Economic Outlook

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There's no more free land for millions of pioneers to homestead, no more buffalo herds to slaughter, no more 50pound nuggets of copper lying on the ground in Michigan, no more unclaimed wealth in North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa. The Great Frontier, for all practical pur poses, has been completely mapped and tapped.

It is also to Webb's everlasting credit that he could see through the "answer" to this dilemma—the myth that "technology will create a new frontier"—a full 30 years ago.

"Only newly found land and riches," said Webb, "can add to the sum total of things in the absolute. Technology can do nothing but change the form of what is already there. Certainly the skill with which science has performed this function has misled us into the assumption that science can contribute to mankind unlimited benefits without regard for substance. But this is a false assumption and appears as such when we look at the whole picture."

Or, to put it another way: Long before the failure of the highly touted "Green Revolution" . .. long before massive oil spills, leaking vats of nuclear waste, and the pop-top beer can . . long before smog, pesticides, industrial contamination, and other pollutants began killing tens of thousands of people annually . . . Walter Prescott Webb realized that science actually creates nothing. It only accelerates the destruction of what is already there.

"Which would you rather have," Webb asked, "the earth as it was in 1500—before the Age of Science—with its natural forests, clear streams, virgin soils, and precious metals intact? Or the earth as it is now ... covered with stumps, foul streams, eroded soils, and left with a depleted store of precious metals? Technology has given us the luxuries and comforts in a riotous holiday in which we can eat and breed, but all the time it is sawing off the limb on which it complacently sits, on which civilization rests."

Nor was Webb misled by the "there's always more where that came from" philosophy which dominated the world's energy industries throughout the late 1940's and early 1950's. The Great Frontier pointedly quoted M. King Hubbert—then Associate Director of the Shell Oil Company—who was, by the end of the 40's, already predicting that U.S. petroleum production would peak (exactly as it did!) in the late 1960's. The book also quoted Hubbert's appeal for the stabilization of population and a switch to solar, wind, and water power. "Otherwise," said Hubbert, "we'll suffer a debacle". . . which is precisely what today's "energy crunch" now threatens to turn into.

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