax species in a new ecological balance. And it is possible for him to do this at a level of existence even far above that which we consider to be the average living standard of North Americans today. Technocracy has the only blueprint for a high-energy social mechanism that will not soon run down. To survive, man must adopt a new strategy for his social operations and change his mode of living to conform with that strategy. He must return unto the ecological system as much as he takes from it. If man can do that, he can survive and flourish for thousands of years more on earth. If he does not, nature will take a ruthless course so far as the human species is concerned.