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

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Listen! I can't recommend The Great Frontier highly enough. Webb was ahead of his time. He had the answers in 1950 that most of us are just beginning to grope for in 1975. If the. world's presidents and premiers and statesmen and politicians and captains of industry had listened to him then we wouldn't be facing the mess we're all in today.

PLOWBOY: That's a strong recommendation. What, for gosh sakes, does this book say?

SHUTTLEWORTH: The Great Frontier takes a sweeping view of history from 1200 through 1950 — which was the present for Webb — and on into the future ... which has already included the past 25 years for us. It lays a firm hand on where we're all coming from, where we are now, and where we're collectively going and puts everything into perspective in a way that I find simply incredible. Webb was a genius and his thesis, vastly compressed, is that Western Europe was from about 1300 to 1500 virtually static. It had an area of approximately 3,750,000 square miles and an estimated population of 100,000,000 people. And that was it. Period. Decade after decade. The carrying capacity of the day today world known by the average inhabitant of Western Europe had been reached.

"Progress" and "growth," the concepts that modern society values so highly, would have absolutely baffled medieval Europe's typical citizen. There were, relatively speaking, no entrepreneurs back then because there was no wealth to manipulate. Opportunities for the accumulation of excess capital, the investment of such funds, or the drawing of interest on them were so sparse that public banking was completely unknown and private banks were few, far between, and used only by a handful of popes, monarchs, and emperors.

As a matter of fact, just staying alive was a major accomplishment in Europe during the Middle Ages. The continent's population was static because it had reached a semi-starvation, subsistence balance on the land it inhabited.

There wasn't enough food to go around. The "limits to growth" that Dennis Meadows and The Club of Rome now speculate about were very real to the people we're discussing. They lived in a mean, brutish, closed little world from which death — and, possibly, Heaven — offered the only escape.

And then — miracle of miracles! — suddenly and within the merest eyeblink of time as the planet measures its age, Europe was utterly buried in an avalanche of riches. In a twinkling, the land available to its people was increased five times over by the "discovery" of and claims made upon North America, South America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and hundreds of islands in oceans hardly known before.

Thanks to the plundering of these new — to them — lands, the amount of gold and silver handled by the inhabitants of Europe was multiplied by a factor of 15 or more. The grains, fibres, timber, furs, base metals, and many other material goods already known to Europeans poured down upon them in a stream hundreds of times larger and more drenching than they had ever dared hope. And exotic new foods and trade goods — such as chocolate, rubber, corn, pumpkins, quinine, tobacco, potatoes, buffalo robes, and kangaroo pelts — further surprised, delighted, and enriched them.

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