The model I presented above was not received with enthusiastic acclaim by either the intolerant supporters of growth or the Greens with their new-fangled philosophies. It was also perfectly obvious that only a tiny minority of those pursuing traditional ideologies would ever understand or approve it. My only consolation is that the majority is always wrong, but the minority could, occasionally, be right.

Passing reference has been made to at least two other theoretical survival solutions, in addition to the third one which is the subject of this book. In what I have to say now about the principles of this third alternative, it is important to analyse the reasons why the other two solutions are either difficult, insufficient or downright impossible.
Phasing out technology?

I think it is right to say that modern industrial technology and its related system of production, together with the population explosion, lie behind the havoc caused to our planet’s environment. The complete rejection of such technology is a natural conclusion to draw, though for the majority not a pleasant one. According to this the only salvation would be a return to a pre-industrial technology based on renewable natural resources and which would reduce consumption and pollution.

This is also one of the three possible solutions mentioned in Beyond the Limits (Meadows et al, 1992):

“The third way to respond is to step back and acknowledge that the human socioeconomic system as currently structured is unmanageable.”

Such a soft approach is not enough; tougher measures have to be taken. Pentti Linkola, in his manifesto for the Finnish Green Party (Linkola, 1986), has suggested a more adequate and convincingly argued model. Although this only studies Finland as a specific example of a typically industrialised society, it nevertheless offers a highly detailed account of how society should gradually return to a pre-industrial state in technology and production. Basically, Linkola’s solution is technically competent and physically realistic, and if it was carried out with sufficient daring and combined with a tough population policy, the world would probably survive.

Even though Linkola’s solution is technically feasible, I cannot see the slightest hope that people accustomed to their creature comforts and mesmerised by modern technology would be willing to return to riding horses and bikes, produce their energy from firewood and muscle power, endure unlit streets, forego plastics, adverts and fashions – just to mention a few of the changes in our everyday life that relinquishing modern technology would mean. Furthermore, there is not the remotest hope that politicians would ever have the courage to suggest such radical and discomforting measures.

In addition to this purely technical observation, nobody is suggesting that mankind returns to the Stone Age, only to a pre-industrial state. The consumption of natural resources would decline to a fraction of the present level, but without a developed recycling industry our ore reserves would still be slowly consumed. The world’s population would be considerably higher than it was in pre-industrial times and slash-and-burn cultivation would, for example, prove catastrophic to the environment. Thus even with this model the world would not be saved, although it would considerably reduce its present rate of destruction. It could only bring about a lasting salvation if it was applied so drastically that consumption and production would be less than in pre-industrial times. Its supporters would then vanish into thin air.

So we come to the second possible model, which most Greens and moderate environmentalists throughout the world appear to favour at the present moment.
The path of gradualism
In Beyond the Limits (Meadows et al, 1992), for example, the authors define their proposal for changing the direction of the world as a “thoroughgoing revolution”. Even so, their detailed analysis does not describe a decisive and sharp change, but rather a series of gradual ones – the same as all Green politicians talk about.

Nevertheless, the book contains a number of basic solutions that have to be approved, and is otherwise a profound and fundamental consideration of the change involved. For this reason I have borrowed the main points of the change which concern technological and regional improvements:

* Efficient renewable energy systems, efficient, cyclic materials systems.

* Technical design that reduces pollution and waste to a minimum, and social agreement not to produce pollution or waste that nature can’t handle.

* Regenerative agriculture that builds soils, uses natural mechanisms to restore nutrients and control pests, and produces abundant, uncontaminated food.

* Preservation of ecosystems in their variety, with human cultures living in harmony with those ecosystems.

In addition to the above, the authors also present a number of good ideas on how to create more healthy thinking, which would undoubtedly help technologically-correct progress. The above mentioned methods are the unequivocal principles which the Greens have been promoting in different countries for decades. They do not constitute a revolution if they are presented as general undertakings. Their weakness is gradualism; they are too slow. The earth will be destroyed before these cautious, puny measures have been fully implemented. Another more important observation is that, without centralised international agreements, these measures will only tinker with existing structures, so no complete transformation will ever take place.
The case of the car

Let us for a moment take a look at the nature of the advanced, world-wide machinery of production. Roughly speaking it consists of the building stock, that is factories, offices and houses, the transport and other infrastructure that links them together, the machines in the factories and offices, and the energy that keeps them all running.

A typical part of this giant mechanism is the petrol-burning car. A broad consensus exists concerning its destructiveness. It consumes nonrenewable natural resources, it is inefficient and pollutes the atmosphere, it is noisy and causes accidents, and it also wastes time because it has to be driven.
Behind the car lie thousands of factories producing sparking plugs, ball bearings, tyres, batteries, windscreens, electronics and so on. For each part there exists an intricate, multi-stage chain stretching from mine to factory, the construction of which has absorbed considerably amounts of money and labour. A tremendous amount of transportation and processing goes on before the raw materials extracted from mines located in all corners of the earth are transformed into finished cars being driven off assembly lines. The machines that produce these part are made in other factories, many of which have been specifically designed for the production of combustion engine-powered cars. But many of the machine tools and part are in general use, so the car connects transport and goods production to each other.

The car should be replaced by something quite different, but then the system behind it would also have to be changed. And this is no small matter.

The car is not the only object with a similar, multi-branch industrial complex behind it. There are also factories and machines behind far simpler products. The question is not just the automobile industry, as there are others also involved in transportation. The petrol engine requires a petroleum industry, which is closely dependent upon the car. Cars and oil form a close partnership. And like the producers of spare parts for cars, so the petroleum industry has its pump and pipeline suppliers. There is a close interdependency between energy generation and transportation.

The car needs an infrastructure, roads and motorways, the ideal form of which is identical throughout the world. It is based on minimum curves and inclinations, standardised surfacings, traffic signs, flyover junctions and traffic lights. Each one of them has behind it its own production mechanism, which in turn is linked to a wider branch of industry. But even more important than this is another connection: the transport network is an integral part of the built environment and so the car effectively dictates the character and planning of our towns, villages and countryside.
The megamachine

The motorcar is but one example of a product around which revolves the major part of our machinery of production: transport, commodity production, energy and building. A similar kind of connection could be thought of for many other products. The real problem is that the whole technosphere is as closely intertwined as spaghetti, because most of our technology has appeared during the last two centuries. It has been continuously updated, but always in line with the original values. It is reminiscent of a natural biotope, whose species are in many respects dependent upon each other, but which has developed in time by eliminating the weaker species and new ones taking their places. There is no ideological change in direction.

Thus the technosphere is a colossal mechanism that produces material things for people. It fashions natural materials for people’s use as efficiently as possible, satisfying their immediate needs and saving their labour. Today’s technosphere processes materials without giving a tinker’s cuss about natural resources or limiting waste, because its ideological basis was created at a time when such problems were distant and unknown. The technosphere, the built environment, therefore, should be considered as a huge machine that produces the wrong goods in the wrong way. It’s like a paper-making machine that should be a rolling mill; it produces paper even though it is steel which is required. This also explains why minor changes, that only tinker with details, are fraudulent and worthless.
If we set out to tinker with the bits and pieces of the technosphere in order to produce new gadgets and accessories, but retain the factories and machines, communications networks and power stations in their present form, we shall be always compromising ourselves. For instance, we could install purifiers and filters everywhere or develop more durable products from previously known raw materials. The outcome is a mechanism that pollutes slightly less than before and squanders natural resources more slowly. Likewise, investment and operating costs would be slightly higher and the final destruction of Planet Earth would be postponed by a few months – but not prevented. I predict, that if we continue in this way for a few more decades, we shall realise the futility of such improvements and then have to make far more radical changes. You can often see this on a smaller scale: early fibreglass boats looked like wooden ones, the first steel bridges like stone ones.

But to return to my example of the car. We could develop one that burns less fuel, we could install catalysers, improve safety belts, use self-inflatable air bags, and have studded tyres in wintertime, but none of these changes solve the basic problem. In fact they only perpetuate the factories, subcontractors, oil producers, town planners and others subservient to the century-old oligarchy of the petrol guzzling car. Such changes are like pain killers; they alleviate the symptoms, but do not cure the disease.

The right answer to the car is its replacement by a cybercab taking its power from underground electric cables. But this requires the total revision of energy policies, regional planning and the road network, as well as scrapping the automobile industry. And despite all this, such a change would only be a small facet of the revolution. Only after many similar changes could we be justified in saying that we are developing a sustainable system, part of a wider totality, and that all communications are but a part of a new technosphere that will save the industrial world.

Placing the technosphere on an economical and clean basis is a out-and-out process in which only a fraction of the existing machinery of production can be used again for its former purpose and in its former shape. Modest, small-scale strategies do not recognise the need for such an extreme change. The danger is that the longer such radical changes are delayed and tinkering continued, the more difficult it will be to take such a sharp turn. Between these two lines of development lies a breathtaking gulf. Even though the aims of moderate tinkering and extreme change are the same, they will ultimately lead to almost contrary results.

One more question relating to the above: why should trains have to run at such high speeds, at 500 kilometres per hour? What’s the hurry? Isn’t it enough that in the long-run we reduce consumption through recycling and the complete reorganisation of energy production? Couldn’t all this be done more slowly, and without such a fuss?

Unfortunately there isn’t time. We have to get to this state of balance as quickly as possible, create the conditions where there is no pollution, no squandering of resources. Each year that Europe, and by implication the whole world, continues in the same way as now, our planet will be consumed and polluted to excess. The intermediate stage during which the megamachine is built should be as short as possible, as during this time we get ever closer to the brink. If the new world could be created without doing anything, by royal command or waving a magic wand, then it should be done. We could then get away with less damage, but now we are faced with a time of turmoil. So it’s very useful that Europe has some 20 million unemployed. Not until the intermediate stage is over, when a non-polluting and sustainable technology operates throughout Europe and the population no longer increases, will we have stemmed the drift towards the annihilation of our continent. Until that time, however, it will perhaps even accelerate before it slows down.
Why Europe?

Before I deal with the practical problems, I should answer the question: Why us? Why not the Japanese, Chinese or North Americans?

There is good reason for us to carry responsible for the aberrations of history. It was, after all, we Europeans who invaded America, exported Western civilisation to the rest of the world heedless of the consequences, colonised America, Africa, Australia and parts of Asia, and are now integrating to compete with them economically. Europe contains the roots of its own destruction.

On the other hand, environmental thinking is more advanced in Europe than in North America, and its population is larger. The intellectual atmosphere in Europe is also more open to change. Europe’s natural resources are greater than Japan’s, likewise its population, and it is unlikely that Japan can achieve self-sufficiency in food, wood and energy for a long time to come. On the other hand, despite rapid economic growth, Southeast Asia has still not achieved the technological level of Europe. Due to these reasons Europe is the best place to introduce these new technological changes. It has not only the responsibility, but also the opportunity.

And what exactly do I mean by Europe? The continent is bounded on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the south by the Mediterranean Sea, on the west by the Atlantic Ocean, and on the east it is generally considered to run along a line from the Ural Mountains to the Caspian Sea. Due to the dearth of reliable information, but certainly not for any other reason, the European part of the former Soviet Union has been for the most part excluded.

Just to summarise: in Part I of the book I have considered certain basic questions that have arisen from earlier circumstances. In Part II I offer a solution for the technosphere of the future. The thoughts expressed are not particularly unique, always right or even always new. Their purpose is to give graphic form to the idea of total change. Without detailed examples, no criticism is justified that focuses only on the general character of the debate.