Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the twentieth century. He made the relationship between new technologies
and the environment a centerpiece of his social theory.
Mumford thought that he and his contemporaries lived in a moment
when society was passing from the Paleotechnic Age—the age of coal and
steam. The Paleotechnic Age had relied on steam engines that produced
mechanical energy through shafts and belts. It had represented an “upthrust
into barbarism.” It had produced a world of steady, unremitting, repetitive,
monotonous toil. It had lived off the accumulated energy capital of the past
instead of “current income,” and then had wasted 90 percent of that energy.
The defining mark of the Paleotechnic was pollution; its by-products
yielded a “befouled and disorderly environment; the end product an
exhausted one.” The Paleotechnic had treated the “environment itself . . .
as an abstraction. Air and sunlight because of their deplorable lack of value
in exchange had no reality at all.” The Paleotechnic had made abstractions
into realities “whereas the realities of existence were treated . . . as abstrac-
tions, as sentimental fancies, even aberrations.”
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Electricity represented what Mumford called the Neotechnic. Electricity
and alloys, particularly aluminum, were replacing coal and iron. Hydroelec-
tric power would purify polluted industrial cities, and they would also purify
human society. Electricity would free workers from factories centered on
large steam engines and disperse them to the countryside, where small facto-
ries depending on electric motors could thrive. Workers would take joy in
their work.The steam engine tended toward an economy of monopoly and
concentration; electricity would promote independence and decentralization.
Through electricity, Mumford envisioned greater individual independence,
more cohesive communities, and an end to crowding, pollution, and waste.
Mumford's proclamations about the Neotechnic seem naive now. His
Neotechnic may have doomed the steam engine, but it was not the end of
coal or pollution.The workers that the electric motor was supposed to lib-
erate now await their liberation by the computer. It will, I think, be a long
wait.The hydroelectric plants that were supposed to ensure environmental
purity did offer environmental benefits; however, they brought environ-
mental problems of their own, and now plans to restore a more pristine nat-
ural world in the Pacific Northwest center on tearing down Mumford's
monuments to modernity. His solution has become a contemporary prob-
lem. This is ironic, but irony is cheap and not very valuable. What is most
interesting to me is not that Mumford misjudged the future, but that today's
critiques of the dams that Mumford praised repeat the premises that built
