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• UNDERCURRENTS, the magazine of radical science and alternative technology [ISSN 0306
2392], was published from London, England, from 1973 to 1984 [No. 60]. This was a joint issue
with Resurgence, which still survives and thrives under the benign editorship of Satish Kumar:
www.resurgence.org . This text version has been created in 2006-8 by me, Chris [Hutton-]
Squire [a member of the now-dissolved Undercurrents Collective], by OCRing scanned images of
a print copy; the text has been spell-checked but it has NOT been checked against the original.
Health & Safety Warning: The practical, technical and scientific information herein [though
believed to be accurate at the time of publication] may now be out of date. CAVEAT LECTOR!
The many stories that Undercurrents told will interest students of a period that is both too distant
and too recent to be adequately documented on the Web. The moral, philosophical, social,
economic and political opinions herein remain, in my opinion, pertinent to the much more severe
problems we now face.
Readers who wish correspond on any matters arising are invited to contact me via:
chris[at]cjsquire.plus.com or Resurgence via resurgence.org/contact/
This pdf version is formatted in 15 pt Optima throughout, so as to be easily readable on screen; it
runs to 177 pages [the print versions were 48 - 56 pp.]: readers wishing to print it out to read are
recommended to get the text from the .doc or text versions and to reformat it. The many pictures
that embellished the print version are sadly not included here. There are no restrictions on the use
of this material but please credit individual authors where credit is due: they are mostly still with
us. Page numbers below are for this pdf version. The beginning of each section or article is
indicated thus:
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Undercurrents No. 10, Resurgence 6/1: March-April 1975


4 Eddies: Erich Von Daniken, Zero Population Growth, Vancouver 76, BSSRS, Bantry Oil
Spills, Gusher, A Buried Flying Saucer . .
23 Undercurrents Letters
28 National Brainstorm: Geoffrey Ashe
Conscious Culture of Poverty: E. F. Schumacher
40 Living the Revolution: Milovan Djilas
45 Resurgence Feedback
54 Industrial Slavery can now End: John Papworth
60 Manifesto for an Alternative Culture: Rene Dumont
66 Towards an Alternative Culture part 1: 'Woody’
79 Solar Energy in Britain: Do It Yourself Solar Collector Project; Solar Collector Product
Review; Solar Collector Manufacturers Listing: Ian Hogan and Brian Ford of LID
93 Land Manifesto
96 New Villages Now: Herbert Girardet
100 Talking About Land Joanne Bower
102 Sward Gardening: a practical guide: Tony Farmer
111 Anarchist Cities: Colin Ward
118 General Systems: Peter Sommer
129 Centre for Living: John Seymour
131 The Future of Alternative Technology: Dave Elliott and Colin Stoneman
140 Reviews

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Godfrey Boyle writes: Undercurrents and Resurgence have a great deal in common.
We share the same anxiety that many of the institutions of modern society have
become far too large to be responsive to the real needs of the people. And we share
a common belief that the building of a humanscaled, ecologically harmonious, non
exploitative culture can begin now, as an important part of the overall movement for.
liberation from all forms of political, economic and spiritual repression that is
gathering strength in the world today. Of course, we do have our differences, too.
Some of them will be obvious when you read this issue, others more subtle. But if
there is one thing the movement for social change does not need, it is the support of
groups which have identical dogmatic views. Our differences are important, but they
must never blind us to our similarities. The spirit of mutual aid in which we have
embarked on this joint issue is one which we would like to see more evidence of in
other radical circles. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
...
Resurgence Journal of the Fourth World. Volume 6 Number 1 March-April 1975
275 Kings Road, Kingston, Surrey, England. Tel. 01 546 0544
Resurgence publishes articles on alternative life styles, human technology.
ecological-organic living, and small, simple. decentralised power structures. Regular
Columns by E. F . Schumacher and Geoffrey Ashe Frequent contributions by Leopold
Kohr. Vinoba Bhave, John Papworth Editor Satish Kumar Editorial Group Brian
Bridge, Tony Colbert, Geoffrey Cooper, Clive Harrison, Stephen Horne. Steve
Lambert, Thomas Land. June Mitchell, Jimoh Omo­Fadaka. Terry Sharman, Anne
Vogel. Associate Editors Ernest Bader, Danilo Dolei, Leopold Kohl', Jayaprakash
Narayan, John Papworth, E F Schumacher. Publisher Hugh Sharman. Layout Mike
Phillips, Pete Bonnici, Helene Saint-Jacques.
...
Undercurrents is designed and edited by Sally and Godfrey Boyle. Martin
Ince edited the Reviews and assembled the ads. Chris Hutton Squire
grappled with finance and distribution; Brian Ford and John Prudhoe took up
arms against a sea of subs; and Peter Harper, the Egon Ronay of AT. got as far
as Wales en route for Australia. Pat Coyne struggled against the powers of
nuclear darkness; Richard Elen followed the Leys and the ancient ways ;
Sooty Eleftheriou maintained the French connection; Dave Elliott
philosophised; and Ray Shannon pondered the deep meaning of it all. Many,
many other people helped us. Even if we haven't room to mention them all,
we thank them nevertheless. Published bimonthly (give or take a month or
two) by Undercurrents Limited. 275 Finchley Rd. , London NW3, England.
(phone 01 794 2750), a nonprofit company limited by guarantee and without
share capitaL

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
EDDIES pp. 1 7

NO . NUKES IS GOOD NEWS


THE FIRST RUMBLINGS of a campaign against nuclear power in Britain
are now, at long last, beginning to make themselves heard.
At the moment, the highlyrespectable Conservation Society is making the
running. Jane and John Pink of the society's local group at Merton are
organising signatures for a petition opposing the nuclear programme
which will be handed in to
10 Downing Street on March 22 (petitioners will be meeting in
Horseguards Avenue at 10. 30 am. )
The focus in the Conservation Society campaign is on
the dangers of longterm . .
storage of radioactive waste. But a general leaflet summarising most of
the other anti nuclear arguments, called 'Nuclear Power, Salvation or
Death Trap?', has also been produced, and members are being urged to
write letters of protest to their local newspapers.
The slightly less respectable Friends of the Earth are also beginning to get
steam up for a grass roots protest drive against nuclear energy. John Price
and WaIt Patterson, two of the nuclear experts from FOE's London office,
recently toured the country putting local FOE groups in the picture about
the dangers, and laying some of the groundwork for a more active
campaign. Up to now, FOE's
work has been low-key, _
mainly on the scientific and engineering level; aimed at undermining the
basic . . . premises on which nuclear optimism is founded.
A couple of very impressive ' "technical reports have been prepared
Amory Lovins' masterful 'Nuclear Power:
Technical Bases for Ethical Concern', and John Price's 'equally
convincing Dynamic Energy Analysis of Nuclear Power• Yet the
overwhelming majority of people in Britain seem still to be largely
untroubled by the nuclear nightmares which haunt a few 'socially
responsible' scientists. And the
Government, in partnership with GEC in the now activated National
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Nuclear Corporation, is forging blithely ahead with plans to build four


Steam Generating Heavy Water Reactors at Sizewell, Suffolk, and another
two at Torness in Scotland.
Official eyes arc firmly closed to such ominous portents as the vibration
troubles which struck the Hinkley B Advanced Gas-Cooled reactor in
Somerset last month. These 'violent vibrations', according to the Financial
Times, were "fierce enough to be felt by the commissioning team
separated by many feet of concrete from the site of the trouble," and
"somewhat puzzling" in that "no warning of impending trouble (had) been
given either in large scale simulations of the reactor conditions, or in
earlier tests on the same reactor a year ago. "
In France, however, it's a different story. The antinuclear protest
movement there received a powerful boost in February when an appeal
to the population to "resist the installation of atomic power stations" was
started at the prestige College de France and signed by over 400
scientists, inclUding professor Froissart, director of the particle physics
laboratory there.
The call has not gone unheard. Two hundred scientists in Alsace have ,/
brought out a text in sympathy, and the press is taking up the issue with a
vengeance. The scientists' protest was the cover story of Le Nouvel
Observateur at the end of February, for instance.
Meanwhile, locations for power stations are now being turned down by
the residents of a number of areas, and at least one local council has
decided to put the issue to
a referendum.
The confidence of the. French public in nuclear' safety was not
increased when, at a crossroads between Pezenas and Beziers early in"
February, a heavy box of radioactive material slid off a lorry when the
driver braked sharply to avoid an accident, spilling its contents all over
the road. And official assurances that the stuff was only mildly radioactive
began to look a little lame when preparations began for spreading a layer
of _ bitumen over the contaminated road.
The United States, too, is the scene of increasing antinuclear protest.
According to The Elements, the authorities in Wisconsin have put a stop
to the spending by private electricity companies of tens of millions of
dollars on new nuclear power stations before permission to build them
has been granted.

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The companies discreetly threaten that if permission is not forthcoming,


the millions spent will have to be repaid by raising electricity prices. But
Wisconsin has now ruled that any expenditure before the granting of
permission must be paid for by the companies' shareholders, not by
consumers. "Encouraged by such displays of antinuclear sentiment," says
The Elements, "Wisconsin environmentalists may try for'" a nuclear plant
construction moratorium. "
In California, ,also, plans for a new 'antinuke initiative' in the June 1976
primary elections are afoot. But perhaps the most bizarre example of the
all-corrupting influence of nuclear-power comes from New Mexico
(again, courtesy of The Elements) where Standard Oil of Ohio are
planning a uranium milling op ration. Low cost hot water for the plant
will be provided by you guessed solar energy.
ZPG CLUB
Addresses
Conservation Society, Merton Group, c/o Jane and John Pink,
42 Vinegar Hill Road, Wimbledon, London SWI9.
Phone 01946 2959.
Friends of the Earth, 9 Poland
/ Street, London Wl V 3DG.
The Elements. This highly informative new monthly newsletter about
natural resources, edited by James Ridgeway, is available from the
Institute for Policy Studies, 1520 New Hampshire Avenue, N. W. ,
Washington DC, 20036, USA. Subscriptions cost $5 for individuals, $10
for institutions.

ENGLAND JOINS ZPG CLUB


AMID ALL the excitements of 1974, England passed one milestone on the
road to the stable society that has hardly been noticed, though I for one
would rate it one of the most cheering achievements of that dismal year.
For the first time since the census started in 1801 the population of
England actually fell
by about 18,000. Not much, but it's a start.
The graph shows how this was achieved. In the mid60s, the natural
increase in population was about 300,000 per annum; immigration and
emigration cancelled each other out. So the net increase was the same,
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about 0. 6% p. a. or enough to double the population in J 20 years.


Since then two things have changed: the birth rate has dropped by a
third, and immigration has been practically stopped. In fact we have
become a country of net emigration, to the tune of about 60,000 souls
per year for the years 196971 (though in 1972 the admission of the
Ugandan Asians produced a net gain of 65,000). Official projections of
future population assume a net outflow of 45,000 p . •. By subtracting
this figure from the published natural increase statistic (27,000) we can
estimate the net loss for 1974 to be 18,000. We have joined the select
Zero Population Growth club, and without a war or a famine to prod us
in fact at a time of unprecedented prosperity (don't say you haven't
noticed it: government statistics cannot lie. ). Population Count Down is
wasting its time, it seems; preaching to the converted one might say. Jim
Callaghan once remarked that the idea of a population policy was
absurd, as it would mean having a policeman in every bedroom, and was
roundly abused for this sage remark by the anti-baby wing of the
ecological lobby . Events have shown that, absurd or not, a population
policy is pretty redundant. Some things at least people can still work out
for themselves.
Chris Hutton Squire

P. S. Scotland joined the ZPG Club 30 years ago, with only three and a
half times her 1801 population. Ireland made it more brutally a century
earlier: her population today is some 20% less than in 1801. Separate
figures for Wales are not available, as far as I know.

Socialist Science?
AT THE VERY end of January,just in time to miss the last Undercurrents, .
BSSRS held their longplanned Conference to debate the question: "Is
there a Socialist Science?'
The title was a complete nonstarter, since the assembled crowd agreed
there was a socialist science, but there was still plenty of verbiage for the
faithful. These numbered some tW9 hundred on Friday evening,
dwindling to about fifty by
Sunday afternoon. Friday evening was the best. Introductory remarks
were by Professor Maurice Wilkins (FRS), who "didn't know the
intellectual left was this ;strong. " Nobel Prizes were worn. He even

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answered questions like: "Professor Wilkins, would you care to comment


on reconciling your liberal idealism with all the money you've made out
of atom bombs and dynamite?" ("No" was the reply. ) Then came the
Roses, whose diatribe may have been comprehensible to some of the top
people on the front row.
The high point of the weekend was Mike Cooley, of the TASS section of
the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. His was a very
convincing account of all the evils chiefly computeraided design and
similar automated forms of previouslyskilled work being forced on the
workers by scientists, and now being used to achieve new heights of
alienation in scientists' own work. AUEW will send you his. excellent
pamphlet on the
matter.
Saturday and Sunday deserve little comment. Things seem to be working
out in China and Cuba, and Professor Eric Burhop (FRS) claimed that
Russia is still the workers' paradise. For the doctrineridden, or for anyone
in need of leadership, or wanting to shelter from the rain, or just with
a pre War world view, it wasn't a bad weekend. But not a weekend for
anyone interested in liberation. There may be a socialist science, but if
that was it, I want no part of it.

A LIFE 'NEATH THE OCEAN WAVE?


IF LIFE amid the polluted atmosphere of planet Earth is getting too much
for you, don't despair. An 'Ocean Living Institute' has been formed to
promote research into "independent, selfsufficient forms of community
living on the ocean". It will encourage "individuals and business firms to
fund
the construction and operation of oceanbased industries", and serve as
"a clearinghouse for ocean living contacts". Information will be published
on legal and other aspects of oceanic settlement, and on new concepts in
oceanography, aquaculture, and oceanic settlement. The Institute says it
will also "conduct tests on new concepts and devices". Including, we
hope, a technique to enable 'independent, selfsufficient' ocean dwellers
to exist without imports of oxygen.
Further information from the Ocean Living Institute, c/o Adam Starchild
[sic],

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23 River Road, North Arlington, New Jersey 07032,


SCIENCE' FACTION
"My work is in a category intermediate between fact and fiction. . "
Erich von Daniken, the millionaire author who has sold over 2S million
paperbacks setting forth "evidence' that the Earth was visited in the
distant past by alien "Gods', let slip this extraordinarilyrevealing remark
during a confrontation with his critics in London on February 21.
Spearheading the attack was Jerry Palmer, who did a formidable
demolition job on von Daniken's conjectures in a recent issue of Time
Out. But von Daniken parried Palmer's thrusts with ease by simply
conceding each individual point with a disarming
grin. After all, what is one tall story among so many? Von Daniken's
evidence is collected together on the faggot principle:"each piece is
flimsy, but gather them together and you have a bundle of surprising
strength. Apart from Palmer, von Daniken met with disappointingly little
opposition. One intriguing point did emerge, though. John d' Ardennes,
an Inveterate ley hunter, claims that his group has identified a site at the
intersection of several ley lines where suspected that a UFO, no less,
may be buried. This startling theory is apparently supported by, evidence
that radio and TV transmissions fade out in the vicinity. Trouble is, the site
belongs to an Illustrious Titled Person and is smack in the middle of a
pheasant shoot. The aforesaid' Illustrious Titled Person is less than
overjoyed at the prospect of long haired spadewielding UFO freaks
swarming over his land disturbing his game. Delicate negotiations are
now in progress with a view to commencing excavations outofseason.
Which is why the name of the Illustrious etc etc must be kept quiet for
now (Hint: he's not a million!? miles from Bath). But watch this space for
further details. If any intraterrestrial extraterrestrials emerge we'll let you
know.

"Here is the . •. . "


BANG:
Near Banbury, where Britain's largest coalfield, dwarfing Selby in size, is
being tested by dynamite seismic survey, the irresponsible BBC 'is
causing even more difficulty than usual. Their nearby transmitter puts out
so much power that when the cable lengths get to half a wavelength, yes,
the detonators explode. No casualties yet further reports will follow.

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SPOT THE GUERILLA


JUST AFTER THE beginning of the New Year, the national press
discovered to its apparent horror that the formula for nerve gas VX was
openly available to the public. What, it was suggested, if an .
irresponsible terrorist group should try to synthesise it
Amid the hysteria, no one saw fit to point out that VX
. is a lousy guerrilla warfare weapon. VX is
a viscous liquid of such' terrifying lethality that a tiny drop will sink
through the pores of the skin and then put paid to you with,the human
equivalent of insecticide
But if you try carrying
a phial of VX in your pocket and hurling it around, you yourself are the
most likely recipient. If you connect it to a timed detonator you'll
probably destroy its chemical structure. The military solution is to
suspend VX in tiny globules by means of an aerosol which can then be
directed using compressed air or inert gas as a propellant but even with
the most sophisticated technology at your disposal the delivery problems
are enormous. In order to control the effect of the agent, to ensure that
not too many of your own side
get wiped out accidentally, you have to control the size of the globule
and have very precise meteorological I information so that wind,
temperature, and humidity de not work against you.
This makes things rather difficult for guerrillas, who like to melt from and
back into the background as swiftly as possible. If the press scare is to be
believed, a tantalising new sort of guerrilla should soon appear. Out of
the shadows emerges a figure with a windspeed and direction apparatus
(a whirling cup windmill),
a humidIty recorder, and
a thermometer. In his hands
(he'll need rather a lot of these) will be an adjustable aerosol made to
very find tolerances. To protect himself he will be wearing a rubber suit,
goggles and breathing equipment,Erecting his meteorological equipment
h will take readings, position himself near to and upwind from his target,
work out the correct size of globule and length of aerosol 'burst' on his
pocket calculator, adjust his equipment, fire, and then disappear as

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inconspicuously as possible.
If you see anyone answering . this description, ring your favourite Fleet
Street news
paper immediately. . . . . .

ENERGY OPTIONS SET BUSINESS MEN DROOLING


IF BUSINESSMEN hunger for cash, they thirst for energy. Many a
moneyed mouth drooled on Saturday March 1st as half a dozen
alternative energy sources were paraded, wiggling and winking, before a
conference at the Charing Cross Hotel. Even the NRDC talent scout was
fiddling with something in his pocket, presumably his cheque book.
This middleclass gathering also attracted a number of young ecological
activists, and some Liberals and quite a few People Party people.
Walt Patterson of Friends of the Earth, always worth
a lislen, talked about the diseconomies of scale and the impossibility of
using several thousand megawatts of waste heat near a large power.
station. Five or ten smaller power stations, however, could each keep a
community warm. Walt's doubts about nuclear power are too well
known to repeat, and in fact he didn't repeat them or only very briefly.
Hugh Sharman of Conservation Tools and Technology Ltd talked about
wind energy, and came over rather noncommittally. This was probably
due to the contradiction between what he was doing selling wind
equipment to those with money to invest in selfsufficiency and what he
was saying that it's not economic unless you live somewhere jolly windy
and jolly remote .
Dr Brian Brinkworth confirmed the impression that all the research on
solar energy has already been done, and that only marginal
improvements in efficiency are likely in future, short of a price
breakthrough in direct con. version to electricity.
Most neglected of the 'alternative sources' is probably geothermal energy,
perhaps because it doesn't lend itself to backyard production. Christopher
Armstead must be the British expert on geothermal, and he created
a great deal of enthusiasm. The hot centre of the earth is so big that in
principle its energy could support a worldwide highenergy society for
centuries, thermal pollution and manmade earthquakes permitting. And
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Armstead
4
believes that with the new techniques of meltdrilling, which means that
no steel liners have to be put down the borehole; and rockshattering,
which might enable rocks anywhere to be made porous, geothermal
energy will eventually be available everywhere, and not just where
Nature has provided running h & c. But risk capital is apparently hard to
find for geothermal energy, which is puzzling: surely nuclear power and
offshore
oil are equallyrisky activities by any definition?
Peter Chapman of the Open University, proponent of the. theory that
nuclear programmes can eat more energy than they produce, painted two
contrasting scenarios for Britain: a highenergy one and a lowenergy one.
His energy analysis is brilliant
and he can tell you how many kilowatthours go to make a loaf of bread.
But his economics take little account of the existence of rich _
people and poor people. This led him to the absurd conclusion that a
highgrowth society (assumed capitalist since no change mentioned) can
be relatively free from
. social problems, and only has to cope with the techniCal ones. About
one member of the audience seemed worried by this. The rest, their
minds stimulated and their consciences assuaged, walked back to their
Jaguars with
a spring in their step.
Whatever became of the CSS?
JUST WHEN EVERY BODY had forgotten all about it, the Council for
Science and Society is about to surface again.
Paul Sieghart, who set it Up, is still somewhere in the back. ground, but
daytoday organisation is in the hands of
Jerry Ravetz, working from
a small office at 34 St Andrew's Hill, London EC4, just down the road
from
St Paul's. Jerry, whose Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems is still
a source book for most who call themselves radical scientists, now seems
tired of fending off taunts about having joined the Establishment. "I've

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found my price, maybe", he says, "Only time will telL"


The reason for the silence of the CSS, which has lasted since its disastrous
launching event at the Royal Society in July 1973, is that over half
a dozen working parties have been beavering away on a list of problems
which includes technology assessment, behaviour control, pleasure
drugs, riot control weapons, and the problem of powerful elites who are
too expert for anyone else to check up on them, Ravetz feels that it's no
good pulling the working parties up by the roots to se_e how they are
growing.
. However by the end of 1975 some of them should have produced
reports of 15,000 words or so, which will be given the full PR treatment.
With such influential names as BBC Chairman Sir Michael Swann on its
list, perhaps the
Council can indeed afford to behave like a temporarily retired film star,
guaranteed
a blaze of publicity on her return to the screen. The only difference,_of
course, is that the CSS as such has had no previous public career.
Ravetz compares the 'working party trip' to group therapy, and thOUgh
the effect of meeting others of different opinions and trying to reach a
consensus, rather than just arguing, may have been radical for the few
dozen people involved, it is not clear that any comparable change of
consciousness can be expected when the results are cast before the
public. Especially since the choice of solutions seems to have excluded, a
priori, such diagnoses as 'the whole system's rotten'; and even the
choice of 'problems' seems to have ruled out those which are, in the
existing framework, insoluble'.
The Council for Science and Society begins its emergence from the
chrysalis on Saturday May 3rd, with
a public meeting on 'Neglected Research and Social Priorities'. By the
end of the year it should be becoming clear whether the creature is going
to be
a swallowtail or a clothes moth. In 1976 the Leverhulme Trust's grant to
the CSS will be running out. Jerry Ravetz says he for one will be prepared
to write off three years' work (and fun) and close the whole operation
down if it does turn out to have been as useless as the cynics predicted it
would be from the start.

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SURVIVAL FIRST, LIBERATION LATER


PLANS TO survive the coming crisis of industrial society are being laid by
the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at Gothenblug University.
One idea they have sketched out is for an experimental village of 800
people, seIfsufficient in food and powered by sun, wind, water and
methane. The Centre's 300 members are also spreading ecological and
antigrowth ideas into other universities and among school teachers. AU
this is described in the 1974 no. 6 issue of the glossy
governmentpublished magazine Sweden Now.
The Centre is said to have the ear of members of Parliament of all parties,
Its Director, Emin Tengstrom, is an assistant professor of classics who was
"impelled to become more active by his confrontation with the student
radicalism of the sixties:' It all sounds as though the Centre has some nice
ecological ideas, but pretty conservative politics. Tengstrom wants to put
questions of how we are going to survive "at the top of the agenda". One
suspects that questions of liberation com some way further down.

IT'S A PLEASANT surprise \ when a Distinguished Senior Scientist begins


a prestige lecture at the Royal Society, before an audience sprinkled with
Nobel Laureates and University ViceChancellors. by referring to Zen and
the
Art of Motorcycle maintenance. The speaker was Professor C 11
Waddington, the occasion the triennial
Bernal Lecture which opened the recent Cibasponsored symposium on
The Future as an Academic Discipline.
In Waddington's view, modern philosophy, and in particular the
philosophy of science, took a wrong turn with the publication of Bertrand
Russell's Principia Mathematica the book which set out to reduce the
problem of making sense of the world by seeking to give
it the formal ease of logic and mathematics. Russell and Frege set the
scene for philosophical stars like Ayer and Wittgenstein at the expense
of what was derogatively (by then) called metaphysics. But, Waddington
pointed out, the Principia had two authors:
Alfred Whitehead's contribution is now virtually ignored.
Whitehead was more interested in seeing the world as a series of
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experiences rather than as a collection of processes that affected matter


and which could be under. stood by giving words
a mathematically 'pure' meaning. Russell's heirs are now in a blind alley
of semantic confusion which
looks ridiculous and they have no means of coping with the curious
conjectures necessary to sustain an under standing of high energy
fundamental particle physics.
But if we go back to
a science concerned with experience rather than impartial observation
and here the audience were presented with a dazzling panorama:
Bacon's real concerns; the influence of hermeticism in early science; and
Richard Gregory's theories of perception then science redefines itself
and becomes more human and more concerned with the rest of us. "
Waddington is sufficiently senior in the scientific hierarchy to afford to be
outrageous in front of his colleagues. But he is also likely to be listened to
our scientific elite does not necessarily change as the result of
tubthumping rebellion; it prefers the gentle assembly of argument.
Later on, part of the audience went on to discuss how the techniques of
examining the future could be handled in our institutions of education . .
. . Was that the sound of appreciative amusement I heard as I left, or of
one domino striking another, which in turn hit another, until . . . . .
SETTLE FOR VANCOUVER
IN THE SPRING of 1976, government representatives
of all the world's countries will meet under the auspices of the United
Nations organisation to discuss solutions to the problems facing our
human settlements the places where people gather to live and work. The
meeting will be held on the campus of the University of British
Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. The name of the
. conference is Habitat: The United Nations Conference on Human
Settlements.
, While government and recognized nongovernment delegates will
convene to discuss officially chosen policies and programmes, there are
those among us who see
a need for an unofficial, freeformcitizens conference.
Three levels of conference activities have emerged. The first is the UN
conference of government representatives. Second is the conference of
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international nongovernment organisations that are officially recognized


by the UN. And for public involvement, towards and during Vancouver
'76, we invite your participation in a third level conference the
Settlements Forum.
This forum can facilitate
the exchange of ideas and information relating to the problems of human
settlements, through meetings, seminars, discussion forums, audiovisual
exhibitions, displays of settlement technologies and any other activities
that might be suggested between now and June 1976.
We want to involve as many groups and individuals as possible in the
early planning of the Settlements Forum.
Our group is still in its infancy but we will do what we can to provide
you with an information exchange
center through which people can begin to come together. The sooner we
receive your suggestions as to how the Forum might develop, the sooner
we can incorporate them into preparations for 1976. Do you know of any
groups or individuals presently organising for the Settlements Conference
with whom we may make contact?
If you are interested in participating, have you any ideas or suggestions as
to things you would like to do, present or discuss at the Settlements
Forum?
How can we best help you to do these things?
If you are an organised group, will you designate
a contact person through whom we can communicate? If you are not part
of a group and would like to participate or keep in contact, please send
us an address.
Bruce Fairburn
and Howard Arfin Settlements Forum, International House, University of
British
Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
V6T lW5

There's Oil in tham thar Waters

GUSHER NOW ventures boldly where few honest oilmen (honest


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oilmen?) have dared to tread: into the shadowy, semimagical world of oil
reserve estimation.
The game of calculating just how much energy can be got from a region
such as the North Sea is, at base, a guessing game. But it's a game on
_'which a lot of options depend such as how fast to develop' nuclear
power (assuming the Government contains enough lunatics to seriously
contemplate such a course especially after the publication of UC 9); how
rude we can be to the Arabs; and whether or not we ought to hang
around in Ireland. It's unfortunate, therefore, that there are at least three
schools about how much oil's in tham thar waters.
The opinions of Professor Peter Odell of Rotterdam are perhaps the best
known thanks to his somewhatoutdated paperback, Oil and World
Power, which has just been given a new cover and a chapter about the
1974 oil crisis, and been shoved back on the bookstalls by Penguin: who
says no one gains from the crises of capitalism? Prof. Odell reckons that
Britain ought to put its shirt on oil, and estimates the North Sea's total
capacity to be between 11 and 19 thousand million tons, which is huge
in comparison to our current annual consumption of 100 million tons.
OdeIl's sternest critics curious to relate, are the oil companies
themselves even Shell, for whom Odell worked for many years. The
companies' comparative
pessimism may not, of course, be unrelated to a desire to save their
empires from nationalisation under Labour, or penal taxation under the
Tories, both of which would be on the cards if North Sea reserves are as
big as Odell says they are. Doubtless the apologetic phrases are even
now being polished up in the Public Relations Department at the Shell
Centre for when the stuff refuses to run out in a few years.
In between Odell and oil companies lie the Department of Energy (see
their Production and Reserves Brown Book) and Arthur Whiteman,
Professor of Petroleum Exploration Studies at Aberdeen. They both plump
for reserves which would be enough to provide the UK with
selfsufficiency for most of the eighties and maybe
a few years more.
. One of the reasons for all these Widely differing estimates is that there
are ways and ways of extracting petroleum. Initially, the oil
and gas are at high pressure and can't wait to jump up the well to meet
their oxidised or polymeric fate. Hence the early20th century

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phenomenon from which this column gets its name. In , those days, in
places like Iran, often only half the available
FRIGGIN' ON
a_
"'
oil was extracted, and gas was burned off because it wasn't worth selling,
so that the equipment could be moved on to the next well for
a quick profit. Nowadays, there are all sorts of:. ways of encouraging the
fluids to come out: forcing water into an oil well, or gas into either a gas
or an oil well, or pushing in oxygen to burn part of the oil underground.
But it's still an unreliable business.
But none of the reserve prognosticators seem to take account of the
efficiency of such extraction techniques
'when they do their sums ,Particularly Odell, who seems to count on 100
per cent "extraction of all the oil that can be detected, and doesn't
discuss the concept of recoverable reserves. Odell. moreover, quite
calmly lumps together the unexplored parts
of the North Sea with the most promising structures already drilled,
including the quite confined belt of Jurassic sands in which the majority
of discoveries to date have been struck. And then he treats the whole
North Sea as one geological province which is like estimating Britain's
coal reserves by working out the reserves of County Durham and
multiplying them, in proportion, by the size of the British Isles.
On the other hand, Odell does allow for
an element of mIsleading pessimism in the oil companies' figures. (BP's
official statistics, for example, are surprisingly opaque on the question of
reserves, though they provide loads of data on . every other aspect of the
company's business, from extraction to plastics. )
On balance, though, it's not possible to have much confidence in either
Odell or the oil industry. The only people with the slightest claim to
neutrality are Whiteman (who, incidentally, went for Odell's throat at the
recent Financial Times North Sea jamboree) and the Government (the
Department of Energy has access to the oil co'mpanies' confidential
information). They both agree surprisingly weB that the best we can
expect is \ a few years of selfsufficient bliss in the eighties.
. Gusher

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A HISTORY OF OIL SHORT AGES


1866 U. S. Revenue Commission . . . . says synthetics available if oil
production should end.
1883Little or no chance for oil in CaliforniaU. S. Geological _ Survey.
1891Little or no chance for oil in Kansas or TexasU. S. Geological Survey.
1908Maximum future supply of oil 23 billion barrelsofficials of U. S.
Geological Survey.
19t4 Total future production only 6 billion barrelsofficials of the U. S.
Bureau of Mines.
1920united States needs foreign oil and synthetics; peak domestic
production almost reachedDirector of U. S. Geological Survey.
1931Must import as much foreign
oil as possible to save domestic supplySecretary of the U. S. Department
of the Interior . . (East Texas field discovered in 1930 but full potential not
immediately recognized. )
1939U. S. oil supplies will last only 13 years U. S. Department
of the Interior. _
1947 Sufficient oil cannot be found
• in the United StatesChief of Petroleum Division, U. S. Department of
State.
1949End of U. S. oil supply almost in sightSecretary of the U. S.
Department of the Interior.
From a chart prepared by the Independent Petroleum Association of
America in 1952 and reprinted in The Energy Crisis by Michael Tanzer

TO SEE THE OIL GO DOWN ON/ BANTRY BAY


Another major oil spill hit Ireland's slickest holiday report, Bantry Bay, on
January 10, when. some 115,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil poured out
from the side of a tanker gashed by a tug.
Bantry hit the headlines in a big way last Autumn when more than half a
million gallons of sticky crude were inadvertently pumped into the sea,
causing what was probably the worst environmental disaster of its kind
around our coasts since the Torrey Canyon debacle of 1965. Yet such
appalling accidents, like others before them, seem to have no measurable

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effect on the willingness of governments or at any rate, the elites who


control them to sell their ecological birthright for a mess of economic
pottage. Patricia:Cummings of Dublin Friends of the Earth gives some of
the background to the Bantry saga, and
shows how public opinion in the area has been manipulated. GULF
OIL's oil storage terminal in Bantry Bay was officially opened in July
1969, and is controlled from London. Gulf is the 10th largest company in
the/USA. Two years ago it recorded an after tax profit of £343 million
about the same size as the Irish balance of payments deficit last year. The
storage terminal has a capacity of one million tons of crude oil, it is fed
by a fleet of Universe tankers of 312. 000 DWT (dead weight tons) that
bring oil from Gulfs resources in the Middle East. From Bantry Bay
'smaller tankers (100,000 ton) take the oil to European refineries.
The 93,000 dwt Universe Leader began loading at
5:30 pm on October 21st. The cause of the spill is still . not certain. At
first it was thought there had been
a faulty valve; later, that one of the valves was not closed when pumping
commenced. One can only assume that the valves were not thoroughly
checked before loading. Needless to say, the blame has been laid on the
shoulders of one sailor on board the tanker.
Some 627,000 gallons (2,500 tons) of crude oil were pumped into the
Bay that night. A North Easterly wind

was blowing, and the vast


mass of oil began to spread over 22 miles of coast.
Almost eight hours elapsed before the spill was detected, and by then the
damage was done. The Bantry Community woke to a blackened bay:
Thick crude oil lapped in with every wave, every tide. The smell was
unbearable, sickening. The rocks, usually peppered with strongly clinging
limpets were bare;
the few limpets that did remain could be easily picked off to expose their
oil covered bases. Seaweed that from
a distance looked almost 'unaffected', upon closer inspection had a new
skin of oil. And when the black oiled birds came ashore, they were so
camouflaged it was difficult for anyone to spot them. No one has yet
given an estimate of the number of birds lost.

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Nor has any official word yet been given concerning the detrimental
effect the spill will have on the fish. But Gearheis Harbour, one of the
worst hit spots, has a herring spawning bed just outside it. The fishermen
lost fifteen 'nets when the spill occurred, their boats and the harbour
were covered in the thick 'chocolate mousse" oil, and they estimated they
were
losing £ 1. 000 a day.
Subsequent events plainly showed just how inadequate were Gulf's
antispill pre . cautions. The company's first estimate of the spill size
(175 gallons) was ridiculously low. Only after eight days did Gulf reveal a
realistic figure and admit that it had had this approximate figure ever
since the spill occurred. Three days passed before Cork County Council
(the body responsible for pollution control for the County) were asked to
help. On the fourth day Gulf,
\ finally realising the seriousness of the spill, diverted all available
manpower to work on the cleanup. Six days passed before the Minister
for Transport and Power deigned to make the first 'air monitoring' of the
disaster.
Then, as 'AntiGulf' publicity mounted in the
papers, it was put about that Gulf might pull out of Bantry, and the
terminal was for sale on the international market. This was immediately
denied by Gulf, though it was said that a UN study had shown that Gulf
could save £4. 5 million by bypassing the Bantry terminal. This would
involve the use of 250,000 ton tankers instead of the Universe Tankers
and shipping the oil direct to Rotterdam. A group of. 'business people' of
the area, feeling they would lose out if Gulf bypassed them, suddenly
became sympathetic. It was stated that a 'silent majority of 80%'
. wanted Gulf, and more industries like it, for West Cork, and felt that the
publicity would be detrimental to the tourist industry.
Interferences is for anyone who liked Undercurrents 7 as much as I did
and can still remember school French. In the first issue there are
articles on how to listen to
the police and how the police listen to us, on REGIS the (French)
government interministerial electronic network, and a special feature on
computerisation of the press. There's a plea for free radio which goes on
to analyse how this might be possible using the low power (some of them
only 50 watts) transmitters taken out of service with the recent
UC10 R6/1: page 21
Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 22

reorganisation of the ORTF. The second issue promises to be just as


interesting, with articles on
phreaking, a history of pirate radio, and a special feature on computers.
The drawback is the price ' which, as editor Antoine Lefebure explains,
was forced on him' by all too
, familiar distribution problems. He is considering ex tending the length
of the subscription to make up for that.
Whereas Interferences gives the tools and information for a transforming
society, Impascience is for those who are still making their. theoretical
analysis. It is produced by scientists and science teachers who feel they
can get out of the impasse of abstract science by writing more abstract
articles although some of them, /
I must admit, are interesting; like <The Political S takes of Science',
<Towards a Marxist Critique of Science'; 'The Daily Life of a Researcher';
'Physics and Libido'; 'The Violence of Mathematics Teaching'; and so on.
However, it doesn't reach the dizzy heights of abstraction of Radical
Science Journal. And it is expected to come out much more regularly.
Sotires Eleftheriou
Interferences. 48 pages unpadded by advertisements. 12 Fr per issue, 44
Fr subscription for 4 (or 51) issues. From 94, Quai Jemmapes, 75010Paris.
,
Impascience. I rue des Fosses St Jacques, 75005 Paris.
52 pages, 2 free ads, 8 Fr per issue. Subs 30 Fr (France) or 40 Fr (abroad)
for 4 issues.
7

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Undercurrents Letters p. 8

HAM AT NET
Dear Sir,
With reference to New Directions Radio (p. 7 ,UC8J. I am a licensed
ham. If you do not receive any more constructive
and positive ideas, perhaps you could suggest interested hams meet
around 3750 Khz at 9 am
on Sundays. Then at least we would know where to find each other. By
calling CQAT or similar, contact could be established. Whilst I am unable
to offer to organise such, once
a meeting place is known something may develOp.
I am on the fringe of • A T' and whilst I would like to join in
a ham 'AT' net when able,
I would not want to be named as suggesting one and then never appear.
So please do not print my name. But I think the point of suggesting a day.
time and frequency is valid. You are then giving all 'ham and listener'
readers a focal point to start.
I wish to congratulate you on the amount of material in each issue. My
interest is limited primarily to the technical data. It is good that you do
not deal with things e. g. . windmills), generally but give the necessary
formulae and figures. Also the news about various. groups e. g. BRAD is
good.
DOWN WITH SKOOL
Dear Editor,
I have been enjoying Under­currents for a number of issues now, I hope
you keep up the out­put. (What problems you must have behind the
scenes well,
I probably cannot imagine)
The purpose of my letter to you concerns an area of interest born of years
of experience in the Education or rather 'schooling' game. 1 have
become convinced that schools are much more
subtle in effect than we ordinarily imagine. Ivan Illich's 'Hidden

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Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 24

Curriculum' is Quite convincing, although I incline to the view taken up


recently by John Holt _ that schools simply 'jail' kids for the day, to keep
them away from adults. The training given to young people (by force of
law remember! is to conform to pressures, to form institutional habits,
and to learn to be cut off from the general community and interesting
ongoing adult activity. 'Education' is mainly a secondary activity of
schools except for the elite who carry off the prizes, and who, by the
way, validate the system and enable the vast majority of people to
rationalise what goes on.
I am arguing that we really do need an alternative education movement,
as well as our involve­ment in alternative technology, or else our whole
philosophy will be so much pieinthesky, and ultimately a Fritz lang
'Metropolis' situation will arrive.
But here I feel a pang of despair, for if the main will of nearly all adults,
parents included, is to get kids out of the way at alt costs, the fast thing
anyone wants _ radical thinkers included is to have children actually
putting their noses into 'real' situations. Besides, they may do enormous
damage, and develop very anti­social ways worse than in school ' if left
around our urban
environments on their own.
I cannot be optimistic about the possibility of Deschooling in our social
structure, yet at root I feel it to be absolutely vital to any hope of an open
society. What is the answer to that dilemma?
I would very much enjoy exchanging learning with others outside the
straitjacket of pro­fessionalised systems. Not just with children, either. I
would totally enjoy being taken on as
a 'source friend' by a few kids or,
a (currently nonexistent) parti­cipatory learning society. Besides, they
would teach me a few things.
However, idealism aside,
I would like to ask Undercurrents readers to write to me concerning
experiences they may have had of the school/college/training system.
Have your children, or others known to you, been. crushed into
conformity, or otherwise intellectually and/or emotionally suppressed by
a school system? What if anything did you try to do about it? Also, are
there any individuals who have systematically resisted the compulsory

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system and for what reasons? Did you stay just on the legal side of the
law? Are there any communities existing where young people's prOgress
occurs outside the standard state school system. If so, how does the com­
munity avoid isolationism?
I would;1 like to hear about any of these or. similar topics, including any
thoughts or suggestions readers may have about what may . be possible.
It will assist my own
education for a start
Yours sincerelY, Dr. K. L. Smith;
The Electronics laboratory, The University,
Canterbury, Kent_
BREAK THE LAW?
Dear Sirs,
Thank you for sending a copy of your magazine. I had looked forward
with great interest to reading it but I was most dis­appointed. The reasons
I have are clear enough. With such a great subject as alternative
technology it seems a great pity that you have to debase your whole
approach with articles that encourage people to break the law with
regard to illegal broad­casting. To print articles from groups such as
'Anarchists Anon­ymous' would also appear to have little connection
with your main aims.
If you were to produce a mag­azine exclusively consisting of
articles such as the excellent ones on pages 27, 29 and 33 of UC8, then I
and many of my fellow students at leicester Poly would be most
interested.
Yours faithfully, Nigel Mills,
97 Upperton Road, Leicester LE3 OH E.
ANARCHISM:
THE AT CONNECTION
Dear Editors,
Obviously, I'm interested in some of the items in the mag­azine, but I
have a very clear impression that Undercurrents doesn't know exactly
where it's going. Clearly, you have problems financial and other and
one way out is to appeal to as wide

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Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 26

a readership as possible. On the Other hand, the magazine might just


suffer the fate which inevitably overtakes those who go round in
everdecreasing circles!
People have a right to express their views freely, in this country and some
others, and people who want to overturn our society have this right as
much as others. But
I wonder if outfits like Anarchists Anonymous have thought right through
what they're trying to do? Why do they feel they have to be anonymous?
Chip on the shoulder? Obsession? Paranoia? They'd be more convincing
if
they came out into the open and said where they get their money if any).
.
If you're running a magazine for people like these, please let me have my
cheque back. If AT is your main interest, include me in! I don't believe
that these two ideas are the same, or that the same people are interested
in
. both although some may be.
The long and the short of it is that we and our children are gail to see
great changes in the way human beings live this MUST be so, because of
the dwindling resources of our spaceship's life support systems. I believe
that the human race should survive, and that AT offers a route to survival.
But I don't believe in imposing my views on other people and I don't
want theirs rammed down my throat. You can run a valuable human
service by publicising R&D work in the many fields of AT and self­
sufficiency, or you can run
a magazine for anarchists, Phone Phreaks, and phoney phreedom
phreaks. But you can't do both in one magazine.
Finally, if you decide to print this letter, please don't print my name or
address I don't want some misguided nit striking
a blOW' for phreedom by throwing a brick through my window"
Perhaps Anarchists Anonymous are keen to conceal their identity for
exactly the same reason that the writer of this letter is keen to conceal
his: they don't want some misguided Special Branch officer striking a
blow for phreedom by breaking their door down and waving a summons
under the Official Secrets Act. We're sorry that he, like the writer of the
previous letter, does not see the connection between anarchism and
alternative technology. The connection exists, nevertheless. The
UC10 R6/1: page 26
Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 27

alternative technologist aims to free himself from dependence on


centralised supplies of energy. food, shelter and similar necessities
(whether supplied by capitalist industry the oil com­panies or the food
conglomerates: or by the state the CEGB and the Gas Board) by creating
his own supplies of such commodities in a simple, usercontrolled,
ecologicallyharmonious way. Anarchism (which, though;, it may have its
limitations, has nothing whatsoever to do with 'phoney phreedom') is
also based on
a desire to free mankind from the shackles of centralised authority and to
create humanscaled com­munities where free individuals can cooperate
voluntarily in the work and culture of these communities. Anarchism and
alter­native technology have a lot in common [if you don't believe us
read Colin Ward's edition of Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops.
]. We can, and will continue to, carry articles on both. Ed.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
page 9 Geoffrey Ashe’s column

One of the cliches of radicalism is that people grow more conservative as


they grow older. Only a little while ago, spokesmen of a new age in
America were saying 'Never trust anyone over thirty'. We have heard less
of that slogan since they passed the age of
. thirty themselves. There was something in it, of course, and there always
has been. The twentyyearold revolutionary does tend to be liberal at thirty
and tory or fascist in middle age. But Bernard Shaw remarked long ago
that this doesn't happen nearly as often as appears on the surface. The
change is apt to be, not so much a shift to the Right (using that term
loosely), as a lessening readiness to support the Left (using that term even
looselier) Shaw diagnosed the reason; too, and it is worth repeating.
Persons who alter in this way may not be getting less revolutionary. They
may well have become more so than they were in their youth. What has
happened is a loss of faith in the techniques of change speechmaking and
journalism, party politics and demonstrations, all seem futile. Convinced
that these will never bring the changes they care about, they lose
enthusiasm for them, and are branded by younger zealots as
reactionaries. Which they are not.
Until, say, the middle 1960s, this was a mood which hit people
individually rather than collectively, and did go with advancing years:.
Since then it has spread more widely and over a broader age­spectrum.
The great disillusionment with movements and methods is one cause of
the resort to terrorism. It is a kind of desperation. About the beginning of
1975, pundits discussing the Provisional IRA finally realised the
nearirrelevance of pointing out that the gunmen and bombers were
'losing popular support'. Doubtless they were. But so what? When you
have reached the provo stage you don't care much about popular
support, or public opinion, or any of the old political norms. These are no
more than incidentals. For practical purposes you have given them up.
I believe terrorism to be hateful and useless. But I also believe the state of
mind underlying it to be fairly common. Since the failure of the followup
to the 1968 Paris rising, there have been more and more people around
who vaguely want a vast change but no longer have any notion how to
work for it. Lacking the terrorist's willingness to do anything rather than

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do nothing, they are in a dead end, inactive. Like the maligned middle­
aged radicals described by Shaw.
Some years; back, I hit on a test question for revolutionaries which was,
and is, revealing. Noticing how members of certain groups complained
of their lack of money lack of resources s, inability to
compete with the media, etcetera, \
I started asking: "Very well suppose you were given a million pounds
with no strings attached, what would you do?" The question was liable to
be met by evasions. It wouldn't happen, you could only get the money by
betraying your cause, and so on. Untrue. Freak million­aires exist,
inheritance exists, and the gift is not impossible. When any serious reply
came, which wasn't often, it was almost always feeble. An editor whose
wailings about his paper's poverty were nonstop could only say, when
offered the hypo­thetical million, "I'd have a permanent European
correspondent. ",If that was the utmost reach of his vision, what right had
he to abuse the Establishment?
Since the time when I first put the question, there has been a promising
growth of small ideas. It will be remembered that when BIT asked for
suggestions for spending £I,250, it received a rich enough harvest of
'alter­native' projects to fill a book. But few of these, perhaps none, had
any credible bearing on change of a major kind.
If you profess revolutionary aims, try
. asking yourself the question. Given your million pounds to further the
cause (or five million, I won't accept inflation. . . :. Js
an excuse), how would you spend it? Do you really have any ideas? Or
are you just another symptom of deadlock and negativity, a mood
without :. J programme?
You may protest that it is unfair to pose the challenge if I have no answer
myself. Well, my personal answer and it is personal only, not put forward
as what the money 'ought' to be spent on ­would fall into two parts. One
would be
a BITtype part, a specific local thing
with powers of development: to be precise, the founding of an
"alternative' hostel and centre in the place where I live. No need to
enlarge on that now. The major outlay would go, not on promoting any
scheme of my own, but on breaking the ice of frustration and conformity

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over
a wider front. I would be inclined to call this project a National
Brainstorm.
That word, used as it is here, may need explaining. It was adopted in
American management circles when they made
a shocking discovery: that their specialists and experts didn't have all the
answers to the problems they were getting involved in. Often, it was
found, the best way to attack a problem is to assemble a varied group of
people some of them specialists in that field, some of them specialists in
quite different fields, some of them rank amateurs and simply let them
discuss it freely, tossing up any idea that comes to them, however silly it
sounds. With luck, somewhere in the hubbub, inspiration will strike.
In one classic brainstorming session, the manager of a factory running an
out­door operation wanted to know the rate of rainfall as it was coming
down. Con­ventional meteorological equipment couldn't tell him. After
much baffled debate, the stenographer who was taking notes looked up
and asked: "Why not count the raindrops?" The experts' first reaction was
to smile indulgently. The' second was to say, "Well, why not?" And that
was the answer. 1 don't recall how they managed it perhaps by putting
0'" sheets of blotting paper but counting the raindrops did the trick.
It seems to me that in the current semideadlock, the great mobilising
ideas and programmes do exist somewhere. They are in the minds of
people whom, for the most part, we don't yet know. People who are
isolated, silenced, without a platform, without encouragement. You may
reply, "If they have any ideas, they can write to the papers. " Yes, they
can, but usually to no purpose. When papers such as The Times run their
periodical correspondences on What's Wrong And How To Put It Right,
the suggestions they print are 'rational' ones for making the present setup
work better, not suggestions for radically changing it.
'. The bulk of my million pounds, or five. million, would go to finance a
National Brainstorm: a gigantic, noholdsbarred, sky'stheIimit airing of
every available idea for a revolutionary leap forward. [t would provide
incentives to speak up, and media and platforms for doing so. A lot
of the ideas would turn out to be totally lunatic and totally disreputable.
So much the better. Sanity and respectability are surely a little faded by
now. If the restraints were once broken, truly broken, I think the paralysis
of mind and purpose would begin to break too. The saving inspirations

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would flash.
And just to forestall criticism, let me say I am well aware that a project
like this could be dangerous as well as helpful. It could lead, for instance,
to the emergence of a sort of First Prize Winner and a personality cult: to
the coronation_ so to speak, of the raindropcounting stenographer. There
is no room here to discuss that hazard or how to guard against it. But you
call find it pursued in one of my books, which I shall be happy to tell the
name of, if asked. I have, you see; given some thought to this. I have
worked out a way to spend the money. But it is only my way. Now work
one out yourself.

Geoffrey Ashe

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Conscious Culture of Poverty pp. 10 11 E F Schumacher

Schon in der Kindheit hort' ich es mit Beben:


Nur wer im Wohlstand lebt, lebt angenehm.
Bert. Brecht

ONLY THE RICII can have a good life, this is the daunting message that
has been' drummed 'into the ears of all humankind during the last
halfcentury or so. It is
the implicit doctrine of 'development';
the growth of income serves as the very criterion of progress. Everyone, it
is held, has not only the right but the duty to become rich, and this
applies to societies even more stringently than to individuals. The most
succinct and most relevant indicatorof a country's status in the
world is thought to be average income per head, while the prime object
of admiration is not the level already attained but the current rate of
growth.
It follows logically or so it seems that the greatest obstacle to progress is
a growth of population: it frustrates; diminishes, offsets what the growth
of Gross National Product (GNP) would otherwise achieve. What is the
point or, let us say, doubling GNP over a period if population is also
allowed to double during the same time'! It would mean
running fast merely to stand still: average income per head would remain
stationary, and there would be no advance at all towards the cherished
goal of universal affluence.
In the light of this received doctrine, the wellnigh unanimous prediction
of the demographers that world population, barring unforeseen
catastrophes, will double during the next thirty years is taken as an
intolerable threat. What other prospect is this than one of limitless
frustration?
Some mathematical enthusiasts are still content to project the economic
'growth curves' of the last thirty years for another thirty or even fifty years,
to 'prove' that all humankind can become immensely rich within a
generation or two. Our only danger, they suggest, is to succumb, at this

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glorious hour in the history of progress, to a 'failure of nerve'. They


presuppose the existence of limitless resources in a finite world; an
equally limitless capacity of living nature to cope with pollution; and the
omnipotence of
science and social engineering. .
The sooner we stop living in the cloud cuckooland of such fanciful
projections and presuppositions the better it will be, and this applies to
the people of the rich . countries just as much as to those of the poor. It
would apply even if all population growth stopped entirely forthwith.
The modern assumption that 'only the rich can have a good life' springs
from
a crudely materialistic philosophy which contradicts the universal
tradition of humankind. The material needs of human beings are limited
and in fact quite modest, even though our material wants may know no
bounds. We do not live by bread alone, and no increase in our wants
above our needs can give us the "good life'.
Poverty is not misery
To make my meaning clear, let me state right away that there are degrees
of poverty which may be totally inimical to any kind of culture in the
ordinarily accepted sense. They are essentially different from 'poverty'
and deserve
a separate name; the term that offers Itself is 'misery'. We may say that
poverty prevails when people have enough to keep body and soul
together but little to spare, whereas in misery they cannot keep body and
soul together, and even the soul suffers deprivation. Some thirteen years
ago, when I began seriously to grope for answers to these perplexing
questions,
I wrote this in "Roots of Economic Growth'. t
All peoples with exceptions that
merely prove the rule have always known how to help themselves, they
have always discovered a pattern of living
which filled their peculiar natural ___
surroundings. Societies and cultures have collapsed when they deserted
their own pattern and fell into decadence, but even then, unless
devastated by war, the people normally continued to provide for them
selves, with something to spare for higher things. Why not now, in so

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many parts of the world? 1 am not speaking of ordinary poverty, but of


actual and acute misery; not of the poor, who according to the . . .
universal tradition of mankind are in
a special way blessed, but of the miserable and degraded ones who, by
the same tradition, should not exist at all and should be helped by all.
Poverty may have been the rule in the past, but misery was not. Poor
peasants and artisans have existed from time immemorial; but miserable
and destitute villagers in their thousands and urban pavement dwellers in
their hundreds of thousands not in wartime or as an aftermath of war, but
in the midst of peace and as a seemingly permanent feature that is a
monstrous and scandalous thing which is altogether abnormal in the
history of mankind. We cannot be satisfied with the snap answer that this
is due to population pressure.
Since every mouth that comes into the world is also endowed with a pair
of hands, population pressure could serve as an explanation only if it
meant an absolute shortage ofland and although that situation may arise
in the future, it decidedly has not arrived today (a few islands excepted).
It cannot be argued that population increase as such must produce
increasing poverty because the additional pairs of hands could not be
endowed with the capital they needed to help themselves. Millions of
people have started without capital and have shown that a pair of hands
can provide not only the income but also the durable goods, Le. capital,
for civilised existence. So the
question stands and demands an answer. What has gone wrong? Why
cannot these people help themselves?'
The answer, I suggest, lies in the abandonment of their indigenous
'culture of poverty', which means not only that they lost true culture but
also that their poverty, in all too many cases, has turned into misery.
The cost of the ephemeral and the eternal
A 'culture of poverty such as we have known in innumerable variants
before the industrial age is based on one fundamental distinction which
may have been made consciously or instinctively, it does not matter the
distinction between the 'ephemeral' and the 'eternal'. All religions, of
course, deal with this '\ distinction, suggesting that the ephemeral is
relatively unreal and only the eternal is real. On the material plane we
deal with goods and services, and the same distinction applies: all goods
and services
can be arranged, as it were, on a scale which extends from the ephemeral
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to the eternal. Needless to say, neither of these terms may be taken in an


absolute sense (because there is nothing absolute on the material plane),
although there may well be something absolute in the maker's intention:
he/she may see his/her product as something to be used up, that is to say,
to be destroyed in the act of consumption; or as something to be used or
enjoyed as a permanent asset, ideally for
, ever.
The extremes are easily recognised. An article of consumption, like a loaf
of bread, is intended to be used up; while
a work of art, like the Mona Lisa, is intended to be there for ever.
Transport services to take a tourist on holiday are intended to be used up
and therefore ephemeral; while a bridge across the river 'is intended to
be a permanent facility. Entertainment is intended to be ephemeral; while
education (in the fullest sense) is intended to be eternal.
Between the extremes of the ephemeral and the eternal, there extends a
vast range of goods and services with regard to which the producer may
exercise a certain degree of choice: he/she may be producing with the
intention of supplying something relatively ephemeral or something
relatively eternal.
A publisher, for instance, may produce
a book with the intention that it should be purchased, read, and treasured
by countless generations; or the intention may be that it should be
purchased, read, and thrown away as quickly as possible.
Ephemeral goods are to use the language of business 'depreciating
assets' and have to be 'written off. Eternal goods, on the other hand, are
never 'depreciated' but 'maintained'.
(You don't depreciate the Taj Mahal: you try to maintain its splendour for
all time. )
Ephemeral goods are subject to the economic calculus. Their only value
lies in being used up, and it is necessary to ensure that their cost of
production does not exceed the benefit derived from destroying them.
But eternal goods are not intended for destruction; so there is no
occasion for an economic calculus,
because the benefit the product of annual value and time is infinite and
therefore incalculable.
. Once we recognise the validity of the distinction between the

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ephemeral and the eternal" we are able to distinguish, in principle,


between two different types of 'standard of living'. Two societies may
have the same volume of production and the same income per head of
population, but the quality of life or lifestyle may show fundamental and
incomparable' differences; the one placing its main emphasis on
ephemeral satisfactions and the other devoting itself primarily to the
creation of eternal values. In the former there may be opulent living in
terms of ephemeral goods and starvation in terms of eternal goods
eating, drinking, and wallowing in entertainment, in sordid, . ugly, mean,
and unhealthy surroundings; while in the latter, there may be frugal living
in terms of ephemeral goods and opulence in terms of eternal goods
modest, simple, and healthy consumption in a noMe setting. In terms of
conventional economic accounting they are both equally rich, equally
developed which mercy goes to show that the purely quantitative
approach misses the point.
The study of these two models can surely teach us a great deal. It is clear,
however, that the question: 'Which of the two is better?' reaches far
beyond the economic calculus, since quality cannot be calculated.

No one, I suppose, would wish to deny that the lifestyle of modern


industrial society is one that places primary emphasis on ephemeral
satisfactions and is characterised by a gross neglect of eternal goods.
Under certain immanent compulsions, moreover, modern industrial
society is engaged in a process of what might be called 'everincreasing
ephemeralisation'; that is to say, goods and services which by their very
nature belong to the eternal side are being produced as if their purpose
were ephemeral. The economic calculus is applied 'everywhere, even at
the cost of skimping and cheeseparing on goods which should last for
ever. At the same time, purely ephemeral goods are produced to
standards of refinement, elaboration;and luxury, as if they were meant to
serve
eternal purposes and to last for all time.
Nor, I suppose, would anyone wish to deny that many preindustrial
societies have been able to create superlative cultures by placing their
emphasis in the exactly opposite way. The greatest part of the modern
world's cultural heritage stems from these societies.
The affluent societies of today make such exorbitant demands on the
world's
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. resources, create ecological dangers of such intensity, and produce such


a high level of neurosis among their populations that. they cannot
possibly serve as
a model to be imitated by those two' thirds or threequarters of mankind
who are conventionally considered underdeveloped or developing. The
failure of modern affluence which seems obvious enough, although it is
by no means freely admitted by people of a purely materialistic outlook
cannot be attributed to affluence as such, but is directly due to mistaken
priorities (the cause of which cannot be discussed here): a gross
overemphasis on the ephemeral and a brutal undervaluation of the
eternal. Not surprisingly, no amount of indulgence on the ephemeral side
can compensate for starvation on the eternal side.
Reducing wants to needs
In the light of these considerations, it is
not difficult to understand the meaning and feasibility of a culture of
poverty. It would be based on the insight that the
real needs of human beings are limited
and must be met, but that their wants
tend to be unlimited, cannot be met, and must be resisted with the
utmost determination. Only by a reduction of wants
to needs can resources for genuine progress be freed. The required
resources cannot be found from foreign aid; they cannot be mobilised via
the technology of _ the affluent society which is immensely
capitalintensive and laboursaving and is dependent on an elaborate
infrastructure which is itself enormously expensive. Uncritical technology
transfer from the rich societies to the poor cannot but transfer into poor
societies a lifestyle which, placing primary emphasis on ephemeral
satisfactions, may suit the
taste of small, rich minorities, but condemns the great, poor majority to
increasing misery.
The resources for genuine progress can be found only by a lifestyle which
emphasises frugal living in terms of ephemeral goods. Only such a
lifestyle o:an create, maintain and develop an ever increasing supply of
eternal goods.
Frugal living in terms of ephemeral goods means a dogged adherence to
simplicity, a conscious avoidance of any_ unnecessary elaborations, and

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a magnanimous rejection of luxurypuritanism, "if you likeon the


ephemeral side. This makes it possible to enjoy a high standard of living
on the eternal side, as a compensation and reward. Luxury and
refinement have their proper place and function but only with eternal,
not with . , ephemeral, goods. This is the essence of a culture of poverty.
One further point has to be added: the ultimate resource of any society is
its labour power, which is infinitely creative.

When the primary emphasis is on ephemeral goods, there is an automatic


preference for massproduction, and there can be no doubt that mass
production is
more congenial to machines than it is to people. The result is the
progressive elimination of the human factor from the productive process.
For a poor society. this means that its ultimate resource cannot be
properly used; its creativity remains largely untapped. This is why
Gandhi, with unerring instinct, insisted that "it is not mass production but
only production by the masses that can do the trick. " A society that
places its primary emphasis on eternal goods will automatically prefer
production by the masses to mass production, because such goods,
intended to last, must fit the precise conditions of their place: they cannot
be standardised. This brings the whole human being back into the
productive
process, and it then emerges that even ephemeral goods (without which
human
Resurgence 6/1
existence is obviously impossible) are far more efficient and economical
when
a proper 'fit' has been ensured by the human factor.
All the above does not claim to be more than an assembly of a few
preliminary indications. I entertain the hope that, in view of increasing
threats to the very survival of culture and even life itself there will be an
upsurge of serious study of the possibilities of a culture of poverty. We
might find that we have nothing to lose and a_ world to gain.

* In unpoetical English: 'Even as a child I felt terrorstruck when I heard it


said that to live an agreeable life you have got to be rich. '

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** Cf. : E. F. Schumacher. 'Roots of Economic Grow/h', Gandhian Institute


of Studies. Varanasi. India. 1962. pp. 37/38.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
LIVING THE REVOLUTION Djilas interview pp. 12 13

Milovan Djilas was one of the leading fighters for the liberation of
Yugoslavia from German occupation. After independence he was vice
president to President Tito. But when he wrote his' critique of the
postrevolutionary government, published as a book entitled 'New Class',
he was arrested and imprisoned for a number of years. He has written a
number of novels and other books including 'Talking to Stalin'.
No,:! he lives in Belgrade where Satish Kumar met him.
SATISH KUMAR: You have spent a long time in prison for your political
beliefs.
MILOVAN D)ILAS: I believed that when a revolutionary attains power he
should not allow it to corrupt him, nor should he try to retain it. His aim
should be to give maximum power to the people. I still
hold that belief. I exposed those revolutionaries who, in the name of class
destruction, withheld power from their own class. I am not a politician
but .
a revolutionary, and although politics may enter into revolution,
revolution is
a continuous process of life. We ought
not to think in terms of 'making revolution' but of 'living in revolution':
S. K. : What do you mean by 'living in revolution'?
M. D. : Revolution is a state of mind. When
one is always ready to accept change and one upholds the ultimate
values of revolution, I would call that 'living in revolution'. In this way a
revolutionary sets
an example for others. During the struggle for independence, for
liberation, for revolution, a revolutionary usually lives up to these values,
but there comes
12
a time, after the struggle is over, when he starts to seek privilege and
opportunity.
S. K. : In countries where socialist revolution has taken place the workers

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are in power.
M. D. : To a certain extent. But the real power is in the hands of
bureaucrats. Bureaucracy has institutionalised socialism. Socialism is no
longer a revolution but has become the Establishment. Once in power,
the leaders of the revolutionary movement retained the power structure
they had formerly opposed. The
reason is that. having achieved power,
they considered it their right to enjoy its fruits. That is how revolutions fail
and turn into counterrevolutions.
Revolution and liberation are not products but processes. They are
processes that should continue ceaselessly in our thoughts, in our
personal, social and political lives, and in relation to the whole of
mankind.
S. K. : Does this mean that revolutionaries become counterrevolutionaries
when they are. in power?
M. D. : What I'm sayinG is obvious. Revolution is not the mere
substitution of one lot of rulers for another. Revolutionaries should get rid
of those in power, but take over power themselves only in order to . use it
to destroy the power structure. Such revolutionaries are very few. Lenin
and Gandhi are the two people who have exerted the most influence on
this century. Although they followed quite different lines of thought and
method,
there is no conflict in the effect they had.
S. K. : Why do you think their influence as so great?
M. D. : Some people have good intellects and produce good ideas, but
they don't know how to put them into practice; others excel at
organisation and the techniques of action, but they don't have original
ideas. Gandhi and Lenin were outstanding because they combined both
_ qualities, and that is why they were such successful revolutionaries.
They both knew what kind of society they wanted and how to set about
achieving it. Gandhi was an Indianstyle socialist. He opposed. private
ownership, a profitorientated competitive economy that is socialism. At
the same time, he did not want power to be in the hands of the state but
believed that it should be retained by the local community that was the
Indian contribution.
S. K. : You admire. Gandhi, but do you agree with his philosophy of non

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violence?
M. D. : Because one admires someone it doesn't follow that one agrees
with the whole of his philosophy. I'm afraid that nonviolence cannot
work in all circumstances. A ruling class will never yield power to the
people if they rely on non violent movements.
S. K. : But it worked with the British in India.
M. D. : There is a basic difference between a colonial ruling power and
the ruling class within a country. It succeeded with the British in India,
but I'm not hopeful about its effectiveness in the Portuguese African
colonies, in Rhodesia and in South Africa. In such circumstances,
I would justify defying the greater violence of the Establishment with the
lesser violence of the revolutionaries.
S. K. : What happened in the USSR proves that if revolution is achieved
by violence it must be maintained by violence.
M. D. : That depends on the revolutionaries. India gained independence
nonviolently, but afterwards the leaders became powerminded and
conformist. It is not a question of violence or nonviolence but of the
concept of revolution.
S. K. : Does that mean you are an advocate of violence?
. : M. D. : No, I'm not an advocate of violence, but in certain
circumstances violence is inevitable. I should like to sec Gandhi's kind of
nonviolent revolution succeed, but it will not be easy. Of
course, I know that in European countries a direct violent confrontation
with the authorities would be almost as difficult to. organise and would
have some disastrous consequences. Therefore a determined effort must
be made to effect change in European society by the use of nonviolent
techniques.
S. K. : What kind of changes do you consider necessary and r:possible in
Europe?
M. D. : Changing regimes is no longer the solution for Europe. We need a
change of attitude" and a revolution of values . . Without such changes it
won't make
much difference whether the social democrats or the communists are in
power. We have to seek a deeper level of revolution. European socialism
and communism have failed to provide truly revolutionary alternatives to
capitalism.

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S. K. : Which are the values that need changing?


M. D. : Since the war we have developed a value known as 'high living
standards',
and now the only thought in most people's mind is to acquire more and
_ more possessions, while the majority of mankind continues to live
under starvation conditions. After all, material wellbeing does not give us
fulfilment. In fact, if you have too large a house, crammed with furniture
and electrical appliances, you waste a lot of time maintaining all your
belongings. In that situation the belongings cease to belong to you; you
belong to them. Personal wealth cannot be an ideal value in a socialist
society. We must arouse people to a higher level of awareness and make
them conscious of the need for constant selfcriticism and for unceasing
revaluation of accepted standards. In order to establish a revolution of
values, intellectuals, politicians and other social leaders must set an
example of ideal living, which, as I have already said, is 'living in
revolution'.
S. K. : How far has Yugoslavia progressed in the years since revolution ?'
M. D. : We have; to a certain extent, achieved people's participation in
the' economic field. In the last few years people have become very much
aware of . the nee for decentralisation and for ' workers' control" rather
than state control. But we must adopt the same approach politically and
aim for decentralisation in that sphere too. When the people participate
directly in politics a man's worth
as a human being becomes the prime . consideration and he ceases to e
valued
for the office he holds or the power he wields
S. K. : But many people would argue that some men are more talented
than others, and naturally they become more important ,and powerful.
M. D. : Those with special abilities and talents deserve some respect, and
of course we must listen to them. But there is a world of difference
between materialistic privilege and moral respect; there is also a
difference between respect and authority. An especially talented
individual deserves respect, but not authority I agree that in political
movements there are some who are better at organising political action
and others who merely follow their lead. The former remain true leaders
only as long as they do not demand extra privileges as a 'prize' for their
natural talents. A true leader gains the confidence and admiration of the

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people by willing sacrifice and service; he must not deviate from those
principles if he is to retain public trust.
S. K. : Do you still consider yourself
a communist? '
M. D. : Not in the conventional sense; I am not in the party any longer. I
am just. Milovan Djilas, a freethinker and an objective observer,
committed to my own search for realism. I belong to myself and not to
any external institution. Of course, I still believe in the fundamental
analysis of Marx, but I am not a dogmatic disciple, because I believe we
have to relate him to the present situation and make the necessary
adjustments. For that reason
I am glad that many Marxist thinkers
have adopted a more experimental and questioning attitude. Communism
is not like a religion which imposes acceptance of an established and
fixed set of beliefs. Noone should take Marx as the ultimate and absolute
prophet, for that would mean we were in danger of turning him into an
idol, thus destroying the true spirit of Marx himself. That is why I have
opted out of organised and dogmatic communism. Each and every
individual should. evolve his own design for revolutionary living.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Resurgence Feedback pp. 14 15

A Rag bag of Oddballisms

Dear Sirs, In some respects 'Resurgence' improves with each issue, in


others, it declines at the same rate. The format is excellent, particularly
the illustrations, but the policy of the journal is being lost in a welter of
intellectual bits and pieces, a ragbag of oddballisms.
The tawdry ecumenism of VoLS,No. 5 which implies that all forms of
'spirituality' are of equal value as providing
a force of social cohesion is part of the same Gradgrind utilitarianism that
Robert
Waller devoted three pages to attacking. The most important thing about
a religion is whether it is true, 'not whether it is usefuL
The kind of 'openmindedness' which admits all kinds of esoteric cults
and dealers in enlightenment under the . umbrella of religion becomes at
last the negation of thought. G. K. Chesterton (for whom I share Geoffrey
Ashe's admiration) observed that one should open one' mind for the
same reason that one opens one's mouth to close it again on some thing
solid.
Yours faithfully, Michael North, Fall Uehar, Brynamman, Dyfed, Wales.
23. 11. 74.

Putting Water out for Pixies

Dear Resurgence, I was profoundly disappointed by the joint Resurgence/


Ecologist issue on religion. ' . " "
While it is true that we should not be prejudiced against those who
believe in the supernatural, we should surely try to
think clearly. Certainly we need a value system in place of the current
one which' . . is rooted in competition and acquisitiveness, but need this
be based upon
religious faith? Of course some kind of axiom of 'faithstatement' is

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essential as a basis for a value system, but need it involve mysticism and
superstition? I can see no reason why a value system could not be based
upon axioms like 'no man has a right to more good things than another'.
The flight from rationality will lead us into blind alleys; we d. . o not want
to end up putting water out for the pixies.
Mark Burton, 78 Three Shires Oak Road, Smethwick, Warley, Worcs. 26.
11. 74

Howling in Orchards

Dear Resurgence, I am compiling a book mostly from readers'


experiences, to be called Talking to Plants and Flowers.
I wonder if you have any experience of Eastern traditions in connection
with talking and singing to plants, or threatening them? Or do any of your
readers have any knowledge of this interesting, ancient
tradition? '
In Britain the tradition is preChristian, "and includes wassailing', or
howling' in orchards at the New Year in order to encourage a good crop
of fruit. It was
also the practice to beat fruit trees with sticks (to drive out the Devil) and
then to placate them by singing songs a rural tradition that later became
carol singing. I have the words of some of these old songs. I will of course
give due credit in my book to any of your readers who write to me on this
subject.
Yours faithfully, John Montgomery, 21 Kensington Place, Brighton, Sussex.
16. 11. 74

Looking at Nature

The extract from Frederic Spiegelberg's Zen. Rocks and Waters, printed in
the EcologistResurgence jOint issue (NovemberDecember 1974) has a
poetic quality, but after reading it with pleasure I would like to question
some of it.
Mr Spiegelberg is concerned with ways of looking at nature. We should
not, he says, ask nature to edify us, or to symbolise a transcendent

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<reality' behind it, nor should we be wanting to get anything from nature
for our use or pleasure. 'The stone is. Why must one want to experience
more than that in looking <It it? . . . The raindrop, the fallen leaf, exist.
Thus they have in common with ourselves and with the gods the
mostimportant thing that can be imagined. ' And the effect of looking at
nature in this way is to 'make . religion vanish into reality', the immediate
'here and now',
This view of things evidently comes from personal experience. But a lot
of personal experience goes against the conclusions drawn from it.
Blake's, for instance: <If the doors of perception were cleansed, every
thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. ' Many people have told of
occasions when their experience of nature was of this heightened order.
(See Raynor Johnson's Watcher on the //ills. 1959, chapter 4).
These people are not carried away from the here and now. They perceive
the ordinary world, but it appears to them transfigured, illuminated; and
it brings them a conviction that this is what the world really is, but
normally they are more or less blind to it.
It could be argued that the radiance is an illusion, a projection of
personal feelings on lo indifferent nature. This 'theory can be neither
proved nor disproved. To those who have this kind of experience it seems
evident that the radiance belongs to the natural scene, illuminates it from
inside.
So much for looking at nature. What about ways of working on and with
nature? Mr Spiegelberg implies that the best thing is to leave nature
alone.
<A stone that has been changed even slightly by the human hand,
whether polished or chopped, has lost its vitality and is rejected by the
bonseki master as "dead" . . . . Seen from this standpoint, 14 ••
even the greatest work of sculptural art is dead stone. '
Similarly, it appears that from
Mr Spiegelberg's standpoint any work on nature, as in farming, must rank
as
a spoiling operation, however necessary it may be if we are not to live
entirely on fruit and nuts.
Nowadays we are very sharply aware of the despoiling and exploitation
of nature by human hands, but that is only one of three ways destructive,
neutral, creative in which man can relate himself to nature. He is
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creative when as husbandman he tends and tills the soil, maintains its
health and fertility and assists it to produce wholesome food, flowers for
pleasure, wood for use. And this working partnership should be seen "not
as an unavoidable interference with pristine nature, but as a healthgiving
cooperation, necessary both for humanity and for the land, and for the
future evolution of the Earth.
Charles Davy, Priory Bank, Forest Row, Sussex. 30. 12. 74

Citizens of Mean Cities

Dear Sir, Readers of A Prophet Ignored may like to note also the following
passage from G. K. Chesterton's Auto
biography: •
<This was the primary problem for me, certainly in order of time and
largely in order of logic. It was the problem of how men could be made
to realise the wonder and splendour of being alive, in environments
which their own daily criticism treated as deadalive and which their
imagination had left for dead. It is normal for a man to boast if he can or
even when he can't that he is a citizen of no mean city. But these men
had really resigned themselves to being citizens of mean cities; and on
every side of us the mean cities stretched far away beyond the horizons;
mean in architecture, mean in costume, mean even in manners; but,
what was the only thing that really mattered, mean in the imaginative
conception of their own inhabitants. These mean cities were indeed
supposed to be the component parts of a very great city but in the
thought of most modern people, the great city has become
a journalistic generalisation, no longer imaginative and very nearly
imaginary.
On the other hand the modern mode of life, only professing to be
prosaic, pressed upon them day and night and was the real
molder of their minds. ' .
B. R. Gilbert, 29 Molesworth Street; Wadebridge Cornwall. 8. 12. 74

Coordinating Communities

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Dear Resurgence, Geoffrey Ashe's 'column' on the kibbutz in your


striking Land Issue is of the greatest importance. The explanation given for
the outstanding success of the kibbutz (which, however,
is not the only such success on record: what of the largescale 400yearold
Hutterite Movement of northern U. S. A. and Canada?); this reason the
Holy . . . . . . . Land mystique can surely not be denied.
Fortunately, it is not the exclusive . basis, this mystique attached to a
particular land, totally unsuited to general use
today. Moreover, it is significant tHE Hutterites (population estimates
seem,; vary: apparently about 15,000 in c 100 communes) have
succeeded for centuries on a purely religiOUS basis contradicting Noyes
who said this \ enough.
What can possibly fill the gap for us: nowadays? Where is the essential un
relenting spiritual drive coming from, This seems to be the fundamental
question for the modern commune movement. It can well be that the
remark letter in your same issue from Henryk) Skolimowski describes just
what we looking for. lie will no doubt be the
to acknowledge that the concept has to now, been Eastern rather than We
With roots which appear distinctly Buddhist in some ways, the modern
Japanese philosopher, Yamagishi, giving his name to a small network of
kibbutzim and cOI1)communes from end to end of it country, stood for
<the oneworld society', i. e. man united with all living creatures as part
of nature and the cosmos. And the Japanese Professor Kusakari,
integrating his work with that of another antiurban modern Japanese:
philosopher, Ishihara, has provided the ideological basis for a
cultureinnature type of kibbutz by outlining a health morality whereby
man can flourish b} cooperating in and with natural surroundings. This
scheme is, as a matter of fact, just beginning to be translated into practice
in Hokkaido. And is not related to another modern Eastern philosophy,
founded on ancient roots, that Gandhi, which we see most notably, if still
insufficiently realised, in the Gramdan land movement of India.
It is not now a matter for anyone country alone. Communards must gain
strength by uniting around the world. I the Intercultural World Movement
of Communities (Dr. Giovanni Abrami, Via A. Cantele 37,35100, Padova,
Ital) a coordination framework of mutual information and progress
centres has already been devised. The Japanese Commune Movement is
happy to cooperate.
Yours sincerely, Mose Matsuba, Japanese Commune Movement, 1962
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Suginosawi Imaichishi, Tochigiken, Japan, 32112 21. 11. 74

Skyscrapers, Subways and Socialism

Dear Resurgence, Your very good SeptemberOctober issue focusing on


land prompts me to make a few contributions to the emerging dialogue.
First, our presentday theorists for the alternative movement would do well
to reread the thoughts of that great English man John Locke. According to
Locke, genuine private property, on which the argument for individual
liberty and republican government was built, consist! of several
attributes. It is productive in nature, or at least potentially so. It is
a product of personal effort. It connotes personal control and
responsibility .
. It may be appropriated by an individual only to satisfy his reasonable
human needs; beyond that, he has no right to it, and it rightfully should
belong to others whose needs are not met.
We must make sure that private property ownership remains widely
distributed. If we do not, we will find our liberties a captive either of the
great corporation or of a remote government In neither case can they
survive.
Second, we must recognise that land use and environmental controls
carry within them the seeds of the centralisation of power over land in
the government ultimately in Whitehall or Washington, as it is in
Moscow. Land use controls such as zoning ultimately confiscate two of
the three main attributes of property ownership the right to use and
enjoy, and the right to exchange and bequeath. Confiscation of the third
main attribute the right to exclude others Will certainly follow soon
thereafter.
Third, private ownership of land and community land trusts are in no way
mutually exclusive. Indeed, land trusts are created when a group or
community receives land as a gift (bhoodan), or purchases it from their
own savings. Although in a land trust individual property is ended, the
land itself is still private property in the hands of private trustees, whose
stewardship is guided by the underlying trust agreement.
The proper remedy for political . liberty, then, is widespread ownership of
genuine private property. I t is possible "that given such a system, we

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would not have some of the benefits of modern life like skyscrapers and
subways and socialism. So much the better.
John McClaughry, President, Institute for Liberty and Community,
Concord, Vermont 05824, U. S. A. 4. 11. 74

Open Reply to John Papworth

Dear Resurgence, I'm not, need I say, replying to you on behalf of 108
organisations [Resurgence Vol. 5, No. 6], nor even on behalf of the one
or two to which I belong merely on behalf of myself. While I am
naturally entirely with you in your insistence upon the need for smaller
communities, I cannot share your certainty that change to less monstrous
groups would of itself achieve the end of war and the manipulators who
contrive it. be it military, political, economic or social war. The
manipulator mentality is not, I think, attributable to the size of the
political unit in which it is nurtured. Th rooster will crow just as fiercely
in
a tiny barnyard with two hens as when he has a large terrain and, say,
two hundred and twentytwo biddies around whet he or not there are
other cocks present. Manipulators known as kings, conquerors, priests,
statesmen have appeared with horrifying regularity on every
community's scene, however small it may have been. Think how small
wen the city states of ancient Greece, of __ Renaissance Italy. They
produced some
A
of man's most noble ideas and splendid art, but they were also among
the most fiercely contentious and warlike groups. And what about the
smallness of the Balkan States pray, and the minute countries that now
make up Britain? Nothing big about them as long as they stay at home
and don't go off empirebuilding across the seas.
It is not size that matters so much. It
is ideas, the rigid institutional and cultural boundaries, selfinterest, and
envy that divide individuals and groups from one another. You may scoff
at the UN and
the European experiments, but the prime motive for their birth was a
fervent desire to live in peace instead of war with the chaps in other

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groups, however many people with less glowing ideals may have
subsequently jumped on the two bandwagons.
We live in a society where, quite thoughtlessly, everyone (almost)
continues to say and write 'employer' and 'employee' without pausing to
reflect upon the nauseating meaning of being
a 'user' of other people or a 'used' by other people person. Isn't it time
that such an obscene, antisocial relationship was finally rejected and the
words themselves confined to the limbo of obsolete crossword puzzle
definitions? Gandhi with his religious view of life reiterated time and
again that one of the most serious crimes against God and Man was a
sense of superiority.
Greenpeace . . . . . . . LoveRosalind Schamma, c/o Jacobson, The
Bungalow, Wittey's Lane, High Street, Thorncombe
Nr. Chard. Somerset. 29. 12. 74

Inflation

Dear. Sir, Anatol Murad wrote in your last issue that inflation was avoided
during World War II by direct price and income controls, and suggested
that, if comprehensive and strictly enforced, these could be equally
effective today.
In this country there was more to the wartime antiinflation measure than
price and income controls: rationing and subsidies on essential goods
played a crucial role. The aim was to stabilise a particular
retail price index covering mainly these goods, and to share the available
supplies fairly among the population by means of rationing. The system
did not produce ) absolute equality in that unsubsidised unrationed goods
not represented in the index could rise substantially arid some ration
coupons were sold on the black market, but it was nevertheless a serious
and largely effective attempt to share fairly the reduced supplies of
consumer goods available.
It would be from this attempt at fairer distribution rather from the use of
price and income controls that we could, if we wanted to; learn
something relevant to our present problem of inflation from the
experience of World War II.
'Peggy Hemming, Flat 4, 62 Southwood Lane, London N 6. 29. 1. 75

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Yes, Big is Bad

Dear Sir, The letter from David Pearce [VoLS, No. 6] 'Big is not Bad'
cannot be allowed to go unanswered; most of our readers must realise
that the question of size is the very basis of our argument.
Does David Pearce see no faults in bigness? What is wrong with a big
hospital, country, or overseas aid programme is precisely what is wrong
with any big organisation or approach impersonality, inflexibility,
complexity, authoritarianism, vulnerability, etc. , etc. More to the point,
however, a correct scale of organisation would enable us to be free of the
need for hospitals, aid programmes and so on.
As regards the merits of the present socioeconomic system, obviously D. r
and I are seeing totally different systems. but he really is out of touch with
a large proportion of the people of this country if he thinks we have
healthier and" more rewarding lives. (Life expectancy has begun to fall!)
Reread your letter, David, and see if you don't think it's an hysterical out
burst which only illustrates how you're viewing things on a superficial
level and failing to see root causes (e. g. How can a scheme like Maplin
be deemed 'good' for anyone, when it is designed to squander
everincreasing amounts of ail kinds of natural resources oil, space, peace
and quiet on which we all depend?) I
Yours seriously, Steve Lambert,
23 Hamilton Road, Hayes, Middlesex. 15. 1. 75

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Industrial slavery can now end! John Papworth pp. 16 17

ONE OF THE MAJOR EVILS confronting mankind, namely' war, does not
spring from any' desire of the generality of people for a nuclear
armageddon; rather armament programmes and the pursuit of war
policies negate the profound desire for peace which is wellnigh universal.
The war danger springs from the fact that our political units are too large
to be susceptible to the control of the people in whose name they are
presumed to be operating. It is this oversize and its corresponding degree
of over centralisation of government functions which is promoting the
dangerous overspill of power. It is for this primary reason that the Fourth
World* is envisaged as a world of small political units which are
genuinely subject to the control of their peoples.
It follows as a matter of course that these small units will themselves be
as noncentralised as possible so that in all but the most unavoidable areas
where national control is imperative, people will be making their own
decisions and running their own lives.
In' this respect the people of Switzerland have shown themselves to be
generations ahead of the rest of the world. We tend to accept it as normal
that local government can only perform those functions decreed to it by
the national government, In Switzerland the national government can
only perform those functions (and none other) as decreed by its
constituent cantons. It is for this reason that the Swiss claim that theirs is
not a country but a confederation. Since it is not. a country it cannot
even have a foreign policy, it therefore abides by a strict rule of neutrality
in the
. affairs of its neighbours and refuses to have any truck with membership
of the United Nations.
But the Swiss experience points to one area where it has failed to
implement the working practice of its political democracy; that is in its
economic institutions. Huge national and multinational concern (not
least in the field of banking andfinance) are subverting Swiss political
democracy simply because . with their vast advertising budgets they are
able to establish the phoney values of consumerism. (t is these values
which are being used to establish the terrain of debate in the political
arena and thus preempting political decisions even before they come to

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be discussed. It is politicians who discuss motorway financing, for


example, but it is the artfully generated appetite for mass motoring from
the economic sector which promotes its presumed need in the first place.
So that for all the unassuming radicalism of its political structure Swiss
democracy can never be a Fourth World reality until it has established an
equal degree of radical selfgovernment at the local level in its economic
life.
Recession from Reality
And that goes for everywhere else too, and it points to a really curious
feature 01 the contemporary scene. It is doubtful if a more blatant and
insidious threat to liberty has appeared in modern times than that of the
giant national or multinational corporations. And it is part of the world
wide recession of the socalled 'left' from radicalism, and even from
reality, that the{ appearance of these monster complexes is greeted with
an almost bovine indifference. Trade Unions bargain with them, socalled
socialist governments sign lucrative contracts with them, socialist journals
discuss earnestly what part they should play, and nowhere is their
existence, or their right to exist, challenged at all. Vet it is these
complexes, often with budgets outstripping those of national
governments, and which are expanding and developing at a prodigious
rate, which are in the vanguard of the gadarene rush to consumerism
which is sweeping the world, exhausting its resources, polluting the
environment and
. promoting an incalculable threat to the freedom of the citizen and the
very existence of civilisation. Seldom in all history has so much power
been encompassed in the hands of so few private people answerable to
nobody but themselves. And still we are only at the earliest reaches of
this development, a development, it is not difficult to foresee, which may
well end in the virtual control of the world economy by a consortium
comprised of a mere handful of such giants.
Hence there is a sharply practical need to counter this monstrous assault
on liberty by deliberately forswearing consumerism, establishing
localised forms of production for (mainly) local consumption, and above
all to democratise the workings of those large economic units which exist
in any given locality. This latter point may well need to be given effect by
simple direct action. Here the workers of the Lipp factory in France have
shown the way forward. I n occupying and democratically operating their
factory when its owners were planning to close it, they demonstrated

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clearly that ownership cum management in private hands is as


superfluous as various schools of socialist thought have always said it
was. Given the isolated nature of their struggle their defeat was probably
inevitable, but a capitalism confronted with direct action of this kind in
numerous areas would soon find it was powerless to do other than
acquiesce in whatever arrangements the workers chose to make.
If the workers were wise they would, in such circumstances,
acknowledge the existing ownership titles of their firms and make
arrangements for compensation at market valuation. In a period of
massive inflation and rapidly dwindling money values this would be a
fairly minor matter, one indeed far less important
than a great deal of theorising is apt to suppose. What matters is that if
the workers could become the owners and managers of their own
concern by means by which even the existing owners could see to be fair
it would reduce the possibilities of a political backlash and open the way
for a new era of economic democracy on Fourth World lines.
It would be idle to suppose that the path to workers ownership and
management will be anything like as smooth else where, but the fact
remains that the era of industrial and economic wage slavery can now
end whenever the workers choose to stop it. One may well wonder what
they are waiting for, and if by chance they are waiting for their trade
union leaders to act they had better . recognise quickly that on that score
they are likely to wait, all too literally as it happens, until doomsday.
All forms of slavery depend ultimately on the acquiescence of the slaves,
who are often guided by the consideration that they have no other choice
but to submit; the moment they withdraw their acquiescence the game is
up. This is the lesson of the downfall of all the imposing colonial empires
of modern times; it is
a lesson the industrial workers of the world have yet, it seems, to learn.
Butthey are learning fast, and what they now need to grasp is that they
are caught today in an historic onrush between 'the authoritarian colossi
of national and multinational concerns which are sweeping towards a
control of the entire global
economy on political terms which cannot fail to be fascist in ethos and
practice, and their own dawning awareness of the possibilities in their
hands for freedom.

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The Destruction of Local Governments

Politically it is possible to note a similar race between rival forces having


substantially similar goals. There is, for' example, a rapid acceleration of
the
trends towards larger and larger units of government; sometimes this is
open and blatant, as in the attempts to impose a 'united' Europe on
unsuspecting or hostile peoples; in others it is more covert and insidious
as in the measures taken by the governments of Britain, France, Italy and
other countries to 'reform' local government. Reform is simply a
barefaced euphemism for destruction, f r what has been effected here is
the abolition of the smallest units of government by grouping the powers
they formerly exercised into the maw of much larger units more
susceptible to central government fiat and control.
Against these trends there are emerging in every continent of the world
numerous ethnic or linguistic groupings, quite a number of which have
been submerged for centuries under the repressive pretensions of
centralised state power systems" These groupings require no economic or
political justification for their appearance, even though they can freely
provide both, their significance arises from the bare fact of their
existence, for they represent in sharp political form the revolution in
human consciousness that is sweeping the world and which is prompting
it to altogether new forms of existential experience. Inevitably that
experience concerns freedom, and by freedom is not meant an abstract
principle which mayor may not come down
to earth in the form of a 'free' election every five years, an election in
which rival party hacks contend for the privileges,
the perks and the general payoff from appointment by the chief party
hack to one public office or another. Rather is freedom seen as a reality to
be lived in terms of making decisions in concert with others about nine
tenths of the matters commonly at present usurped by central
governments, matters about schools and education in themselves one of
the most vital aspects of freedom about the structure, staffing and
operation of all kinds of local government services, especially the police,
about the use of language, forms of dress, patterns of sexuality, means of
communication and so on and so on.
'Bomb the Headquarters'

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Even now many socialists of the old school seem quite unable to grasp
what this revolution is all about and how it is tipping the old concepts of
progress through mass" party structures, a mass party headquarters, mass
party leaders and mass party discipline into the dustbins of history. Even
now they seem unable to grasp that the key question is not whether
something will work, whether an independent Scotland will work or
whether a free Wales, let us say, is viable, but whether people want them.
At present the political forces ranged against the Fourth World are
imposing enough and repression is the order of the day either by police
and military thuggery or by administrative artifice coupled with a
conspiracy of media silence. I t is not commonly known, for example,
that when Robert Lafont, the author of several books on Occitanie, and a
champion of the independence of this historic region of France, sought to
enter his candidature for the recent presidential elections it was rejected
by the French constitutional council. "
Nevertheless, the old order is facing its own problems, for whilst small
nations of only a few million people are showing that their arrangements
work very well indeed, so that Denmark, for example (population 5
million), has a higher per capita gross domestic product than West
Germany population 61 million), it is becoming increasingly evident that
the political and economic arrangements of the big units, far from
working at all, are quite simply breaking down. Indeed, the future of the
big powers is now being freely_prognosticated in terms of the total
collapse of their paper currencies, massive{ unemployment, widespread
social unrest and rebellion and greater and greater measures of repression
and coercion by the state, itself largely a machine of war.
There is as yet no ideology of world liberation which will rescue it from
the clutches of our decaying bourgeois civilisation, so that Women's Lib,
Gay Lib, Student Lib, Black Power, the commune movement, radical
pacifism, ecology action, community politics and a host of other new
manifestations have yet to see the vital ideological link between their
own concerns and the broader realities 01 the Fourth World.
When that link is established we may expect the world to change and
the, prospects of a new and more hopeful phase in human affairs to open
up. This will not happen because people want it, even though they do; it
will result from the unremitting efforts of a small minority (as always') to
establish those organisational links and those working structures imbued
with a clearsighted momentum towards objectives which at present are

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so patently lacking. The nee' now, as never before, is for organising and
building, to lay that groundwork of structure which will help to make the
Fourth World a reality. 'Our lack is nothing but our leave'.

* The Fourth World;s the world of small nations, the colonies within
states. the Mohawks. the Basques. the Lapps. the Welsh. Those who want
decentralised, smallscale forms of organisation and the fulfilment of
human values. Editor
17

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Manifesto of an alternative culture Renee Dumont

Rene Dumont, professor at the agronomic institute of ParisGrignon;was


nominated by more than. a hundred ecological societies as their
candidate for the Presidency of France in 1974. Here is his. election
manifesto.
The Ecological Problem
It is one and the same system which organises the exploitation of the
workers and the degradation of living and working conditions and puts
the whole earth in danger. The blind policy of growth which is so
extravagantly praised by all the political parties, takes no account either
of human wellbeing or of the environment. In this system the cost of
pollution, then of depollution are added together to swell the production
figures, though in fact they cancel one another out. Goods with builtin
obsolescence that deteriorate as soon as they are bought, the wastes
that accumulate, the production of armaments, the recourse to ever larger
and . more dangerous technology: our system has to run faster and faster
in order to
stay where it is.
Nuclear power stations require so much energy for their construction that
it is necessary to keep building new ones in preparation for future
stations.
In support of this project governments invoke the mystique of progress.
Let us be clear on this point: progress whose price is so heavy, for our
health, for our children, for the workers, is not progress. ' Growth has not
done away with inequalities in France: it has accentuated them.
On the contrary, a privileged minority benefit from this growth and
carefully preserve for themselves an agreeable way of life. All decisions
are concentrated in their hands. Centralised control is extended into all
spheres and transforms the people who are deprived of information into
robots for production and consumption. In this system women have no
rights and no voice even in the disposal of their own bodies in the matter
of contraception and abortion. In this system
a Breton has not the right to be a Breton. Regional cultures are
suppressed, uniformity is the rule.

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Our 'expansion' has been brought about largely through the pillage of the
third world, through underpayment for raw materials, including oil until
1971. This pillage has made possible our unparalleled waste&e of all
these resources. The famine is due to the breaking down of the traditional
customs, grain reserves, and irresponsible export of cultures. I t is also
caused by the extravagant spending of the elites who want to live. in
western style at the expense of the agricultural and industrial equipment
of their countries.
There are Solutions
• The primacy of wellbeing over the accumulation of goods, and the
quality of Iife over the standard of living.
• equilibrium between production, consumption, population and
resources.
• transference to the whole population, men and women, within the
framework of their communities, of the power to organise themselves,
make their own decisions, as well 'as the power to acquire the necessary
information.
• respect for technical and cultural diversity, of human beings and of
social I
groups.
• the use of decentralised production techniques, nonpolluting and
based on renewable resources as, for example, solar energy (soft
technology).
• decentralisation of power at all geographical levels (regions,
departments, communes, quartiers).
• obligatory information to associations about the decisions which
concern them, and access to the decisionmaking procedures.
. the possibility of legal intervention by the associations before the
harmful projects are begun.
• the setting up of local means of communication which will allow
everyone to express their views and effectively make decisions (local
television).
All the present economic calculations are false. They count as an addition
to the national wealth expenditure on medicines, costs of hospitalisation,
charges for car repairs and costs of burial.
Equally monumental errors today remove all significance from the Gross
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National Product (G. N. P. ) which is still the official index of progress. A


more accurate measure of the national well­being is urgently heeded.
This would make it possible to escape from the short­term economic
perspective based on appetite and power.
To Avoid Economic Crisis . and Unemployment
• By social measures such as reduction of working hours and rates of
working,
• By social investments (creches, hospitals) the most productive of all.
I. Il By changing industrial production to more durable, useful and less
polluting products. This is especially possible for the motor car.
• By altering agricultural policy so as not to favour the moneylenders.
Confining of subsidies to activities which do not destroy the natural
equilibria.
• By reorientation and development of services such as preventive
medicine, state education, permanent citizenship to the foreign workers,
the protection of nature and the struggle against pollution.
)
The Redistribution of health
democratising education, increasing low wages, helping the aged . . . is
not enough. The redistribution of wealth involves above all a move
towards:
• greater equality in the conditions and environment of work, housing
and health. • greater equality for all in quality and standard of life a
fairer relationship between the prices of agricultural and industrial
products.
• finanCially it requires a complete re­thinking of the distribution of the
national wealth.
• giving the major part of public money to the local communities.
• economising by avoiding waste.
• giving priority to social spending for the betterment of the
environment of the underprivileged.
• a generalised tax on pollutions.
But don't wait for things to change by themselves, Only you have the
power to change them.

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Manifesto of an Alternative Culture


ReneDumont
They have not told you this. , But it is true.
• There is no life left in the Baltic Sea; soon there will be none in the
Mediterranean.
• Each time you take your car away for the weekend, France has to sell a
gun to one of the petrolproducing countries of the Third World.
• Intoxication by exhaust gases and tobacco cause as many road
accidents as drunkenness.
• In order to travel 10,000 kilometres, one has to devote 1,500 hours to
one's car (earning the money to buy and maintain it, driving time, waiting
in traffic jams, hospitalisation). This comes to
6 kilometres an hour, the rate of a pedestrian.
• Winter 1974, Morlaix flooded: the hedges which held the rain in the
soil having been destroyed. Lisbon and Florence had already suffered the
same fate.
• Each year 1 00,000 hectares s of agricultural land vanish under
concrete.
• The MaineMontparnasse building consumes as much electricity as a
town of
25,000 inhabitants. ,
• According to the technocrats, 80% of the French people will live in the
towns in 1985. According to a recent poll, 70% of the French people
want to live in the country.
But have they told you that . . .
• Domestic heating and production of hot water by solar energy is
practicable now.
• The recycling of aluminium requires eight times less energy than its
production from ores.
• The richest beds of tin ,are the rubbish dumps of the big towns.
• The train uses four timeless energy per passenger/kilometre than the car.
• An agriculture which respects' the soil and relies on natural processes
obtains excellent yields with a minimum of chemical fertilizers and
dangerous

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pesticides. n /'
translated by Anne Vogel

Country Afternoon
we buy postcards sepiatinted
putting extra money, carefully, in the box
a lone tourist
made nervous by laughter
and the child climbing on tombstones hurries towards the lychgate
shuts it with an echoing click
a church noted by Betjeman saddlebacked, herringboned
tiny, cool '
more ancient than its written history a god's eye in Cotswold fields:
outside, the graven cross, six centuries won is a single shaft to heaven
from the crypt I look up
see your face for an instant
dark against sunlight
still as a stone knight
a ,woodpigeon clatters­from a smouldering bonfire smoke wavers
upwards
we gaze into the rectory orchard
I heavy with forbidden fruit dahlias in shocks lean towards us
across the lane
five. geese _from a fairy tale
cows gathered peaceably to be milked a muddy ford with minnows
no sound or sight of other human
fifteen adults in this community a few children and the old
where are they allindoors, or vanished long ago
into the hedgerows, the rolling fields?
at the edge of the wood a horse chases a cow "an afternoon out of time,"
you say

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. "fifty years or ,more ago.


if I built a church it would be like this"
I pick flowers that will not last the journey home heat dances on tarmac
the child runs towards the car
where to go from here?

Frances Horovitz

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Towards An Alternative Culture Woody

This is the first extract from a long essay entitled 'An Introduction to
Alternative Culture' which will be serialised in the next few issues of
Undercurrents. We think it represents an original and refreshing approach
to the problem that has plagued radicals in every era: how can society be
changed? Subsequent extracts will deal with, and hopefully shed light
upon, such topics as: the characteristics of a society in which sociality
('living for each other') is the keynote; the factors which restrict the
spread of radical ideas to limited numbers of people and how those
limitations might be transcended; the necessity for tolerance of the views
of others; and how the embryonic alternative culture can begin, now, to
lay the foundations of the 'voluntary state' in the midst of our 'mature'
society.

GROWING NUMBERS of radicals in our portion of the world are coming


to under­stand that the struggle for social change cannot be waged with
the ballot box, nor yet with the gun. The alternative culture is happening.
Or rather, it is trying to happen. Countless small groups of human beings
have decided to go back to square one: to the first principles of social
co­operation. A growing literature surrounds this activity. Manifestos and
subjective essays proclaiming the new values
,abound; side by side with accounts of practical experiments. But the
failure rate is staggering.
Meanwhile, the heavy homework has not been done. These practical
activities labour under social theories which only . have meaning in other
places, and for other purposes, not in these societies, nor for this task. If a
movement is the unity of theory and practice, then it is true to say that no
movement to alternative culture exists. Yet the same real social conditions
which have generated this practical activity have also prompted
widespread questioning and thinking by
isolated individuals. .
The twin intentions of this essay, then, are first to offer some provisional
basis for discussion of strategy among those actively involved; and
second to provoke if only by its errors, and its brashness ­a response and
a continuing elaboration of theory among those already moving towards,
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or ahead of, these ideas.


Use of the first person singular has been avoided except where the
context requires it. For few of the ideas are
. original, even in the everyday sense. The central concepts have come
via a number of comrades who have applied themselves to the problem.
And the wisdom of older social theories has also been drawn on.

What's wrong
There is something very wrong with the world. If you don't think so, don't
bother to read this. If you do think so, I am try­ing to talk to you.
We are all, basically, unhappy about what is wrong. A few million people
get very down at times, and have to take tablets or go to the doctor. And
thousands commit suicide every year. But most of us keep p cheerful
enough. We have our jobs and our duties; and we have our
entertainments. So we keep cheerful, and yet we are unhappy.
Moreover, we feel lonely. For old people, those who cannot get about,
people who don't make friends easily, being lonely is very real. But most
of us have lots of friends,as well as families ­yet we still feel lonely. The
other people in the street, or on the train even people who live a few
doors away seem like strangers. When something special happens, like a
fire in our street, we are ,1I1 out in the road and everybody finds they can
talk to everybody. For a little while, it is just as it should be.
We don't feel safe, either. It's not so much the Bomb that frightens us we
don't like the thought of it, so we don't think about it. We don't feel safe
because we are worried about 'holding our own'. Most of it comes down
to money,. If we have a fairly good job (or our husband has) we can buy
most of the things other people can buy and do most of the things other
people can do. But if we lose our job, or fall ill, or get injured, or reach
retiring age, then we can't hold our own any more: We feel a failure,
even if it was not our fault. Some blokes stay away from their local pub
and their friends, rather than not be able to buy a round.
So long as we compete like this, there have got to be losers. And the next
loser could be you or me. That is why we don't feel safe.
We feel selfish. Most of us can be very generous at times, and yet in our
whole lives we feel selfish. I f you are trying to hold your own against the
others, it just does not make sense to let yourself down by helping

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someone else up. And how


can you be bothered about other people's problems when they seem so
far away you cannot even talk k to them? I n any case you haven't got the
time to help because there are so many things you have to do. So we just
help our own. And give a few bob to charity if we have it to spare. And
go on feeling selfish.
We have no control over our lives. Now, we live in a democracy: the very
best, we, are told. We can vote in secret for anyone we like. We can elect
our own council and our own government. We can choose our leaders
and they can pass laws toput right anything that is wrong. Other countries
also say their system is 'the best'. And yet the world stays very wrong.
Our lives have no purpose. The message we get(from all around us, from
the telly, from the papers, is to,look after number one. And we do. But we
need some purpose bigger than ourselves. Once, the Church gave this
purpose to all. Today, some of us are again turning to God to give our
lives meaning. Others see that this does not itself change the real things
that are wrong with the real world: not even for those who believe. Some
still
find purpose in serving 'their country', whether Britain, Israel, Mexico or
what­ever. But most of us today can see that to be for 'us' is to be against
'them', and that in any case a nation is not the same thing as its people.
There is no shortage of other causes, but for most of us ,it is still true that
our lives have no purpose.
I r
We are not ourselves. Perhaps this is the most important part of what is
wrong. Most o us feel that the person living the daily routine is not the
real us. That the 'man or woman being distant, selfish and
hard is not the real us. We know we are not really ,doing what we could
do, or being what we could be. Now and then, the real us seems to break
through for
a while usually when tragedy strikes, or some other sudden change takes
place in our lives. But mostly, the person we could really be stays shut
inside, and the world in which we could be that person remains a dream.
It is mainly the young who can work to make a dream come true. Which
is why young people protest in so many ways ,against the kind of world
we live in. But as we get older we become more realistic. We bury our
dream. And nearly forget that we are not ourselves.

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There is a word for what's wrong with the world. I t is called Alienation.

The Symptom or the Cause?


But, you ask, what about all the other things wrong with the world? The
over half a million of us unemployed in this country alone, when voices
are calling urgently for higher production? The
angry contempt shown to one section of those who do not work (the dole
queue), compared with the respect given to another (the shareholders).
What about the punishment Of common thieves, and the rewards heaped
upon those who steal from all of us? What about the 'democratic' society
in which the orders still come down from above and bosses are chosen
by bigger bosses? Or invitation to people to take part in democracy, and
the branding of those who have their shout as troublemakers? The
management which insists on its right to manage our working lives down
to the last detail, and yet is so out of touch with the reality of work that it
couldn't get by without the bloke on the job using his own initiative? The
'free press' which is tied to the patronage of its advertisers; or the
unbiased news which just happens to carry the values of a tiny minority,
making them the ideas of the majority? The things we are teased into .
wanting so as to keep the market boom
Undercurrents 10
ing, instead of the market being there to supply what we want? The boast
of equal opportunity, and the different schools for the rich, the clever and
the poor? The whole outfit run for profit, and not for social use and need?
The worldwide pledge that all are born equal, and the secondclass rating
of people of darker colours, lower classes and women everywhere? The
new tyrannies we see grown up in the name of ending tyranny? The small
countries which are independent, yet bleeding to death under the heel of
Big Power troops, Big Power money, or both? The aid to them which
leaves them more strangled than before; and the home taxpayer feeling
he has helped some ungrateful children? The starving millions throughout
the world, when there is enough, at least at present, to feed them all? The
Bomb which few people on any side really want, yet which could end it
'all for us in a few minutes time; or the still more horrific chemical and
biological weapons? The pollution of the world, and the rape of its
resources while our numbers increase by millions every year?
Well, what about them?

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We believe that these things (and many more you probably wanted to
add) are not things wrong with the world. They
all exist because of what's wrong with the world: they are symptoms of
the illness, not the illness itself. I f we were wrong; if they were just things
wrong by them­selves, then many of them would have been put right by
now. For some of them are too dangerous or inhuman for any human
people who were themselves, and who were in control of themselves, to
allow.
The world is not all bad
What do we have that's good? Firstly, a measure of political. freedom.
This means that there is no law stopping us from becoming Prime
Minister, 'or
a millionaire. We are not denied the poli­tical right to stand on a soap
box at Hyde Park Corner, to meet with others who share our views, to
demonstrate our opposition to this or that i[injustice. We have the legal
right to live in any part of the country or even to leave it, to change our
job at any time, to buy
a cottage or a mansion. There may be good reasons why we can't do any
or all of these things, but they are not political reasons. We, in Britain,
have political freedom. People who haven't got it know how important it
is. We know that it doesn't put everything right.
Next, there is paid social behaviour.
There are many people who, though they go to work firstly for money,
take pleasure and pride in their work as
a social act in itself. We can straight away think of many doctors and
nurses, teachers, engineers, craftsmen and trades­men of many kinds,
even some people with what seem to be really lousy jobs.
Then, there is voluntary social behaviour. People who, without pay and
for all sorts of reasons, do things intended to help other people; from
holding a door open for another person, to a lifetime of work for the
mentally handicapped; from hot soup for the hungry, to political agitation
for justice, Some of these actions have mixed results. An efficient
voluntary service for the aged may bring real help to thousands, though it
may
also help society to dodge its debt to tens of thousands. But, taking all
these things together, our lives here and now are better for the voluntary

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acts of those who care, and did care in the past.


In adding up what's good, of course, we must be careful not to add things
which are good for us because they are bad for other parts of the world.
Our high standard of living is not good and
would not be good even if it was fairly shared between us. We can buy a
pound of sugar with ten minutes work because the man who cuts the
sugar gets many times less for his work. Worse still, part of the reason
why we have what justice we have is because the most powerful groups
. are able to share some money and power with us and still stay powerful.
They can do this by stealing new wealth from other parts of the world.
They can go on steal­ing most easily from countries where only a
smallgroup in power wants a cut, and the rest have no say.
For us in this country, the world around us is part good, part bad, part
stolen. And behind it all, there is some­thing very wrong with the world.
Many books have been written to explain why the world is like this. Out
of them all comes one simple central idea: the world is as it is because
we are all living against each other; it cannot be different until we live for
each other.
We take this simple statement to be so / obviously true that it does not
need to be proved or explained.
22
The trouble is that what's wrong is in two parts: part of it is the way the
world is, and part of it is the way we are. Not only that, but neither part is
the way it is by accident, nor is it free to be different on its own. The way
we are is fixed by the rules, and the rules are fixed by the way we are. By
the rules, we mean not only the law but the way work is organised, the
way society is organised, in fact, everything that adds up to a complete
way of life.
Politics and morality ­Reform or Revolution?
Many people have said: "The world is the way it is because we are all
wicked, so we must start changingour ways to get
a better world. " This is a personal or moral approach. Others have said:
"We behave as we do because the rules of society are wrong; we need to
change the rules. " This is apolitical approach.
Political workers choose one of two ways to try to bring change: reform
and revolution. The reformer assumes that society is basically good, and

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that the bad things can be put right little by little. The
revolutionary assumes that society is ('
rotten, and must be broken down before a better one can be built.
But what changes are possible in
a society of people who are Iiving against each other? The pressure for
power to be shared does not come from the very bottom, but always from
a group which has grown in identity and selfconfidence on the edge of
power. Barons in one age, clerics in another, merchants in another,
managers in another, organised labour in
I'
another, students in another. The sharing is seldom equal, and each time
there is less to share. Society becomes a great pyramid with many groups
arranged according to their bargaining power. Few groups haw; great
power, and few have none. To take account of, and to try and fix these
changes, the rules are changed.
. They become more and more compIicated. .
How far can reform go? In theory all
the way to full, hostile equality. The end
of the reformist road is the Conservative dream: a property owning
democracy; equality in,competition; all the forces of greed and ambition
in perfect balance. Luckily for us, this nightmareparadise is unlikely to be
reached, though it is the
goal for which reformers of all political parties are working, whether they
know it or not. As the forces of society slowly
wear down the pinnacle of total power,
so the corruption of power penetrates
every level of society. This in turn undermines the drive to reform. The
point
today is not so much that the top two per cent still own four fifths of the
wealth
(or whatever) but that the rest of us are prepared to fight each other for
what's
left. So the very fact of living against each other sets a limit to how far
reform can

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go. When a society gets to this point, we


can say that it is 'mature'. The great ages
of reform have ended. W should be
grateful for all the reforms that have been won usually in the teethof
bitter opposition. They make life for most of us better than it would have
been: but they " still leave things very wrong.
The worst thing about the mature
society is this: some institutions, once used by a powerful group to keep
other people in their place, or to live on their backs, become living
monsters in their own right. Examples of these are the Church
establishment, the money system and the Party, or political bureaucracy ­
often after a political revolution. These living monsters grow so powerful
that they dominate our whole lives. Weak and strong alike, we become
robots to their inhuman laws. This is the stage of alienation proper.
Some people refuse to believe this pro­cess is happening: you can't
see,this sort of monster as you can see a person. So they blame the
managers of the money system or the groups which gain most from it. The
argument is that since some groups are still able to take advantage of the
money system, they must be running it. But the total powers needed to
do this have been taken away by reform.
A human tyranny has been curbed to release an inhuman one.
How long does a mature society last?
There doesn't seem to be any clear answer to this. Sometimes a country
manages to keep going for a long time without any of the things we have
mentioned reaching a crisis. The engine has no real driver, but it doesn't
go off the rails. I n other cases, a society starts to
break up even as it begins to mature:
Mostly, it's somewhere between these limits.
What happens then? History shows us that several things can happen.
Occasionally, society disintegrates all together, giving way to a return of
the 'dark ages'. More often, total revolution or foreign conquest (usually
the latter) cancels all the rules, gives a new group total power, and the
whole process starts again. More often still, the change is not so dramatic.
Perhaps peacefully, perhaps via a coup or partial revolution, a strong man
comes to power. He is able to take at least some control of the runaway
engine at the price of many of the 'democratic practices' won from the
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old order. But the new restrictions on free­dom renew the drive to
reform.
Where does this leave reform and revolution? The reformist hope that the
'improvement' in the rules would itself change our ways, has not been
met. The revolutionary insists that in the real revolution the people as a
whole will take power. But this, as we have just seen, requires the people
to be for each other
as a whole . l the very condition which
the revolution is, or should be outto achieve. Likewise, the reformer,
seeking changes in the rules from competition to cooperation needed a
real reforming drive in this direction from the people the rules were to
change. So both reform and
revolution require as a condition of success the very thing they intend to
create a real human society.
Escape or example?
What about the personal or moral approach to change? Here again, we
find two different ways of dealing with the problem: escape and example.
The escapist believes that we are hope­lessly contaminated by the real
world, and can only change ourselves by turning away from it. The
exemplar believes that the world does allow us the options of being good
and bad, and that the good in us can be increased by example and
teaching. The attitudes of the revolu­tionary and the reformer can be
seen in these positions, despite the difference between the personal and
the political approaches. The escapist and the revolu­tionary reject the
world as they find it. The exemplar and the reformer accept it as a
foundation on which to build.
Escape takes many forms. For some it is turning away from the dirty world
of the body and of things, to the pure world of thought and of the spirit.
For others, it is the more practical step of
. withdrawing from modern alienated society to some small selfcontained
com­munity of likeminded souls usually to a fairly primitive and hardy
life. Many others simply drop out from personal cooperation with society
and its values.

The escape of the commune is more important Despite the hard


conditions of life, it can produce a real satisfaction that begins outside

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rather than inside the


head. The commune can and does ­also serve as a workshop, making
and testing new community values and human attitudes. Yet the
commune is not an escape which is open to society as
a whole; the most isolated commune only has meaning in relation to the
society.
The second, personal or moral, approach to change, we have called
example. In fact, most of those who try to change us this way rely more
on teaching than on example. Many of them do not practice what they
preach a fact not lost on the rest of us. The few who have backed up their
words with actions have at least made some impact on man­kind.
Attempts to educate us into being good vary. The" first method is to put us
right on the facts of life: showing, for instance, that cooperation rather
than competition is the natural tendency of all forms of life, and our
competitive existence is unnatural. But whether these facts are true or
not, it is ridiculous to expect such revelations alone to change us. They
may provide vital support to a cooperative practice but that's another
story.
" The second kind of moral teacher reveals to us that being good, and co­
operating with our fellows is in our own interests. If this were true, we
would soon all be converts to the cause. Unfortunately, there is a big
difference between everyone being good, and one person
being good without waiting for the others you can end up being
crucified that way. And an appeal to our own self­interest is itself in
conflict with the ethics the teacher is trying to inculcate.
Next comes the teaching of duty. We are told it's our duty to be good, to
behave in a certain way. This amounts to an attempt, by internal
conditioning rather than external force, to make us serve the interests of
some other individual group or cause, past or present, before our own
interests. The point about this kind of brainwashing is that the ethics are
placed in our heads as given truths we are not invited to judge their
merits.
The true exemplars have been rare and exceptional men and women.
They have sometimes attracted small bands of followers who have come
near to match '" ing them; more still who tried to follow but could not
face the total cost; and so on down to the millions who accepted their
values in name only. So the ideas have made their way out at the price of

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being diluted to nothing. The problem is


not one of staying in power: the ideas have often outlasted civilisations,
commanding a faithful few,in each generation. The world has flinched
under their impact; visions have been refueled. But the world, and we,
have been changed
less than the faithful might have expected.
For any new values or ideas, there will always be a small number of
people who are prepared by accidents of personality and life experience
to accept them, and
a smaller number of these who are prepared to be driven into a state of
tension with their world in defence of them. But the exemplar is asking
too much of the average person on both counts: to accept values for
which his or her life style has not prepared him or her, and to defy the
culture which sustains him or her. So the attempt to change us all by
moral example and teaching alone, requires as the condition of its
success a world which already endorses the desired values.
We have now looked at politics the attempt to change ourselves by
changing the world; and morality, as the attempt to change the world by
changing our­selves. We have seen how each attempt tends to be
defeated by the two way connection or dialectic between them.
Cutting across this division is the difference between acceptance and
rejection of what is already there. So we count four basic positions which
a radical may hold: revolutionary, reformer, escapist teacher. The point to
note is that none of them can be written off as rubbish, for each has hold
of aspects" of the truth.

THE COMMUNITY LEVY for Alternative Projects was started at the


beginning of last year by Nicholas Albery of BIT Information. Two years
earlier BIT had an unusual problem call: "I've been left £20,000 and
don't know what to do with it. Any ideas?" Nick suggested ways to get rid
of the problem including an' 'alternative society ideas pool' to avoid the
word 'competition' with a prize of cheque for the prize money was a few
hundred short with a note from the donor's friend who sent it: "sorry, old
chap, but I've creamed off a bit for a favourite project of my own. "
Over 300 entries came in all sorts of zany schemes were entered from
destruct­ive to frivolous my favourite was to develop a device to put out
blazing ships at sea by quickly ducking them under the water. But a lot of
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serious projects arose that couldn't get money elsewhere because they
didn't fit into society's framework. .
So CLAP was to fulfill this role of financing alternative projects on a
regular basis by placing a voluntary tax on established projects. The idea
was that
any going organisation has a turnover of money and won't be broken by
giving say 2% not of profit, but of total turnover to new projects. And to
avoid a hier­archy deciding which projects get the money, the donors
would give direct to the projects they like CLAP only acting to put givers
in touch with takers.
Purely in terms of money CLAP has been an amazing success, averaging
over £3,000 every twomonthly payout. And it's had another important
side effect of putting people in touch who have projects listed in the
CLAP Handbook which is included with Peace News.
But, as a tax it's so far been a failure.
Most of the money. comes from generous individuals; nearly all the rest is
lump sums from organisations hardly any is
a percentage of turnover or individuals' income. Why worry? Personally,
I'm not worried where the money comes from (it's said the most generous
donor runs blue movie clipjoints) but it's unlikely. to keep flowing in a
depression. But if the same amount came from a lot of indi­viduals and
organisations each giving 2%, then it would be a much more stable
situation and could expand indefinitely without anyone feeling the
pinch.
Travelling around the country over the last year researching my new book
Alter­native England and Wales, I've found the CLAP Handbook a useful
source of con­tacts but one aspect does worry me. The writeups in the
handbook aren't a clear indication of what's happening or likely to
happen someone can do a con­vincing writeup of a scheme that's only
in his head while others have really gat it
all together except the writing. But I can't see a good answer to this: do
you vet the schemes like the new Northern CLAP pro­pose, and if so
doesn't this bring in similar problems of the people applying putting on a
show the roots of PR? The Northern CLAP people reckon they all know
who's. who but I don't like the sound of that much better.
. As I see it the problem goes very deep

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1 first, what right has one person got to say what other person. is OK?
Secondly, can anyone, even the person himself, say whether he's got the
energy to carry out
his plans? So often people say that it's only lack ofmoney stopping them
going whatever it is and they firmly believe it. Yet in reality it's often that
they just haven't got the energy and aren't pre­pared to risk failure. To
give a safely
I irrelevant example, a shopkeeper down Kings Road decided to make
over a big space for artists to hold free exhibitions since he was always
hearing them com­plain that the galleries were too commercial. But, to
cut a long story short, four out of the first five keen artists to book it never
got it together. I'd be surprised if the proportion of CLAP projects that get
money and then do what they said they would is any higher.
To enable one in five supported pro­jects to succeed is certainly
worthwhile on the obvious level, but maybe CLAP's most important
function is to teach some of the other four who fail: that it's inside them
where the difficulties really lie. n For further information contact CLAP c/
o BIT, 146 Great Western Road, London WI1.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Solar Collectors pages 25 30 Low Impact Design/Undercurrents

'To Catch In Flight The Sunlight . . . '


THIS ARTICLE is about solar collectors, to which I shall proceed
elliptically, But first; trees:
I think that I will never see
A poem as beautiful as a tree.
Spike Milligan
Nor a building, that's certain.
Trees are exquisite photo chemical manufactories, drawing their energy
from the sun. Almost all of their material is from the earth's fluids the
atmosphere and water. Soil itself supplies only tiny quantities of inorganic
minerals. Jan Van Helmont grew a large tree in a bucket in the
seventeenth century; the weight of soil remained unchanged.
Diagram 1 is a simplified representation of photosynthesis, and reveals
that every plant and trees are the best adapted of all to do this on a grand
scale is a highly evolved device to . . .
" . . . catch in flight the sunlight streaming towards the earth, and to store
this, the most evasive o(,all forces, by converting it into an immobile
form"
Julius. Robert von Mayer in 1845.
Catch it, and store it: the two engineer­ing problems of solar design.
You see, trees are solar collectors; exquisite, evolved, ubiquitous, vastly
varied, beautiful and slaughtered.
So here's your first doityourself solar project go out and plant something.
Watch your solar collector grow, and give you food and oxygen
So the simplest, most elegant way of obtaining solar heating is by burning
brother wood. Your storage problems are overcome, your hardware is
selfrenewing, requires little maintenance, and so long as you graze, not
rape, your landscape ­looks beautiful too. You get useful by­products,
healthy energy (wood warms you twice; once when you chop it) and
a sense of integration. A fast grower, like a hazel coppice, produces 1 ton
per acre per year of croppings; 2 tons heats a small house through a year.

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OK, I know you want to build solar collectors. We're going to tell you
how, but we must realise that we're infants of the technocracy, and great
chunks of tin on your roof are in no sense alternative technology. They
started life as ore, half a world away, and have been thoroughly chomped
by highenergy processes since.
Diagram 2
CLIMATE
Pause again, and learn another lesson from trees. Because we in Britain
have a climate problem.
All the enthusiasm, all the data, all the freaks, NASA and all, are from
America
(though a little information trickles North from Australia and France). And
there they have sunshine.
America is a large landmass, our small one is heavily influenced by the
seas. Large landmasses get cold winters and hot summers, and, away
from the coast, yearround bright skies. We all know that
maritime climates bring year round grey skies, with little direct sun.
Diagram 2 makes this clear. We get about 1200 hours of direct sun
yearly, according to this map. New Mexico gets nearly 4000. New
Mexico is the home of solarenergy workers. High, cold, bright.
Here's a plug. Write to Zomeworks
P. O. Box 712 Albuquerque
NM 87103, USA
for Steve Baer's Solar Book$3 + $1. 50 p&p). It's full of insight and
understanding, by a man who's actually done it. Better than any other
publication I know' for the feel of the thermal environment.
But there, in NM, when they need sunlight they have it, right there on
their wintertime south walls. Here, though, the classic crunch occurs:
when you want it, you don't have it. We need it at night, in winter. We
get it in the day, in summer. Occasionally.
Now a flatplate solar collector is con­ceptually very simple, and it works
beautifully in New Mexico. But here, the technology just doesn’t import.
And the trees tell you why (I said I was still with the trees). Take a
hotclimate low­latitude palmtree, and compare it with the English elm.
Both are highly adapted, to get the carbon dioxide and water together in

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the
presence of sunlight. The palm has ample sun and has to conserve water,
and has' therefore a small crown of tough leaves. '­The elm is not limited
by water, but spreads a great cauliflower of leaves to trap and retrap the
diffuse, reflected radiation that gets through the cloud­cover from the
whole bright sky
While the palm is nature's precursor of the flatplate solar collector, the
elm is nature's triumphant answer to a tricky' design problem.
So you want to build flatplate collectors here in England? Well, at least
the problem is easily defined. You need a very large area, collecting from
the whole sky. It has to work when the sun comes out, but mostly when it
doesn't. It has to swing into action pretty quickly when the photons do
zap through, though. It has to closedown elegantly to weather the winter.
It has to get the energy into store rapidly and lock it in securely. It has to
be happy working at fairly low temperatures. Just like an elm.
Translating the above requirements into engineering reality produces a
system like this:
Very large collector plates, at lowish, uncritical angle to the horizontal,
with uncritical orientation. Rapid, accurate control system sensitive to
brightovercast and brightclear conditions, activating pumped fluid
system. Thermistor control accurate to about 2°C, but not prone to
'hunting'. Very thin collector plates with thin allover film of water or
other heattransfer fluid (why heat the tin if ya want hot water?). Long
heatstorage period (large storage mass). For reasons we'll go into in
subsequent articles, we think about two months' heat require­ment is
most sensible. And you've got to find a use for lowtemperature heat.
(You'll never escape the need for a 'back­up system' of conventional
type. Or you're into heat pumps. ) The system has to weather wind and
rain, winter cold and equinoctial gales. Has to be exceptionally well
insulated, or else work at temper­atures so close to ambient (or even
below, using heatpumps) that insulation doesn't matter. And it has to look
good, other­wise your local planning Neanderthals won't let you build it.
So far, no manufacturer is remotely close to solving these problems in a
way that competes with existing power sources. And the only
economically­viable installation is a wellinformed doityourself design
using readymade collector plates originally designed for domestic central
heating radiators, in other words.

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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT SOLAR COLLECTORS I've heard a


lot about solar collectors recently. What are they?
The simplest flatplate collectors consist of four elements: a blackened
receiv­ing surface/heat exchanger; a covering plate of glass or plastic;
insulation behind the heat exchanger; and a weathertight frame. A fluid
air,'or refrigerant, but usually water circulates through the heat
exchanger and carries the heat off to store. We will think mainly in terms
of watercooled collectors, and there are two main types. A closed system,
which circulates water through pipes in the heat exchanger; and an open
system which trickles water down over the face of the exchanger.
The flat plate collector works best if it is tilted up to face the sun, and is
oriented due South. The best tilt is equal to angle of latitude J52° here in
S. England) plus 15 for midsummer; and minus 15° for midwinter. Tilt and
orient­ation are not critical in Britain, because such a large proportion of
the energy received is scattered wholesky radiation. Most roofs, therefore,
are suitable for
a collector installation, and pitch can be left unchanged through the year.
Although simple in principle, solar collectors by their nature create a
situa­tion of high thermal stress. Thermal movement and condensation
are impor­tant practical problems. Ultraviolet light
degrades plastics and paints rapidly, and wind creates difficulties. Pipes
have to be taken through roofs, and this is not easy to do without making
the roof leak.
How does a flatplate collector work? Glass and some plastics (Mylar and
Tedlar by Du Pont) are transparent to shortwave radiation (light) and
almost opaque to longer wavelength (heat) radiation. Light passes through
the glass, and is partly absorbed by the blacksurfaced heat exchanger.
Black is the best colour for absorbing light. Between 60% and 90% of the
light energy is absorbed, degrades to heat, is carried off by the high
thermal conductivity of the heat exchanger, and passes into the
circulating fluid. The hot . exchanger surface radiates heat back towards
the glass, which cannot transmit it back to space; some of the heat is
absorbed by the glass, some reflected back to the heat exchanger. This
oneway property of glass is known as the 'green­house effect'. The
carbondioxide of the atmosphere does the same for the whole earth.
Heat is lost by a solar collector largely by conduction and convection.
The pro­portion of the incoming radiant energy which ends up in. the

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storage tank (usually heated water, sometimes rocks) defines the


efficiency of the collector system for any given set of conditions
temperature of store, incoming flux, losses by wind­flow, etc. etc. Noone
has yet agreed
a standard set of conditions for measuring efficiency, and everyone
quotes efficiency for, of course, the best conditions for their collector.
Most systems are between 30% and 40% efficient. Their losses are
minimised by: good insulation; reducing internal air con­vection (with
baffles); eliminating con­densation; maximising absorption by the
heatexchanger by uS,ing special, very
matt black, surfaces; running collectors cool; and double glazing to cut
down con­duction and convection losses from the front (though this also
cuts down incom­ing energy by 8% for the first additional layer of glass).
Almost all collectors on the market perform very similarly, because losses
are common to them aiL The design of the actual collector plate or
heatexchanger is uncritical, and cheap­ness is the main criterion for its
selection.
Your average roof covers, say, 40 m2 in plan, and so in midwinter gets
16KWh/day. A well insulated house stays warm with a continuous power
consumption of ,3 KW, which is equivalent to 72 KWh of energy per day.
So you see, midwinter solar energy in Britain is of very little use. The
midsummer story is a different one. There's no heating load for the house,
and the main requirement is for hot water for washing and similar tasks.
Take that 4. 6 KWh/m2 day and allow for a 30% efficient collector
system. Sliding back into the old Imperial measure,
4. 6 KWh x 30% = 1. 38 KWh.
1. 38 KWh x 3413 = 4710 Btu.
Now think of a 25 gallon bath full of water(250 Ibs) heated from 50°F to
a piping hot 150°F. The heat required to do this is 25 x 10x 100 = 25,000
Btu.
So a 1 m2 horizontal solar panel will heat about I/5th of a bath, daily in
summer. Mostly, you would be advised to have 4m2 of panel and this
would normally be tilted up to the South, so giving a slightly better yield
than a horizontal array. On an average day such an array would therefore
give you energy" equal to the heating load of a bath, or in the order of Y2
the hot water load of an average small household. Now, this does not
mean that you get a store of water at the right temperature for use, not

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even one that is too small for all your" needs. (If that were true, we could
all take economical 5 gallon showers. ) This
is because solar,collectors work best at It
low temperatures. (Smaller losses, and '
better heat transfer into the water. ) So
what you get is a largish body of water, I
lukewarm. And you therefore need a 1
backup system such as the dreaded ]
electric immersion heater. If you were to "
attempt to get fullyhot water, you'd have to be con tent with teacups fuII
on 10 or 20 days a year. '
Solar collectors are designed to collect
from direct radiation, and the best for us
are those that heat up smartly when the i
sun comes out from behind a cloud, arid j
which have small thermal mass. At the moment, plastic collectors are
apparently
the best (see Product Reviews section); l
pressed steel radiators are not quite as J
good, and 'purpose made' plates, made up
from sheets of copper, steel or aluminium .
with pipes attached, are worst of all, being usually clumsy with overlarge
water pipes spaced too far apart on their
surfaces. '
A blackpainted standard central heating radiator of pressed steel is the
ideal do­ityourself answer.
But surely in our cloudy climate we don't get much energy from the sun?
Well we do get some, and times are rough, so we should look at the
possibilities.
At SOoN, we would theoretically, under clear skies, receive 8. 6 KWh/
m2 day in MidJune, 4. 3 KWh/m2 day in MidSeptember and March, and
1. 3 KWh/m2 day in MidDecember on a horizontal surface.
Measurements at Kew show average figures for actual receipts of 4. 6
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KWh/m2 day for MidJune and 0. 4 KWh/m2 day in MidDecember. These


figures include the scattered radiation from the bright but cloudy
skybowl.
So we get between about a half and one third of the total available sun
energy, depending on time of year.
The world's sunniest climates get about 80% of the total energy.
So we do get enough energy to do something. If I put a solar collector on
my roof, how could I work out in advance the energy I'd receive?
Here are some simple approximate formulae, largely taken from a
research paper by Robert Vale, Results of Solar Collector Study, available
(price 40p + s. a. e. ) from:
University of Cambridge Dept. of
Architecture,
Technical Research Division, 1, Scroope Terrace, Cambridge CB2 1 PX.

The formulae below will give values for various tilted collectors pointing
due South. But Steve Baer gives the following table showing the
percentage of possible sunshine intercepted by a plane orientated away
from the sun by the number of degrees shown.
o degrees 100%
5 99. 6%
10 98. 5%
15 96. 5%
20 94. 0%
25 90. 6%
30 86. 6%
35 81. 9%
40 76. 6%
45 70. 7%
50 64. 3%
55 57. 4%
60 50%
65 42. 3%

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70 34. 2%
75 25. 8%
80 17. 4%
85 8. 7%
90 0%
Use this table to modify your result if the collector you're installing is not
due South. In fact, the use of the table in this way is not strictly correct,
but it'll give an approximation quite a good one if your collector is
within 40% of due South. Over 40°, reflective losses from the surface of
the glass cover begin to be important.

FORMULAE FOR CALCULATIONS


To calculate the monthly Direct energy receipt of a collector:
In a given month a collector at angle e to the horizontal receives 0. 698 I
n sin(e+a) KWh/m2/month where I is the average monthly intensity of
direct solar radiation on days of high radiation, measured in cal/cm2/
minute on a surface
normal to the radiation.
n is the number of hours of bright sunshine in the month
e is the angle between the collector surface and the horizontal
a is the average solar altitude in the month under consideration.
To calculate the monthly Indirect energy receipt of a collector:
In a given month a collector at angle b to the horizontal receives
0. 698 i n Y2(1 +cos e) KWh/m2/month
of collectable indirect radiation
where i is the average monthly back­ground diffuse radiation intensity
intensity, measured in cal/cm2/ minute on a horizontal surface;
n is the number of hours of bright sunshine in the month (this value is
introduced because it is only on days of high radiation that indirect
radiation can be collected at useful temperatures);
and e is the angle between the collector surface and the horizontal.
The actual available energy will be 30%
to 40% of these calculated receipts, depending on efficiency of your

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collector.

Here is a worked example of the cal­culations for a 1 m2 collector, due


South, 45° tilt, at Kew, in March.
DIRECT RECEIPTS
. = 0. 698 I n sin (e+a) KWh/m2/month now, = 0. 62 cal/cm2 min, and is
obtained by averaging the Met. Office data for Kew, given by Robert Vale
as follows
Jan 0. 41 cal/cm2 min
Feb 0. 49 "
Mar 0. 62 :'
Apr 0. 65 "
May 0. 76 "
Jun 0. 77 "
Jul 0. 63 "
Aug 0. 71 "
Sep 0. 63 "
Oct 0. 57 "
Nov 0. 46 "
Dec 0. 41 "
(These figures should be increased by 10% for the South West, and
reduced by 20% for the North of England and Scotland. )

n = 110, and is available for 19 locations throughout Britain, check the


Met. Office for your nearest, but here are some figures for Kew:
Jan 43 hours
Feb 63
Mar 110
Apr 168
May 198
Jun 220
Jul 192 •

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Aug 190
Sep 137
Oct 96
Nov 55
Dec 40
(Kew is one of the sunniest places around, so reduce these figures, or
obtain local ones for your area. )

e = 45°, a = 31, it is taken as the angle of solar elevation at 10. 00 or 14.


00 hours in mid­month, and can be read off this table:
Jan 12° Feb 22° Mar 31° Apr 41° May 50° Jun 54° Jul 50° Aug 41° Sep
31° Oct 22° Nov 12° Dec 7°

So for this example, 31° is the angle for


March. So 0. 698 x 0. 62 x 113 x sin (45+31)
= 47. 4 KWh/m2month

INDIRECT RECEIPTS
= 0. 698 i n Y2 (1 + case)
now i = 0. 22, and is obtained by averaging Kew data from Robert Vale as
follows:
Jan 0. 08 Feb 0. 16 Mar 0. 22 Apr 0. 29 May 0. 36 Jun 0. 39 Jul . 0. 36
Aug 0;29 Sep 0. 22 Oct 0. 16 Nov 0. 08 Dec 0. 05
These figures are probably OK to use throughout the country.
So 0. 698 x 0. 22 x 113 x Y2 (1 + 0. 71) = 14. 7 KWh/m2 month.
Therefore total receipt of energy =47. 4+14. 7=62. 1 KWh/m2month.
Allowing 30% efficiency, Usable heat= 18. 6 KWh/m2 month.
These formulae were used to compile this table for the monthly energy
receipt of a theoretical 1 m2, 45° collector at Kew, 30% efficient.

RECEIPTS (KWh/month)
Jan Mar Jun Sep

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Direct 11. 0 47. 0 113. 3 62. 1


Indirect 2. 1 14. 7 49. 2 18. 5
Total 13. 1 62. 1 162. 5 80:6
Actual 3. 9 18. 6 48. 8 24. 2

Compare this with a monthly hotwater requirement for a small household


of about 70100 KWh.

What can I do with this energy?


Solar collectors can be installed to pro­vide both space and water
heating,but before such an installation is considered, an estimate should
be made of your space/water heating requirements. If you're thinking of
space heating, the standard of installation in your abode is critical in
reducing heating needs. It has been shown that an overall U value (= loss
in watts/m2 °C) equivalent to four inches of polystyrene insulation is now
economic (cost of insulation amortised against fuel savings), although the
new building code on in. insulation goes nowhere near this. The same
applies to the insulation of your domestic hot water system ­ we have 4"
glass wool + reflective foil around our hot water cylinder and water
raised to 65°C will stay hot for 3 days before requiring another boost.
Even with a high standard of insulation, you will) find that unless you
have a very large area of collector, or a very large heat store (both of
which are excessively costly) that you will not be able to meet peak
heating demand in Dec/Jan, In fact, we have found that a break point is
reached when about 60% of the heating demand is met by flat plate
collectors; beyond this point a relatively larger area of collector must be
provided for a corres­ponding reduction of heating demand. It seems
sensible to limit the area of flat plate collector to that which will provide
60% of the heating demand, and to meet residual peak demand by
conventional (fossil fuel) or unconventional (sheepskin coat) means.
Would I save money? Could I doit­myself?
The cheapest readymade solar collector available is a standard pressed
steel panel radiator (about £6/m2) and if you have ' general building and
plumbing skills, such a system would be straightforward to install.
Standard radiators have their dis­advantages, and they may not be as
'efficient' as some manufactured panels ­but then, since they are less

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expensive, you can afford a bigger area.


Most solar collectors being marketed in this country are too expensive to
be worthwhile, and, often technically mis­conceived. The pamphlets
describing them often incorporate unsubstantiated claims and misleading
information. But maybe these are just teething problems; with time
technical problems can be ironed out, and with a growing market their
prices could come down.
About 4 m2 of collector will preheat your washing water for 68 months
of the year, saving about £20 p. a. at a cost of £300£400 if bought
offtheshelf (includ­ing plumbing and tanks). Allow say a 10year payback
allowing for price escalation of fossil fuels, and the market looks limited.
If you're considering space heating, about 40 m2 of collector will give
perhaps 60% of the space heating needs of a small house, but will still
need a conventional backup system, and will cost about £2,000. (Based
on anticipated performance of Szokolay's Milton Keynes prototype
solarheated house. )
Collectors are being marketed at prices ranging from £20£80/m2, glazed,
insulated, but uninstalled. The companies are mainly backyard
businesses: there is no largescale manufacturer in Britain. Unless
manufacturers can roughly halve the cost of a total installation then the
situation will remain strongly in favour of the group or individual building
their own system. The DIY man can buy and install a domestic water
preheating system (4m2 collector + tanks and plumbing) for £150, saving
money after probably 6 years.

Ian Hogan and Brian Ford

HOT COMPETITOR
Sunheat Systems Ltd. Barn House, Kemerton,
Nr. Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire
APART FROM heating water, the Salamander solar collector seems likely
to raise still further the temperature of com­petition between the
numerous small companies now manufacturing solar collectors in
Britain.
Out of what many people have come to feel is the unacceptable face of
AT, has come a solar collector made in this count for this country; and at

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around £17/m (for the ABS plastic heat exchanger only) it's the least
expensive in its field.
UK manufacturers have tended to follow blindly the early example of the
Israelis and Americans in using a metal (copper, aluminium or galvanized
steel) collector plate. However in the
UK, where the intensity of solar radiation is very variable even on sunny
days,
a collector which responds quickly to periods of intermittent sunshine
will prove to be more effective. Th is 'quick response' can be achieved by
providing
a thin film of water which covers virtually the whole of the back of the
collector plate, enabling more of the heat absorbed by the plate to be
conducted away more quickly.
In effect this is what the Salamander collector does. The front of the
collector is made from . 062 ins thick matt black ABS plastic sheet, and
the back is
. 031 ins thick corrugated ABS moulded sheet with 'header' pipes
moulded at top and bottom of the vertical grooves. (The material is
claimed to be resistant to ultra­violet radiation. ) The two sheets are
welded together to form the heat exchanger, which contains only 31/3
Iitres of water per square metre, with an inlet and outlet from headers at
the back. This basic unit is available for anybody wanting to frame and
insulate it them­selves, and costs about half the price of the completed
unit, which incorporates
an extruded aluminium frame, % in insulation and 4 mm glazing, and
sells at about £30/m2•
Plumbing connections are taken out of the baCk of the collector, and
units are connected in parallel. Brackets are pro­vided to join panels
together and to pro­vide angle supports for fixing to roof battens. Joins
between panels are made watertight by use of flexible plastic strip, and a
'flashing' is used to make good between the edges of roof tiles and the
sides of the collector
A pumped, indirect circulation system
is recommended which heats water in a small tank. This then feeds
preheated water into the base of the main hot water cylinder A simple
dual thermistor control

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unit is used to switch on the circulating pump when the temperature of


the water in the collector panel is above that in the solar tank.
For people with limited hot water requirements, Sunheat suggest the use
of a single, wallmounted panel connected directly to a five gallon storage
tank, which could provide hot water straight to an adjacent sink or basin.
Brian Ford Manufacturers in this country now pro­ducing flat plate solar
collectors.
D. O. M. Engineering Ltd (Mr. Sharpley) Wellington Industrial Estate
Nr. Taunton, Devon.
Solar Heat Ltd (Mr. Blanco) 99 Middleton Hall Road
Kings Norton, Birmingham 30. Production Methods Ltd (Mr. T. Aitken)
Barrhead, Scotland.
'Warmswim' Solar Panels
Drake and Fletcher (engineers) Maidstone, Kent.
Sunstor Solar Water Heaters Solar Centre
176 Ifield Road
Chelsea, London SWl 0 9AF.
Stellar Heat Systems Ltd(MF. F. McDonnell) 113 Stokes Croft, Bristol.
(See UC9 pp. 1112)
Sunheat Systems Ltd (Mr. Dobson) Barn House,
Kemerton. Nr. Tewkesburv. Gloucs.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Land For The People page 31

1. Land is Life! Man must work the land for food and life. Agriculture is
the one mode of production with which humans cannot dispense under
any circumstances.
2. Land ultimately cannot be owned by anybody. Land is constant while
human life is transient upon it. It is the duty of every generation to leave
the land as vigorous and fertile as they found it, in order not to diminish
the chances of future. generations.
3. At present the land in Britain is "owned" by far less than 1 % of the
popu­lation. Those who work it farmers and agricultural workers
represent only 1% of the people. Half of Britain's food is imported and
yet there is enough land to feed everybody. Greater food self­sufficiency
can only be achieved if agri­culture ceases to be the private concern of a
tiny minority.
4. Present agricultural practices aim at maximising yield per person and
machine, but due to cost explosion this system is coming unstuck.
Industrialised agri­culture is experiencing a crisis which can only be
resolved by drastic changes: agriculture can only be revitalised by more
people being engaged in it, on the basis of cooperation rather than com­
petition. But people will not 'go back' to the land if they have to look
forward to
a life of drudgery and subservience, on somebody else's farm.
5. In every economy a balance must be achieved between agriculture
and industry, between country and town. The 'principle' that food must
be imported from wherever it is cheapest is' dead: nobody is prepared to
sell us cheap food any longer. But greater food self­sufficiency, which is
becoming increas­ingly necessary, cannot be achieved
unless more people work the land, collectively and in the public interest.
6. At the present time nearly all develop­ment taking place upon the
land is residential, traffic or industrial develop­ment. How the
inhabitants of new towns are to be fed is never taken into con­sideration;
it is taken for granted. But
due to speculative land prices the gardens of the houses in new towns are

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usually so small as to be incapable of feeding even


a rabbit. New towns are geared to their inhabitants being employed by
industry.
7. With permanent redundancies in some major industries becoming very
likely,
a 'return' to the land by hundreds of thousands of people will become a
vital necessity. Agricultural growth is possible and desirable as industrial
growth is becoming unlikely and even undesirable in western countries.
We must work towards a new equivalence of agriculture
and industry. ,.
8. The demand for the takeover of large areas of land for new farming
villages is becoming increasingly popular. What such new villages shall
actually look like nobody knows, only suggestions can be made at
present. It must be clear to us, however, that we can no longer afford to
be messy creatures, i. e. new communities must be the basis for
ecologically sound activities, as far as both production and consumption
are concerned.
9. Should n w farming communities aim solely at selfsufficiency or, in
fact, at surplus production? As long as towns and cities exist, agricultural
villages must be able to produce more food than they require for
themselves. We must aim at high yields per acre achieved with methods
of cultivation which can be sus­tained for many generations to come,
indeed, indefinitely. To this end liberated agriculture, science,and
industry must " work hand in hand.
10. In new villages gardening and farming should coexist with crafts and,
possibly, smallscale industry. Many skills should be represented among
the members of
Undercurrents 10 every new community; at least all those skills required
to build it and maintain it. Surplus production would enable new village
communities to exchange their produce for necessary products of the
cities. \
11. The economics of the new village way of life must have the
satisfaction of human needs at their centre, which also means that work
itself must be satisfying. But every human need must be weighed up
against its ecological consequences: if the fulfilment of a need or want
today undermines the basis of human life tomorrow, it offers only a very
dubious kind of satisfaction.

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12. Some sceptics might say: "But no body wants to leave the cities to live
in farming villages. " But there is much evidence that they are wrong. It is
well­known that many people are still being driven from the land who
would love to stay if only they had the chance of
a satisfactory life, economically and socially, as well as culturally. There
are many people eager to live and work in the country who can't afford a
few acres and a cottage.
The redistribution of land (by popular demand) is a precondition for the
creation of new and viable communities. Agriculture and industry must
be under the control of those who do the work. But without a popular
movement the necessary changes cannot be brought about.
It is time that those who broadly. agree on these urgent issues join and
work. together. If you are interested in joining a work & study group write
to:
Land for the People c/o 8a Leighton Crescent, London' NW5

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
New Villages Now
MANY thousands of people in the cities have had enough ... they want to
get out, onto the land ... but where can they go? What can you do if you
don't have the money in the bank to buy a small holding? For a start the
State now controls over 5 million acres of land! Much of this was
previously 'owned' by landlords whose heirs couldn't pay the death
duties. If the State has 'confiscated' land in the interest of the people,
then the people must get access to it. If the people need land to work and
to live on they must get together - and voice their demands, loudly and
clearly.
Another 16,000 agricultural workers (and their families) left farms in
1974 to take up work in factories or to join the growing queues outside
labour exchanges in British towns and cities. Just 1% of the people are
now working in British agriculture and that is the lowest percentage of
any country in the world. The number of farm workers is shrinking almost
as fast as the food import bills are growing. These are trends which we
can no longer afford. There are clear indications that the limits of
mechanisation in agriculture have been reached and that the productivity
per person can grow no further. In some areas the productivity per acre of
land has been decreasing in the past few years due to deteriorating soil
conditions.
After the oil crisis some sections o( industry will never be- the same
again. It seems clear now that at least in the car industry there will be
permanent redundancies. This will have serious repercussions for
everyone. At a time of growing unemployment in industry it is becoming
apparent that we have neglected the land and all its marvellous potential.
If we say 'Back to the Land' we are not trying to run away from reality, on
the contrary, we are facing up to it! It is clear now that we ourselves must
grow much more of the food we require. In other words, that we must
establish a new balance between agriculture and industry, between
country and town. We can no longer afford to treat agriculture as the
neglected child of the economy. Growing food is the basis of human
existence and it is time that we gave it more thought than we are
accustomed to.
In order for Britain to become selfsufficient foodwise more people must
work the land. But nobody will choose to go and work in the country
under the sort of conditions that are offered to

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farm workers at present. Agriculture can only be revitalised when new


patterns or working and living on the land have been evolved.
Smallholdings, cultivated by individual tenant farmers, are not the
answer: The work of smallholders is hard, lonely and unrewarding and
their families suffer from isolation and lack of social life. This makes their
situation little
. better than that of farm workers. Many have given up under these
conditions and left the land.
If-people are to return to the land, and if we are serious about growing
more of our food ourselves, we must find new solutions! We must find
new ways of working and of living on the land. It seems to me that it is
necessary to build new villages which would have gardening
and farming, crafts and small scale industry a,s their economic base.
What could such villages look like? How big should they be? What is
said here in words and pictures is meant merely as
a suggestion. The value of utopian ideas is. often being disputed by
people engaged
in struggle ... but here are some anyway. Conventional thinking and
collective action without clear aims in our minds will not solve the
problems we are facing.
It is among other things the setting of houses which may or may not
contribute to the harmonious relationship between humans and their
environment and between one person and another. In the sort 'of village I
propose home and place
of work are closely linked together: the garden surrounding each house
should be large enough to supply at least all the vegetable food required
by the household; the fields adjoining the village -. which could be
farmed collectively should supply the rest of the food required by the
community as well as
a surplus which could be sold; cooperative workshops - maybe in the
centre of the village -could cater for the needs of the community as well
as providing additional income from 'trade'. In this kind of setting
children would have the opportunity to learn crafts and skills from an
early age. The aim of education
in such a community would be for children to acquire a wide range of_
practical knowledge as a basis from which to develop their intellects.
I am suggesting the concept of circular gardens for the proposed type of
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community for a number of reasons: it makes possible a lay-out in which


each house has an adjoining garden of equal size. It avoids the boring
straight lines resulting from a chess board pattern, or, for example, from a
pattern of interlocking hexagons. The spaces in between gardens could
be planted with trees, and in particular, with fruit and nut trees for the
benefit of the community as a whole. There would also be ample space
for children's play.
If the community was to produce
an agricultural surplus this would probably be done best by cultivating
grains, potatoes, sweet corn and other crops that can be stored easily, on
land adjoining the village. Cows, sheep and other animals, too, should be
kept by the community as a whole. The level of mechanisation in
collective farming activities would depend - among other things - on the
scale of the operation. I would opt for as little mechanisation as would
seem practical and the same applies to the use of artificial fertilizers and
other chemicals. Advanced organic farming methods have been proved to
be highly productive.
The drawings suggest a village consisting of about ninety houses for
around 500 people. If there are 5 to 6 people per house a garden of
about 3A of an acre should be large enough to make them. self-sufficient
in vegetable food. If the gardens and the spaces between them are added
together the community as a whole should be about ninety acres ilarger
sn area. Of course, that is a lot of land per person and this sort of lay-out
goes completely against present planning principles in ' which people are
piled together on as little space as possible. But we must recognise that
the average yield per acre in vegetable gardening is much higher than
that achieved in larger scale farming. It would seem very likely then, that
by building such a village on agricultural land we would actually be able
to increase the yield from these 90 acres.
In order to make this sort of new village viable economically there should
be several hundred acres of land around the community available for
collective farming. I t is obvious, that not everybody in the village would
work on the land fulltime. Some people would be engaged mainly in
craft production and would help out on the land only during the sowing
and harvesting seasons. Others might spend a couple of hours a day
working on the farm. The pain Us that there would be many people
available to help work the land and to increase its fertility. You may say:
Who would give up the present consumer way of life and would want to

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join such a community? It seems to me that the considerable response


that I and other writers on this topic have had from a number of articles
that have been published, is a clear indication that there is a considerable
amount of interest and willingness to participate. There would be some
problems of adjustment to such a way of life which should not be
underrated. But I reckon it would be easier to adjust to this kind of life
than to the rat race which ,most people never seem to get used to. What I
have suggested here is merely meant as a stimulus to think along new
lines, but there may well be other solutions to some of the problems I
h:l':~ listed. It would be foolish to impose a pattern of identical sized
round gardens on an already we'll structured landscape and I am not
suggesting that for one moment. A way of life which can be sustained
over long periods of time will require a much more even dispersal of the
population throughout the available land. The sort of village j am
proposing would be a first step in that direction. It would be an excellent
setting for trying out new kinds of energy saving architecture and
technology. In the past decades we have been busy trying to fulfil wants
without really knowing what our needs are. I f we adopt a more natural
way of life we might find out. Herbert Girardet

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Talking About Land (Where have all the farmers gone?)
FARMERS WHO HAVE TIME to confer together are usually well-heeled,
established, hard-headed businessmen who have achieved - not, it must be
admitted, without much hard work -
a position where they can afford both time and money to take anything from
one to four days off and travel far from their farms.
The Oxford Farming Conference of 5-7th January 1975 was no exception, and
it was perhaps a little paradoxical to hear so much of their desperate situation
when 850 of them could converge on Oxford for this occasion to debate the
theme 'Farming for Survival?' Those in danger of not surviving were no doubt
hard at it on their farms. As one speaker from the floor pointed out towards the
end of the Conference, it could hardly be regarded as covering the agricultural
scene when not one small farmer had been heard. A young man from Wales
who asked if he could survive if he bought a small farm now was firmly
advised to get off the grass, while the single reference to 'small is beautiful'
came from a speaker who farms 3,800 acres, is chairman of a farmers' co-
operative, a director of an oil seed company and of two frozen food processing
companies. Sir Michael Culme-Seymour certainly talked of stewardship and
the duty of the farmer to hand over an estate in a better condition than he
found it. His statement "You do not own the land, the land owns you" might
well be written on the brow of every farmer, Sir Michael also recognised that a
farm divided into small tenant holdings does better than a large enterprise, but
regarded 800 acres as the sort
of farm-unit which an individual could adequately handle. Cold comfort for all
those seeking anything from 10 acres up (or even less) had they been present.
Professor Britton from Wye College opined that if the average farmer in Britain
has three or four times as much land as his continental counterpart, this is a
situation we should do everything possible to preserve.
A speaker from the floor who questioned the ethics of feeding quantities of
cereals to livestock received
no support, while others felt confident that intensive animal production would
continue, using all available land for production of red meat, and producing
white meat from intensive units. This seems to suggest a painful ignorance of
the world food situation.
At a discussion on economic use of fertilizers, the chairman tentatively
enquired whether anyone thought
a return to,'muck and mystery' techniques desirable. One farmer muttered that
he had never left them, but so sotto voce that only his immediate neighbours

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heard, and the thought was strangled as soon as born.


The standard of the Papers,was high. and gave evidence not only of
considerable time in which to prepare them,' but of sufficiently wide reading
to pro-vide a plethora of apt quotations - all very pleasant to listen to. The
accent, however, was too much on exploitation of land and capital and on
profitability
to be very heartening for an ecologist. True, John Cyster, farming 700 acres in
partnership, preached self-sufficiency. He was going to be more careful about
the kind of fertilizers he used, and suggested
a drawing in of horns regarding the 'excessively intensive agricultural methods
of the last decade'. He was using no bought-in feeding stuffs except minerals,
and was growing his own seeds in defiance of a warning from the British Seeds
Council. He dropped a somewhat alarming hint about first-class firms who do
the farmer's accounting work provided he uses the right kind of fertilizer,
which seems to indicate that domination of agriculture by big business will die
hard.
The effects of the Capital Transfer Tax proposed in the present Finance Bill
were generally agreed to be of sinister portent to farmers, and something
which the NFU and CLA could fight on a joint front, to prevent a 'slow
grinding down until nationalisation of land becomes inevitable'. A suggestion
that next year's conference might include consideration of Community Land
Trusts, now being experimented with in America, and which could provide an
alternative to nationalisation, was received with no enthusiasm.
Much was made of the figure of only 1.8% of the population being involved in
farming, with consequent lack of adequate representation in Parliament.
Perhaps farmers should remember that 100% of the population is involved in
consumption, and would be far more likely to back up the farmers if it could
be assured of food produced without poisons and with humane methods of
animal husbandry. These aspects of' farming were not touched upon. Joanne
Bower
ONE DAY CONFERENCE TO BE HELD ON FRIDAY, 4th APRIL, 1975 AT
EWELL COUNTY TECHNICAL COLLEGE
Topics to be covered: Historical appraisal of land tenure in Britain; natural law
and land tenure; urban development and social discontent; movement for
return to the land; work of groups dedicated towards proper use and
distribution of land. Societies with an interest in land from all points of view
are invited to advertise their work at the conference. Further details and
booking forms from: Mr. T. Reddick, Department Liberal Studies, Ewell
Technical College, Reigate Road, Ewell, Surrey; Telephone: 01-3941731.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Good Sward Guide Tony Farmer pages 35 37

Sward Gardening is an ingenious technique which could enable


gardeners to maintain the fertility of their soils without the need for
external inputs of fertilizer, either organic or inorganic. The sward
gardener attempts to mimic the natural process by which grassy pastures
(or swards) establish and maintain their fertility. In the sward gardening
techniques developed by Tony Farmer over the past few years, vegetables
are grown in rows alongside rows of white clover. The action of the
grazing animals is imitated by mowing the clover at regular intervals.
Results, so far, have been impressive. Tony explained the principles
behind his system in Undercurrents 8 (and Resurgence Vol. 5, No. 4). In
this article, with the growing season
fast approaching, he gives detailed advice on how readers can try the
sward gardening system for themselves.

SINCE THIS article may be read by a number of people who are faced
with their first gardening experience and who intend to produce a
significant part of their food by gardening, I would like to begin by
explaining a few basic practices which are so 'obvious' they generally get
left out of gardening manuals.
For example, digging. Whether you wish to prepare the garden for sward
or intend to be a continuous digger, you are bound to have at least one
large bout of soil moving. Digging soil, especially neglected sailor
pasture, is heavy work. If you are not used to it, start gently. Do only an
hour a day at first. Keep your enthusiasm balanced with your strength. It
is very important in the garden to maintain a positive frame of mind as
plants acquire an unusual sensitivity to the mental pattern of their human
mentor. And don't forget that there is as much plant life in the soil as on it
in the
"form of the essential fungi. (Organic soil that is).
Divide the digging into parts and con­centrate on one part at a time for
short spells for example, breaking the soil, turning it and chopping the
lumps. Loosen the surface with a spade or mattock, if necessary, in a line
until your arms are complaining. Then return to the beginning and turn a
spadeful at a time all along, then return again and chop the lumps if
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there are any. This way, more of a rhythm can be maintained whilst dis­
tributing the effects of the exercise around the body,
Weeds; Even in sward gardening,
a certain amount of soil has to be kept clear in the immediate vicinity of
the vegetables. This is best maintained by growing the vegetables in tracks
six to eight inches wide. Stemmy perennials such as nettles, wild mint
and burdock will soon disappear if clipped or mowed regularly, every
two weeks or so. While the occasional dock or dandelion in the sward is
beneficial (it taps deep sources of minerals) stem my perennials should be
removed with tap root intact from the growing tracks. Buttercups' also
will' . succumb to regular mowing in a clover sward but they are such
greedy and rapid colonisers of cleared ground a determined effort should
be made to confine them to the wiId patch. A good tool' for the
_ removal of unwanted growth without too much mess is the small,
twoprong d
hand weeder rather like a rightangled jointcarving fork.
Fertilizer: Nothing discourages the beginner so much as poor results.
I strongly advise the use of a good organic fertilizer either in powder or
spray form for the first few years in a new garden. The fertilizer should be
well balanced ­for example, hoof, bone and blood in ­powdered dry
form, or a seaweed con­centrate diluted with water and applied with a
watering. can. About two feeds per year will be all that is necessary and
will stimulate soil flora and fauna to digest
the first heavy doses of compost needed to raise the soil potential. The
cost is negligible: a gallon of concentrated sea­weed spray may cost a
fiver and will last several years used on !4 acre of garden. Liquid feeds
produce such excellent results when combined with composting and
swards that the gardener may wish to make his own. This can be done
very simply by washing good compost and rich turves in a bucket with
fresh water. Or more elaborately by growing a special crop specifically
for the job for example, comfrey, nettles, borage, angelica. These can be
suspended in a bag in a tub of water for a week or two and decompose
very rapidly to give a rich supply of nutrients.
Establishing a sward garden
There are two basic approaches to beginning a . sward garden. I f there is
a stiff stand of deep rooted perennials in the

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soil the best course would probably be to clean the soil thoroughly with a
fork and compost the roots.
If the soil is covered with a thick carpet of buttercups or grass it could be
prefer­able to dig the entire area with the spit and trench method.
Spit and trench: First cut a strip of the topsoil about three feet long and
eight inches wide into turves eight inches square. Lift these turves and lay
them aside, without breaking if possible. Dig out the subsoil to a depth of
a foot at least and place this aside also but separate from the turves of
topsoil. You now have a trench three feet long, a foot deep and, eight
inches wide. Step back and cut another eight inch strip of topsoil and
turn the turves, as intact as possible, into the bottom of the trench so that
they lie upside down. Dig the subsoil over on top of them. Step back and
proceed as before. (Fig 4) When you reach the end of the plot place the
first spit cut in the trench and the first subsoil dug on top. If the
soil is fine you might find it more manageable to take two spits at the
beginning with their subsoil and place them aside. If this is done carefully
it will ensure a good start to the clover sward as there will be less weed
and grass seeds in the raised subsoil to compete with the clover as it is
establishing.
Raking and sowing: The digging or cleaning should be completed
immediate­ly before the sowing. For best results, , speedy germination of
the sward mixture is required, and as clover needs more heat to grow
than most grasses and weeds, the sowing should not take place too early
in the year. The best time is late March to early April in the South, and a
month later in the North. The raking and sowing should be done as
soon,as possible after the digging so that any weed seeds brought to the
surface do not have
a chance to gain a start on the clover.
Rake off any large stones from the sur­face of the riot and break up any
clods remaining.
Seed mixture: Along with the clover, I have been using some herb seeds
which are commonly sold for pasture leys.
A typical mixture would be: 70% clover, 10% yarrow, 10% chicory, 10%
ribgrass. These are thoroughly mixed and sown with a seed sower
(purchased from Chase organic seed merchants for a few pence). Also a
quantity of burnet is sown by hand, as the seeds are too large to go with
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the other parts of the mixture. All of these herbs, like the clovers, are
deep rooted arid therefore droughtresistant and capable oftapping the
subsoil for minerals.
The type of clover required will depend
/ on what is suited to your particular soil.
On acidic poorer soils such strains as Alsike and Danish wild white are
recommended, whilst on better soils Kent wild white or one of the New
Zealand strains may do better. Ask your nearest farmer or the seedsman.
Laying the swards: After the final raking, mark off the positions of the
vegetablegrowing tracks at 24 inch intervals and lay a couple of planks,
or
36 _,
'some strips of paper about eight indies wide over the first two track
positions.
,Commence sowing seed with an even steady movement not too thickly,
about % ounce of seed to the square yard. When this has been
adequately covered begin treading with the feet at the edge of the bed
and proceed carefully over the extent of the seeded ground. Sow a few
more feet then continue treading. The treading should be done with flat
heeled shoes or bare feet, in order to have an even surface to the sward
which allows closer mowing or clipping. The treading should not be done
when the soil is too moist, as the surface and seeds will stick to the feet.
When the space between the first two positions is finished move one of
the planks over to the next position and begin on the next space, taking
care that no seeds resting on the plank fall onto the vegetable tracks. No
further raking or covering of the seeds is necessary. At this point it is
advantageous to give the bed
a feed of a good liquid fertilizer (followed by a similar feed a few weeks
later) if the soil is poor. Do not sprinkle it too heavily as the seeds may be
washed away.
Composting techniques: After treading the vegetable tracks should remain
about two inches or so above the sward strips. They can be prepared for
vegetable sowing immediately, provided conditions are dry, but as soon
as the clover has begun to germinate all traffic on it should
cease for several weeks until the sward has established itself. The growing
tracks may be mulched, in the manner of Shewell Cooper, or dug and

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composted as in traditional gardening, though if they are dug, care must


be taken not to sub­merge the nearby swards and cause lumps in the turf
which are difficult to mow.
Plants requiring large spacing
In the case of brassica, globe artichoke, asparagus and similar vegetables,
the com­post can be liquified with enough water to make a thick soupy
consistency and poured down holes made with a crowbar. When all the
holes are filled the soil can be incorporated with the compost by
further barring or moving with a spade. In the case ofvegetables which
are being transplanted into a track, the compost can be concentrated
around the growing station, particularly in the case of per­ennials.
If a seed bed is required in a growing track it would be preferable to
disperse the compost throughout the entire length of the track, then
prepare a small seedbed down the middle. This is done by opening a
small trench about two inches deep and filling it with a carefully sifted
mixture of fine soil and compost or peat.
A double row of such vegetables as carrots, parsnips, leeks, onions,
shallots etc. , can be grown in the clear tracks. The two rows should be
staggered with about six to eight inches between plants on the same row.
Large barred holes are made at the proper distances and they may be as
deep as enthusiasm allows. The fillings should be carefully riddled in the
case of carrots and parsnips, and thoroughly mixed, otherwise the roots
will "fork" (separate into two or more parts).
A typical mixture for carrots would be: 50% rich compost; 40% good
black soil; and 10% fine sand.
The mixture should be poured down the holes and tamped firm with' a
stick then the seeds sown on top in the centre of each hole. About half a
dozen seeds to a station. If dry compost is unattainable an effective
alternative is to chop and mix the ingredients in a wheelbarrow with
enough water to make a consistency somewhat less watery than . the one
used for the brassica stations. The mixture should again be tamped down
with
a blunt ended stick. The holes should only be filled to within two inches
of the top with the wet mixture then topped up with a fine, dry, soil and
sand,. seed bed mixture, otherwise the seeds may become locked in the
compost as it hardens and fail to germinate.
The barring and filling of a hole for every plant in this way may seem
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tedious and longwinded but the yields more than compensate roots
weighing one pound apiece are common.
The same method is recommended for onion sets and leeks, the
transplanted leek going into the hole after it is halffilled with compost,
with a little waterdiluted fertilizer poured down afterwards.
Weeding of the vegetable tracks: Any weed, grass or clover in the
vegetable tracks should be lifted, complete with roots 'and dropped down
the barred holes before filling with compost. Weeding of the track may be
necessary one to two months after the vegetable seeds are sown but
thereafter the growing plants, pro­vided they are not checked, should
inhibit further week growth by the shade cast by their leaves.
Take care with transplants, handling them gently and do not let them dry
out during the change over. Watering them with a weak solution of liquid
fertilizer is very advantageous. I n the case of plants remaining in the seed
beds, a liquid feed given after the seedling has established itself will bring
it on smoothly and one further feed before fruiting or heading should be
sufficient to produce good crops reliably.

Maintaining the sward


It is not advisable to use liquid fertilizer with long root crops, and
unnecessary if the above method is followed. A newly­established sward
may be cut. when it reaches a height of about three or four inches. This
cut should not be too close to the soil but leave one to one and a half
inches. Any clumps of grass or chickweed which appear at this time
should be removed. Subsequent cuts can be made closer and closer.
When the clover is well established the mower or shears can be used as
low as possible.
Whilst seedlings are in the beds the swards should be treated as a normal
lawn and kept fairly short with the clippings left lying where they fall as
food for the worms. Once the plants have grown
a sufficiently hard stem to be immune to slug damage the clippings may
be raked onto the vegetable tracks where they will' help to concentrate
worm activity, pro­vide a moisture retentive cover to the ground, and aid
in keeping the strip free of weeds and grass. During mild winters it may
be necessary to clip the weeds off above the level of the clover, say once
during the winter. Weeds should recede in the following summer under
the effects of mowing.

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I n the growing season, cut the swards about once a fortnight until the
develop­ing vegetables make further cuts impossible. Mowing is an
extremely rapid method of controlling growth and
a properly laid out sward garden measur­ing one tenth of an acre can be
mown thoroughly in under two hours, whilst the small amount of initial
weeding of the seedlings requires, altogether, around six hours for the
first two months of growth and virtually nothing thereafter. The con­
siderable subsidiary benefits gained from the sward fertility, moisture
retention and visual beauty have also to be taken into account.
Tools: A very cheap pair of lawn shears can outlast and outperform
several sets of' more expensive blades. Basically because the blades, of
softer steel, are easier to sharpen, (I use a large file not a stone) , and so
there is less strain on the bolt and handles. Avoid shears with narrow
blades: they are too flexible and will fail to cut stemmy swards. It is
essential to keep the shears sharp and oiled, and see that the cutting
edges meet all along the blade. If necessary substitute a bolt with more
thread and. use a lock nut.
For larger areas of sward a mower reduces maintenance enormously. I am
using a 'Husqvarna' type with a cutting width of ten inches. This is a very
light, efficient little machine of the barrel type without a roller, measuring
15% inches between the outsides of the sidewheels.
It fits neatly down the sward tracks.
A smaller mower would be still more efficient as space becomes cramped
when the vegetables begin to mature and crowd the swards. It is
beneficial for the sward if mowing can continue into the Autumn, as
clover is more competitive the greater the number of cuts.
I am at present trying to get together the prototype of a hand mower
made from bicycle parts and designed speci­fically for sward gardening .
. If any readers familiar with light engineering can lend
a hand, I should be interested to meet them.
Establishing a sward garden on pasture land
t appears to be quite feasible to begin a sward garden ona piece of
pasture land with a minimum of digging, retaining the pasture sward for
the sward strips. The
Undercurrents 10 vegetable tracks are established in
. a variety of ways depending on the con­dition of the pasture land. Here

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are a few
possibilities: Cut a strip of turves from .
the position where the vegetables are to grow, and lay them aside. Bar or
spade the subsoil that has been exposed and incorporate compost as you
go. Return the turves to their original positions but upside down. Give the
strip a good liquid feed and sow vegetable seeds or trans­plants on the
'upturned turves.
Dig spit and trench method, as explained above, but only along. g the
actual growing track position. Compost as, you go. This will need a good
liquid feed as you will have brought some very
dormant subsoil to the surface. Begin to bar large holes as for
carrots and scrape off the surface green around each hole and drop it to
the bottom of the hole before topping up with compost. You will end up
with a cleared strip, well composted for a root crop.
If the pasture already supports clover then nothing need be. added. The
mowing will increase the percentage of clover.
If no clover is present, and does not appear in the first year even with
feeding, the sward strips might be chopped Iightly with the point of the
spade to loosen the surface, then some clover and herbs scattered over
them. This should be trod­den down as before and more feeding done.
It will be found that the swards can be permitted to grow quite long,
particularly in dry weather. They will then act as moisture collectors and
keep the wind and sun from drying the soil surface. But in continuous
wet conditions close cropping may be essential, particularly around
seedlings, in order to deter the slug population from moving around too
much. ,
I n gardening of any type it is always preferable to do a little work, often
­rather than doing all of it at once. With the sward garden, maintenance
is minimal but should be done regularly to keep things under control. n

Primavera
april's buds
explode into bloom shaking last year's leaves out of their gloom like stars
they beam
through the darkest room

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Michael Horovitz

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Anarchist Cities Colin Ward pages 38 39
Anarchism ­the political philosophy',of a nongovernmental society of
autonomous communities " does not at first sight seem to address itself to
the problems of the city at all. But there is in fact a stream of anarchist
contributions to urban thought that stretches from Kropotkin to Murray
Bookchin historically, and from John Turner to the International
Situationists ideologically. A lot of the people who might help us evolve
an anarchist philosophy of the city would never think of trying because in
spirit, though less often in practice, they have abandoned the city.
GOVERNMENTS are invariably based in cities: whoever heard of a
nation ruled from a village? Very often they actually build cities to house
themselves: New Delhi, Canberra, Ottawa, Washington, Chandigar and
Brasilia are examples. And isn't it significant that the visitor who wants to
sample the real life of a place has to escape from the city of the bureau­
crats and technocrats in order to do so? He has to go ten miles from
Brasilia for example, to the Cidade Libre (Free
Town) where the building workers live. They built the "City for the Year
2000" but are too poor to live there,' an,d in their own homemade city, "a
spontaneous wild west shantytown life has arisen, which contrasts with
the formality of the city itself, and which has become too valuable to be
destroyed. "
The myth of rural bliss
Particularly in Britain, the most highly urbanised country in the world, we
have for centuries nurtured a myth of ruraL bliss a myth cherished by
people all across the political spectrum. Raymond Williams in his book
'The Country and the City' has shown. how all through history this myth
has been fed into literature, always placing the lost paradise of rural bliss
in some past period. And , E. P. Thompson comments that what is wrong
with the myth is that it has been "softened, prettified, protracted, and then
taken over by the city dwellers as
a major point from which to criticise 'industrialism. Thus it became a
substitute for the utopian courage of imagining what a true community, in
an industrial city, might be indeed of imagining how far community may
have already been attained. "
Like Williams, he sees this as a debilitating situation: "a continuous
cultural hemorrhage, a loss of rebellious blood, draining away now to

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Walden, now to Afghanistan, now to Cornwall, now to Mexico, the


emigrants from cities solving nothing in their own countries, but kidding
themselves that they have some
how opted out of contamination by
a social system of which they are them­selves the cultural artifacts. " All
those merry peasants and "shepherdesses of the pastoral dream are now,
they point out, "the poor of Nigeria, Bolivia, Pakistan. "
And the paradox is that the rural poor of the Third World are flocking to
the cities in vast numbers. If you want examples of anarchist cities in the
real world today, in the sense of largescale human settlements resulting
from popular direct' action and not from governmental action; it is to the
Third World you would have to turn, In Latin America, Asia and Africa,
the enormous movement of population into the big cities during the last
two decades has resulted in the growth of huge peripheral squatter
settlements around the existing cities, .
inhabited by the 'invisible' people who have no official urban existence.
Pat Crooke points out that cities grow and develop on two levels; the
official, theoretical level, and that the majority of the population of many
Latin American cities are unofficial citizens with
a popular economy outside the insti­tutional financial structure of the
city. "
One way of reducing the pressure on these exploding cities, would be to
improve Iife in ,n villages and small towns. But that would demand
revolutionary changes in land tenure, and on starting smallscale
labourintensive industries, and in dramatically raising farm incomes.
Until that happens, 'people will always prefer to take a chance in the city
rather than starve in the country. The big difference' from the explosion of
urbanism in 19th century Britain is that then industrialisation preceded
urbanisation, while today the reverse is true. The official view of the
shantytowns of the Third ,World is that they are breeding­grounds for
every kind of crime, vice, disease, social and family disorganisation. But
John Turner; the anarchist architect who has done more than most people
to change the way we perceive such settle­ments, remarks: "Ten years of
work in
Peruvian barriadas indicates that such
a view is grossly inaccurate: although it serves some vested political and
bureau­cratic interests, it bears little relation to reality . . . Instead of

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chaos and dis­organisation, the evidence instead points to highly


organised invasions of public
, land in the face of violent police opposi­tion, internal political
organisation with yearly local elections, thousands of people living
together in an orderly fashion with no police protection or public
services. The original straw houses
. constructed during the invasions are con­verted asrapidly as possible
in)to brick and cement structures with an investment totalling millions of
dollars in labour and materials. Employment rates, wages, literacy, and
educational levels are all higher than in central city slums (from which
most barriada residents have escaped) and higher than the national
average. Crime, juvenile delinquency, prostitution and gambling are rare,
except for petty thievery, the incidence of which is seemingly smaller
than in other parts of the city. "
What an extraordinary tribute to the capacity for mutual aid of poor
people defying authority. The reader who is familiar with Kropotkin's
'Mutual Aid' is bound to be reminded of his chapter in praise of the
mediaeval city, where he observes that "\;Wherever men had found, or
expected to find, some protection
behind their town walls, they instituted their cojurations; their fraternities
their friendships, united in one common idea, and boldly marching
towards a new life of mutual support and liberty. And they succeeded so
well that in. three or four hundred years they had changed the very face
of Europe. " Kropotkin is not
a romantic adulator of the free cities of the middle ages, he knows what
went wrong with them; and of their failure to avoid an exploitive
relationship with the peasantry. But modern scholarship supports his
interpretation of their evolution. Walter Ullmann for example remarks
that they "represent a rather
clear demonstration of entities governing
themselves" and that "In order to transact business, the community
assembled in its entirety . . . the assembly was not 'representative' of the
whole, but was the whole. "
. The social City:
a network of communities
This implies a certain size and scale of communities, and Kropotkin
again, in his astonishingly uptodate 'Fields Factories and Workshop's',
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argues on technical grounds for dispersal, for the integration of


agriculture and industry, for (as Lewis • Mumford puts it) "a more
decentralised urban development in small units, responsive to direct
human' contact, and, enjoying both urban and rural
advantages. " Kropotkin's contemporary Ebenezer Howard, in 'Garden
Cities of Tomorrow' asked himself the simple question: how can we get
rid of the grim­ness of the big city and the lack of opportunities in the
country (which
drives peopleto the city)? How on the other hand can we keep the beauty
of the country and the opportunities of the city city? His answer was not
only the garden city, but what he called the social city,
the network of communities. The same message comes from Paul and
Percy Goodman in 'Communitas: means of livelihood and ways of life'
where the second of their three paradigms, the New Commune is what.
Professor Thomas
Reiner calls "a polynucleated city mirror­ing its anarchosyndicalist
premises". And the same message comes again in Leopold Kohr's
dazzling essay 'The City as Con­vivial Centre' where he finds the good
metropolis to be "a polynuclear federa­tion of cities" just as his city is a
federa­tion of squares.
And like Kropotkin too, the 'Blueprint for Survival' sees the goal as "a
decentral­ised society of small communities where industries are small
enough to be responsive to each community's needs". And long before
the energy crisis hit people's consciousness, Murray Bookchin
in his essay Towards a Liberatory Tech­nology (which I published in
'Anarchy' in 1967 and is now in his book 'Post­Scarcity Anarchism;)
argued the energy case for the polynuclear city: "To main­tain a large
city requires immense quantities of coal and petroleum. By con­trast,
solar energy (from the sun), wind power and tidal energy reach us mainly
in small packets. Except for great dams and turbines, the new devices
seldom provide more than a few thousand kilowatthours of electricity. It
is hard to believe that we will ever be able to design solar collectors that
can furnish us with the immense blocks of electric power produced by
a giant steam plant; it is equally difficult to conceive of a battery of wind
turbines that will provide us with enough electricity to illuminate
Manhattan Island. If homes and factories are heavily con­centrated,
devices for using clean sources of energy will' probably remain mere

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play­things; but if urban communities are reduced in size and widely


spread over
the land, there is no reason why these devices cannot be combined to
provide us with all the amenities of an industrial civilisation. To use solar,
wind and tidal power effectively, the giant city must be dispersed. A new
type of community, carefully tailored to the nature and resources of a
region, must replace the sprawling urban belts of today. "
The acceptance of diversity
and disorder
A quite different line of anarchist urban thought is presented in Richard
Sennett's 'The Uses Of Disorder: personal identity and city life'. Several
threads of thought are woven together in this book. The first is a notion
the author derives from the psychologist Erik Erikson, that in adolescence
men seek a purified identity to escape from pain and uncertainty, and that
true adulthood is found in the acceptance of diversity and disorder. The
second is that modern American society freezes men in the adolescent
posture
a gross simplification of urban life in
which, when rich enough, people escape from the complexity of the city
to
private family circles of security in the suburbs the purified community.
The third is that city planning as it has been conceived in the past, with
techniques like zoning and the elimination of 'non­conforming users',
has abetted this pro­cess, especially by projecting trends into the future
as a basis for present energy and expenditure. "Professional planners of
highways, of redevelopment housing, of innercity renewal projects have
treated challenges from displaced communities or community groups as
a threat to the value of their plans rather than as a natural part of the
effort at social reconstruction. " What this really means, says Sennett, is
that planners have wanted to take the plan, the projection in advance, "as
more 'true' than the historical turns, the unforeseen movements in the
real time of human lives. "
His prescription for overcoming the crisis of American cities is a reversal
of these trends, for "outgrowing a purified identity. " He wants cities
where people are forced to confront each other:' "There would be no
policing, nor any other form of central control, of schooling, zoning,
renewal, or city activities that could be performed through common

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community action, or, even more importantly


through direct, nonviolent conflict in the city itself. " Nonviolent? Yes,
because Sennett claims that the present modern affluent city is one in
which aggression and conflict are denied outlets other than violence,
precisely' because of the lack of personal confrontation. (Cries for law
and order are greatest when communities are most isolated from other
people in the city. ) The clearest example, he suggests, > of the way this
violence occurs "is found in the pressures on police in modern cities.
Police are expected to be bureau­crats of hostility resolution" but
"a society that visualises the lawful response to disorder as an impersonal,
passive coercion only invites terrifying outbreaks of police rioting. "
Whereas the anarchist city that he envisages, "pushing men to say what
they think about each other in order to forge some mutual pattern of
compatibility", is not a com­promise between order and violence, but a
wholly different way of living in which people wouldn't have to choose
between the two.
And are cities going to change?
They have to because they are collaps­ing, replies Murray Bookchin in a
book recently published in America, 'The Limits of the City. ' The cities of
the modern world are breaking down, he declares, under sheer excess of
size and growth. "They are disintegrating admin­istratively, institutionally,
and logistically; they are increasingly unable to provide the minimal
services for human habita­tion, personal safety, and the means for
transporting goods and people . . . " Even where cities have some
semblance of formal democracy, "almost every civic problem is resolved
not by action that goes to its social roots, but by legislation that further
restricts the rights of the citizen , as an autonomous being and

enhances the power of superindividual agencies. "


Nor can the professionals help: "Rarely could city planningtranscend the
destructive social conditions to which it was a response. To the degree
that it . , turned in upon itself as a specialised pro­fession the activity of
architects, engineers and sociologists it too fell within the narrow
division of labour of the very society it was meant to control. Not
surprisingly, some of the most humanistic notions of urbanism come from
amateur who retain contact with the authentic experiences of people
and the mundane agonies of metropolitan

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He's right. Ebenezer Howard was


a shorthand writer and Patrick Geddes was a botanist. But the particular
bunch of amateurs who, for Murray Bookchin, point the way are the
young members of the counterculture: "Much has been written about the
retreat of dropout youth to rural communes. Far less known
is the extent to which ecologically­minded countercultural youth began
to. subject city planning to a devastating review, often advancing
alternative pro­posals to dehumanising urban 'revitalisa­tion' and
'rehabilitation' projects . . . "
For the countercultural planners "the point of departure was not 'the
pleasing object' or the 'efficiency! with which it eXpedited traffic,
communications and economic activities. Rather, these new planners
concerned themselves primarily with the relationship of design to the
fostering of personal intimacy, many­sided social relationships,
nonhierarchical modes of organisation, communistic living arrangements,
and material inde­pendence from the market economy. Design, here,
took its point of departure not from abstract concepts of space or
a functional endeavour to improve the status quo but from an explicit
critique of the status quo and a conception of the free human
relationships that were to
replace it. The design elements of a plan followed from radically new
social alter­natives. The attempt was made to replace hierarchical space
by liberated space. "
They were, in fact, rediscovering the polis, reinventing the commune.
Now Murray Bookchin knows that the counter­cultural movement in the
US has subsided from its high point of the 1960s, and he inveighs against
the crude political rhetoric which was the next fashion. "Far more than
the flowers of the mid sixties, the angry clenched fists of the late sixties
were irrelevant in trying to reach an increasingly alarmed and
uncomprehending public. " But he insists that certain demands and issues
raised are imperish­able. The call for "new, decentralised communities
based on an ecological outlook that unites the most advanced features of
urban and rural life" is not going to die out again because of the harsh
fact that "few choices are left today for the existing society. "

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
General systems Peter Sommer pages 40 43

Most of us are to some degree suckers for the Big Theory, the New Guru,
the Opened Door of Perception that will Change All either through
Wisdom or Immutable Scientific Law.
The General Systems Approach (GSA) has been around in one form or
another, since the Thirties and has scored considerable success both as a
theoretical discipline and as a technology particularly under one of its
disguises, as Management Science/Operational Research. I n the past five
years it has extended its influence considerably. Its concerns are being
adapted to whole countries (Stafford Beer tried it briefly in Chile and is
now apparently doing the same for India) and the whole world (the Club
of Rome /MIT 'Limits to Growth forecast). Academics and armchair
polemicists are turning to it as an indirect justification of
elites (or so one gathers from Mensa) or as a quasiutopian model
for change. (Donald Schon in the 1970 Reith Lectures).
It also throws up some . entertaining views on political science.
I think we'll be hearing a great deal more about GSA. Because it is often
presented as holding out more promise (and threat) than is in fact
the case, here is a guide to its concerns and its terminology:
THE FIRST mistake people make about general systems theory is that they
think it attempts to have (or actually does have) an explanation of
everything. General systems theory is about systems which for this
purpose is anything that is reasonably complicated. A singlecelled
creature is a system, so is a community, a farm, a large commercial
enterprise,
a nation state. And so, of course, is the Earth. Systems can be biological,
eco­logical, economic, political, and social. .
The one common factor is their com­plexity; they are comprised of a
number
of separate parts and processes, which interact with each other. At
anyone time these components are in a state of stable tension, though
this may vary with time. General Systems Theory claims that systems as
such, irrespective of their com­ponents, show certain common pro­

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perties, and that by extracting the basic laws that describe these
properties, we can have a better understanding of the
world. .
The second mistake implied in General Systems Theory is that it presents
a whole theory. It doesn't only a series of separate models or ways of
looking at systems:This is why I have preferred to refer to the area as the
systems approach. . Most of traditional twentieth century science has
attempted to make sense of the world by pulling it apart and examin­ing
the constituent parts this approach is called 'mechanist' or 'reductionist'
and was a reaction against the mystic ideas of 'vitalism' and 'life force'.
But if you pull a clock apart you are left with just a set, of cogs and
springs a clock can only be really 'under stood' by seeing it as a "work­
ing whole. I n practice, of course, it is wrong to oppose the 'reductionist'
and
'holistic' approaches we need both. Our ways of 'understanding' what
we see depend on the creation of a number of models which we use at
various times to give us a rounded view and we need to have the
imagination to map several models on to each other.
The first model I will deal with is con­cerned with a system in which the
com­ponents do not change much over
a period of time and which receives no stimulus from outside and has no
effect on outside either this is the theoretical 'closed' system. In most
simple explana­tions we like to say that A causes B ­inflation is caused
by wage demands, for example. In practice, an end result may be the
product of a number of mutually­interacting forces, and the 'simple'
explanation is therefore wrong.
Imagine a tugofwar in which there are three, instead of two teams. The
three strands of rope meet in one knot and
once the game has commenced the knot hovers, more or less steadily, as
atribute to the respective strengths of the teams. This is a stable system. If
one of the men in one of the teams suddenly has to leave the game, then
the pull given by his team will diminish and the position of the knot will
change, moving partly towards one
of the other teams; and partly towards the third. This change is known as
per­turbation and the period it takes for
a new stability to emerge is called the relaxation time. Now suppose a

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man in another of the teams develops rope burn blister. Again the system
is perturbed and then relaxes. If we observe the knot and the teams over a
period of time we can assess the area of space over which the . knot will
hover and hence the number of states of possible stability. This number is
known as the system's variety, which is a measure of its complexity.
Now imagine (and I'm afraid the art of metaphor gets strained here) a
whole series of threeteam tugsofwar going on in a moreorIess circular
formation and with each knot linked to a gigantic­central knot:
In fig. l the individual games going on are ABC, DEF, GHI, KJL, and
MNO, the respective knots of which are U, W, X, V, and Y. The centre
knot, affected by all the games, is Z. At the time the diagram was drawn,
the system is stable ­although all the teams, A through 0, are working
hard at tugging. Now, if team L, say, is suddenly weakened, this will
affect directly the position of knot V. This in' turn will affect slightly the
position of knot Z (the centre one) and all the other knots and teams will
change position slightly.
If we allow a more serious change to take place in one of the teams,
depending
on the relative strengths of the other teams in the various games and the
lengths of the rope involved; one of the other individual games may
actually cease to exist because its knot has moved out­side the control of
the three teams keep­ing it in place. In order to keep the big system
going, one of the component parts has had to collapse and be sacrificed.
This, in the jargon, is a catastrophe.
Also; in the jargon, each knot can be regarded as an esoteric box. for
certain purposes, one does not need to know all about the properties of
each of the teams A through O. If we simply want to know roughly what
knot Z is likely to do, we can treat each of the games ABC, DEF, GHI,
KJL, and MNO as esoteric (or 'black') boxes, the insides of which we
need not examine because their general external properties Le. the
'pulls' exerted by their respective central knots give us enough
information on which
to predict the behaviour of knot Z.
While the teams go off to the changing rooms and you start clipping this
out to send to Pseud's Corner, let's map this notion to something more
important ­contemporary British society. The model demonstrates why
the apparently stable institutions of a society can break down with no

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apparent reason. Stock exchanges collapse, not because of a sinister


marxist plot, but because they are one of the knots in the capitalist
system: Britain is in a period of perturbation partly because
its component parts (industry, unions, government) are themselves in a
state of perturbation and that perturbation is due largely to living on an
eroded economic base (i . . e. we have been used to cheap raw materials
which we have processed and then sold dear, and not only can we not do
that any longer, we haven't realised it yet). So certain industries, welfare
services, and so on, may have to be 'sacrificed'. We can also map the
systems model on to the global ecology, using resources and needs as the
various 'games'.
The second model I want to talk about is also 'closed' but is not stable
with respect to time it grows. One of the most familiar global debates
has been about exponential growth which
among other things is the rate at which an organism perpetuates and
replicates itself in perfect conditions. I n a closed system, where most of
the ingredients are con­stant and cannot be replaced, if one ingredient
grows exponentially it can
only do so up to the point at which the imbalance is such that the system
breaks down. This is the 'general' theory behind the 'spaceship earth'
l;:concept; our mineral resources decline with use, our vegetable and
animal food resources scarcely
replace themselves each year, but popula­tion expands and our
expectations of the consumer lifestyle increase. So we get starvation and
pollution, and instead of an everincreasing exponential growth curve, the
system that is spaceship,earth follows an 'Sshaped' path in which the
growing ingredient either 'plateaus' out or declines another form of
catastrophe.
Now for our third model, which is still 'closed'.
We can map the first idea of interacting
esoteric boxes on to the second model, so that each knot may be subject
to growths and plateaux in a series of complex ( but not
incomprehensible) perturbations and relaxations with respect to time.
This combined model gives a much
more accurate picture of why inflation happens, or why sections of
industry collapse, and takes us away from looking I for the one simple

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'cause'.
So far; we have assumed that all the components of our system are
roughly equal in status, if not in strength. But many systems are in fact
hierarchic and have chains of command (fig. 2).
Obviously one thinks most readily of the business concern and a good
deal of the real work done in GSA (under its titles ofManagement Science
and Opera­tional Research) is concerned with this situation. Biological
organisms, however, are hierarchic as well, the brain helping to regulate
the function of the specialised organs which provide and use energy.
In the simplistic account of hierarchies (say in the Army or a big
corporation) the talk is of 'orders' and 'chains of command'. 'Delegation',
a word beloved of oldtime managers who like to think themselves liberal
and modern, implies that the boss could, if he had time and wasn't so
fantastically talented, do the worker's job. In fact, he couldn't, because
whatever their respective innate natural abilities, the worker is doing his
job all
the time and hence the greatest expert in it. The boss's skill really lies in
selecting and manipulating workers.
For this reason, Operational Research (OR) sometimes tries to talk in
terms of 'flows of information', the 'information' flowing backandforth in
a series of loops which modify the behaviour at both the top and bottom
of the hierarchy. Inform­ation which goes back to the top is of course
known as feedback, one of the best known terms in the cybernetic
vocabulary.
Simple hierarchies, of course, rarely exist and some OR people attempt to
draw complicated charts showing actual
_ flows of information: These charts can then be used as a means of
regulating flows of information. You can, however, have a hierarchy in
which certain middle elements are connected together, inside an esoteric
box the Civil Service is in theory a hierarchy, except that individual
Ministries, and even groups within _
a Ministry, may in fact be allied. It is in this way that bureaucracies get
'bureau­cratic': and a hierarchy may collapse because of such internal
tensions as well as the result of instability created by out­side pressures.
This brings us to the distinction between 'closed' and 'open' systems.

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Most systems are closed in respect to some of their functions and 'open'
in regard to others. It all depends on what way you have of looking at the
model ­are you trying to see its internal working, or its effect on other
elements outside?
It is, however, misleading to think of hierarchies as being simply about
flows of information and to feel that the other 'immutable natural laws
are suspended. The economic 'laws' that capital tends to regulate what
happens in a society, whether overtly profitmotivated or not, don't
suddenly disappear, they merely
get tempered. As we will see, later, some of the more utopian visions of
GSA practitioners tend to ignore considera­tions of economics and
sovereignty.
At this point you may feel that your sense of free will and
selfdetermination is threatened, if not annihilated. Most people interested
in 'Alternative Techno­logy' put a high premium on being against 'the
system'. And GSA, with its claims to perceiving everything as a system,
seems to leave no room for choice or self­expression. However, if we go
back to our very earliest model, it was shown that the 'knot' was capable
of occupying a number of different positions called its variety.
GSA says that any given 'knot' or • esoteric box (which can of course be
a human being) exhibits a series of ( possible. e states, and the number of
these states is its variety. In binary computer logic, each 'bit' has only
two states 'on' or 'off'. Human beings may exhibit a large number of
possible states, alternative courses of action and behaviour, pre­ferences
for which can be expressed on
a scale.
The cybernetic principle governing variety is:
Only variety can absorb. variety
and is known as Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety. In other words; if an
individual wishes to have almost total free will (irresponsible anarchy! do
I hear someone say?) then if he . is to exist in any societal group, that
group and its environment must have an almost total ability to absorb or
satisfy not only his actual
needs, but also all his possible needs.
In a reallife situation, a society couldn't exist if its members, unrestricted,
wanted almost total choice. The choices would conflict both with the

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other indi­viduals in the group and with the group itself. Hence the need
for a variety reducer ('you can have any car you like as long as it's black'
for instance) which, in terms of a society, tends to mean laws
and a way of enforcing them.
But although this argument could be used to 'justify' a police state, in
practice this need not be necessary. Very few of us, when it comes to it,
wish to exercise all our possible 'choices' simultaneously. In practice too,
whilst in theory everyone in a community could all suddenly demand the
same item, in fact they don't; and by observation it is possible to
ascribe a probability to people's wants and so give the system a chance
of satis­fying it. A corner vegetable shop could suddenly find that all of
its regular . customers want carrots and nothing but carrots, but the
greengrocer's experience is that not all his customers come in on
42
j.
the same day and that they also wish to buy quantities of potatoes,
swedes, pars nips, and so on. .
. Thus the Law of Requisite Variety, though always there, need not be
parti­cularly tough in its application, especially if the situation in which
itis operating is a stable one. The more unstable a situa­tion within a
system, the harsher are likely to be the effects of Ashby's Law. The French
mathematician Rene Thom has a formal mathematical theory, known as
catastrophe theory which seeks to show the links between the elements
of restricted variety, and the perturbations and relaxations in a system,
and which can show when a catastrophe is likely to occur. (But to
demonstrate it involves cartesian coordinates on at least three dimensions
and an examination of the folds (instead of straightline graphs) created. )
Even if the explanations are difficult, however, the ideas are easy to
recognise. We can pause now and look at some poli­tical implications.
In a reasonably stable "­society, without any important shortages, without
complicated hierarchies and
where each individual is modest in his wants (exhibits a low variety),
there will only be a small need for 'rule enforcement'. In a situation of
economic shortages, hierarchies that are felt to be 'unjust', and with a
growing population, the various esoteric boxes forming the institutions of
a society will be under

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great strain, each attempting to assert its internal stability at the expense
of the
rest. Individuals will feel threatened, and the society will feel the need to
restrict
the 'variety' of the individuals normally by policing.
It is on this basis that the currently­popular GSA term 'the extremism of
the centre' makes sense. If we look at the British scene today we can see
the 'social contract' and 'parliamentary democracy' as holding the centre
of a complicated set of tensions between various elements in
the country workers, consumers, manufacturers, capitalists, pension fund
operators, trade unions, government, and so on. Outside that 'closed
system' is another one embracing such factors as the area of resources
available (which in turn reflects our eroded economic base
and dwindling world supplies) and the expectations of the individuals in
the community for an improvement in their life styles.
In order to protect 'parliamentary democracy' and the 'social contract', it
would be reasonable to expect govern­ment to try to ensure their
stability ­otherwise, the whole system will undergo a perturbation before
finding a new point of stability (which would probably be after some
people got hurt).
This model seems to give a much more real picture of what is actually
happening than the eternal slanging matches involv­ing the workers
versus the capitalists or the deflationers versus the inflationers, which are
the currency of most political
debate. .
However, if the social contract should collapse (which seems quite likely)
the process of perturbation would be painful and the sets of variety
available to the
participants in the system would be reduced, probably painfully. In GSA
terms, therefore, government's task would be to make the perturbation as
easy as possible that is if you think it
a good idea that some variant of the present system should continue and
if you think it likely that people will be 'reasonable' enough to accept a
modifica­tion of their 'choices'.
Now the utopians among the practi­tioners of GSA have a number of
recipes to sort this type of situation out. One is simply to aid the change
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by identifying the problems in 'systems' terms and suggesting


modifications which is what management consultants traditionally do.
However there is the problem of imple­mentation, none too easy in a
'demo­cracy'. Hence the argument in favour of
a benevolent eliteof systems engineers ­this idea is what Hudson Europe
recently proposed (see Undercurrents 9) and is also upheld by some
members of Mensa on the basis that brain power will conquer all. .
A second approach is to see the com­puter as saviour. The computer can
be regarded as a variety amplifier not so much in the sense that it
actually makes more choice available, but in that it identifies and
matches people's wants with what is available from the system, and does
it with great rapidity.
If you really want the computerto work, however, then you have to feed
your systems model into it. Up to
a point, this can be done. You don't even need complicated maths,
because you can make the computer look at all the possible variable
stable states simply by step­bystep arithmetic. Even though the com­
puter does this quickly, this method takes up a lot of memory space and
so an elegant series of programs is needed.
But the state of such computer tech­niques is advanced only in theory
the MIT/Club of Rome computer model of the world problematique The
Limits to Growth is just one study that has been criticised because it was
too simple.
The theory of computer modelling also enables a program to be modified
in the light of experience (this is known as
a learning program, but i is practically and theoretically difficult to say
how far a computer model can modify itself. The danger is not that the
rampant computer will take charge, but that it will not adequately reflect
what is going on in
a system and so become itself another limiting factor within the system.
Donald Schon's Reith Lectures in 1970 were concerned with the
problems of technological change he suggested learning programs in
computers as a way in which society could change according to its
needs. Stafford Beer seems to be suggesting (ifone can disentangle the
technicalities from the purple prose) that if one attempted to monitor the
eudemony of a system (by which he means a version of happiness which

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can be measured) the system could modify itself accordingly.


But it is one thing to say that we should try and create computer
programs (and
a means of feeding data into them) and quite another 'to act as though it
was

already possible to do so. I n terms of what can be actually achieved


today, the
, computer finds it much easier to act as
a variety reducer by limiting the ranges of options open to us acting as
agent of policing, or watching our creditworthiness. There is/also an
important. theoretical constraint on the extent to which a com­puter can
cope with revolutionary change. Godel's theorem which says (in a more
precise way, than I am actually using
here) that a system can never understand itself is one 'reason' why
humans can never really understand themselves and also why computers,
however large, are still limited, after a while, by the capabilities of the
original programmer.
Overriding these considerations is
a major criticism that must be made of masterful computers who
controls them, and who has access? Protagonists of the computer systems
model (foremost among them Stafford Beer) claim the computers are
ridiculously cheap in comparison to the results they give but this still
doesn't answer who has initial control?
Beer, whose ideas in this area can be seen in Platform for Change and
Designing Freedom has many claims on
. one's attention, chief among them his work in Allende's Chile where the
. economy was hooked up to a computer ­though not with testable
results because of the destabilising effects of the CI A. (Maybe' he will
have better luck in India. )
Beer is both impressive and annoying, his style a mixture of arrogance
and desperation linked with laziness in putting his books together (they
are all reprints
of talks, though Platform for Change has
a gimmicky presentation, with different coloured sheets and 'poetic' text

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setting, which don't work. ) But Beer is also energetic and imaginative.
He knows very little about realpolitik and has some curious ideas about
how human happiness (which is what counts) might be measured. He
also undoubtedly behaves
as though computer modelling was more
. advanced than it actually is. But some of
what he says should be listened to .
. . . What emerges from this survey of GSA.
I think, is that it does not actually solve anything it merely presents a way
of looking at the world which is extremely helpful. Of course you can use
it to 'justify' police states, or low impact tech­nology (of a certain sort),
or elites (of a certain sort), and anything else you like, , just as, years ago,
the new theories of evolution were used 'to 'justify' laisser faire
capitalism (the survival of the fittest) and the supremacy of man as a
rational ethical animal (because we had the ability to think). J am
suspicious of all theories that try to explain everything. GSA shows, in the
language of maths, that we are all part of one another. The system will
always be there in some form or another, but it is up to us, within limits,
to make it what we like. Peter Sommer

Acknowledgments
General Systems Theory Ludwig von Bertalannfy
Man and the Computer John Deibold The Human Use of Human Beings
Norbert Weiner
Lecture course by F H George at Brunel University (not published) ,
Platform for Change Stafford Beer
Designing Freedom Stafford Beer
Beyond the Stable State Donald Schon
and helpful talks with CH Waddington and Michael Thompson.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Centre for Living page 43

JOHN SEYMOUR, author of Self Sufficiency and The Fat of the Land,
intends to establish a Centre of Living at and around his farm in
Pembrokeshire. The object will be to provide a place where people who
wish to master the skills needed for self sufficiency in the countryside can
come and do so. Such people will be able to stay for as long as it takes
them to master the necessary 'techniques (a year seems reasonable for
most people) and when they leave, if they desire, the Centre will try to
help them establish themselves as peasant craftsmen,' or peasant food
producers, or peasant­professionals, or whatever they want to be.
Thereafter it will be hoped that contact will be kept with as many as want
it so that they shall still feel affiliated to the Centre, that help will be given
to them if possible when necessary, and that they will continue to help
and support the Centre, and in particular help other free people to
establish themselves in the countryside.
The main aim will be to train people to be able to take a piece of their
country and make it produce more food than it did before with less input
than it had before, and also to earn a good and honest living at some
craft or profession. If a person cannot make his or her land produce more
than it did before then they shouldn't have it!
It is/to be hoped that some alumni will stay near and in close touch with
the Centre, perhaps even helping it to expand and themselves becoming
part of it, others will drift further away and perhaps some of them even
set up Centres of their own. There is no reason why such an infiltrating
movement should ever stop!
Instruction in the various skills (which will have to be completely
professional ­not the blind leading the blind!) will be provided partly by
the 'staff' partly by experts paid to come in from outside. More buildings
will be required (which involves buying at least another farm) and more
stock and equipment although we have a pretty good collection already.
It is therefore necessary to find a small number of people who are willing
to come in as working partners and invest capital in the Centre. They will
be assured of a good life and their capital will be secure but
moneymaking is not the object.
Learners may be expected to pay a fee at first if they can afford it. If not

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they will have to pay with very hard work! But the aim will be to produce
all the food, power and fuel required, as far as possible use free material
and our own labour for buildings, and also produce enough high quality
produce or artifacts to sell to pay the expenses of the Centre.
It is the aim that all the produce of the land of the Centre shall be brought
to its final and most perfect form before being used or sold. For example
wool will not be sold as wool but as clothes or blankets. Milk will not be
sold as milk but as high quality cheese, butter, buttermilk, yoghourt etc.
and the skim and whey will not just be fed to pigs for market but the pigs
will be turned into the best quality ham, bacon, and smoked sausage.
There will be enough labour available to bring everything to its peak of
excellence. Any trees harvested will not be sold as sticks of timber but as
high class furniture, turned goods, etc. Some apples may be sold as
apples but more will be sold as cider.
Research will be carried out on every aspect of self sufficiency, not only
in husbandry and food production and pro­cessing but in power, heat
production (wood, wind, water, manure] crafts and manufacturing. The
findings of the research will be disseminated as widely as possible in
publications like this one and also possibly through a Centre News Letter
(which of,course will be printed on the Centre press on Centre produced
paper!)
At present thousands of people are dropping out of the cities and finding
their bits of land and trying to 'have a go'. Hardly any succeed because
they don't know how. The aim of the Centre will be to show them how
and to do it well. If technological society is to break up, let us start
preparing people for something better now.
Anyone interested write to: John Seymour, Fachongle Isaf, Newport,
Pembrokeshire, Wales, with a stamped addressed envelope.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
The future of alternative technology Dave Elliott & Colin Stoneman
MANY ALTERNATIVE Technology 'enthusiasts have a predilection for
pragmatism which cohabits uneasily with their utopian tendencies. Faced
with the complexity of national not to mention international power
politics, they prefer to work at a relatively practical
, level, sustained either by longterm ideals or simply by success at the
parochial level.
As Robin Clarke has argued: "Having lost faith in any system of rescuing
mankind as a whole they operate in a world of selfhelp".
One common scenario for the future is as follows.
Plagued by environmental crisis, and by energy and resource scarcities,
the 'advanced' world wakes up to the fact that it must decentralise to
survive: it must find new technologies which are
ecologically appropriate and new forms of socioeconomic organisations
that are less wasteful of energy and material. The Alternative Technology
people, having worked in isolation in garrets, basements, and remote
communes will suddenly be welcomed back into the mainstream
technological fold. The adoption of Alternative Technology would imply
a transition to decentral forms of organ­isation. Thus Alternative
Technology carries within it the seeds of a new society.
Behind this scenario lies a revision of Marx's belief that the capitalist
form of' organisation creates the necessary techno­logical base for
socialism. Much of the technology produced under Capitalism is
'flawed', argue the AT enthusiasts; some might be rescued, but most
would have
to be abandoned. The technological base for thefuture must be
'fundamentally rethought, all existing technologies must be reviewed,
and Alternative Technology may lead the way to new 'appropriate'
technologies.
There is an element of technological determinism in this scenario. It is
assumed that the introduction of Alter­native Technology would
automatically change the socioeconomic structure. The attributes
associated with Alternative Technology such as nonalienation and
ease of control by the worker
are supposed to be inseparable from it; they are part of the Alternative
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Technology package_
In one sense this is true, but in another it is false. A society creates the
type of technology suited to its mode of production and its social forms
whether of hierarchy or equality. Technologies like the national grid, the
mass media, super\f00 sonic transports and intercontinental ballistic
missiles, are more likely to arise from societies in which a few people are
in a position to control, (and to threaten to deny) the means of heating,
information, communication. even existence itself, for others. Such forms
of technology depend on centralisation, and centralisation increases the
power of those at the top.
On the other hand, societies with grass\f00 roots democracy are more
likely to successfully develop refuse digesters, local entertainment
(perhaps including community television), communal transport,
democratic communication techniques, and so on.
But it is important to realise that although both 'Flawed Technology' and
'Alternative Technology' come as packages, both can be broken up_
Ideas and inventions are often perverted to serve opposite ends from
those originally envisaged: witness the fate of the pacifist suggestion that
the army should be issued with rubber bullets instead of lead ones.
Peter Harper has emphasised in past issues of Undercurrents that the links
between social and technological components of a package are not
indissoluble. Alternative Technology, like any other technology. provides
only a means to social ends: but there is no fixed link between means
and ends the link can only be made politically_ It is possible to imagine
a highly reactionary Alternative Technologybased world, with feudal
ownership and control and intensive slave labour, which is nevertheless
'ecologically' viable. (Some might even say such a world would be
socially desirable if it avoided economic collapse: better
a slave than dead . . _ . . and better still
a feudal lord than a slave. )
The separation of means and ends, techniques from goals, is profoundly
dangerous. It is understandable that Alternative Technology people
despair of political involvement. and want to get on with the job of
developing hardware_ But unless they consider how this will be
implemented on a mass scale they are coming dangerously near to
elitism.
Some of them would retaliate saying that the social 'software' associated

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with Alternative Technology communal organisation can be exported


and implemented when the crunch comes; that the 'Alternative
Technology Commune' is a social experiment, a demonstration which
can help convince people of the feasibility of alternative ways of life.
Retreatist communes may indeed play such a role; but their exercise in
demonstrating the future can only be meaningful if they have a strategy in
mind for social change. Otherwise they can easily misdirect their
communications and be used for reactionary purposes by
those with other than 'social' or environ\f00 mental concerns.
There are already signs that some of the work of the ecological movement
is being used to provide scaretactic propaganda on behalf of the
corporate state. Ecological rhetoric can be used to disguise capitalist
ideology and some parts of the ecological movement are only too
willing to oblige. As Cotgrove' has
written of the Club of Rome: . . . . . theirs is, in fact, a strategy for
increasing control and order over the economic and resource problems
with which the corporations are faced", while Ridgeway] goes further and
suggests that behind the revolutionary rhetoric of parts of the movement
"are arguments for policies which would lead to a more effectively
managed central state, a benign form of capitalism".
Certainly alternative technology could be easily absorbed into capitalism.
There are already signs of growing interests fuelled by the energy crisis in
Alter\f00 native Technology by industrialists. In
the USA, Grumman Aerospace is building both large and smallscale
windmills; NASA has a $1. 25 million windmill project, and the National
Science Foundation has funded a $60 million project on solar radiation
energy conversionl Arthur
D. Little (Consultants) estimate that there will be a $1. 3 billion annual
market for solar power systems by 1985. In the UK, British Oxygen's
New Venture Group and Lucas Aerospace have both studied this market.
The patrons of the National Centre for the Development of Alter\f00
native Technology in Wales include Sebastian de Ferranti, Lord Robens,
Lord Annan, and the Duke of Edinburgh.
A number of small firms are already advertising alternative energy
systems to the general public. And of course, there are countless projects
underway in universities and government institutions
(for example, the Energy Technology Support at Harwell).

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So corporate Alternative Technology may soon arrive . . . . .


This brings us to our second scenario \b the politically realistic one. 4
Plagued by resource and energy crises, the corporations and the state
absorb many of the Alternative Technology techniques but not the
associated ideology. They will purvey Alternative Technology survival kits
for profit to those who can afford them: the middle class will buy itself
(temporarily) out of the ecocrisis, by building defendable, safe
environments. Alternative Technology production is carried on in much
the same way as conventional production \b in energy intensive and
socially exploiting largescale industry. (Of course, energy\f00 intense and
polluting massindustrial production is to say the least suboptimal
environmentally,"so eventually there might have to be a move to
decentralised smallscale operations and alternative production
technology. )'
The central speculative question is: would the corporate state then be
dissolved, or would capitalism seek to retain its control and its profits?
The answer must depend on the collective political actions taken by
those who
otherwise would be pawns in the game. The growing power of trade
unionists, for instance, is increasingly making itself felt in directions
which transcend the old issues of wages and conditions. Workers are
demanding a say in the way their factories are run, a say in investment
decisions. Consequently they are demanding that the books be opened.
We are growing ever nearer to the day when they will be demanding a
say also in what pro\f00 ducts are made and what technology is used in
the industrial process.
On the other hand, it would be too deterministic to maintain that their
decisions would in the early stages necessarily be more ecologically
sensible than those of the capitalists_ For at present, in many cases, the
heat of the immediate battle is too intense. We must understand that
highlyskilled people fighting for their jobs cannot be expected to
appreciate arguments that bicycles are nicer than Aston Martins or
Concordes.
But such attitudes, arising from defensive situations, cannot provide
reliable justification for writing off workers as agents in an offensive
situation. As workers' control develops we must help the process already
evident in the ICI workers' 'Positive Employment Programme' whereby
organisational demands lead to financial demands and finally to
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technological demands. The foreseeable endresult of this process is


workers' selfmanagement, in which
a social audit of the community's needs and of its available resources
would be able to replace the Market mechanism, notorious for its neglect
of environmental and social factors.
Only if technological change goes hand in hand with change in the
balance of power can we hope for a viable future. Since ends and means
must, as we have argued, be constantly linked, it is important to discuss
what means are appropriate for such ends. Let us concentrate first on the
political aspects.
A common model for decentral social structure is to base all economic
and productive life on a small community of 510 thousand or so, who
participate directly
in setting production goals, allocating resources and in general decision
making through facetoface democratic meetings. The distinctions
between consumer and producer, work and leisure, would be dissolved
by extensive task rotation so that 'workers selfmanagement' and
'community control', would overlap. The semi\f00 autonomous units
would be coordinated regionally and nationally by some form of
representational body, with delegates subject to recall and dismissal. The
basic aim would be to ensure control by and accountability to the
citizen.
This scheme has many similarities with Guild Socialist and Syndicalist
ideas, the main difference being in the type of technology used.
Syndicalism grew up during the early days of the industrial revolution
and was firmly rooted in the craft tradition. Some people argue that
presentday technological capabilities make the syndicalist dream
realisable \f00 particularly if we make use of electronic means to aid
communication and participation in decisionmaking. Market
structures, which are only one way to coordinate trade and resource
allocation between autonomous units, could be replaced by continuous
and rapid communication of information concerning needs and
capacities. (See Stephen Bodington's book Computers and Socialism .
Computers could be used in an interactive mode as an aid to
participative decisionmaking and similar tasks).
The use of what amounts to advanced technology to aid the functioning
of decentralised society will, of course, be

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an anathema to many alternative technologists they would prefer to


employ low technology exclusively. But in some situations it is sensible at
least to consider the use of high technology, where appropriate, and with
sufficient safe\f00 guards. It may, of course, turn out that complex
cybernetic integration is in\f00 appropriate since there are grave dangers
of technocratic manipulation of information by the inevitable 'experts'
associated with advanced technology. But we should be wary of throwing
all existing technologies away without first assessing their relation to our
social and environ\f00 mental ends.
Take production technology for example. This topic has largely been
ignored by the Alternative Technology enthusiasts, who, as Peter Harper
has pointed out, seem to forget that Alternative Technology hardware
(windmills, solar panels, heat pumps) must be produced somewhere and
by someone, and usually require fairly complex and scarce materials,.
tools and techniques in their construction. Moreover, it should not be
assumed that workers in presently efficient hightechnology factories will
all enthusiastically embrace Alternative Technology as they gain power
indeed, in some cases they will be right not to.
Now it may well be that most production can ultimately be established at
the community level in small craftwork based community workshops. For
it is
46
true that there are major diseconomies of scale in many fields probably
in most. And in any case we might not place a high value on economic
or technical 'efficiency'. Given the changed pattern of consumption
associated with a decentralised communal life, there would not be
a need for many of the artifacts that keep the present corporate industries
churning, and certainly smallscale community workshops using relatively
simple labour\f00 intensive craft techniques could provide many of the
things we need. But it is worth considering other possibilities: in our
eagerness to escape from the commodity consumption patterns of capital
\f00 ism and the associated production techniques we tend to overreact
against the 'economies of scale' argument and to deny the efficiency of
massproduction in some situations. For example, there might be a role for
some advanced technology say in mining, smelting and refining of basic
materials; and in automation, for
the highly efficient production of certain standard items (such as tubes,
sheeting, nuts and bolts). Such advanced techniques would make full use
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of the economies of scale, at central, regional or national level.


MoreOrLess totally automated (and perhaps selfmaintaining) plants, are,
given the economic and I political will, technically feasible. And it might
be possible, using numerical control techniques, for components to be
marginally tailored or modified to suit
the needs 'dialled in' from a particular community a sort of bespoke
production. Certainly, such a plant could be controlled via computer so
as to optimise resource usage (materials, energy and plant) and to
distribute its time rationallY amongst the various orders sent in from the
communities it served.
_ The standard products would then be distributed to each community for
labour intensive assembly into the final product thus creating a sort of
massive extension of the doityourself kit concept.
This 'mixed' system would make use of the advantages of capitalintensive
modern technology and of labour intensive, communitycontrolled work,
where appropriate. Thus, in some situations, automation could be seen as
an 'appropriate technology'. Of course, there are many problems. Since
'capital\f00 intensive' tends to mean 'energyintensive' and since
transport costs are likely to be high, perhaps smaller local factories,
utilising alternative sources of energy would be appropriate in some
circumstances. 7
For example, it might be possible to establish smallscale numerical
control units feeding components directly to the community workshop. .
,
However,the point we are trying to make is that once we have defined
our social and environmental ends, it then becomes possible to design
appropriate means to reach them. We should then be able to avoid two
opposite traps: allowing Alternative Technology to be perverted into a
new technological super\f00 structure, serving an essentially unchanged
economic base; or supporting the development of a new selfmanaged
social base destined to suffocate under the weight of the old
technological superstructure.

References
1. Robin Clarke in his Review of
David Dickson's Alternative Technology: New Scientist, May 16th 1974.
2 Stephen Cotgrove 'Ecology and Utopia' New Scientist, to be
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published.
3. J. Ridgeway, The Politics of Ecology \f00 E. P. Dulton and Co. , 1971.
4. There is, of course, a third possible scenario it may be that AT will turn
out not to be socially, technically, economically, or even environmentally
viable, even if used on a small scale in decentralised units. Of course this
would not stop the corporations from marketing it for shortterm gain. But
if it were obvious, as some people believe, that AT is just 'not on', then
industry would be unlikely to take much interest in it.
5. Although they might not subscribe to the ecological determinism
implied by the latter part of this scenario, some AT enthusiasts would be
happy to accept the absorption of AT by industry, since, they argue,
industry has the money and skills to develop and market AT systems and
kits and once it has done so, it would find it had undermined itself, by
enabling sections of the community to become selfsufficient. However,
although it is possible that the centralised industrial system would
consequently 'wither away', it seems equally likely that, (as in the case of
the doityourself boom, or even the health food boom), the purveying
organisations would continue to thrive at their customers expense.
6. S. Bodington, Computers and Socialism, Spokesman books, 1973.
7. M. Bookchin 'Towards a Liberatory Technology' in Post Scarcity
Anarchism Ramparts Press 1971.

EVENSONG
The downpour hesitates;
Frail ghosts are rising from the ground and raindrops halt their skate on
leaves.
Especially after evening rain
the moments freeze among the green.
The gardener moving mid the plants replaces tools for the night's rest,
is touched by icc that locks the day,
and lovers coupled in the shrubs
are dressed by silence, then by dew, then frozen in the twilight's cloak all
feel at one with leaf and wood.
The hand that holds the stars and then will move the fragile arms of ivy
through the stone of walls

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between this evening's song and next is forger of death's signature.

Peter Fallon

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Books Pages 47 52
PAPER DOMES BLOW YOUR MIND
TONY DURHAM
PAPER HOUSES (Survival Scrapbook 4)
by Roger Sheppard, Richard Threadgill and John Holmes. Unicorn
Bookshop, Caerfyrddin. Cymru. Paperback. 133pp. £2. 50.
WHEN PAPER HOUSES have been produced commercially it has usually
been for one or two purposes: for kids to play in, or for people to live in
when disaster has wiped out their former dwellings. Ordinary people do
not live in paper houses. Play and disaster arc "at opposite ends of a
spectrum; ordinary adult life, which goes on in brick and mortar houses,
occupies the middle of the spectrum and has little contact with the
extremes. For the alternative culture,however, the middle ground is
narrow or non'existent. Playas a way of life is often practised by the same
visionary people who are conscious of the advancing, global ecological
disaster. If, as this Survival Scrapbook says, 'domes blow your mind', (and
all the houses it describes are, broadly speaking, domes) then I think it is
because domes make you more aware both of the possibilities of play
and the possibility of disaster. Life on earth is precarious, but it should be
fun.
In fact, 'paper houses' sound rather more precarious than they really are.
It's not Basildon Bond we're talking about, but triwall fibreboard. Its
stiffness and insulating properties qualify it as a build\f10 ing material.
But if you're going to build something strong with it, you have to build
clever. The main source of inspiration here is of course Buckminster
Fuller. Most of Fuller's designs were not done with paper, but they were
lightweight and highly engineered; his aluminium Wichita house was
actually built by an aircraft firm. And the geodesic dome concept,
popularised by Fuller, is easily adapted to paper buildings. Paper comes
in flat pieces, ,and geodesics will magic a sphere
out at planes.
Domebuilders need some grasp of geometry, and with luck this book will
get you there if you're starting from OIevel maths. The section on
spherical geometry and geodesic calculations should help a lot if you're
planning

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a dome from scratch. The catalogue of polyhedra (flatfaceted solids) will


be useful, too, though you might do better to go back, as the authors
suggest, to the source: Cundy and Roliett's Mathematical Models'.
A couple of mistakes here bugged me, Lines are missing from some of the
'nets' and if you took them literally you'd get holes. ,in your model
polyhedra. The picture labelled 'edge truncated cube' is in fact a
truncated octahedron, a serious mistake since both of these solids are
referred to later on as the bases of house designs. Some people will get
very con\f10 fused.
Almost half the book is about geometry. But then it's on to constructional
details, photo reports on various paper structures that have been built,
and some thoughts on what paper houses do to your head apart from
keep it dry.
Most of the practical section seems to be based on what the authors
themselves have done. It will provide you with a good choice of methods
for cutting out your panels, bending the flaps at their edges, fixing them
together, and then weatherproofing the surface. I don't have their
experience, but instinct tells me that weatherproofing will be the trickiest
bit, and the one most likely to submit to surprising, counterintuitive
solutions. I like the idea of boiled linseed oil a good traditional
waterproofer. The steamroller solutions arc to coat the dome either with
fibreglass or with con\f10 crete, but we are suitably warned of the
practical problems involved. Anyway, one would feel a fool saying: "this
is my paper house; don't worry about the con\f10 crete, that's just for
waterproofing. "
The only weather problems which I feel this book may underestimate are
strong wind and rising damp. Maybe
a ring of bricks round the base of the dome would be heavy enough to
hold the
dome down in a gale. But without a dampproof course, bricks are very
porous and I fear the cardboard in contact with them would get soggy.
Doors (or hatches?) and windows are obviously practicable with the
methods given here. We're even told how to fit a lock the book's one
concession to bourgeois society.
It's surprising I haven't mentioned Keith Critchlow so far. For it is his ideas
on geometry and design which inspire this book still more than Fuller's.
Critchlow's 'Order in Space' (Thames & Hudson), modestly described as

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a 'design source book' is in fact, when read seriously,


a kind of yoga course for the parts of the mind which relate to
threedimensional space. One subject it explores is the close\f10 packing
polyhedra, the solids which can
be used to fill the whole of space. In this respect most architects have
been no
more inventive than the manufacturers of cube sugar. In his paper domes
Critchlow has explored some alternatives such as the truncated
octahedron and the edge truncated cube. Both of these have a mixture
of square and hexagonal faces. Their advantage over the familiar geo\f10
design shapes (with triangular faces and usually fivefold symmetry) is that
these shapes nest together in all sorts of ways.
Fuller's domes arc individualistic, but Critchlow's are sociable. They can
bud and spread like living cells, both sideways and upwards. The
directions of growth are not in general at right angles, so the resulting
forms are gentle and visually interesting. All this is well set out, with
many pictures. The illustrations are not very explicit about the geometric
principles involved, so if you care you'll have to work it out yourself.
Committed as it is to one particular style of building, this book can't be
an encyclopedia of paper houses. The bibliography, though, is pretty wide
ranging, with plenty of stuff from abroad. Surprisingly, they've missed one
of the closest to home, Vinzenz Sedlak's folded paperboard shelters
developed at the University of Surrey and described in 'Architectural
Design', December 1973.
One of the most significant titles in
the bibliography must be: 'Paper Houses Open New Billion Dollar
Housing Market to Doublewall Corrugated. ' Clearly some one is looking
beyond the stage of garbage housing and scrap technology, to the point
where vast amounts of paper are produced specially for housing.
I think we ought to draw up a few ecological balance sheets before
Kleenex City is allowed to paper over the sky. But meanwhile, unwrap
your new fridge with care. Someone might want the card board.

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT NOW TAKE PLACE


CHRIS HUTTONSQUIRE
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THE MILLENNIUM POSTPONED


by Edward Hyams. Secker and Warburg. 1974. 27700. £4.
THIS BOOK is a popular history of socialism 'from Sir Thomas More to
Mao Tsetung'. It is written in polemical style with a clarity and wit that
has been rare on the left since Orwell died. Today's' revolutionaries sadly
fail torealise how much their submarxist jargon repels the unconverted.
They would do well to read this book for its style alone.

The book is in two halves, Theory and Practice. Unusually, the former is
the shorter, only twofifths of the book. There are four chapters on
premarxist socialism, three on Marx and his work and one long chapter
on Anarchism, which shows distinct signs of compression. The Practice
section deals with the Social Democrats with satisfying crispness
('Sweden: welfare, certainly; socialism, not bloody likely'), the Anarchists,
the Syndicalists, Russia, China and the New Left.

Edward Hyams' own position is ambivalent, and it is to his credit that he


frankly admits this. On the one hand his heart is in the right place, up
there with Peter Harper among the millenary rose­tinted clouds, and in
his nexttoIast chapter he sets out with modest irony a sketch of a possible
world organised along libertarian socialist lines:
'Let us, for a few minutes, assume that the impossible has happened, that
the New Left all over the world has grown in strength and ruthlessness . .
. ; that by strikes and sabotage and some measures of violence both
corporate and state imperialism have been overthrown and the way
cleared for the installation of a worldwide society realising the millenary
vision of pure socialism. A brief indulgence in fantasy will do no harm. '
On the other hand, however, his feet and his head are firmly on the
ground. His final chapter, 'The Millennium Has Been Cancelled' sets out
clearly the eco­logical argument for thinking that we are spitting into the
wind. Simply, that the socialist utopia depends on freedom and
democracy, which need elbowroom, of which we have very little and
shall have less or even none at all. It is simply a matter of numbers.
Edward Hyams regards it as 'foolish optimism' to suppose we can check
population growth below the maximum the earth can support, which he
puts at more than 10 billion. This is a problem the Libertarian Left has not
faced up to: how do you get people to restrict their families voluntarily,

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without legal or economic sanctions? Parents like having kids, and come
up with endless rationalisations to prove that their own offspring aren't
part of the population problem. But considering how close we are to a
stable population already, it seems more like 'foolish pessimism' to regard
population growth as inevitable. Many traditional 'cultures stabilised their
numbers well below what their territory could support. We might have
something to learn from their. use of social measures such as taboos on
inter­course. There is already in some circles in this country a taboo on
large families. Some otherwise affluent societies limit population by
linking marriage to certain prestige goods whose supply is artificially
limited, so that their price is bid up, much as if we were to say that only
couples buying colour TVs could have children, production being limited
to 300,000 a year. Clearly under the present setup this would be grossly
unfair, but would it be so unacceptable in an egalitarian society? The
point is that social control can be achieved in quite subtle ways as well
as by the crude mechanisms of the market and the law.

My own view is that 'the Revolution' still has a chance, albeit a slim one,
and certainly not in our lifetimes. At the very best the world population
will be stabilised at an uncomfortably crowded level (and this will take
30 years) as has happened in England. But once this has been achieved
then the question of what the population should be is back on the
agenda. Would it really be impossible to persuade (say) the English that a
slow fall in their numbers would be for the good of all? Many, I think,
would accept this already. What the longterm carrying capacity of
England is, sans nuclear and fossil fuels, an open question: it might be
very mu. ch lower than anyone now thinks, sayan eighth of today's
numbers (6. 5m. , the population in 1750, before
the Industrial Revolution) because of the large acreage that would have to
be devoted to growing fuel to keep us warm. Without a catastrophe and
uncoerced it is hard to imagine the population falling at more than 0. 5%
p. a. initially. The death rate is about 1. 3% p. a. so the birth rate would
have to be reduced by about
a third from its present level. At that rate the population would halve in
about 120 years, so that it would take at least 450 years to achieve
stability, about 200 times the average planning horizon of our rulers. No
wonder noone gives much thought to the problem except for a few
cranks. Much better to hang on, Micawberlike, for fusion power o come

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up trumps and bail us out.


In the meantime, the struggle con­tinues. We must be content to travel
hopefully down the stony road to Utopia. But at least we are in good
company. Not­withstanding my reservations about the last chapter I
recommend this book as a guide to some of our fellow travellers, and a
sympathetic account of those who have passed before us. on the way.

VlDEOVISION AND NEW AGE SCIENCE


RICHARD ELEN
THE PRIME TIME SURVEY
by TVTV. Box 630, San Francisco, Calif. 94101. From Twenty Four
Frames.
12 Chepstow Mansions. London W2 4XA. 64pp. £2. 20 personal and
community. £4. 40 business and institutional.
UNPOPULAR SCIENCE
by Arthur Rosenblum. Running Press.
38 S. 19th St• Philadelphia •. Pa_. 19103. 111 pp. " $3. 95_ (You might
find it in somewhere like Compendium for under £2. >
THE PRIME TIME SURVEY of new video developments, by the US group
TVTV (Top Value Television, makes one wonder once again why all these
media developments never seem to happen here: why is it the US that
brings home all the goodies? The answer seems to be partly economic ;
as TVTV rightly point out, European standard portapaks (portable video
recordercamera units) cost almost twice as much as American models. I
see no reason why this should be purely
a result of differing electronic standards, as the same price differentials
apply to the majority of Japanese manufactured audiovisual equipment,
and there is little or no difference, technically speaking, between the US
and UK models. Some­one somewhere must be making a packet. The
result is that a portapak costs over £800 (plus V AT), sO placing new
equip­ment out of the running as far as totally independent video
producers are concerned. Some groups have been able to obtain grants,
from such sources as local councils or even the Government, result­ing
in community video projects, like those in Lewisham and Hammersmith,
run by the local council, and groups like Interaction, who (amongst many
other things) are doing muchneeded 'educational' work making
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community action groups aware of the facilities for publicity and


organisation that audiovisual media can offer. The second reasonfor the
non­proliferation of alternative video in the UK is that, when it comes to
finished programmes, there is next to nowhere to put them. Unless, of
course, they're establishmenttype 'Educational' or 'Business' programmes
that can be marketed as VCR tapes, etc. When it comes to alternative
news, or video art, both covered extensively by the survey, there is next
to no way of getting it shown unless you stuff a VTR and
a monitor in the back of the car and go and set up in your local shopping
precinct. If the onein106 chance of a net­work broadcast comes your
way, they'll probably cut half of it out and run credits over it (remember
TVX on BBC2?). There's little enough cable TV as it is, let alone space for
alternative projects. And, as the TVTV team point out with regard to
museum/art gallery video, 'the ritual of going to a museum or gallery to
watch television is somewhat antithetical to its nature as a household
appliance. '
One answer is, of course, pirate TV stations. If the response to this idea is
as great as that which greeted the recent 'Undercurrents' radio articles,
then we may soon see independent television (as opposed to
Independent Television, in the same class as the lndependent News­
paper i. e. highly dependent), broadcasting clandestinely.
But this solution is hardly cheap:
a bust would mean the end of you. Perhaps the real solution is PO
licensed Public Access TV stations, although the Post Office would
probably regard this as a challenge to their ironedged monopoly. So the
situation continues.
Returning to the survey, it gives a very good outline of the presently
available­techniques; such as the timebase corrector which enables
halfinch video tapes to be used directly for broadcasting; the new
equipment providing a portable colour recording medium at low cost;
and a run down on available hardware (most of which is available to
European standard.
It gives a good few production tips in the form of accounts of the major
TVTV programmes to date. It is an altogether worthwhile publication, and
will no ­doubt stimulate a great deal of interest in those people who are
just beginning to get interested in alternative video, or, like
me, have been waiting until the hardware became more easily available

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within
a limited budget. High technology it may well be, but it is also a very
significant and worthwhile medium in today's world, and maybe in
tomorrow's too.
When faced with the label 'Freak Science', I always used to wonder what
it meant, along the lines of "Who are the Freaks? What is their Science?"
Now, I am pleased to report, I know at least part of the answer. Art
Rosenblum is one of the freaks, and his science is in his book. Art
Rosenblum runs an outfit which goes under the name of the Aquarian
Research Foundation, and he and it churn out a huge volume of news­
letters, whence the book is compiled. The ARF exists to find ways in
which the New Age can be brought in peacefully instead of chaotically.
(If only it were more likely. ) Drawing on these news­letters as he does
gives the book a sort of 'diarylike' effect; we hear about his dogs
having puppies, people visiting him, and so on, plus a good deal of
introductions to many 'New Age' subjects, including Pyramid Power,
recording spirit voices, ESP in plants, Astral Travel, and lots more. All
good stuff on an introductory level; a read through will give you plenty to
'break the ice at parties' plus a good selection of books to read on your
favourite psychic phenomenon. Could do with a better index, but it's
good fun trying to find a specific subject, so why bother?

SUBVERSIVE TEACHING JOHN M. RAFTERY


FREEWAY TO LEARNING: EDUCATIONAL ALTERNATIVES IN ACTiON
edited by David Head. Penguin Education Special. 1974, 50p.
THE CURRENT manifold 'educational' crisis is superficial in that it is
merely a symptom of the more deeprooted crisis of belief and meaning in
urbanindustrialism. In educational institutions, 'progressives' espouse
busyness as an apologia for unthinkingness and as an antidote to doubt,
while working for more sophisticated facilities and audiovisual aids,
a proliferation of options on the curriculum, replacement of the annual
degradation ritual of examinations by the even more degrading
surveillance of con­tinuous assessment. When quiet reflection, passive
nonintervention, and ­philosophical pondering are required,
with respect to human, social and existential problems, the cult of
busyness instead produces blind intervention, inhumane and blundering

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'solutions' and a host of intractable secondary problems that necessitate


further callous interventions.
In the process, the institutional monopoly on respectable education is
reinforced; and to cope with the crisis, the wellmeaning, but misguided
educational physicians prescribe inoculation with more of the same:
organisational research, planning, computer aids, the usual technocratic
fumblings which attempt to impose rationality. More things (including
persons) are processed more quickly, categorised more efficient­ly,
castrated more hygienically, and con­ditioned more completely.
David Head is a soidisant educational quisling, and if the posting of
radical questions is tantamout to subversion, he would,. like Postman and
Weingartner, see teaching as a subversive activity:'How do you set about
producing the misfits that you and I are convinced society needs to bring
it health?; How do you encourage the children you meet to equip them
selves with power?; How do you set about making learning a discovery
and
a dialogue?; How might any future educa­tional system counteract the
'hidden foundations' of a schooled society?;' ­and somewhat
incongruously 'How do you meet the requirements of the 1944 Act?' I
felt after reading this anthology that the hidden foundations were
insufficiently delineated, exposed, or countervailed, despite the pervasive
realisation by the various authors that while 'education' is confined to
dingy, joyless, authoritarian classrooms, then, no matter how 'progressive'
the tutors, no matter how ultramodern the fittings, the result can only be
rigid, straightjacketed and conformist tuition. The freeschoolers agree on
praxis reflection and action on' the world in order to transform it as
a worthy aim of education, and know
that this can only be approximated by sincere personal relating in a
decentralised humanlyscaled setting. Only these exchanges can
demystify the social world, and restore the power of selfdetermina­tion,
autonomous decision, and con­sequently, selfrespect, to people who
have been organised, directed and bullied out of a sense of selfhood for
too long. But once people are regimented in insti­tutions, even ostensibly
beneficent institutions, the tentacles of control and roleplay, statusseeking
and envy, quantification and mystification, extend to and submerge
irrevocably every last vestige of 'free' education. The spirit of praxis is
unwittingly channelled and diverted to the ends of the system, and

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the pseudodiversity renders the monolith still more monolithic.


The evil of competitive and acquisitive sociallyapproved 'success' has its
locus not in the hidden curriculum, which free­schooling effectively
counteracts, but in the hidden foundations of a schooled society. We
have all been processed on Procrustean education at beds. Fear of being
unable to meet the system's require­ments forces people, over and over
again, even at the pinnacle of success, to dream not of success, but
failure. Socially­approved goals can best be attained by
the negative motivation of failure, rather than by a positive urge towards
personal growth. So, although orthodox schools extol individualism and
creativity in the abstract, they create in practice circum­stances which
put a premium on con­formity and uniformity. But even in free schools,
irrespective of the radicalism of the teachers, creativity can only be
encouraged within the limits set by such values as: an appreciation of
money,
a devotion to work, a respect for people in authority and the desire to
emulate them. They want their pupils to be slightly different, but not too
different.
In his postscript, David Head asserts that: 'The survival of the freest of free
schools is linked unavoidably with what
we can only call 'administration', .
questions of premises, regulations, moneyraising, relations with
authorities. ' I would suggest that the former school­supporting
preoccupations must render the latter relations servile, sycophantic, and
exceedingly heteronomous. I t is only outside the network, conventional
and unconventional, of schooling, that a con­templative and popular
search for wisdom will supplant the blind production of illiterate
specialists, and only then will
a real opportunity exist for the reevalua­tion of technology, economics,
progress, and the public institutions whose runaway hegemony lies at the
seat of our urbanindustrial disease. And this new
zeitgeist might eventually lead to the atrophy of other repressive and
counter­productive institutions. The freeing of resources, mental and
material, brought about by the removal of these expensive superparasites
e. g. a huge medical service which thrives on disease; a legal bureau
crazy which legislates for crime, would mean a less frantic life, so less
diseased, ' less criminal life, for all.
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To the extent that free schools provide free access to things, places,
processes, events and records, they are unquestion­ably good. But the
'freeway to learning' lies beyond the certification effect and the Education
Act.

NEIGHBOURHOOD REVIVAL
STEPHEN HORNE
NEIGHBORHOOD GOVERNMENT
by Milton Kotler. BabbsMerrill Company Inc. , New York. $4. 95.
KOTLER CLAIMS that the modern' American city is an empire. It spread
from its original area; the present down­town business district, not, as
one would suppose simply by covering the surround­ing fields with
buildings, but by annexing adjacent towns which had their own
governments. For example, Philadelphia covered two square miles from
1682 till 1854 when the State legislature allowed it to annex twentyeight
neighbouring town­ships so increasing its area to 129 square miles, the
size it remains today.
The neighbourhoods are not vague groupings mitigating the vastness of
the city but the townships annexed by the city. The object of annexation
was to destroy the commercial independence of the neighbourhoods
which, given that local governments in America seem to have fiscal and
legislative powers far greater than their English counterparts ever had, t
reacted downtown interests. The neighbourhood revival, Kotler says, has
come about because the cities are falling apart, the party machines which
kept political attention focussed on City Hall are disintegrating and
modern multi national companies are not interested in buying local
politicians in the manner of their robber baron predecessors. The book
was written in 1968 and whether the revival continues now I do not
know though I see from the press that two of the neighbourhoods
mentioned in this book, Roxbury and South Boston, have
recently shown a remarkable degree of neighbourhood spirit. Roxbury,
Kotler tells us, had, perhaps still has, a group called the Roxbury United
Front wishing to regain Roxbury's independence of Boston. The city
government must now be kicking themselves for not having conceded it.
Much of the book is taken up with
a theoretical analysis of how, and why, to recapture neighbourhood

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control and how to organise neighbourhood govern­ment. He believes


that local power is
an Object in itself not a step towards national revolution nor, directly,
towards social equality. It should be regained by constituting a
neighbourhood corporation as a legal entity which can then gradually
receive powers from the city as it establishes its claim to represent the
neighbourhood. He suggests it should be governed by an assembly of all
residents electing a council for the routine business. He also makes
suggestions for the control of the local economy by the locals which he
rightly regards as vital. Such schemes are all as yet but schemes. He
describes
an actual neighbourhood organisation, the East central Citizens
Organisation in Columbus, Ohio, whose activities at the time of writing
were mainly the administration of federallyfunded aid pro­grammes. Still
that is a start; I can hardly imagine our own Department of Health and
Social Security allowing its money to be doled out by a parish council
though, since the one political matter which_ excites the people in my
village is the way some villagers who could work, bum off the Social
Security, such a transfer would probably save_the State millions. I must
write and suggest it to Sir Keith Joseph.
Kotler has the right ideas. The follow­ing words from his last chapter
should be branded on the left buttock of all poli­ticians and officials"
There is an obsession with devising new social programs as solutions to
riots, racism and poverty yet all share a common failing: they are all
programs legislated by the central government and controlled by out­side
central power. In addition to the social inequities of millions in this
nation, there is a worse poverty shared by the poor and the affluent. It is
the impover­ishment of political life, which results from the growth of
central administra­tion. '
Vet I cannot wholly recommend this book. It shows signs of its origins in
an article in the Yale Law Journal in its waffly and overabstract approach.
Reading it is rather like eating candy floss; it seems solid, you bite on it
and it vanishes. Also he has a way of discussing patently crazy ideas such
as neighbour­hood armed uprisings against City Hall at excessive length
and in a straightfaced way only equalled by John Cleese in Monty
Python's Flying Circus. Still he is on our side. n
For the benefit of our American readers interested in all this there is an
Institute for Neighbourhood Studies at /520 New Hampshire Ave. NW,
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Washington DC 20036, which they may find useful.

PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY NlCHOLAS POLE


DEMOCRATIC THEORY ANO LOCAL GOVERNMENT
by Dilys M. Hill, Unwin University Books. 1974 £2. 75.
THERE IS an implied value judgment in the word 'participation' just as
there is in the word 'apathy', yet 'participation' can be a euphemism for
the undue influence of particular pressure groups just as 'apathy' can be a
pessimistic term for the pursuit of happiness. It depends on your point of
view. Politicians for example might agree with Anthony Crosland, that
only a small minority of the population wish to participate directly in
decision­making: "We do not necessarily want
a busy, bustling society in which every­one is politically active, and
fussing
around in an interfering and responsible manner and herding us all into
parti­cipating groups. " Similarly, the local government officer, a
professional with a job to do, may regard participation as an awkward
interference. "We should always remember", one has said, "that local
government is not a selfsufficient creature. It is a service industry
dependent on the goodwill, approval, acquiescence and support of the
public, without which it would be crippled. "
To some extent these views of parti­cipation, 'fussing around' and local
government as 'a service industry' are quite understandable. If people arc
'apathetic' towards local government it is not necessarily because they
have been gripped by the sinister tentacles of an everwidening sense of
alienation, but because, as Dilys Hill points out, the individual in a
complex industrial society has a multitude of "alternative calls on his
loyalty These alternative ties cut across local administrative boundaries.
They relate man to man and individual to society, in ways which bypass
local government. " It is therefore not surpris­ing that planning decisions
are now the main source of spontaneous participatory outbursts, as
planning is the area in which local authorities most commonly take
decisions which threaten large numbers of their citizens.
The proposals of the Skeffington Committee report on participation in
planning appointed in 1968, says Dr. Hill, "are little more than

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exhortatory" and "have


unfortunately met with little response Skeffington was wrong to suggest
that participation has its main part to play at the late stage of the
planners' preferred proposals and not at the earlier, more crucial stage of
identifying choices available. "
This is the fundamental criticism of the 'public relations' approach to
parti­cipation, in which glossy folders are distributed to the public,
informing them, rather than asking them, about what the planners have
planned. All planning must start with some method of identifying the
'needs' of the community. The public
relations approach 'participation from above' is an extension of the
view that public relations is simply a service industry; that planning
officials arc responsible for identifying potential demand (often using
sophisticated market research and 'attitude surveys'), for pro­viding the
services and advertising them effectively.
Dr. Hill describes the government Community Development experiment
of 1969, based on local social services, voluntary groups and university
research teams. In these projects, research high­lighted needs, there was
feedback into local administration and policy, and an emphasis on
citizen involvement. The projects stressed the need to get local people to
feel concerned about their communities One town clerk saw the
Community Development project as analogous to a management
consultant firm helping to improve the local authority's social responses;
the team, for its part, saw its role as improving social services and making
social needs articulate•
The complex functioning of participa­tion as a social process (as
opposed to the glossy folder approach) is well illustrated by this example.
To assess the needs of
a community it is necessary to become intimately involved with that
community (this is why voluntary organisations like playgroups and
community newspapers are usually a more accurate guide to local needs
than anything market research can provide), and that involvement may in
turn encourage a higher level of participation within the community a
individual learn that the authorities are accessible. This is partly why
participation is so important. It is a builderup of complex­ity and
'interaction' in social systems, and these arc the qualities that make cities
good places to live in.

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Although in her chapter on Demo­cratic Theory and LOCal


SelfGovernment' Dr. Hill discusses the various philosophies of
participatory democracy, she does not attempt to present a 'model' (thank
good­ness) nor, (what would be more
welcome), a rough theory of the role of. local participation in a modern
industrial society. This is a pity, because the grand old theories of
participatory democracy, which she deals with very well, arc clearly in
need of revision. JS. Mill, for example, argued that local democracy
provides the _ political education necessary for citizenship in a national
democracy a dubious
theory to apply to modern Britain, con­sidering that most people acquire
most of their political education now as spectators of national politics
rather than as participants in local politics.
Dr. Hill provides an admirably readable and comprehensive account of
how the theory and practice of democratic participation in local
government have developed since the 19th century. But in matters of
theory, at least, Dr. Hill seems unwilling to go beyond an account of what
other people have though t, and even in matters of practice she maintains
an almost infuriatingly scrupulous impartiality in her accounts of debates
and controversies. In a textbook this is, I suppose, praiseworthy, and
anyone interested in the question of democracy. participation and
community will find this book very useful, comprehensive and clear.

IRISH ENERGY MAUREEN BRENT


THE GREAT IRISH OIL ANO GAS ROBBERY
from Sinn Fein, 40 Plas Gardner. Dublin. Eire. 40p
THIS 102PAGE BOOKLET was going to get a favourable mention in the
last 'Undercurrents', but maybe it's worth more as it illustrates all that's
best and worst in conventional leftwing thought about energy matters.
Of course, Sinn Fein have got it right when they write about what's
happening in Ireland right now. Esso, Marathon and the others are
making off with Ireland's massive reserves of oil and gas. They are going
to remove not only the gas and oil but also the profits, partly to Britain
but mostly to the States, and all there's going to be for the Irish is a few
transient job and a lot of junk and pollution after­wards And yes, of
course the penetration of Irish business by American and British interests,
by both Irishmen and foreigners, is painstakingly and clearly
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documented. And of course, the farce of exporting oil and gas and
building American lightwater reactors, as at Carnsore Point, to make up
the energy requirement, is lovingly documented. So full points for the
standard Marxist analysis of. the status quo.
But oh dear! Sinn Fein's alternative seems hardly better. What they'd
replace the above with is a massive tripartite nationalised petroleum
industry, based on the Electricity Supply Board (whose 'proud record',
'dedication and skill' and 'ingenuity' are lauded extensively) for energy,
Nitrigin Eirann for fertilisers and
a nationalised version of the foreign­owned plastics industry for
polymers. But even Ireland's stocks of oil and gas are exhaustible, and if
they are developed there's every chance they'll get covetous glances from
Britain by the end of the century. And not even Ireland's air can stand
indefinite amounts of pollution,
and nor can her already acid soil. An economy which, for all the usual
third world reasons, still has lots of farming, small industries and little
dependence on hightechnology stuff like oil, plastics and fertilisers
should count its blessings. By all means chuck the foreignowned
industries out of Ireland, North and South, and accept gladly the
increased prosperity for most Irishmen. But why not accompany that with
a massive decentralisation, with peat for burning (Shetland's high
standard of living isn't maintained by imported fuel) and com­post
instead of Nitrigin Eirann's excrescence, and lowcost renewable energy
instead of offshore petroleum?
Maybe because, come the revolution, Sinn Fein want something to rule,
not a load of independent rural communities that don't need Dublin?
* Best send a PO rather than a cheque even your friendly bank manager
might notice this one!

A MESSAGE PETER ABBS


POLITICAL WRITINGS OF WILLIAM MORRIS
Edited by A. L. Morton. Lawrence & Wishart. Paperback £1.
WILLIAM MORRIS was one of the great radicals of the nineteenth
century. AL. Morton has made an excellent selection of Morris's political
comment­aries. Most of them have been taken from his lectures and
have the vitality and

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directness of good speech.


Morris's message is essentially simple: 'Nothing should be made by
man's labour which is not worth making; or which must be made by
labour degrading to the makers. '
For Morris it was axiomatic that work should bring pleasure to the
worker, not in the form of extraneous rewards but in the actual process
itself. Part of our dignity depends on finding work which properly
engages our mind and spirit and, for Morris, any society which failed to
provide for all its members the oppor­tunity of such work stood self
condemned:d. It was William Morris' belief that the human being was
essentially ,In artist, a creator, a symboliser whose mind needed beautiful
forms and patterns as much as his/her lungs needed air.
The power and persuasion of his politics rests on his vision of the good
society, the truly cultured society, not on any doctrinaire theory. For this
reason his work speaks to our age even more directly than to his own,
because we have witnessed the failure of all doctrinaire politics.
In short, this is an important book, pleasantly produced, cheaply
available and anticipates many of the ideas that are, once again, taking
shape against the Commercial Society.

SONGS OF A FREE SPIRIT


DAMARIS PARKERRHODES
THE MINSTREL CYCLE: the Sunflower Seed Collection. On Emptiness
Green. Songs of the Troubadour.
by Peter Singer, WIth linocuts by Laurie Josephs. Love minus zero/no
limit. 13 Chester­ton Road. Cambridge. 1974. [1. 20 (set of three
booklets.
PETER SINGER's rather homemade Songs and Utterance show a real
progress from the first with its often illegible handwriting on coloured
paper, to the third very attractively got up booklet­Tao. The three have an
endearing quality in our machine age, and finally one is comforted by
their relaxed childlikeness, and agree that Peter has a right to call himself
'The Troubadour'. His 'I Want You ' on one of the back covers rings
through all in a modern Walt Whitman style. I take to Peter, and so the
first two books which are exclusively his, delight me, though I never
know when he is borrowing other people's rhyme tunes to set his words,

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and when they are his own:


Thus:
God made the little spaceship
flies up above our head
he/made it in a fury
to survive us when we're dead.
and this:
and my father was a farmer
kind of scientific man.
ah, but deep inside you know
he had no feeling for the land.
Sometimes he hits curious and lovely
wisdom, and often falls into silly and sometimes maddening nonsense.
However in 'Tao' he has collected from his friends, and these are people I
at least would adore to be befriended by, and one comes across pieces
for which alone the books are worth possessing, in order to keep.
Peter's note to Zengo Miroku, the monk: 'Dear Zen go, You rang and I am
full of gratitude for this tenderness.
I could not speak; the words congested inside,' followed by Zengo's
careful account of ZAZEN: The Divine Seat of the Buddhas.
Then Frances's white hot account of her experience: 'There is so much of
danger, there are so many directions other than that one that is true.
When we open the doors of ourselves we go into a vast country, peopled
by those we do not recognise but who fascinate and even desire us. A
country crisscrossed by innumerable paths and the direction is faint as
we travel, for so many have taken the side paths and the direction seems
so. much to be questioned. Sometimes we cannot even be sure we are on
the right path at all. But when the decision has been made, the doors are
all open, air from all worlds mingles through us and pens us and reveals
us to ourselves . . '
In 'Tao' too Peter begins to share his own skills, and gives useful
instruction On Working with Leather, and on Whole Foods and Natural
Eating. One hopes he will continue, improving with each volume. If any
Resurgence reader has a notion he might publish a homemade type
booklet, he would do well. to buy these to see how it can be done. Two
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out of three of the booklets have magnificent Iinocuts by Laurie Josephs:


this artist deserves to be famous. He loves bodies in such a warm, twisty
and kindly way, con eying not only sex joy, but that hard to define quality
of purity. Some people buying these books may find it hard to resist
cutting them up in order to stick up the pictures round their walls.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
See what you've been missing:
BACK ISSUES of Undercurrents numbers 1. 2. 3, 4 and 5 are now sold
out. But we're hoping to reprint numbers 1,2. 3 & 4. along with early
issues of Eddies (which used to be mailed out separately to subscribers
only) in the form of a book. We can't do it for another few months.
though. because all the capital we can get is needed just to keep current
issues coming out. and we can't afford to tie UD money ill reprinting
hack issues. which may take years to pay for themselves. We’ll be
announcing when the book is ready.

Undercurrents 6 . Heat Pumps how they work and what they can do.
Organic Living Experiment part 1. Do We :\ccd An Alternative
Electronics Industry? Two DIY Wind Generator designs from France. Peter
Harper's New. Improved Alternative Technology Guide. Running Your
Car On Gas complete DIY Instructions. Petrol Stinks how petrol pollutes.
how gas is cleaner. Water Running Wild a guide to homebuilt water
Dower plant. What's Left of Alternative Technology part 2 of Peter
Harper's evolving Movement strategy. Alternative ways of looking at
Cancer Research is stress the cause? An AgitKrop Communique
manifesto from the militant naturalists.
Science Fiction Review. The Dark Side of the Mind Stan Gooch's Total
Man reviewed by Colin Wilson.
Plus Reviews: The Secret Life of Plants; Shelter; Phenomenon: Survival
Scrapbook on Energy: How It Works. And Eddies: The Diggers & the
People Party; Irish Sea Gas Strikes; Dinorwic is Flooded for the CEGB:
BRAD Community Progress Report: Radial House proposal; Cuban
Science.

Undercurrents 7. Special Issue on Communications. The Snoopers and


the Peepers how phone calls are tapped, who does it, and how it can he
detected: how letters are intercepted by the P015t Office. and
countermeasures. Confessions of a Phone Phreak a guide to the National
and International Phone System. Beneath the Official Secrets Act tunnels.
bunkers and microwave towers protect the Government's
communications in wartime or revolution. Cameras Above the Streets
mushrooming TV surveillance of London. The People's Radio Primer: a
UC10 R6/1: page 159
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practical guide to liberated communications. Ha Radio and TV low cost,


low energy communications for a decentralised world. Cable TV just
one. more step in the concentration of ownership of media for profit.
AT In the Shade Part 3 of Peter Harper's philosophical Odyssey .
Behaviour l\modification a chilling new penal technique: and Science
Fiction prizewinning story chosen by Michael !\Moorcock.
Plus Reviews: The New Technology of Repression; Alternative Technology
& the Politics of Technical Change:
The Oil Fix: Appropriate Technology Projects.
And Eddies: Did a runaway missile shoot down an airliner? The National
Centre for Development of Alternative Technology' Comtek 74: and more
….
Undercurrents 8 . Organic Living Experiment, Dart 2 . Sward Gardening
let the worms do the work. The Other London Underground hideaways
for the bureaucrats beneath the city streets. Opening Up the Airwaves
community radio. Building with rammed earth how to use free local
materials in construction. Complete French multiblade windmill design
with tower construction details. Wind generator theory design details in
a nutshell. Breaking the Hermetic Seal does technology need
transcendence? COMTEK Festival complete report & pictures. DIY
Exhibition picture story. BRAD Community photo report. Duke of
Edinburgh visits National Centre for AT interview with the marl behind
the Centre. Plus Eddies: Pirate Radio, Celtic Oil Capers. Eddies social
Paranoia corner 8. : other titbits
And Reviews: An Index of Possibilities; British Bread; Hazards of Work;
Private Future Manual for Revolutionary. ',
Leaders; The Private Future: Scandinavian magazines. And: an expose of
Undercurrents finances

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Why not sell Undercurrents?
We offer a discount of 40 per cent to anyone ordering more than 10 copIes from us. Why
not order a few to sell to friends who may be interested? Or, if you don't want to be a
salesperson, take a few copies round to your local newsagent or bookshop. They'll ask for
2533 % discount, and they won't pay you until they've sold the copies.
but the few coppers you make on the deal should at least cover the bus fare.
I enclose a cheque/postal order for £. . . . . . . . in payment for ••••. . . . copies of
UNDERCURRENTS No . . •••• at 27p per copy (minimum order, 10 copies). These terms
also apply to orders from overseas (surface mail). I understand that UNDERCURRENTS will
credit in full against future orders any copies which I return in good condition (we prefer
not to make cash refunds) •

TAKE OUT A SUBSCRlPTION MOW I
I'd like to subscribe to UNDERCURRENTS and I enclose a cheque/postal order for £2. 50
($6. 50 US or equivalent) Please put me on your subscription list and invoice me for £2. 50
($6. 50 US or equivalent)
TICK THE APPROPRIATE BOX
Please start my subscription with issue number . ••. . •
My subscription entitles me to six approximately bimonthly issues posted by surface/second
class mail anywhere.
NAME
ADDRESS
DATE •••••••••
Please allow us a while to deal with your order.
o I'd like to order back issues of UNDERCURRENTS numbers •••. . •. •••••••. •••••.
to be sent to the above address. 01 enclose a cheque/ postal order for £. . . . . . . 0 Please
invoice me for. • • . •• • . Back issues cost 50p ($1. 25) each, including second class /
surface mail. But back issues of numbers 1,2,3,4, and 5 are now sold out. When reprints are
available. we will let you know.
01 would like to take out an Am MAIL subscription tJ I enclose a cheque/postal! order for £
•••••••••• lnvoice me • Air mail subscriptions are worthwhile in many countries since
surface mail can take more than two months to many places. Air MAIL SUBSCRIPTION
RATES. EUROPE £3. 90 ($9. 40 US): Single copies by air cost one sixth of the subscription.
(middle east & N Africa, roughly) £4. 50 ($10. 80) (USA &Canada, etc) £5. 00 ($12. 00)
ZONE C (Australasia, Japan, etc) £ 5. 40 ($13. 00)
SUB RUNNING OUT? The number with which your sub expires is written on the top or
bottom right hand side of
the wrapper in which we send your copy.
RENEWALS: & CHANGES OF ADDRESS. When you renew your sub or change your
address. it helps us if you can return one of the wrappers. Thanks.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Things . .
BRAZIERS COMMUNITY Recognising that all the problems of humanity
stem from ourselves.
a small group of people at Braziers are working on a living experiment in
social research in which they them­selves are the material. They
endeavour as individuals to face and admit their own weaknesses as well
as their own strengths. as these are revealed to them in the course of their
communications with each other. The 'core' of this group functions in a
pleasant country house which is run as an Adult Education Centre,
supported and assisted by the active work of its many nonresident
members.
Its research is carried on in some of the courses and summer schools, and
as far as possible in the centre, where the aim is to try to live in
accordance with their findings. Conflict and stress are not shirked, and
when they arise, as they always do in any group or community, they are
studied care­fully and an endeavour made to turn them to positive use.
The research, which was originally launched under the aegis of Norman
Glaister, a medical psychiatrist, is based on the observation that humanity
tends to be roughly divided into two main types. Various names have
been given to these types by different philosophers. 'I immediate and
Deliberate'; 'Introvert and Extro­vert' and so on. The terms used by
Norman Glaister are 'Resistive and Sensitive'. By the recognition and
acceptance of these differences they can be seen to be complementary.
The aim is to achieve a better balance and understanding in our living
together. To date results are encouraging. For further information write to:
Bonnie Russell. Braziers, Ipsden, Oxford. OX9 6AN .
• WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS
A study<of the road lobby by Mick Hamer.
"I can confirm that the British Road Federation is the strongest lobby
inside parliament:'Frank Allaun MP.
Nearly one quarter of all the oil used in Britain goes into transport and
about onefifth of the total energy resources. The levels of pollu­tion from
exhaust emissions, disappearance of increasingly valuable agricultural
land and habitat destruc­tion are all related to the transport policies we
adopt. The road lobby is an industrially based interest group, which exists
to promote the con­struction of more, and better, roads, and to minimise
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restrictions on roads and road traffic. The road lobby tends to shun
publicity and it has enjoyed an unusually close working
relationship with Government.
Published 1974 by Friends of the Earth,9 Poland St, London W1V 30G.
See also: Some Alternatives to the M65 Motorway, by Transport Action
Group, 45 Lowerhouse Lane, Burnley, Lancs.
• HELDER CAMARA'S LATIN AMERICA
Betty Richardson Nute has written the latest booklet in the series Non­
violence in Action. 25p. Other titles are: GramdanRevolution by Per­
suasion, by Erica Linton; The signi­ficance of John Woolman for Southern
Africa, by Fred Moorhouse. Published by Friends Peace Com­mittee,
Friends House, Euston Road, London NW12BJ.
LOVE IN CONFLICT
David Harding states a case for loving ways of conflict resolution,
Published by F. O. R. 1974,9 Coombe Road, New Malden, Surrey.
• COMMUMANITY
A transnational journal of the Com­mune Movement particularly report­
ing the activities in Japan. Full of useful and detailed information all in
English. From The Japanese Com­mune Movement, Nikko Kyodo Noen,
1962 Suginosawa Imaichishi, TochigiKen, Japan 32112.
• ON CREATIVE THINKING
I n this original essay, Marjorie Hourd, author of the pioneering book, The
Education of the Poetic Spirit, reminds us of the intricate nature of poetic
thinking, reveals the important connections between creative teach­ing
and psychotherapy and gently urges teachers to cultivate in them­selves
and in their children or students, a state of reverie. Her argu­ments,
quoting some beautiful children's poems, should be of, l'nterest to all
those concerned with education as a force for expression and individual
development. By Marjorie Hourd. The Gryphon
Press. Llanon, Cardiganshire. SOp
• MA VA Free Nation News
was first produced to counter the media misrepresentation of the events
of the 3rd People's Free Festival in Windsor Great Park. It exists as a
mouthpiece for the counterculture, an outlet for the many creative people
within our national community, and deals in depth with those issues not

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normally covered by the free press, promoting a healthy interest in our


lives here on this planet. Copies are distributed free to groups of people
all around the country who are part of community activities in their
area. They redistribute at 5p
a copy, building a cooperative national communication network ­an
alternative system.
From 26 Grafton Rd. London NW5.
• PRACTICAL VOGA
Mehr Fardoonji runs an organic market garden of four acres, and her
collaborator, June Johns. a pro­fessional writer, attended some of the
Yoga classes that Miss Fardoonji ran for the W. E. A. , and so their
collaboration began.
Although Practical Yoga is. as its name suggests, mainly concerned with
the practice of Hatha yoga, it is far more comprehensive than the
majority of 'exercise manual' books on Yoga, that are to be found on
bookshelves. In addition to the admirably clear instructions and
photographs of the Asanas, and the sections on fasting, relaxation and
breathing, that come under the heading of Hatha Yoga, there is also a
lucid introductory section on the other Yogas, Jnana, Raja, Karma etc. By
June Johns in collaboration with Mehr S. Fardoonji. David & Charles £3.
95.
SCOTTISH SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF VIVISECTION Objects:
The Protection of Animals from Cruelty, the Prevention of the Infliction of
Suffering and the Abolition of Vivisection.
Thousands of people are licensed by the Home Office to perform
experiments on living animals and the moral. medical and scientific
aspects of this concern YOU. Vivisection is rapidly spreading and has
already spread into new non­medical fields: cosmetics, aerospace
engineering, testing of weed killers, detergents, soaps, into the study of
Psychology, Zoology, Ecology, Forestry & Agriculture. Their book­lets
include The Extensive use of Animals in Nonmedical Research and
Experiments on HumanS,Free from 10 Queensferry Street, Edinburgh EH2
4PG.
SUPPORT THE 'BICESTER THREE'
In 1973 there wer; 5,363. 641 experiments on living animals. 4,565,542
of these experiments were carried out without the use of anaesthetic. Two

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young men, Cliff Goodman and Ronnie Lee, members of the militant
animal liberation group the 'Sand of Mercy', carried out attacks on
a partially constructed vivisection laboratory and vehicles belonging
to animal breeders. Ronnie Lee and Robin Howard attacked twO boats
which were used by seal hunters in the murder of baby seals. At all times
the 'Bicester Three', Robin, Ronnie and Cliff took the utmost care that no
person or animal would be injured by their activities. They have been
charged with arson. They face possible life imprisonment. Please give
generously to: Bicester Three Defence Fund, 91 Home Close, Hockwell
Ring, Luton, Beds.
CLAP
Payouts happen every two months. The last CLAP Payout, No. 5, was the
biggest ever, and came to £5,002. 47 projects for radical social change
received money, including: the Chapeltown Women' Group 1£2571,
Cope alternatives to mental hospital 1(500), Lazarus Emergency
Ambulance Corps (Belfast I (£2161, Maya free national newspaper
1(230), the Transsexual A'ction Organisation (£2001 and Unicom
Community Press Birmingham (£2001.
Please pay your CLAP tax! You pledge up to 4% of your gross income
every two months mini­mum £1 and choose yourself projects to
support described in the CLAP Handbook. It's a good read in its own
right, full of outrageous, visionary and imaginative projects.
HEALTH ANO HEALING SELFHEALTH CENTRE
This is a centre for the promotion and practice of selfhealth. Pre­ventive
medicine through correct bodymanagement and diet; health education;
and the ultimate dissolution of the doctorpatient situation. Seminars every
Tuesday evening on alternatives in medicine, regular workshops on
acupuncture, shiatsu, massage, etc, and cooking classes. Newcomers are
always welcome. 507 Caledonian Road, London N7. .
WOMEN'S SELFCARE
Women help women take respons­ibility for their own health care.
Women have started selfexamina­tion. With the aid of a torch,
a mirror, a plastic speculum and
a group of women to share the experience each woman can easily and
safely see her own cervix and 'os' the entrance to the uterus!. Women
can know and care for their own reproductive organs. Self determination

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is a necessary part of a wholesome and complete cure.


We can shake off oppressive medical practices only by making the alter­
native a personal realitY.
• HAELAN CENTRE
Organic food and herbal medicine.
Remarkable collection of all the herbs you can think of, 3% page
duplicated list plus some advice on ailments and remedies. Only by
visiting it can you know what it is. We recommend it. 39 Park Road.
Crouch End, London N8 aTE .
THE MASSAGE BOOK
This book is full of simple, all body massage techniques including the use
of foot massage (with the aid of a foot map) to heal other parts of the
body. There are lots of beauti­ful and clear drawings. This is the book to
break down barriers and lead you into body awareness. By George
Downing, Penguin GOp.
• MEDICAL NEMESIS
I f there is a corner of you which still venerates the medical pro­fession,
if you are a patient willingly submitting to a doctor, here is the book to
revolutionise your thinking and your role. 'The m'edical establishment
has become
a major threat to health' writes Ivan IIlich in this book published by
Calder & Boyars, 1975, £1. 25p. There will be a review of it in the next
Issue.
• Enormous HEALTH issue of CATONSVILLE ROADRUNNER which
includes a report on the Women and Health Conference, Sheffield, a
chart of herbal remedies, from antiseptics and aphrodisiacs to varicose
veins, articles on massage, teeth, 0. 1. Y. health, book reviews and a
reading list. All for lOp from 28 Brundretts Road, Manchester 21.
THE HEALING ARTS
Alison Heard has produced a useful introductory booklet on the alter­
native therapies of Nature Cure, Herbalism, Homoeopathy, Radionics,
Colour Healing and Spiritual Healing. From 160 Glen Albyn Road,
Wimbledon, London SW19

Resurgence classified rates Display: . £3 per single column inch

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Lineage: All classifications 5p per word Minimum £3


Box numbers: 25p per insertion Classified advertisements must be
prepaid (cheques made out to INTERPRESS) and sent to Katie Thear,
Advertisement Department, 19 Anne Boleyn's Walk, Cheam, Surrey.
Tel: 01642 5826).

SITUATIONS VACANT HELPER wanted to spread the word about


nonviolence resurgence/undercurrents. Based in Harlow, Essex; start­ing
at £15. 00 weekly, free accommodation and various expenses paid.
About 25 hours' work a week. Opportunities
for extra work and income if required. Telephone 014029273 or
012622873.
ACCOUNTANT, qualified and experienced, required full or parttime by
expanding organ­Isation supporting nonviolence, alternative technology
and thirdworld contacts. Salary and conditions negotiable, Telephone
Peace Projects, 014029273
HARDWARE
IF YOU'RE interested in Saxon spinning wheels (. £30) or Dutch wooden
clogs (£2. 50) write a nice postcard to Postorder Community voor der
Overlevenden, Knoevenoord straat 71, Brummen, Holland.

Small Ads . . . .
COMMUNITIES PEOPLE with capital/income needed for BRAD
community to replace departed members. Interests: (i) communal living;
Cii) alternative technology and farming. Rewards: happy living on
established self­sufficient 40acre Welsh hill farm. Write fully to: Eithiny
Gaer, Churchstoke, Mont gomeryshire.
GROUP PLANNING to pur­chase 100 acres to farm organically and
create a cooperative community endeavour for all to work together and
find common purpose for the future, need someone to help with an
interest free loan to enable start. Bridge Trust, 20 The Chase, Reigate,
Surrey.
A GROUP OF MATURE
New Age workers are
planning to buy a large property with at least 4 acres of land to form a

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mainly self supporting Light centre for retreat, healing and teaching of all
kinds. Also art and craft work and animal care. We should like to know of
any­one interested in selling such
a property for this purpose or wishing to join such a venture. Write '
Allways', 21 St. Pauls Road West, Dorking, Surrey.
YOUNG rural community aim ing for selfsufficiency. experimenting with
alternative technology and cooperation. needs people. Those with
building skills especially welcome, as we're about to start a major
renovation job
on part of the property. If you're interested, write to Inside Out Press,
Edenbank
Cottages, Dairsie, Fife, Scot­land.
PUBLICATIONS ARCTIC COUNTER­CULTURE. Read about the arctic
counterculture in Vannbaereren. If you like Resurgence (and understand
Norwegian) you're going to like Vannbaereren. Each issue contains
articles and pictures about various aspects of the search for new lifestyles
that are ecologically sound. Also poems, reviews: short stories, comic
strips. contact column etc. Write to: Vannbaereren. Box 13, 9155 Karls
\,>y. Norway.
JUST OUT! Smoothie's Alter­native Technology Series. SAE for details.
prices etc. to John Noyce, Flat 2, 83 Montpelier Road, Brighton, Sussex.
IRISH BOOKS BY POST. For descriptions and prices of our large
assortment of books about Ireland, send just 20p, refundable on your first
pur­chase. Listed are books about visiting and settling in Ireland,
genealogy. history and many more. Gand Ltd . • Dept. U2. Dunmanway.
Cork, Ireland. LEAVING THE 20th CENTURY the incomplete work of the
Situationist Inter­national. Original translations of SI texts comix and
graffiti. joyful and nonsensical. 168 pages (large) for only 80 pence plus
15p postage. Free Fall Box 13u 197 Kings Cross Road, London WCI.
"Milord, I am from another country We are bored in the town We have no
intention of contributing"' to this mechanical civilisation. to its bleak
architecture . . . . We want to create environments which are permanently
evolving . . . . The hacienda must be built!" Hurry!
NEUE FREIE PRE SSE (New' Free Press) from Vienna. Independent
magazine for dependents. Monthly4 colours more pictures than
wordshard pictureshard wordsnothing softcomix­sex. THE
leftwingmagazine for young people. Be newbe freeread New Free Press.
UC10 R6/1: page 168
Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 169

Free copies from: Neue Freie Presse. A1070 Wien, Museum­strasse 5.


Austria.
'SOLAR HEATED Buildings:
A Brief Survey' from Solar Energy Digest. PO Box 17776. San Diego.
California 92117. Price: $7 (£3) post paid. "It includes houses, schools,
commercial buildings that are partially or fully solar heated. It lists 92
buildings that did exist, do exist or are expected to exist very soon. "
EDUCATIONAL DORDOGNE Field courses in Practical Ecology. 20
acres limestonebased mixed environment for comparative studies. From
£20 for 14day course. Selfcatering accom­modationincluded. May, June,
July. LewinPoole 99 Worple Road. ,t Isleworth, Middlesex. OI8 2 1785.
ACCOMMODATION EXMOOR MILL HOUSE vacant short term tenant to
keep idyllic 3% acre site on edge of trout stream in well husbanded
condition for 912 months min. whist plans devised to create centre for
alternative technology, small­scale organic farming and partial
selfsufficiency. Resourceful. practical person/ couple, some experience in
farming/smallholding an advantage. 4 bedrooms, 2 living rooms. dairy. )
barn, 4 loose­boxes, etc. Use of most of accommodation available.
No electricity calor gas. Fertile kitchen garden and 2 fields/pasture.
Existing weir, millrace but no waterwheel. Alternative power sources
turbine, heat pump. solar power. Reasonable rent required to help offset
loan costs negotiable. Barter possible. Write outlining interests,
experience. Refer­ences will be required.
Michael Brown. 57 King's Rd, Richmond Surrey.
FREE ACCOMMODATION for nine to twelve months. Old cottage
situated Ridgewell (Essex/Suffolk border). Would expect some practical
help with repairs and maintenance in return. Contact Niels Toettcher. 44
Albion Street, London W. 2.
SARVODAYA PEACE CON­FERENCE
A conference
• for the friends of Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave and J. P. Narayan. • for the
sympathisers of Gramdan. Sarvodaya and Shanti Sena movements.
• for the supporters of small scale, decentralised and eco­logical society.
To be held in the autumn of 1975. Anyone interested write to Satish
Kumar, London / School of Nonviolence.
2 Amen Court. London EC4.
UC10 R6/1: page 169
Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 170

Undercurrents Stockists
LONDON
Housman's Bookshop 5 Caledonian Rd Kings Cross Nt.
Grass Roots
61 Goldborne Rd, W11.
Seed Bookshop Portobello Rd, Wl1.
Compendium
240 Camden High St, NWl. Haelan Centre
39 Park Rd, Crouch End, N8.
Sunflower Friends
Portobello Rd, W11. Paperback Centre
28 Charlotte St, WI. BSSR5
9 Poland 5t, WI.
Friends of the Earth 9 Poland St, WI. Moonfleet
39 Clapham Park Rd, 5W4. Village Bookshop
Regent St. WCI.
Architectural Association Bookshop 36 Bedford Square, WCl.
Freedom Bookshop
846, Whitechapel High 5t, El Mandarin Books
New College Parade, NW3. Robinson & Watkins 1921 Cecil Court
(off Charing Cross Rd) WCZ.
Rising Free
197 Kings Cross P,d, WCI. Ceres
269 Portobello Rd, W11. Centreprise
136 Kingsland High St, E8. Collets
66 Charing Cross Rd, WC2.
Dillons University Bookshop 1 Malet St, WCI.
Grotes
29b Hornsey Rise. N19. NUS Environment Section 3 Endsleigh St, WI.
Copies may also be purchased from the Undercurrents Office (this is not

UC10 R6/1: page 170


Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 171

our editorial office any more) at 275 Finchley Rd, NW3.


CAMBRIDGE
Cokaygne Bookshop .
I Jesus Terrace, New Square. Arjuna Wholefoods
12 Mill Rd.
MANCHESTER
Orbit Books
Whittle St, M4.
Percivals
Peter House, Oxford St, Ml. Wheelers
36 Ann St, M2.
Grass Roots Bookshop 78 Oxford Rd, M13.
Bookflair
Mount St, M2.
On the 8th Day
11 Oxford Rd, MI3.
EDINBURGH Better Books
11 Forrest Rd, EHI.
CARDIFF
The l\. Miskin St. Book Shop 19 Miskin St, Cathays. One 0 Eight
108 Salisbury Rd, Cathays
NOTTINGHAM Mushroom
15 Heathcote St, NG2. __
Conservation Society Portland Building Nottingham University, NG7.
Nottingham University
Peace Society.
GLASGOW
AF & J Barrett,
178 Byres Rd. G12.
John Smith & Son 89 Otago St, W2.
SHEFFIELD

UC10 R6/1: page 171


Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 172

Rare & Racey


166 Devonshire St, 53.
BATH •
Searights Bookshop Ltd
9 New Bond St Place, BAI.
BRIGHTON
Symposium
12 Market St, BN 1.
Public House Bookshop 21 Little Preston St.
DUBLIN
Eblana Bookshop Gratton St. Green Acres
4 Great Strand St . . Dl.
Reas Bookshop
St. Stephens Green.
LEICESTER
Leicester University Bookshop University Rd, LEI.
Black Flag Books
I Wilne St.
BIRMINGHAM
632 Bookshop
632 Bristol Rd, Selly Oak, B29.
Prometheus Books
134 Alcester Rd, Moseley, B13. Birmingham Peace Centre
18 Moor St, Ringway.
LIVERPOOL
Atticus Bookshop
31 Clarence St.
News from Nowhere
48 Manchester St, L16.
HULL
Bogus

UC10 R6/1: page 172


Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 173

21 Prince's Ave, HU5.


John Sheridan Ltd
19 Anlaby Rd, HUI.
NORWICH
University Bookshop University Plain, NOR88C Bristows
4 Bridewell Alley, NOR 02H.
Conservation Book}
28 Bearwood Rd Wokingham, Berks.
Out of Tune
Hyde Park House
Kings Cross Rd, Halifax. John Smith & Son Ltd Stirling University
Bookshop. Spice Island
Osborne Rd, Southsea, Hants. Books & Things
9 Oswald 81, Lancaster. The Other Branch
7 Regent Place
Leamington Spa, Warwicks. Bookshop (The Fourth Idea) 14 Southgate,
Bradford 1. Alligator
104 Fishergate, York. Books
84 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 8AB. EOA Book
34 Cowley Rd, Oxford.
Low Impact Technology Ltd. has moved to London and been reorganised
as Conservation Tools & Technology Ltd. CTT have formed the CIT
ASSOCIATION which offers subscribers information on recent
developments around the world in its quarterly newsletter ALTERNATIVE
ENERGY SOURCES. Subscription"to the CIT ASSOCIATION also offers
members discounts on en products and publications.
CTT offer a range of publications on various specialised aspects of
alternative energy sources and selfsufficiency.
CTT also offer wind generators solar collectors inverters _
selfcontained toilets fireless cookers small experimental and large
modularised methane digesters solarpowered mini motors (educational
toy)
heat and sound insulating shutters etc. CTT's Energy Management

UC10 R6/1: page 173


Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 174

Division, in consultation with architects and engineers, will advise on


energy saving (with site evaluations at RIBA rates) to industrial,
commercial, governmental, agricultural and horticultural energy users.
CTT Please send a stamp only
P. O. Box 134, (not an envelope) for
Kingston, further information on
Surrey anything that interests you.
KT26PR
OUNCIL FOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY is holding an
OPEN FORUM
,
on Saturday, 3rd May, 1975 at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London,
W. C. !. , from 10. 00 a. m. to 5. 00 p. m.
on
'NEGLECTED RESEARCH AND SOCIAL PRIORITIES'
The priorities of human need are not always matched by the allocation of
scientific research effort, The Open Forum will start a public dis­cussion
about this, with reference to real cases.
The Council invites brief proposals for contributions, on general or
particular topics. Details from: The Secretary (Spring Conference),
Council for Science and Society, 3/4 St. Andrew's Hill,
London EC4V 5BY.
TICKETS by application: 50p; Students, O. A. Ps, Claimants and
Unemployed: 25p. For creche facilities, please enquire.

SMALL ADS . . . .
HARDWARE
THINKING OF BEEKEEPING All equipment. Send for list. Honey
Producers, 66, High Street. Malmesbury, Wilts.
HEDGEHOG HAND CARDING and Spinning Equipment ­made to order
for beginners and professionals. Handcarders, Drum carders, and
Canadian Indian Spinners. I try to keep prices low. SAE enquiries
welcomed. . J'. J. Willcox, Wheatcroft, Itching­field, Horsham, Sussex.

UC10 R6/1: page 174


Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 175

GROUPS
BSSRS, 9 Poland Street, London WI V 3DG. organises radical work on all
aspects of science and technology. including occupational health.
military science, unionising scientists. and more. ­Membership is £3 per
year.
£ 1 for, students and claimants. Latest Science for People magazine. No
28, is now out. Articles on Fighting
pollution at work.
The New Technology_ ill re­pression: lessons from Ulster, is only 45p by
post while stocks last.
BOOKS & magazine
UP AGAINST THE LAW. Issue No 8 now available from all disreputable
newsagents, bookshops and UPAL office, 66. York Way, London Nt.
Contributions welcome for
next issue. More bent apples,
sagas of corruption. bent wigs, and naughty tales about the legal gravy
train.
And in spite of the Law, radical legal advice continues to be published
all the vital little tips your lawyer won't tell you. UPAL: essential reading
for all those who want an alternative diet to ZCars
and SoftlySoftly. £2. 50 per annum, special rate for lawyers and
professionals, £6. 00.
COURSES
MIDDLESEX POLYTECHNIC BSc and BSc Honours in Society and Technology.
This four year sandwich course offers you the opportunity to stud)' the natural
and social sciences and their inter­dependence. You can enter with Alevels In
any two subjects. The course pro­vides an understanding of the complex
relationships between science and tech­nology, enabling you not only to
understand your own place in contemporary society, but to work responsibly
with the benefits technology can bring. Write or telephone for further details
and an application form to: The Admissions Office. PO Box 40. Middlesex
Polytechnic. Queensway, Enfield. Mlddx. EN3 4SF. Phone 01 805 0892.

UC10 R6/1: page 175


Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 176

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
SUBSCRIBE NOW Resurgence Journal of the Fourth World
This journal includes articles on the social and political implications of alternative
science and peoples' technology. It emphasises the importance of care of the land,
good husbandry and selfsufficiency in food production for England and for all
countries. E. F. Schumacher, founder of Intermediate Tech­nology Development
Group and author of Small is Beautiful, and Geoffrey Ashe, historian,. author of
Gandhi: a Study in Revolution, and authority on Glastonbury and King Arthur, write
in every issue.
VOL 5 No:5
A special issue on the spiritual impetus to ecological living.
Hunting Peoples: harmony between com­munity and environment: Robert Waller
"Religion articulates a moral order which fits us complicated human beings into our
com­plicated world. "
The Holy World of the Hindus:
"Thus practising the art of seeing God at play everywhere, one day, the seersaint
merges into the Divine,"
Other articles include: Ancestor Power, Make Religion Vanish Into Reality
VOL 5 No:3
Afraid of Magic:
"Quite simply the rod twisted or failed to twist, and knew more than I did. "
Whole Food and Agriculture for Healthy Selfsufficiency "Britain must feed itself
because nobody else is going to . . . Treating the Whole Body and Soul
"The sick person in search of a cure is an easy victim. "
Other articles include: The Fourth World:
History Written Backwards, Technology with Good Vibes, Ecology: The Household
Pet of the Corporate State
VOL 5 No:1
The Rape of Mother Earth: John Seymour, author of SelfSufficiency.
"The only alternative is smallscale farming to get more people on the land. "
Meditation: Satish Kumar.
"Meditation is to be able to experience existence without anxiety, impatience, haste
and attachment. "
Plus 8page poetry special.
VOL 5 No:6
No Future for Megapolis: E. F. Schumacher. "For more than a century, the emphasis
on city life and the brain drain at the expense of the rural areas has been
devastatingly severe. "
Missing Knowledge: Keith Critchlow et al. "We have become increasingly aware of

UC10 R6/1: page 176


Undercurrents 10 Resurgence 6/1: 1975: page 177

three major omissions in our educational system: the survival areas of food, shelter
and health. "
Other articles include: How Many Celts,
The Nuclear Myth, Back to the LandWork­ing Weekends on Organic Farms, School
of Self reliance, and more.
VOL 5 No:4
A special issue on who owns the land and how it should be cultivated.
Can Britain Feed Itself?: Michael Allaby. "There are more tractors than workers on
British farms and six times more energy goes into a British battery farm than home
produce. "
Letter from Chief Seathl to the President of the United States:
"If we sell our land, love it as we've loved it. Care for it as we've cared for it . . . Our
God is the same God. "
VOL 5 No:2
The Tantra of Erotic Love: Acharya Shree Rajneesh.
"One who is interested in life and conscious­ness will automatically become
interested in sex because sex is the source of life, of love, of all that is happening in
the world of con­sciousness. So if a seeker is not interested in sex, he is not a seeker
at all. Sex is just the beginning, not the end. But if you miss the beginning, you will
miss the end also. "
VOL 4 No:6
Education or Manipulation?: Vinoba Shave. "We consider medicine bottles the sign
of
a sick body; we ought to consider books the sign of a sick mind. The wise men of
past ages took no pains to make life literate, but to make it meaningful. "
When the Food Crisis Comes: Anthony Farmer.
The author was one of the first to argue that it is possible for England and Wales to
be selfsufficient in food. I would like to subscribe for one year. Enclosed is £2. 50 (U.
S. $7. 00, airmail $10. 00)
NAME ADDRESS Cheque to 'RESURGENCE', 275 Kings Road, Kingston, Surrey,
England.
Lost Post
Due to circumstances "beyond our control (honest:) Undercurrents has lost an entire
days post. If you wrote to us on or about February 19th please write again. We have
asked the Post Office to try to trace the missing letters.
Missing Resurgence
If any reader can give or loan us the following Resurgence issues we would be very
grateful: Vol. 1, No. 9 Sept/Oct 67 Vol. 1, No. 11 Jan/Feb 68 VoI. 2, No. 7 May/
June69 Vo1. 2, No. 10 Nov/Dec 69. The Architectural Press wants to put them on
microfilm.

UC10 R6/1: page 177

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