"You see Brian, Chuck has explained that industrial society itself is the problem, the solution is for the population to return to the country-side. The Chucko alternative energy plan for the future is, as his slip suggests, modelled on the distant past. Energy will presumably be sourced mainly from the burning of cow-pats and plant material metabolised by human and animal work-horses."
I don't know Bill, I'm reading what ChuckO is writing too and I'm not getting this at all. Of course technology is not netural...a short-handled hoe is not a long-handled hoe, a nuclear power plant is not a solar cell panel, and the concept of eternal human progress founded on ever-expanding industrialization presupposes a certain relation to nature which threatens life on earth. It's good to be warm, fed, have clean water, health care...but our techno fantasies have gone way beyond that and it's certainly not clear to me that they have brought any kind of actual "progress" in their wake.
Joanna