Karl Hess: Presidential Speechwriter Turned Homesteader

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PLOWBOY: Agreed. But what can we ego about them?

HESS: Well their days are numbered, I'm quite certain of that. And not just because I want their days to be numbered.

Big Business and Big Government-the natural spawning ground of bureaucrats-can only thrive and grow when there are unlimited and easily tapped and inexpensive resources for them to devour. And we all-at least the rational among us-now know that we live in a finite material world. Our fossil hydrocarbons and magnesium and other resources are not unlimited, they're no longer easily tapped, and they're becoming increasingly expensive. Expensive to find, expensive to mine, expensive to process, expensive to transport, expensive to use, and expensive-even-to throw away or recycle.

Besides that, some of those impudent people in Bolivia and Jamaica and a few other little backward countries are getting uppity. Why, they're starting to expect to be paid for their tin and bauxite and other resources! And some of them have even decided to keep those raw materials for themselves instead of shipping them all away to the big corporations and the big nations of the world. Imagine!

So we're running up against the planet's physical limits in more ways than one and those limits are going to force us to change our lifestyle. It's gonna be "goodbye Big Business, Big Government, Big Everything" and "hello small-scale".

PLOWBOY: But will we have-do we have-the technology to make such a switch?

HESS: Of course we do. Modern technology is small-scale. If you want to see the most modern factory in the world, you don't go to Detroit you go to Roanoke, Virginia. There's a plant down there that a bunch of little old ladies could run. It's a bank of computers connected to an army of machine tools and the factory can be programmed to turn out any damn thing you want: gears, shafts, axles, you name it.

Or consider, if you will, one of the most basic of all industries: steel. There was a time when-if you wanted to produce high-quality steel efficiently-you had to do it big with open hearth furnaces that consumed tremendous quantities of space, fuel, and labor and which seriously polluted whole counties. But now-if you use the continuous slab casting and basic oxygen process-you can scatter small steel mills all over the country on a community level. Even the making of steel, in other words, can be adapted to small-scale production that individual communities can finance and which doesn't absolutely devastate the surrounding countryside.

Another example: energy. We're exhausting the easily exploited concentrations of fossil fuels at an extremely rapid rate and there seems little chance that nuclear power or any of the other centralized and easily manipulated "miracle" sources of energy now being touted by Big Business and Big Government are going to work. Which leaves the so-called "alternative" energy sources-wind, water, etc - all of which are directly set into motion by the sun.

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