The continuing energy crisis has begun to make us realise that we've been burning up the world's limited resources of fuel too fast, and unlike wood, fossil fuels like coal and oil are non-renewable, making energy the most treasured commodity on earth today.
It's the price of our evolving in the West, in little more than 200 years, a completely new way of life. Almost everything from mass housing to transport, industry, and even food, now depends on a vast use of energy.
Instead of costing today's loaf in pennies, cost it in energy. First the wheat. Of the total energy in one loaf, this much goes on tractors, combine harvesters, fertilisers, and pesticides.
The power to mill it takes this much. Then just to package the resulting flour at the mill takes this proportion of the grand sum, and to transport it to the baker, this much.
Making the flour into a loaf and baking it uses up this much energy. Then it has to be packaged ready for the supermarket, costing this amount, and finally getting it from bakery to sales counter, this much.
The total energy put into this loaf would run an electric fire for about three hours. The snag is that for each one unit of energy we now extract as food. Our new labour saving processes have burnt up three units of energy in growing, baking, packing, and transporting the bread.
Eat an egg from a modern battery farm and you swallow one sixth of the energy it took to produce it, to feed and keep the hen, and get the egg to your table.
In energy terms, whether it's food, transport, or virtually any aspect of life today, we're probably the last of the big spenders.
We can imagine only the things that we see every day in front of our eyes. That something quite different is possible, we find hard to imagine.
Now it may well be argued, correctly, that in the early 19th century production units were too small to be effective.
Okay, with the help of concentrated fuels we made them bigger. I believe we've overshot the mark.
The man who said we've overshot the mark questions the wisdom of the current trend to mechanise and automate everything around us.
Life itself implies energy and depends on it. To live means to burn it up, but there's living within your means and there's living dangerously.
His optimism assumes we will recognise the warning signs he sees around us and act before it's too late.
Because we value human energy so highly, we get machines to do all the work for us. It's always seemed the obvious way out, but it could be a rather short-sighted policy.
Almost all the energy we use today to keep machines going is like oil from fossil fuels, and it's non-renewable.
The realisation that non-renewable fuel resources are limited has already sent prices rocketing. It's beginning to force a rethink on how we use them.
Cheap fuel gave us cheap transport, making big industrial centres seem economic. But power stations alone dissipate as much energy as they produce in just keeping cool.
We need some alternative to this extravagance. Dr EF Schumacher is a fuel economist. He believes that if we face the facts around us we can find alternatives.
They already exist, and he calls them the other way. Schumacher accurately foretold the recent oil crisis 16 years ago, and his advice is sought by many of the developing nations like India.
He has made a name not just as a far-seeing economist, but an economist who puts people first.
In his book Small is Beautiful, now republished in several languages, he attacks current economic thinking, which he says too often equates bigger with better, completely ignoring the human factor.
He's not, however, against technology itself. Quite the opposite.
This is his wheelbarrow, and it's unique. It's battery powered. It hardly uses any electricity at all, but takes a lot of the hard work out of gardening.
He makes full use of his economic ideas in his own private life. He not only points out the waste of energy in the average loaf you buy in the shop, but makes his own bread and even mills his own wheat.
This extreme in do-it-yourself-ery may seem eccentric, but by using his own energy to mill wheat he always has fresh flour, and like us gets the full vitamin value from the wheat, and what's more it's cheaper, doesn't take much time, and tastes very good.
Many in the West are now taking his ideas very seriously, but it was in the Third World where the Industrial Revolution has barely begun that his thinking has had its major impact.
Despite all their problems, Schumacher foresees a reasonable future for such people, but only if they don't succumb, like us, to the glossy lure of big technology.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to persuade a developing nation that there are any dangers inheriting technological progress.
In one small town I was shown the work of a potter who, with marvelous skill, was making beautiful pots on the most primitive equipment.
Having taken that in, I was taken out into an industrial estate which the government of India had put there in order to bring industry into rural areas.
The first man I encountered was minding a machine tool, was being trained, very expensive machine tool.
I asked him, after you've completed your training, will you then get into production here in this area?
He said, how could I ever get hold of such a machine? All my life I'll never see the money it takes to buy such a machine.
What are you going to do? He said, all I can do is to go to Bombay and look for a job, but there are already hundreds of thousands of unemployed people in Bombay.
So he shrugged his shoulders.
And then it occurred to me that the government of India was putting an industrial estate there in order to bring industry into the rural area, but it in fact was another channel to draw people from the rural area to Bombay, so it didn't work.
And I reflected on this potter whom I had seen, whose equipment was worth perhaps five pounds, and this man who was trained on equipment worth five thousand pounds.
And it didn't work. The five pound technology is too primitive to make a decent living, and the five thousand pound technology is too expensive to be within reach of the people whom it ought to benefit.
And then I thought what is required is something in between, a technology much better than what they've got, and very much simpler than what we from the West or from the United States are introducing into the rural areas of India with the Indian government.
Something intermediate. That I called an intermediate technology.
A typical problem is posed in many hot countries where summer-baked land has to be ploughed before the autumn rains make it an impossible quagmire.
Even oxen make little impression on such hard ground, but few peasant farmers can afford our alternative of a big tractor.
Ideas that have to be systematically explored is, for instance, this. Is it really sensible to send two tons of tractor backwards and forwards across the land, pulling a curved knife called a plough?
Why not just pull the plough on a rope?
Now in the olden days they used to do this, particularly on hillsides where one couldn't do it otherwise, but this technology has never been systematically perfected.
It would be a tremendous simplification just to pull the rope mechanically instead of having a tractor with, they now have over 20 different gears.
Also although the obvious solution seemed to be an ordinary tractor, it made poor headway under trials on test plots of hard ground, using a lot of fuel for the amount of earth a standard rig could turn.
As cattle can live on renewable resources and positively improve the soil, better designs of plough were tried, but more power was needed.
They tried the most obvious intermediate solution, a much smaller tractor, but even when this prototype could get a grip, it barely turned the earth and only cut a ridiculously shallow groove.
As this clearly wasn't the answer, a fundamentally different approach was needed. The result of their rethink was a disarmingly simple contraption which they call snail.
It needs two men to work it and pulls them to the site on its tiny seven horsepower motor. In this mode it's ideal as a cheap farm utility.
In the field it takes little time to convert it into a mini equivalent of a traction engine.
As it's designed for peasant farmers, there are no sophisticated parts which can't easily be replaced.
With the engine running, the power unit can now be driven to the other end of the field, leaving behind the towing assembly now converted into a plough.
The whole process is more time consuming than using a tractor, but it keeps two men usefully employed and only burns about a tenth the fuel of a big tractor.
It's still in the prototype stage, but the deep furrow it cuts proves it's a practical alternative to conventional technology.
The whole outfit, including plough and motor, is designed for simple construction anywhere in the world for less than a tenth the cost of most tractors.
Extra equipment enables it to do a whole variety of jobs, but until now the tractor provided the only answer.
Not surprisingly, this kind of idea is causing interest not just in those Third World areas for which it was intended, but amongst smallholders here who can't afford a big tractor.
The almost impossible problem of enabling the Third World to enter the 20th century and our age of science and technology with as little pain and as much benefit as possible has been the focus of much of Schumacher's work.
But there are aspects of so-called primitive village life which he thinks we in the West may have lost in our extreme dependence on machines.
Such labour may look primitive and is unlikely to appeal to us, yet no fuel is being burnt and it's keeping someone in a useful job.
Whether animal or manpower, we largely rejected such alternative energy sources with our industrial revolution.
How improved transport carried coal and people to the new factories causing the growth of new cities is familiar history.
What was less obvious until recently is that this industrial expansion, and it's still going on, was based on the exploitation of seemingly limitless fossil fuel.
People left the land to become the new wage-earning consumers. Labour itself changed as mechanisation made human skills redundant.
In 30 years, villages grew into cities. It all happened so fast, we're still trying to make good the mistakes, but it's the less obvious ones that Schumacher suggests need most attention.
For example, although working conditions have improved, even today it's still difficult to get job satisfaction when the job is serving a machine.
Another legacy is that the people and factories now congested in cities are wholly dependent on a constant supply of food and fuel.
Some say our coal reserves are good for 50 years. Schumacher points out that's when today's teenagers expect to be enjoying their retirement.
Instead of just exploiting the last coal seams, he suggests we should be finding alternative sources of power and better ways of saving it.
But most important of all, we need to discover alternative ways of life which don't wholly depend on burning billions of tonnes of energy.
He's not just calling for economies in coal and the way we use it, but questioning the very future of those crystallisations of fossil fuel, our big cities.
The continued existence of cities demands huge inputs of energy. Schumacher points out that where 95% of a population live in cities, their energy consumption is inevitably high, even on food, for the remaining 5% somehow have to feed them.
Faced with acres of bricks and mortar, it's difficult to see how we can ever decentralise towards smaller communities, but if Schumacher is right and city life eventually becomes insupportable,
it will be the facts, not him, that persuade a massive exodus from the tangled complexity of urban life to the greater self-sufficiency of small towns and villages.
With both North Sea oil and nuclear energy just around the corner, many consider his analysis of the current facts about energy too pessimistic. But is it?
To obtain energy involves us all in a price, and despite our need for power, Schumacher considers today's price too great. Take nuclear power.
In order to really make nuclear energy a mass phenomenon, and when we talk about oil we are always talking about hundreds of millions of tonnes,
not millions, not ten millions, hundreds of millions, even thousands of millions of tonnes, to make it quantitatively relevant.
You can't do that with natural uranium, you have to go on to the breeder reactor, and the breeder reactor is an awesome proposition.
There we produce plutonium, the most terrible substance which nature has never produced,
which is not only extremely radioactive but also extremely poisonous.
A lump of plutonium which you could hold in your hand the size of a grapefruit, if dispersed, would be enough to kill all creation.
Plutonium will remain active for thousands of years, and all that time it will have to be kept safe.
But it's not just the safety factor that worries some economists about nuclear power.
So far it's very largely been what's called an energy sink, which means we've spent more energy
installing nuclear power stations than we've got back as electricity, and Schumacher fears they may never break even.
Constructing a nuclear power station uses up a lot of energy, not just in building it,
but in many other processes like mining and enriching the uranium.
It takes about five years, and for all that time the plant is a power input.
It takes a year to get it going, and then at last it produces power for its fairly brief lifetime of about 25 years.
But that's not the end of the story.
The materials involved will remain radioactive for at least 250,000 years.
But that colossal period just guarding and keeping them safe will involve some energy loss.
There's another snag. Reliance on nuclear energy means lots of reactors.
Even if you build one a year, when your first one starts producing power,
the other five being built will still be consuming it.
After 12 years with six stations now producing power, you still won't have a net power output.
Increase the building program to cope with increasing energy needs, and you'll go on pouring more power in than you get out.
Schumacher's been proved correct in the past.
But if he's right yet again, does it mean all city dwellers should flee urban disintegration
and growing unemployment to try and find a job on the land?
Schumacher's an optimist, even when faced with the colossus of modern city life,
but dislikes extremes and drastic solutions like motorways.
He criticizes them as a violent answer to transport requirements, themselves created by short-term thinking.
He wants a new mentality where, now that cheap oil is over,
we recover from travel mania and stop devouring energy as we rush ourselves around the world.
I was told by an industrialist not so long ago, not in this country, overseas,
who had a highly automated factory in a region where there was a lot of unemployment,
that surely his job in order to produce a high quality product was to eliminate the human factor,
because people make mistakes, people are unreliable, people can even go on strike,
whereas machines, when they are properly set, they don't make mistakes, they're reliable, they don't go on strike.
Well, that is one type of logic.
The question is what becomes of the human factor if it's been eliminated.
It's still needed, but only for very menial tasks, not for any creative task.
And the recipe for the future, I'm quite certain, is to try and bring the real human factor back into the productive process.
Hitherto, it has been easy to eliminate it because it's been substituted for by very power-hungry machines.
Now, if the power base becomes questionable, these machines become also questionable,
if only for the resources argument, but also ecologically machines are mindless and they cause pollution.
The human factor is gentle.
Some farmer told me that it was a big problem how to explain that some small farms were getting such higher yields per acre than the big farms.
And he'd come to the conclusion it's the TLC factor, the tender loving care.
Now, if people can practice this, can practice their ingenuity, then they're happier people,
then they don't need so many resources, and with the help of modern technology we can make them into very productive people.
Schumacher says the words sewing machine are a misnomer.
It should be called a sewing tool, for while it helps its operator,
it doesn't take over the whole job and reduce skill to mere machine-minding.
The skill shown here took time to perfect.
It's still needed for making top-quality, long-lasting shirts.
Today, though, there's less call for such craftsmanship.
Industry goes for the bigger profits of quantity output.
That means mechanization and often at the expense of quality.
Even if the collar here being stitched outwears a mass-produced one,
few people are prepared to pay that bit extra for it.
The market is more for fashion than durability, and novelty is often the major selling point.
This machine isn't much bigger, yet sews collars faster than any human.
But it can only sew collars, although it costs many times the price.
It's a mesmerizing example of superb engineering, churning out collars at such a rate
that it's a demanding task just watching it, feeding it with cloth,
and awaiting the one-in-a-million chance that it goes wrong.
But for its operator, it's hardly a very creative or rewarding job.
However, as she herself said, it passes the time.
Today, like staring at clocks, millions of people get little more from work
than a way of passing the time.
Switch on the machines and let them get on with it while we enjoy the new age of leisure.
That was the almost universal hope not so long ago.
It hasn't worked out quite like that.
Schumacher agrees that massive technology has vastly improved our material standard of life,
but at a price, and not just the obvious price of non-renewable resources.
Perhaps there might be fewer strikes and less industrial unrest
if the jobs we do all week were more satisfying.
Most strikes are for more money, money not just for survival,
but to compensate for a drab working week and to keep up with inflation.
And after all, inflation is itself another product of growth economics.
If we get rid of the idea, the bigger the better,
which may well have been a 19th century truth,
but now has become a 20th century myth, in my opinion,
if we get off this idea and give the benefit of the doubt to work in the other direction,
if we start systematically from the actual human requirements and longings
and try to adapt our technology to these requirements and longings
instead of asking people all the time to adapt themselves to the machines,
then I think everything is possible.
Now what do I mean?
One of the deep longings of human nature is to work creatively,
not just with the brain but with brain and hands,
to make something, to take pride in what he is making.
This has been virtually wiped out by this high-power modern development.
If the high power disappears or is no longer so plentiful,
then perhaps this longing has a better chance,
provided it is backed up with real intelligence, intelligent technology and so on.
In other words, the beauty and desirability of creative work can be restored.