The Technics of Decentralization

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Short of the release of atomic energy—which would be an absolute major catastrophe at the present stage of culture—we shall slowly be forced by natural laws to revise our attitude toward machines and engines and horsepower. We shall be forced to develop a social structure and a kind of technics which is closely related to the natural cycles of the land, to the proper use of water, of soil and of growing things. The mechanical power at our disposal, coming as it must from the yearly and daily circulations of water, air and living matter on the globe rather than from ravished subterranean store-chambers, will be limited. It will therefore be imperative to apply it far more judiciously, scientifically and efficiently than we apply power today.

But this implies no poverty or meagerness. After all, our vastest energy source, one whose capacity makes insignificant even the underground reservoirs of mineral fuel we are tapping, can be kept in perpetual running order. Considered as plants or laboratories in which the sunlight that falls upon them is converted into useful work, the "horsepower" of America's farming lands must be reckoned at not less than seven and a half billion. More and more must technics turn its attention to the development and refinement of the methods used in this titanic continental laboratory in which we dwell; less and less must it concern itself with attack on the bowels of the earth and the fabrication of ever more powerful mechanical contrivances.

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