Summary stricture: revere, nurture and preserve cultural-
heritage and natural-heritage resources with a respect for the
historical past and a sense of the ‘history’ to come.Exploitation of free-flow resources (see box 3.2)
embodies and engages the cleverly neomodern
mode of progressive and allowable free-flow
resource exploitation. Highly approved in this
category are hydroelectrical generation, wind
and tidal kinetic energy capture, photosynthetic
food and energy productions, and the likes of passive and active
solar energy capture (and natural heating and cooling systems) for
buildings. Ingenuity may have to be constrained if it implicates
denial of reasonable access to, or utility of, some other ‘finite’
‘renewable’ and or ‘heritage’ resource, as for example with the likes
of windmill ‘farms’ obtruding into the conservation estate, and the
flooding which can result from the silting up of hydro lakes. But,
on the whole, a loose rein ‘exploitation’ of largely benign free-
flow resources has appeal, and great potential for human benefit.
It is solely in relation to free-flow resources, provided from energy
sources largely off-planet (the sun) and beyond human output
control, that individuals and communities can be allowably
profligate.
Summary stricture: exploit, with neighbourly consideration, the uptake of free-flow resources.Communities tend to resist the idea of technological reversal and revisionism.
With most new technologies ‘going wrong’ in one way or another, inspiration can
be drawn from Kropotkin’s nineteenth-century treatise (paraphrasing by Ward
1985) in which ‘to get it right’ Kropotkin made four points. Firstthat:[P]roduction for a local market is a rational and desirable tendency. The second
was that each region of the globe must feed itself, and that intensive farming
could meet the basic needs of a country...Thethirdwas that dispersal of industry
on a small scale and in combination with agriculture is also rational and desira-
ble...and the fourthis that we need an education which combines manual and intel-
lectual work.By contrast to Kropotkin, the OECD categories of wealthier nation, expanding into
the twenty-first-century, remain aligned to the notion of expressing farming effi-
ciency in terms of high worker input-to-output ratios on an also high hectare-per-
worker basis, andto allow the growth-on-growth model to enslave the consumer
mind.Much that was ‘hard’ and ‘smart’ with twentieth-century policies must eventu-
ally give way to ‘soft’ and ‘clever’ twenty-first-century practices. Yet, it is impor-
tant that this should be achieved not by giving up on sophistication in favour ofPracticeNatural heritage: wild coastline
Californian wind farm