electricity they took for granted was produced, or that the burning of coal,
oil, and gas was building up global environmental problems. Those who
were aware tended to assume that the advent of nuclear power would prove
a panacea; a few even claimed that nuclear electricity would be so cheap
that it would not be worth metering! And university engineering courses
paid scant attention to energy systems, giving their students what now
seems a rather shortsighted set of priorities.
Yet even in those years there were a few brave voices suggesting that all
was not well. In his famous book Small is Beautiful , 1 fi rst published in
1973, E.F. Schumacher poured scorn on the idea that the problems of production
in the industrialised world had been solved. Modern society, he
claimed, does not experience itself as part of nature, but as an outside force
seeking to dominate and conquer it. And it is the illusion of unlimited
powers deriving from the undoubted successes of much of modern technology
that is the root cause of our present diffi culties. In particular, we are
failing to distinguish between the capital and income components of the
Earth ’ s resources. We use up capital, including oil and gas reserves, as if