John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part II

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SHUTTLEWORTH: Oh yes. There's a few of us who take this broader view of Spaceship Earth. Not every one who does actually comes right out and says that most of contemporary humankind is crackers, of course ... not in so many words, anyway. But the thought is quite apparent as it bubbles there, just under the surface of the arguments and pleas of a rapidly increasing number of environmentalists, conservationists, and ecologists.

Listen. You've got to be collectively crazy when you belong to a species that can casually assemble enough nuclear weapons to totally destroy all the life on Earth a hundred times over. Or breed and stockpile more than enough special strains of anthrax and God knows what other super-diseases to do the same thing. Or completely — and, again, casually — exterminate other whole species for the manufacture of lipsticks and rectal suppositories. Or ransom the lives of the next 20,000 human generations with atomic waste just so this generation can continue doubling its consumption of electricity every 10 years. As God is my witness, that has to be insanity.

PLOWBOY: Well, I may concede the point. But only if you tell me what it has to do with being able to forecast the future.

SHUTTLEWORTH: It has everything to do with predicting the future. See, as long as you allow your attention to be so completely dominated by a single idea — in this case, economic theory ... money! — as most of us in the so-called "civilized" world are ... nothing makes a great deal of sense.

What is inflation, really? Where do depressions come from? Why did the stock market go up — or down — today? Will increased trade with Russia this year make the world more or less secure in 2075?

See what I mean? As long as you operate on the premise that everything can be answered strictly in economic terms, you can't even give an authoritative answer to purely economic questions.

That's why politicians and economists can get away with acting as if inflation or depressions just somehow fall out of the sky and bite everybody on the ass. That's why they can get away with "fighting" economic slumps with printing press money or "combating" inflation by raising welfare and social security payments.

The inmates, you see, have taken over the asylum. And as long as you allow your mind to be whittled down to a fine point and dominated by purely human and imaginary concepts such as "nation", "money", and "economic growth" you're going to remain one of the inmates. Securely locked up, confused, and terrified again and again by at best dimly understood "crises" that seemingly swoop down out of the blue, at random, and knock you on your keister.

But once you take a giant step back, shake off all your cultural myths, and look at the Earth wholistically from the vantage point of space ... My God! You can see all kinds of trends washing over the face of the planet for all sorts of reasons.

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