Dr. E. F. Schumacher: Author of the Book Small is Beautiful

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And we've done more yet. We've plundered and sacked and raped this planet's capital assets. Clear-cut its forests. Mined away the soil with intensive agricultural practices. Rifled its storehouses of minerals and fossil fuels.

I do not know which of these three increasingly insistent crises—human, environmental, or capital resource—is most likely to be the direct cause of our society's collapse. But I do know that a society which seeks fulfillment only in mindless material expansion does not fit into this world for long. There simply is no place for infinite growth on a finite planet.

PLOWBOY: A great many of the establishment economists, of course, do recognize all or part of this developing threefold crisis you've just outlined. They even use it as a major justification for further growth of the world's industrial economy. Walter Heller, for instance, has said, "We need expansion to fulfill our nation's aspirations. In a fully employed, high-growth economy you have a better chance to free public and private resources to fight the battle of land, air, water, and noise pollution than in a low-growth economy."

SCHUMACHER: Ah yes. The ultimate folly. Trying to cure a disease by intensifying its cause. Such a line of reasoning is entirely representative of our age. We have, with our idolatry of wealth, molded a "system" . . . and this system now molds us and our thinking. It makes us think absurdities.

But let us say that black is white, day is night, and that the cure for the triple crises brought about by industrial growth is indeed more industrial growth. Just how much longer can that growth go on when it destroys and consumes for all time the very capital resources on which it depends'?

PLOWBOY: Such as the fossil fuels which now provide almost all the primary energy upon which our society is increasingly hooked?

SCHUMACHER: Especially the fossil fuels. PLOWBOY: Well the commonly given answer to that one, as you know, is that "something will come up". Or, to be more. precise, that we'll probably discover new reserves of coal and natural gas and oil as fast as we use our known reserves . . . and that, besides, we'll be switching to nuclear energy pretty soon anyway.

SCHUMACHER: I know. When it comes to future supplies of energy—whether based on fossil fuels or the atom—many people manage to assume a position of limitless optimism, quite impervious to reason.

I won't bore you with the calculations since you can find them in the "Resources for Industry" chapter and other sections of Small Is Beautiful. But the simple fact is that even if you accept the fossil fuel industry's most starry-eyed projections of future coal, natural gas, and petroleum discoveries . . . you cannot show any way that our consumption of such resources can continue to grow much past 1980.

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