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

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Look, sometimes I think of it this way: On a few remote islands in the South Pacific, as we all know, certain isolated tribes were completely overwhelmed by the sheer wealth our armed forces dumped on their shores during World War II. They had no idea where that wealth came from or how it was collected, processed, and transported. They only knew that — suddenly, one day — tons of C-rations and jeeps and Quonset huts and gasoline and chocolate bars came in across the ocean and down out of the skies and landed on their islands. Now those simple natives liked that wealth and they never quite figured out why once the war was over it stopped being delivered to their doorstep. So now, every so often; members of those tribes build elaborate replicas of the landing craft and the cargo planes that once brought all those riches to them. And they hold a ceremony and they promise their gods that they'll be good little boys and girls if that Magic Spigot In The Sky is only turned on once again.

Now you know and I know that it was a nasty war and the industrial capacity of the United States — which for a short time — put all those goodies on those South Pacific islands. Magic had no part of it and magic has very little more than a zero chance of ever doing it again. Still, magic is all the leaders of the "cargo cults" have to work with so that's what they use.

And that's exactly the way most of the so called leaders of the "civilized" nations are operating today. We were all poor once but — suddenly, one day — we all got rich. And we stayed rich for 450 years. And then we all started to get poor again. And, since practically no politician or economist seems to have read Walter Prescott Webb, our "leaders" can't figure out why all the goodies have quit pouring in.

So they've resorted to magic. The same guys who laugh at the cargo cults of those "simple natives" out there in the South Pacific are seriously operating a cargo cult of their own that's 10 billion times bigger. They think that if they mutter the right incantations and fiddle with the discount rate or insure bank deposits or create investment tax credits just so... that, somehow, the Good Times will roll once more.

Well I got news for those guys. Magic — even in a business suit — ain't gonna do it. What we need is another Great Frontier. Another unmapped and untapped planet to swing right into orbit with the Earth so we can build a bridge across and start plundering all that wealth. And until that happens, it will do us absolutely no good to look back at the late 40's, the 50's, and the early 60's and think that our magic will ever recreate the binge we were on then. It'll never happen.

PLOWBOY: What will happen?

SHUTTLEWORTH: I think the human population of the world now faces a long, slow slide down. A slide that has already begun.

From now on — for as long as you, your children, and your children's children live — we can expect the quality of life, as we've come to know it, to do nothing but decline. There will be ups and downs along the way, of course, but in general each and every year from now on will be a little worse than the one before.

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