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

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It was that liberating windfall of riches rather than any particularly noble characteristics of our own that straightened our backs and sprinkled our language with words like "freedom," "independence," "individualism," "self-reliance," "courage," "initiative," "invention," and "industry."

PLOWBOY: So we got wealthy and developed some rather inspiring institutions in spite of ourselves. That's not so bad, is it?

SHUTTLEWORTH: If I interpret Webb correctly, he passed no judgment on the matter. But he did point out that the flood tide of "found" riches has now crested. The tidal wave which picked us up and washed us to our high water mark — our elevated, in every sense of the word, "standard of living" — is receding. The kind of crest topped by crest topped by crest life that Western man has lived for 450 years is possible only as long as it's kept afloat by fresh floods of new and basic wealth. Frontier wealth.

PLOWBOY: And the Frontier is now gone.

SHUTTLEWORTH: It has been, for all practical purposes, completely mapped and tapped. There's no more free land for tens of millions of pioneers to homestead, no more buffalo herds to slaughter, no more 50 pound nuggets of copper lying on the ground in Michigan, no more unclaimed wealth in North America, South America; Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa. The Great Frontier is closed.

PLOWBOY: But what about science? We may not have new acres to homestead, but we can still develop ways to grow more on the acres we already farm.

SHUTTLEWORTH: Ah, yes. The "Green Revolution" argument. The last ditch "technology will provide the answers" line of thought that the power companies, industrialists, and politicians now spout with monotonous regularity. \

It is to Webb's everlasting credit, I believe, that he completely, utterly, and totally devastated that absolutely futile "solution" a quarter century ago ... long before the warts began popping out all over nuclear energy's face, long before smog and industrially contaminated drinking water began killing thousands of people annually, long before Dr. Norman Borlaug — the "father" of the Green Revolution — began explaining away its failure by saying that he had never expected energy- and fertilizer-dependent increases in hybrid crop yields to do anything but "buy time until we could face up to the world's many headed population monster."

Webb was a genius. A levelheaded, analytical genius. For, despite the deafening chorus of hosannas to science and technology which filled the air in the late 40's and early 50's and we all, environmentalists included, thought we could invent our way to Heaven back then he could already clearly see the handwriting on the wall.

Only the Frontier, Webb pointed out, adds to the sum total of things in the absolute. Technology can do nothing but change the form of what is already there. "The skill with which science has performed this function," he says in his book, "has misled us into the assumption that science can contribute to mankind unlimited benefits without regard for substance. This is a false assumption and appears as such when we look at the whole picture."

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