The liquidation of these capital assets is so rapidly that even in the allegedly richest country in the world, the United States of America, there are many worried men, right up to the White House, calling for the massive of coal into oil and gas, demanding ever more gigantic efforts to search for and the remaining treasures of the earth. Look at the figures that are being put forward under the heading 'World Fuel in the Year 2000'. If we are now using something like 7,000 million tons of coal , the need in twenty-eight years' time will be three times as large - around 20,000 million tons! What are twenty-eight years? Looking backwards, they take us roughly to the end of World War II, and, of course, since then fuel has trebled; but the trebling an increase of less than 5,000 million tons of coal . Now we are calmly talking about an increase three times as large.

People ask: can it be done? And the answer comes back: it must be done and therefore it shall be done. One might say (with apologies to John Kenneth Galbraith) that it is a case of the bland leading the blind. But why cast aspersions? The question itself is wrong-headed, because it carries the that we are dealing with and not with capital. What is so special about the year 2000? What about the year 2028, when little children running about today will be planning for their retirement? Another trebling by then? All these questions and answers are seen to be absurd the moment we realise that we are dealing with capital and not with : fossil fuels are not made by men; they cannot be recycled. Once they are gone they are gone for ever.

But what - it will be asked - about the fuels? Yes, indeed, what about them? Currently, they (reckoned in calories) less than four per cent to the world total. In the foreseeable future they will have to seventy, eighty, ninety per cent. To do something on a small scale is one thing: to do it on a gigantic scale is quite another, and to make an on the world fuel problem, have to be truly gigantic. Who will say that the problem of production has been solved when it comes to fuels on a truly gigantic scale?

Fossil fuels are merely a part of the 'natural capital' which we steadfastly insist on treating as expendable, as if it were , and by no means the most important part. If we squander our fossil fuels, we threaten ; but if we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself. People are waking up to this threat, and they demand that pollution must stop. They think of pollution as a rather nasty habit indulged in by careless or greedy people who, as it were, throw their rubbish over the fence into the neighbour's garden. A more behaviour, they realise, would incur some extra cost, and therefore we need a faster rate of growth to be able to pay for it. From now on, they say, we should use at least some of the fruits of our ever-increasing productivity to improve 'the quality of life' and not merely to increase the quantity of . All this is fair enough, but it touches only the outer fringe of the problem.

To get to the crux of the matter, we do well to ask why it is that all these terms - pollution, , ecology, etc. - have so suddenly come into prominence. After all, we have had an industrial system for quite some time, yet only five or ten years ago these words were unknown. Is this a sudden fad, a silly fashion, or perhaps a sudden failure of nerve?

The explanation is not difficult to find. As with fossil fuels, we have indeed been living on the capital of living nature for some time, but at a fairly modest rate. It is only since the end of World War II that we have succeeded in increasing this rate to alarming . In comparison with what is going on now and what has been going on, progressively, during the last quarter of a century, all the industrial activities of mankind up to, and including, World War II are as nothing. The next four or five years are likely to see more industrial production, taking the world as a whole, than all of mankind accomplished up to 1945. In other words, quite recently - so recently that most of us have hardly yet become conscious of it - there has been a unique quantitative jump in industrial production.

Partly as a cause and also as an effect, there has also been a unique jump. Our scientists and technologists have learned to substances unknown to nature. Against many of them, nature is defenceless. There are no natural agents to attack and break them down. It is as if aborigines were suddenly attacked with machine-gun fire: their bows and arrows are of no avail. These substances, unknown to nature, owe their almost magical effectiveness to nature's defencelessness - and that accounts also for their dangerous ecological . It is only in the last twenty years or so that they have made their appearance in . Because they have no natural enemies, they tend to , and the long-term of this are in many cases known to be extremely dangerous, and in other cases totally .

In other words, the changes of the last twenty-five years, both in the quantity and in the quality of man's industrial , have produced an entirely new situation - a situation resulting not from our failures but from what we thought were our greatest successes. And this has come so suddenly that we hardly noticed the fact that we were very rapidly using up a certain kind of irreplaceable capital asset, namely the tolerance which benign nature always provides.

(Small is Beautiful by E F Schumacher)