This book is an artifact excavated from the kitchen-midden of my files, datable in the era of 1968-'69. It evolved out of a growing conviction that far too little attention was being paid to the real ways in which burgeoning industrial energy was being controlled and directed.

Some potentially catastrophic 'unforeseen consequences' of our choices were edging into view. Among them (but by no means all):

1. The supplies of readily accessible resources such as metals, fossil fuels, forests, soils and dam-able rivers being spent with reckless abandon.
2. Steady emergence of a global analog of a giant wheat field: a mechanical-electronic monoculture increasingly vulnerable to "unforeseen consequences."
3. Global warming: measurements in the 1950s already showing that the ground work had been laid for accelerating changes to the gaseous mix of the atmosphere, which would inevitably alter the retention and distribution of solar energy — which is to say, climate.
4. Forced evolution of new pathogens: hospitals becoming hotbeds of antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus organisms. Malaria rebounding similarly from DDT assaults in the tropics.
5. Relentless subsidization of private over public transport: air pollution rising with the demands on finite fossil fuels. Cities forced into unsustainable patterns, designed for automobiles (see early Jane Jacobs).
6. Degradation of real work: accelerating capital attention on "productivity," which is to say, "disemployment."
7. Steady perversion of new science into weaponry: CBW, aircraft, ancestors of Star Wars, etc., etc., etc.

Buckminster Fuller, in the lecture referred to in these pages, observed that, as a young man, he had been urged to get a job. However, he concluded that his proper course of action should be simply to set about doing work that he could see needed doing and hope for the best.

It was in this spirit that I wrote these pages; and it is in this spirit that now, in my dotage, I attempt to exhume them and set them free. I hope that this work, done a generation ago, might cast some light on how we have achieved our present perilous state, with once-unforeseen consequences besetting us on every side.

In his moving film "Come Back Africa," Lionel Rogosin conveys with crushing intensity the plight of a man from the South African bush, taught the rhythm of a shovel and sent down into the black and noisome bowels of the Great Dike of Johannesburg; there to work on a meaningless schedule at meaningless tasks, surrounded by swarms of others like himself. From those around him he draws his meager comfort, buries his fears and builds small meanings. For this man, the fears are close to the surface, the unknowable within arm's reach. His children may glimpse a larger view of the stream he is caught up in, and arm themselves with larger meanings. But the man with the shovel faces a lifetime torn between nostalgia for a familiar world whose paths his feet know, and the myriad messages he gets from mysterious authorities around him which tell him that his familiar world is dead, valueless and a trap; that salvation lies in the rhythm of the shovel.

Who really owns the shovel? Of what machine is it a moving part? For two million years the Community owned the shovel, and its handle was always warm from the palms of the fathers. Its rhythm was the rhythm of life, love and the seasons. The shovel turned up real earth in real mounds for purposes that everyone shared. The labor was not less — but it was life, not labor. The schism separating labor from life is new, not old. Convention has it that domestication of plants broke the spell. Marshall McLuhan suggests the invention of the phonetic alphabet and moveable type. Whatever it was, it decreed the end of man's most successful social form: a small tribal non-literate community, which had brought him from the primates to his human estate and preserved the species for some 65,000 Homo generations. In the last fifteen of those generations a driven people from Western Europe has transformed mankind. With irresistible force they have destroyed the community and replaced it with the nation state; replaced the familiar shovels of wood and iron with strange ones of forged steel, aluminum and titanium; and substituted progress for life.

Who owns the shovel? Who composes the myriad messages from mysterious authorities that tell us that our old familiar lives without autos and antiperspirants are dead, valueless and a trap? How has it come about that the task of processing 50,000 human corpses and a million potential corpses swept up annually from the wreckage of automobiles has become simply another addition to the Gross National Product? How has it come about that courses of action clearly leading to eventual species suicide becomes identified with "hardheaded realism" and opponents to these courses are "dreamers" or "impractical idealists?" How has it happened that conventional wisdom has become, in a word, insane?

I sincerely believe that we do not know. I believe that over the last two centuries industrial people have built such a dense screen of illusion between our flesh-and-blood selves and the workings of our technologies that public and private discourse has become one long litany of non sequitur. The young sense the monstrosity of this disjunction, and rebel against it. That they sense it at all is a measure both of their sensitivity and the incompleteness of their education. But since their literacy is the literacy of the industrial cultural non sequitur, their rebellions reflect its limitations. Thus students obstruct Dow Chemical's recruitment on campuses, but drive Fords and Chevrolets. They attempt to root out military research projects, but leave departments of advertising and public relations in peace. This is, of course, not surprising. It would be extraordinary indeed if one whose entire experience with language was limited to the prose and poetry of Lewis Carroll, were thereby enabled analytically to criticize Lewis Carroll as an author.