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

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Tools serve man while machines demand that man serve them. Tools enhance a man's skill and power while machines, which are supposed to be man's slave, sooner or later wind up enslaving the men who build and tend them.

As Ananda Coomaraswamy has said, "The craftsman himself can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsmen's fingers . . . but the power loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work."

So we are not talking about dropping our man-dominating and nature-ravaging modern technology for a return to the primitive, brutish hand labor of our distant ancestors. We're talking about trading both of those extremes in for something in the middle. We're talking about the development of something new . . . an intermediate technology. A technology that we can all own a part of and which will allow us to realize our highest human potentials while helping us nurture and tend and preserve the earth.

As Gandhi said, we do not need mass production . . . but production by the masses.

Mass production is sophisticated, highly capital-intensive, and gulps down ever-increasing amounts of energy. It concentrates the people who use it into crowded cities, is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in its demands on natural resources, and stultifying for the individuals who must make it work.

Production by the masses, on the other hand, is simple enough for everyone to understand, inexpensive, and conservative in its need for energy. It is conducive to decentralization, inherently gentle, and compatible with the laws of ecology. It preserves scarce resources and is designed to uplift, fulfill, and serve the people who use it.

The intermediate technology which makes production by the masses possible is vastly superior to the primitive technology of bygone ages but much simpler, less expensive, and less oppressive than the supertechnology which now dominates our society. One might call intermediate technology a "self-help" or a "democratic" or a "people's" technology. I call it the hope of the future.

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