Humankind Advancing, Vol.3, No.4 October 1992

Theme: From the Perspective of Technology

CONTENTS

Editorial

Quotes from Csikszentmihalyi and from Sperry

Quotes from Chaisson, Platt, and Sperry

Technology and Human Hopes
David Stover -- Technology's Promise
Robert L. Olson -- [The Greening of High Tech; discussion]
W. David Stephenson [The New Efficiency; discussion]

Technology and Nature
Robert L. Olson -- Nature's "Advanced Technology"
In Defense of Common Sense

Technology and Liberation from Dependency Amelia Rankin [From Dependency to Empowerment]

Thought in Action
Union of Concerned Scientists
One Person's Impact
The Roundtable Dynamic

Reflections

Acknowledgments

References


Editorial:

This quarterly is dedicated to a truth beyond prejudice and ingrained habits of thought. It is dedicated to showing opposing views in a light that makes it possible to turn enemies into friends -- or at least into partners working toward common aims with full understanding and appreciation of each other's contributions.

Persons striving to achieve a healthy biosphere will find it strange that a publication, having the same goal in mind, would contain an issue with the theme treated from the perspective of technology.

Let us look the "enemy" into the eye: we will discover that advanced technology can be compatible with love of nature and even with being more humane.


Consciousness gave us powers that we were not equipped by evolution to handle. We have not had time to learn where the safe limits of [our] new-found freedom are, what safeguards and conditions should mitigate the consequences of a runaway imagination.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1991)

* * * * *
In regard to the inheritance of a given behavior pattern, it is no longer so much a question of whether the machinery of growth is capable of installing it [in the brain], as to whether the survival rate [of the species] may be better if the behavior is kept flexible by having it learned in each generation and thus adaptable to external conditions and adjustable to change.

Roger Sperry (1965)

* * * * *
All technical cultures, anywhere in the universe, must evolve a planetary ethic or they will be unprepared to endure the byproducts of techno-culture. This implies cosmic selection. Those techno-civilizations of any type, on any planet, that recognize the need for, develop, and fully embrace a global ethic will survive. Those that do not, will not.

Eric Chaisson
Senior Scientist and Division Head
at the Space Telescope Science Institute
a Research Center of NASA and the European Space Agency

* * * * *
When the first Sputnik was sent up, it did not just happen to go into the proper path because it was the only one of thousands of Sputniks that survived. And it did not try a high path and then a low one, learning by trial which one was too fast or too slow. Problem-solving by survival or by trial-and-error learning would have been too wasteful. No: the Sputnik went into the correct orbit on the first try because the development of science had enabled the laws of physics to be discovered, which permitted the calculation of the trajectory in advance and the construction of a feedback control-system to steer in the chosen direction and to turn off the rocket motors at the right time to reach the preset path.

- - -
It is this change from shift to choice, to collective responsibility and commitment, that dominates all the other changes today. It is the change from the adolescent to the man. It is the change from evolution by ignorance and fatal acceptance to evolution by intelligence, anticipation and decision....We have been driven out of the Eden of irresponsibility into the world of decision. We now know that it is we who are responsible for shaping the future. Whether we live or die, we will never be able to go back to irresponsibility again.

John R. Platt
The New Biology and the Shaping of the Future
Pp.133, 169

* * * * *
Our advancing technology, if separated from the population factor, I take to be part of the advance in the evolving quality of existence, something that gives added meaning and higher dimensions to the human venture -- and also, let us hope, will provide space travel in time to escape our dying planet [at the end of its life span] and, perhaps, control over the aging process, along with other yet unimagined wonders of an ever-evolving open-ended future.

Roger Sperry
Neuroscientist and Nobel Laureate


TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN HOPES

Technology's Promise
by David Stover

Environmentalists reject technology for apparently obvious reasons: the ozone layer is thinning; toxic wastes poison land and sea; global warming threatens the planet; and high-tech weapons can render entire countries virtually uninhabitable. All these problems could be solved, they believe, if only we could turn the clock back, to a simpler, low-tech day - -

But such a view is a prescription for disaster. It's all too true that today, while millions of people in the developed countries live comfortably and affluently, millions more in less developed countries endure miserable, hand-to-mouth existences.

Two hundred years ago, however, all the world was "less developed" and all but an infinitesimal fraction of the humans alive struggled through existences that were (in the philosopher's words) "nasty, brutish, and short."

In the days before medical technology, child-birth was more than painful: it was often fatal for mother and child alike. People of all classes endured as a matter of course illnesses and chronic conditions for which today immediate medical relief would be sought. Large cities were cesspools of disease and violence, making the streets of even the most decayed 20th century metropolis seem idyllic by comparison.

And consider how little we knew as recently as 1800. Human beings had only the sketchiest view of their place in the universe. Science had made but the tiniest inroad on a vast thicket of ignorance and superstition.

What changed all this? What brought -- for the first time -- some substantial fraction of the species out of ignorance, pain and squalor?

Technology!

Technology liberated women from virtual enslavement as child-producers and allowed them to participate fully in the human drama at every level -- political, economic, cultural. (And it allowed them to have children far more safely and successfully than ever before.)

Technology enabled us to figure out, for the first time, where we are in the universe and how we got here. -- Technology spread the intellectual heritage of humanity far beyond the tiny, cultured elite of bygone times and allowed large numbers of people to share in it.

Have mistakes been made in employing technology? Of course. Could a misguided use of technology destroy what we have achieved? Of course.

The key to survival is to fine tune our technology -- to understand better how it will affect the environment and how adverse consequences can be minimized.

The key is to adjust our social and political values so that they reflect the reality of a small world and advanced technology, rather than being based on the assumption of a limitless world which a strictly limited technology could not so much as dent.

But is abandoning technology the answer? Is the solution of our problems to reduce the developed world to the misery characteristic of the less developed world?

Absolutely not. To take such action would condemn humanity to live in the constricted, claustrophobic, low-tech world we emerged from only decades ago -- a world of disease and pain and death for all, a world of little knowledge and vast ignorance, a world where torments of hunger were taken for granted as part of existence. - - -

David Stover is a journalist, science writer, and co-author of Beyond a World Divided. He can be contacted care of the editor of this quarterly.


Discussion of

The Greening of High Tech

by Robert L. Olson.

Olson describes a promising alternative to a choice between the blind forward rush of destructive inventions and the demand for a limit to growth that appears unacceptable to our society's progress-oriented mentality. He promotes the development of "entirely new, sustainable, efficient and intelligent technologies."

Three serious misconceptions are dispelled:

1) The first error is to believe that our technology is already an "advanced" one; advance is a constant process. Hardly 100 years have passed since we made our first clumsy steps into the field of technology based on science. "Within 50 years, nearly everything that passes for high tech today is likely to be a museum piece."

2) The second error is the conviction that "big, complex, and environmentally destructive" features are an intrinsic characteristic of advanced technology. Olson describes photovoltaic technology, which does not even have any moving parts, as a typical example for progress toward an era of "small, simple, safe, and nonpolluting" devices. He also shows that high and low technologies are not exclusive but can profitably be used in combination.

3) The third error is the belief that advanced technology "just happens." Instead of moving ahead full speed into the same direction we started, as some optimists recommend, we can choose alternative paths, "defined by different value systems," along which "better" does not necessarily mean "bigger and faster." Direction of development is determined not only by the "unpredictable emergence of scientific knowledge," but also by concerns and needs.

Having drawn our attention to these three misconceptions, the author discusses the new direction commensurate with our present situation: "a technology shaped by environmental values and drawing on the full potential of modern science." Although still advanced, it will differ considerably from that steered by "value-empty economics." Through this new direction, the dream of economic growth and environmental health might become a reality. It is a choice, Olson believes, matched in importance only by that about run-away population growth.

What are the specific characteristics of such "environmentally advanced" technologies? What opportunities lie ahead? Several examples are explained and shown in pictures, and the following qualities are listed:

The new inventions would be sustainable, based on a safe and permanent energy source, use resources efficiently, involve recycling and conversion of by-products ("pollution would be viewed as a design flaw"), and be more and more "intelligent" and "alive." These last two qualities are explained as an ability to change in response to changing conditions, and to use methods of living systems to perform self-repair and self-design. Even food growing will become far more efficient, so that much of our land can revert to its natural beauty.

The author explains that technology is steered into this new direction by two "enormous social forces," one of them based on the undesirability of the present stage -- such as "accelerating environmental degradation" with our "human civilization ultimately at stake" -- the other one on the lure and promise of superior solutions. Gone are the times when a limit to growth seemed the only way out. Our salvation does not lie in going backward, but forward. There are even vast new business and industrial opportunities -- in the fields of redesigning production methods, recycling, new and sustainable energy sources and agricultural procedures, and the use of tele- communications instead of travel. -- Through insights like these, the entire environmentalist approach would be redirected from confrontation to cooperation with industry and become much more effective.

"If we succeed," Olson ends, "people in the future will look back at late-twentieth-century technology as primitive and totally unsustainable -- based on depleting resources, inefficient and wasteful, and crashing against people and ecological systems like the proverbial bull in a china shop. They will wonder how we could have seriously asserted that ours was an age of `advanced technology'."

- - -
Robert L. Olson is a senior consultant at the Institute for Alternative Futures, 108 North Alfred Street, Alexandria, Virginia 22314, U.S.A.

- - -
Editor's Comment: The article describes a breakthrough in human thinking. Its importance reaches far beyond a mere bridging of the chasm between environmentalists and promoters of technological advance: it promises to tip the balance between destructive profit-chasing and responsible progress in favour of the latter.

If we are to have a future, it will be due to efforts of thinkers like the author of "The Greening of High Tech."

===================================
Discussion of
The New Efficiency
by W. David Stephenson

To the most promising of future-oriented thinkers belongs W. David Stephenson. For him, too, progress toward environmental health does not have to occur at the expense of profits. The secret lies in the acceptance of principles, which involve again the shifting of one's mental set from the idea that bigger is better to the insight that it is possible to do more with less, and the use of one's ingenuity to discover the best ways toward this aim.

To further new inspirations, Stephenson recommends the study of nature's problem solutions as well as openness to worker input. The latter has the added advantage of preventing alienation.

He moreover draws attention to the advantages of "designs for disassembly," the production of instruments with exchangeable parts, so that each damaged part can be replaced individually without throwing the entire instrument away. The buyer would prefer such designs to those with built-in planned obsolescence, and the manufacturer would therefore profit. Most of all, the latter would be globally competitive to his advantage in the long run.

Stephenson addressed his thoughts to the Central European Environmental Seminar in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in April 1991. Once his principles have been tried, he believes, and their advantages have proved themselves, it will be only a matter of time until they will be taken for granted in this hemisphere too (where entrenched mindsets opposing them might be more difficult to change). -- His main objective, of course, is reduction of resource depletion, waste, and pollution worldwide. A simultaneous increase in profits is a fortunate side effect.

The following condensation of his principles' benefits is quoted from a synopsis of his Bratislava address in the Sept./Oct. 1991 issue of ONE PERSON'S IMPACT.

"Achieving sustainable development by making this broader definition of efficiency your goal will give your new companies both less, and more:

Less time needed to introduce new products to the market

Less raw materials, production and disposal costs

Less packaging and distribution costs

Less consumer and investor boycotts

Less regulatory and liability costs

and...

More quality control

More global competitiveness

More employee and consumer loyalty

Best of all, it can give your new companies more profits, proving that we can improve both profits and the planet."

- - -
From: "The New Efficiency" -- Address to the Central European Environmental Seminar in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, April 1991.

W. David Stephenson is an environmental strategies consultant. He can be contacted at 335 Main St. Medfield, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 02052.


TECHNOLOGY AND NATURE

Nature's "Advanced Technology"
by Robert L. Olson

Nature itself provides a successful model of an environmentally advanced technology. The biosphere as it now exists is an enormously sophisticated system for gathering and using energy, recycling materials, and regulating the temperature, oxygen level, and many other variables to maintain conditions favorable for life.

Nature was not always so sophisticated. It took billions of years and many "inventions" in the course of biological evolution for the biosphere to reach the present level of "advanced biotechnics." In its earlier stages, nature often resembled our present unsustainable industrial system. The earliest, fermentation-based forms of life lived by feeding on and using up a finite stock of organic molecules accumulated in the oceans during prebiotic time, just as today's unsustainable form of technological civilization is using up a finite stock of fossil fuels.

Nature solved its original "energy crisis" through one of the greatest innovations in the whole history of life -- photosynthesis. Tapping into the abundant and inexhaustible energy of sunlight, photobacteria, the first photosynthesizers, produced glucose from atmospheric carbon dioxide, replacing the depleted store of organic molecules in the early oceans.

But the invention of photosynthesis had side effects that led to the earth's first "environmental crisis." Photosynthesis produced oxygen as a waste product, and oxygen was highly toxic to fermentation -based organisms. Nature used a temporary "technological fix," organisms called stromatolites, to combine this free oxygen with iron dissolved in the oceans, creating the iron-rich hematite deposits that we mine as iron ores today. This quick fix only worked for a billion years or so. Then, as the dissolved iron in the oceans was used up, the oxygen level in the atmosphere began to rise sharply. The early biosphere faced a critical situation similar to the one we have today: It could neither tolerate nor recycle its own toxic waste.

Nature responded with a surge of biotechnic innovations. A new type of oxygen-tolerant photo-bacteria emerged: the blue-green algae. Then another great innovation, respiration, allowed organisms to actually use oxygen "waste" in obtaining energy from organic molecules. The aerobic respirators required much less organic material to sustain them than the earlier anaerobic fermenters, and their yield of energy available for further metabolic processes was 18 times as high. The fermenters could not compete with the new energy- and resource-efficient respirators except in oxygen-free environments, such as sediments and deep oceans.

As oxygen-using photosynthesizers bloomed abundantly over the oceans and land masses, a second planetary environmental crisis occurred that was the opposite of today's greenhouse effect. By burning fossil fuels we are increasing the amount of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere, which will eventually cause the earth to heat up. The early photosynthesizers used the carbon dioxide in the air and oceans as food and were rapidly eating the blanket that kept the earth warm. The planet was saved from freezing because some bacteria feeding on plants gave off methane. The methane -- a far more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide -- kept the earth warm.

The planet manifested more and more sophisticated biotechnologies that promoted the development of life and protected it from environmental dangers. For example, marine algae synthesized a chemical called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). When picked up and transported by the wind, the sulfur in DMS helped sustain plants and animals on the land. Vast limestone reefs were formed that trapped salt in evaporating lagoons, thus protecting life against toxic build-ups of salt in the ocean. This planetary-scale "macroengineering" project dwarfs any construction project ever undertaken by human beings.

Even in its earlier stages, when the earth was populated only by bacteria, the biosphere was a busy information processing system. All life was linked by a slow but accurate genetic communications network, exchanging messages on nucleic acids. As living organisms acquired sense organs and complex nervous systems, "intelligence" became a significant variable in evolution. It is information processing, the vast majority not of a "conscious" type, that has made the biosphere's self-regulation and evolution possible.

Nature's evolution towards a more advanced biotechnics suggests lessons for our own efforts to create an environmentally advanced technology. The path of process goes toward long-term sustainability, solar energy, high efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, and increasingly intelligent tools that help us monitor and regulate our environmental impacts.

- - -
Sources: "Industrial Metabolism" by Robert U. Ayers in Technology and Environment, edited by Jesse H. Ausubel and Hedy E. Sladovich (National Academy Press, 1989), and The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth by James Lovelock (W.W.Norton, 1988).


IN DEFENSE OF COMMON SENSE

The following is the second of four installments of a critical evaluation of the book Beyond a World Divided by Erdmann and Stover (Shambhala, 1991), and its senior author's response to it.

Criticism, Part 2: To me, for instance, a question like, say: "What happens to the soul after death?" is like asking "what happens to the motion of the car after it has already completely rusted away on the scrap heap?"

The only possible answer to both questions is the same -- the speed or motion of the car simply doesn't exist by itself after the car is decomposed any more than the "soul" exists after the body is decomposed.

In other words, human thought or human consciousness or human values are nothing more than a certain kind of motion of certain molecules in certain brain cells, and these things don't exist outside of the living brain.

That doesn't mean that you can't have human values. I value honesty and kindness but I believe that you don't need God or religion to make values. They just make common sense. If I am good to others and they are good to me, then the world is good and we are all happier. If I cheat, kill, and steal, so will others and we will all be unhappy.

That, to me, is all the explanation of human values that is necessary.

Response: First of all, I agree with you that thoughts and values have no separate existence; they are intrinsically linked to the living brain. And that is one important tenet of Professor Sperry's mind-brain theory, which we discuss.

On the other hand, thoughts and values are more than molecular motions in the brain; they are emergent properties of brain function. That is, though nothing external is added and no supernatural powers are involved, the "certain kind of motion of certain molecules in certain brain cells" you describe bring about new phenomena never before existing on earth -- just as, for instance, hydrogen gas and oxygen gas in appropriate combinations under appropriate conditions bring about water, a new entity that did not exist before nature created it for the first time. That new entity behaves differently from its gaseous precursors, though no other substances are involved in the new creation; the new combination of relationships and movements among atoms creates a new part of reality.

To understand the entire universe as an incessant dance of subatomic particles -- and nothing else -- renders it senseless. Only if we grant reality to the variety of phenomena that affect our sense organs, the sky and the earth, the living creatures on it and the thoughts and emotions of human beings, we become aware of, cherish, and protect the beauty and wonder that surrounds us.

While evolution creates constantly new qualities, properties, and laws, all these new phenomena affect one another -- in fact, that is the principle through which evolution progresses. From this constant mutual interaction, Sperry selects downward causation -- and especially the causal effect of thought on brain function -- to establish a new mind-brain theory that makes the entire cultural wisdom of history relevant even to science.

What has all this to do, you will ask, with current global problems? -- It provides the foundation for a new way of thinking able to close the chasm between two incompatible world views which you so well describe at the beginning of your critical letter. For religious fundamentalists, science is blasphemy; for scientists, religion is at best irrelevant, at worst the source of all evil. -- You understand very well that values, such as honesty and kindness, will prevail when they are internalized as personal standards; do you know that with that "common sense" declaration you express one of the most fundamental inspirations of wisdom that lies at the basis of all major religions on earth -- the golden rule? (Treat other persons the way you wish to be treated yourself.) --

But these insights are not self-evident to everyone. Too many persons who reject God and religion as nonsensical, also reject moral rules as unbearable shackles to be discarded with relief. The problem is that very few persons are farsighted enough to think about the ultimate consequences of their actions, or responsible enough to care. For this reason, the authority of a God was needed to prevent chaos and make cultural progress possible.

Our present knowledge and the world-wide interconnection of cultures with different religions prevent a return to that stage. Besides, many of the old commands are incompatible with insights achieved through new knowledge. -- Science has been suggested as new authority, and it is, in fact, in that role already widely accepted. But science remains unsatisfactory and incomplete (most people would even say "revolting") as long as conscious experience has no place in it. Sperry's philosophy sees thought and values as vital factors, even in science, and in that consists its importance.


TECHNOLOGY AND LIBERATION FROM DEPENDENCY

The following is excerpted from a thought provoking letter written to a friend by a nearly completely paralyzed elderly person.

From Dependency to Empowerment.

This may sound like a personal problem, but it is really more than that.

This week I've had problems with my chair. It is difficult to explain the relationship of a chair and the occupant who is totally dependent upon the chair and the kind of person she, the occupant, hopes to become. There was the queerest feeling when I tried making sharp turns around corners. You see, the chair takes on a more than mechanical personality. I never talk to it but I think to it.

But the real problem comes when I have to seek persons with the mechanical ability to service the chair. The thing I want to discuss now is service and responsibility. This is a thing which I've decided, this week, hits us all squarely between the eyes.

(Before I get involved I'll tell you how it came out. Alma and her husband, Ray, found that the gadgets fastening the cables on the left battery were broken, probably jiggling allowing only a little current to go through.)

Monday when I phoned the man who had been working on my chair he said he would come Wednesday. I spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday moving only when absolutely necessary. For me this is difficult. Late Wednesday afternoon I called this man, he would phone me, he didn't. Thursday morning when I talked to him I found that he was afraid it might be the module, which is the highest of the high tech parts of the chair. I think, I find it difficult to reconcile these terms with the words I find in the dictionary. If so, he would need to send the chair to the factory for two or three weeks, and my experience with the factory is that weeks could easily be translated into months. So what do I do, suspend existence for an undetermined length of time? He suggested another place I might call, same thing. Now that I've had the reprieve by Ray fixing the battery cables, I'm faced with the challenge of finding someone or some business that reconditions all of these electrical contrivances, for a reasonable price. You see these parts, new, are expensive, thousands of dollars. Also, this person must be willing to help with making it possible for me to live while the chair is being repaired. Another also, I must remember their humanness and not make unreasonable demands.

Through all of this I've been forced into a thinking corner. This thinking corner concerns us all in a world that is partially hi-tech. An extreme imbalance exists. Where have been the specialists in humanness while the technicians have been having a field day? One thing I know, all that the human experts have been doing is dwelling upon the failings and sins and uselessness of humanity. One thing that makes me boil is the remark, "Well, he or she is only human, what do you expect?"

I feel the time has come that I am going to have to do something to save my own peace of mind as well as find my way out of the chair problem. I'll work on the chair problem by searching for leads to repair/service people in Southern California.

The other problem of having my say about the importance of recognizing the greatness of the human species is really going to be difficult. In politics, in science, in religion, in education, in the media? In none of these do we find responsibility and efficiency and creativeness for the whole species. There are individuals in all of these who are trying.

Perhaps they are making the mistake that I am making right now, wallowing in the futile, impossible aspects. This is the point at which we all need to change. The opposite pole exists. The intangibles are the energies by which we can promote constructive creativeness. This wheelchair, this computer, this telephone, this dictionary were all compiled, invented, discovered, recognized, through the use of the human mind/brain. The simplest of movements is unexplainable, so we despair, we look at the negative pole of humanity instead of exploring the opposite pole of the human species.

The next exploration we must set out upon is to compile information about the range of capabilities latent within each individual and then work out the possibilities of finding ways to use these talents without destroying or injuring, wait, wait, that's a negative pole. Instead let us say using these talents to enhance the greatness of our humanness. We must recognize how difficult it is to make this switch.

- - -
One of the first in working out the problems of divergence of technology and humanness is to insist that the invention of a mechanical tool, be a TOOL, to extend human usefulness. When a chair with all the electrical gadgets was put together the system to service that chair for the user should be put in force simultaneously, for the benefit of the users. Same thing for computers, cars, airplanes, all mechanical tools, they must be serviced beneficially, for humans.

- - -
[Three days later.] More problems have cropped up with the chair. .... I am trying to make arrangements to have my wheelchair repaired. To do that I must rent a chair to use for a week. I can't seem to make all the appointments fit, it's like a jumbled jig-saw puzzle which comes out looking as if I have done the jumbling. The service people are speaking back to me in accusing tones.

- - -
[One day later.] I canceled one chair rental, it was a left-hand drive, I have no use of my left hand. I found and rented a good chair for about half the price. But, of course, the left-hand drive people are not happy, and, they are the people that sold me my bed. I must find some way to get along with them because they will be servicing my bed.

I am telling you this to show you that it is all well and good for me to write these glamorous phrases about these wonderful humans and chanting about meeting the day with a smile and loving everyone you meet today, when I can't even negotiate a simple thing like renting a chair without ruffling all our feathers.

So, operating, and living in a society of great humans isn't as simple as talking and writing about it.

- - -
[One week later -- other letter.] The gifts we have been granted are the means and talents to restore our planet for further generations. In addition we must release these new generations from some of the destructive thinking processes of the past.

For Creative Beauty,
Amelia
[Amelia Rankin]


THOUGHT IN ACTION

The Union of Concerned Scientists is a non-profit organization of nearly 100,000 scientists and other citizens concerned about the impact of advanced technology on society. Its programs focus on national energy policy and arms control.

One of its present projects is the promotion of the idea that "Renewables Are Ready" (title of brochure), and that solar power, wind power, and other renewable energy sources have far surpassed their experimental stage of the early seventies and could now supply a much larger part of the nations energy needs than they do.

To accomplish this aim it is necessary to convince policy makers as well as the general public -- the latter to a large part through programs in schools, which the Union of Concerned Scientists advocates and helps to organize.

Further information will be supplied by:

The Union of Concerned Scientists
26 Church Street
Cambridge, MA 02238
U.S.A.

* * * * *
One Person's Impact is a practical non-profit educational organization dedicated to individual environmental and social responsibility.


It's newsletter is filled with suggestions for recyling, etc., lists sources for recycled paper and other materials, but also articles on its workshops, and related activities; there are special reports, guides, and resource directories, information referral service, and other educational material -- including articles on the need for better adjusted values.

More information about this organization is available from:

One Person's Impact
P.O.Box 751
Westborough, MA 01581
U.S.A.
* * * * *
The Roundtable Dynamic links local community groups, discussing topics of global concern, with other such groups or single individuals in various parts of the world. -- The process evolved during the last 30 years through Jane Meleney Coe's work with communities in Nigeria, Ghana, Chile, India, and the U.S.A. -- The discussions lead to deeper understanding of important problems, to a new perspective, and to an increased sense of responsibility in both, the less developed countries and the more developed ones.

Each discussion revolves around one recently published book or paper dealing with a topic of special relevance. Among these were during the last few years several World Watch publications, the Brundtland report, Dawkin's "Blind Watchmaker," Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons," Kennan's "Morality and Foreign Policy," Capra's "Turning Point," Gould's "Wonderful Life," the movie "Gandhi," and many more.

To receive further information about the process, please contact:

Jane and Bob Coe
6703 Pawtucket Road
Bethesda, MD 20817
U.S.A.


REFLECTIONS

And even if storms and hurricanes will have been tamed,
If epidemics and mass starvations will have been conquered,
If wars and torture will be but memories,
And reason will have replaced passion as arbitrator,
Yes, even if we survive this planet's life span
And find new homes in the vast universe,
Even then -- unless the ever present craving
for power devoured the core of our very being --
One hunger will still remain, the hunger for
An irreplaceable treasure our earth brought forth:
Undemanding, simple human warmth.

Erika Erdmann, 1992

(This poem is exempt from the blanket permission to quote. Please contact me first.)


Acknowledgments: I wish to thank Robert L. Olson and The World Future Society for permission to reprint the article "Nature's Advanced Technology" in full, Terry Platt for permission to print excerpts from the work of his deceased father, the president of One Person's Impact and W.D. Stephenson for permission to print an excerpt from "The New Efficiency," Karl E. Erdmann for permission to reprint his criticism, and Amelia Rankin for permission to print excerpts from two of her letters.


REFERENCES

Chaisson, E. 1991. Cosmic Evolution: The Religion of a Scientist. IRAS Newsletter, 40:2,3.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1991. Consciousness for the Twenty-First Century. Zygon, 26:7-25.

Erdmann, K. E. 1992. Criticism of "Beyond a World Divided," Part 2. (Original Contribution.)

Olson, R. L. 1991. The Greening of High Tech. The Futurist, 25(3):28-34. Used with permission from the World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814. Telephone:301/656-8274; Fax: 301/951-0394; http://www.wfs.org/

Olson, R. L. 1991. Nature's Advanced Technology. The Futurist, 25(3)p.33 (Insert into above article.)

Platt, J.R. 1968. The New Biology and the Shaping of the Future. The Great Ideas Today, Pp.120-169. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. (Distributor: New York, Praeger.)

Rankin, A, 1991. Letter to Leon Vickman, publ. in Designing New Civilizations, 7:521-525.

Sperry, R.W. 1965. Embryogenesis of Behavioral Nerve Nets. In R.L. Dehaan and H. Ursprung (eds.) Organogenesis. Holt Rinehart and Winston, New York , pp. 161-85.

Sperry, R.W. 1991. Search for Beliefs to live by Consistent with Science. Zygon, 26:237-258.

Stephenson, W. D. 1991. "The New Efficiency." One Person's Impact, Sept./Oct.1991, pp.1,4.

Stover, D. 1992. Technology's Promise (Original Contribution.)