9 Critical Path: Part Three

Chapter 9
Critical Path: Part Three

2WITHOUT LOSING SIGHT of all the foregoing, to which I will return later, I’d like to turn our attention to soil and land conservation and its essential functioning in support of total ecological regeneration and the work of those who would like to be on the productivity teams for reforesting the world as well as those working on ways to hold onto and regenerate the fertile topsoils—the people who are concerned in a very major way with the planet Earth as a total crystalline, hydraulic, and pneumatic system.

3 We can harness great streams and let gravity pull water inward to the sea while returning and reducing the run-off of topsoil-carrying-water. We can dam areas to recover washed-away topsoil as yet resident in freshwater lakes and streams and, using off-peak wind-power generation, re-pump bottom silts to dry land to enrich the soil’s surfaces.

4 The engineering and planning teams of our post-1980-1990 world crisis period will look at our whole planet only omniconsiderately, whether dealing with the conservation of the soil or with how to employ gravity hydraulically, in an omni-intelligent and omniconsiderate manner: for instance, to irrigate most effectively, never again thinking in terms of individual local economies or individual material advantage terms, but thinking only in terms of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe as aided locally by total planetary ecology support and thereby omnihuman support. In respect to optimum omniecology conservation there are some immediate-past-history experiences to be considered.

5 As recounted in our ‘‘Legally Piggily’’ chapter, during the time of the 1926 ‘‘bad hog market,’’ which led to the 1929 Great Crash, which led in turn to the 1933 New Deal, after all the farmers had been displaced by the banks foreclosing on their farm mortgages and their farm machinery, the no-longer-worked-and-irrigated land dried out, and the wind-storm ‘‘dust bowls’’ began to grow and to blow away the topsoils; this sequence, followed by heavy rains, brought about vast land erosion.

6 The 1933-inaugurated New Deal instituted a program to rebuild the soil and get the farmers back on the land. They erected what they called ‘‘shelterbelts,’’ produced by high hedges initially produced with swiftly and thickly growing Osage orange trees augmented progressively with other varieties of slower-but higher-growing bushes and trees. These high hedges enclosed square ‘‘sections’’—quarter square miles-of potentially rich farmland. These shelterbelts wrought miracles in recapturing the as-yet-wind-borne soils and new, daily, stardust receipts of our planet. Altogether they rebuilt the soil throughout the last flat plains and prairies of the United States.

7 Using the knowledge gained in producing the U.S.A. shelterbelts, the recovery of fertile land from desert in Israel, accomplished twenty years later, was an extraordinary vindication of the New Deal agricultural department’s soil-building theory. The Israeli shelterbelts were started in deserts with the water-capturing eucalyptus trees-all of whose roots collect local ground water. In the shelterbelt growth there is a decade-long series of planting of different kinds of tree and bush growths, which growth finally forms huge, high, dense, linear barriers of trees and bushes.

8 As they put farmers back on the land, the New Deal discovered that the productivity in America was such that with only 7 percent of the world’s population here in North America (including the people of Canada and Mexico), the North American farms greatly overproduced its people’s needs. Had they been able to look realistically at the whole Earth in terms of total productivity of the planet and the needs of all its people, administered by one world government, it would have been a different story. It still can be a different story.

9 Until after World War II there was no mechanical refrigeration of railway or highway vehicle transport. From 1900 until 1950 we had progressively re-iced refrigerator freight cars for railway transport of fresh meat and fruit. So many of the artifacts that now make possible special-environment-maintaining container-car conditions were not available until after World War II. In 1933 the technology was not yet suitable for serving the rest of the world’s food needs from America, so farm overproductivity became frequent. In the game of food marketing in America entrepreneurs gain as money, in minutes of market trading, the major portion of the real life-support wealth produced by the farmers’ year-long labor. For instance, cattle-men produce the original cattle that are sold to feeding and fattening farms in a series of price markups before the food finally reaches the dining room table. Of the present price paid by you and me for beefsteak, the cattle-men receive only a small percentage. Incidentally, all the corn and other grains fed to the cattle to fatten them renders those grains and kernels saleable as fat for prices tenfold what they bring simply as grain. The fat is useless to the buyer, but the hoax-myth that it makes the meat more palatable makes it impossible to buy the beef without the fat. If all the corn and grain going into useless fat were converted into alcohol for driving our cars, it would take care of much of our energy fuel needs.

10 In the 1920s and 1930s overproduction in U.S.A. farming frequently drove the prices paid to the farmer substantially below his costs, let alone his unpaid-for labor and worry. So the New Deal established what it called ‘‘the ever-normal-grainery,’’ which recognized the farmer as the one to be protected. In ‘‘the ever-normal-grainery’’ the U.S.A. government stockpiled against periodic crop short-falls. Under this program local representatives of the government would seal the farmers’ harvests in local grain bins and pay them a fixed price adequate to cover their operating costs. Keeping surplus grain off the market kept the prices up. The New Deal U.S.A. government was, in fact, engaging in across-the-board price-fixing of everything—metals, oils, rents, wages, bank loans, etc. The farmer was paid to keep much of his land out of production, thus fostering productive acreage crop rotation for rebuilding the soil and other sound cultivating practices. For instituting all of those periodically unproductive acreage practices the government awarded the farmer a generous annual per-acre bonus.

11 This is how the government came to pay farmers for keeping acreage out of production as well as fixing prices so that farmers would not be victimized by the greed of the middlemen. Now for the ‘‘Legally Piggily’’ Change: add ref side of the story.

12 During the half-century since 1926 another set of class-one evolution events occurred which often seemed to be only-humanly-planned-and-contrived class-two evolution. In the ‘‘Legally Piggily’’ Change: add ref chapter we noted how the farmers’ machinery was seized by the banks when the banks foreclosed on the farms. When the New Deal arrived, the banks owned vast quantities of farm machinery.

13 It was rarely sold back to the individual farmers. They had no money or income enough to warrant a loan to them. Private-enterprise mobile brigades for mechanically plant-ing, cultivating, and harvesting were formed and bought much of the bank-replevined farm machinery, which they transported by trucks from state to state, town to town, and farm to farm. These mobile farm-operating brigades start in the Deep South in early spring, moving north with the spring and their truck-mounted farm machinery. They travel together in caravans, with human mechanics aboard to operate the machinery which they unload at their local stops. Their crews occupy all the motels in the small farm towns along the way. Plowing and sowing seeds all the way northward, they turn around at the northern borders of the U.S.A. and return to the South to progressively reap the now-ready harvest with their CB radiotelephone-interlinked reaping-machinery crews. The grain harvested is now stored in the former ‘‘ever-normal-grainery’’ bins. The mobile-harvesting teams’ managers then go to the local banks and are given certificates of receipt, which they then forward to the offices of the no-longer-locally-resident owners of the farmlands. These owners are no longer ‘‘farmers’’ or even non-farmer individual humans. They are great business conglomerates.

14 In most areas of the American economy huge conglomerate money-making businesses have swept together many smaller money-making acquisitions; no single product name can adequately describe the vast money-making characteristics of these new conglomerates. Only a unique collection of alphabetical letters now identifies them. These conglomerates had nothing to do anymore with the ‘‘personal equation’’ idea of history’s originally locally-owned-and-managed businesses.

15 ‘‘Practical’’-size farm acreages rapidly grew from a hundred to thousands of acres, serviced mechanically by the already-described roving teams of workers. When the great corporations bought these farmlands, they bought with them the U.S.A. government’s agreements to pay plannual per-acre bonuses to the owners to compensate them for their non-earning, soil-conserving, rotationally unused acres.

16 Sponge-sucking together of a plethora of profit-wise-successful small enterprises—both of the invisible, metallurgical, chemical, and electronic revolution and of the highly profitable, successful, older visible-product companies—has produced conglomerates so powerful as to overwhelm the credit and business-doing capabilities not only of approximately all small single-category-of-production corporations but of all the old individually owned general store businesses.

17 Just as humans’ names at one time indicated their occupations—Smith was a blacksmith, though successive generations of his progeny Smiths no longer smote—in the same way today’s corporations’ names mean nothing.

18 International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) company now owns and operates book publishing companies, makes musical instruments, bakes bread, and engages in hundreds of other essentially unrelated businesses. For this reason these super-supermarket conglomerates are now adopting multi-initial names and logos without providing the public any means of knowing what the initials stand for.

19 Many of the great conglomerates have such power and size—as, for instance, Exxon, GM or IBM—that any one of their annual business acreages, values of machinery, numbers of employees, budgets, etc., dwarf the corresponding acreage, plants, structures, budgets, and population of many of the world’s nations.

20 A man named Edward Higbee was the first ever to write an article on this subject for Time magazine (June 29, 1962, pp. 10--11). Change: add to bibliography Everyone at that time assumed that the American farmer was on the land and was a great political power. As I’ve mentioned earlier, when I was young, 90 percent of humanity in America lived and worked on the farms. ‘‘There resided the great grass-roots votes.’’ Today only 7 percent live and work on the farms. Higbee caught on long ago to the fact that the farmers were no longer living and working on the farmland, though all the politicians in Washington thought they were on the land. The politicians were misinformedly doing everything they could to curry the voting favor of those vast-majority-of-the-population ‘‘farmers’’ supposedly living and working ‘‘out there’’ on the land. There were, however, almost no real, live human farmers out there on the farms whose votes they could curry with their favors. In a magnificently well-written two-page article in Time Higbee suddenly brought some but not all of the politicians to the realization that their picture of the ‘‘farmer’’ was mistaken. Many of the politicians found it ‘‘worth their while’’ to maintain the old picture in the public’s concept. It provided invisible latitude for their wheeling and dealing.

21 Because everybody was living in cities, thousands of miles away from the farms, the public illusion that all the farms were being lived on and were being worked by those farmers has persisted to this day. The illusion persists despite the fact that superhighways-and automobile-touring Americans drive and fly ever more frequently across the vast farmlands of the country. The illusion is sustained by the clusters of tree-surrounded farm-houses, barns, chicken houses, silos, and sometimes windmills, which always lie on the horizon because the farmers did not wish to live or have their livestock near the roads, and the superhighways have been led along the outer ‘‘section lines.’’ The fact that they are unoccupied cannot be seen at remote distances. Once in a while one of those farms is occupied by a conglomerate super-intendent. The smoke from his house implies that all the farms are occupied. Seen from airplanes, the same illusion exists.

22 The big corporations have been taking advantage of all the favorable-to the-corporations’ sentimental illusions of the presence of farmers, gaining along with their enormous uncultivated farmland acquisitions large subsidies paid out by the U.S. government for ‘‘farmers’’ rotationally unused farmland acreage. Billions of dollars of government subsidies now go to the conglomerate farmland owners.

23 In the ‘‘Legally Piggily,’’ Change: add ref lawyer-capitalism-controlled time of Eisenhower Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Butz said, ‘‘You conglomerates can cut out all the green belts. There is a tremendous amount of valuable bonus-earning unused acreage under those shelterbelts.’’ Suddenly all the shelter belts were bulldozed away, so the conglomerate farmland owners could now legally claim the bulldozed-into-existence unplanted land to be ‘‘with-held production acreage,’’ upon which they could realize very sizeable government subsidies. In vain did the few Mennonite and other religious sect farmers of Kansas’s—and other states’—corn and wheat lands complain about the returning dust bowl occasioned by the bulldozing away of those shelterbelts.

24 We’ve talked in this book about entropy and syntropy: The entropic stars exporting energy as radiation; and the syntropic loci in Universe where energy is being imported and converted from radiation to matter. We noted how, despite Boltzmann’s brilliant reasoning, the syntropic import-ing loci of Universe have not been scientifically accreditable as existing because they are astronomically invisible.

25 They are invisible because of not giving off any radiation. We noted that the planet Earth is one of those syntropic energy importing places-the only one we know of-where the entropic Sun radiation is constantly being im-pounded by the syntropic photosynthesis of the vegetation and converted from random radiation receipts into beautiful, orderly molecular structures (matter), with other living creatures and organisms in turn consuming the vegetation-produced molecules and thereby syntropically ‘‘growing’’ physically by themselves, producing large numbers of chemically orderly molecules. We observe this great syntropic operation pattern to be manifest in the natural ecology of our planet.

26 Some of the businesspeople described in ‘‘Legally Piggily’’ and others in political bureaucracies are willfully entropic, arguing that ‘‘ends justify means.’’ For instance, almost all businesspeople undertake to make all the money they can in as short a time as possible both for their stock-holders and themselves. The money they make is not the medium of exchange—gold, silver, and copper coinage—but the entirely ‘‘abstract,’’ matterless numbers of digit dollars entered into their respective, legally valid credit accounts in the bank ledgers, or as manifest in the stocks and bond portfolios of individuals certifiably owning the corporate shares. Such abstract dollar entropic ‘‘worth-making’’ is the antithesis of syntropic-energetic- wealth-making by producing more service function with ever-less weight and volume of material, or by vegetation-and-its-physical-growth by ever-multiplying and -regenerating molecular structuring. The business and political entropy occurs in many ways. For instance, to make the most money with least costs, corporations put fumes into the sky and other wastes into the sluiceways; they cut out the shelterbelts, letting the topsoil blow away; they cut out employees to save money, while making the customers stand in line for long periods of time, often wasting the valuable productive time of those in line. Furthermore, the banks loan your (real-life-support, wealth-representing) dollars to others at 10 percent or more interest, which 10 percent the bank keeps, wherefore the banks’ transaction, having produced no additional physical life-support wealth itself, means that the banks simply took their legally attested 10 percent away from your real-wealth account.

27 By and large the function of life on the planet is designed to be syntropic—to impound the radiation, conserve it, and use it to produce further syntropic functioning in overall support of the syntropic integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. The tendencies of many human beings—wanting to cultivate the soil, to care for the animals, the drive of artists to create, of artisans to build, of inventors to invent and develop time- and trouble-savers for others—are all manifests of the designed-in syntropic propensities of humans. The generous, compassionate propensity of humans is primarily syntropic. The selfish are ‘‘entropic.’’ In order to keep Universe regenerative nature has placed human beings on this planet for their syntropic functioning.

28 We may safely assume that class-one evolution is syntropic and that class two is often entropically diseased. The drive to make money is inherently entropic, for it seeks to monopolize order while leaving un-cope-with-able disorder to overwhelm others. We must remember that the majority of those convincedly committed to ‘‘making money’’ are motivated to do so primarily because of their mistaken conviction that there is a fundamental (external) inadequacy of human life support on our planet. That has been true until yesterday. They were right until the syntropic, class-one evolutionary accelerating ephemeralization reached a point of doing so much more work with so much less effort, because of the reduction in weights per strength ratios, that we came ten years ago to the point where we could, by proven design, take care of everyone at standards higher than any have ever known.

29 In the vast majority of humans there is an innate inclination, propensity—even drive—to make sense and to produce order in consonance with universal order. The assumption by many humans that there is only entropic disorder seemingly present in Universe is brought about by looking only at the phases of energy separating out from any one system and by not looking at the same disengaging energies always joining syntropically in the production of other systems.

30 We will now consider other ramifications of the about-to-be-realized synergetic integration of all the objectives of the great half-century critical path.

31 All the artifacts needed for its synergetic fulfillment have been accomplished. (See historical table of realized scientific and technical accomplishments, Appendix I.) The generalized principles calling for their inclusion in the critical-path conceptioning of fifty years ago have been realized objectively in special-case discoveries, inventions, or designs taking place only during the last half-century.

32 It is a fact that we can now technologically recover and sort out the valuable chemistries in all the chimney-escaping or sluiceway-escaping ‘‘wastes,’’ which, though unwanted by the local manufacturers, are necessary chemical-element components in the overall syntropic success of eternal regeneration of Universe. Nature has no pollutions—it has very valuable chemistries that function only under special conditions, so the critical-path strategy is to get all the money-maker-unwanted chemistries shunted into all their syntropically functioning routes. Pollution is simply energy—in the form of unfamiliar matter-which the timing of the omni-regenerative cosmic system cannot immediately use but must use later.

33 We will now seek for the causes and solution of smog as a special case syntropic problem—whose solution, however, leads to understanding of how many other such problems will be solved.

34 We have places on our planet, like Los Angeles, that are world-famous for what is called ‘‘smog.’’

35 With the Earth revolving from west to east, the morning Sun heats the eastern slopes of mountains. In the afternoon it heats the western slopes as the eastern slopes cool off. The Northern Hemisphere’ s prevailing winds are being sucked from the northwest highs by low-pressure areas of the tropics in a southeast direction for the Northern Hemisphere observer, which phenomena we misidentify as ‘‘northwest winds.’’ They are in reality southeast drafts. These prevailing southeast drafts dominate the environmental conditions of the 90 percent of humanity living north of the Equator—the majority of our planet’s moist, life-support land is also north of the Equator. From the vast expanses of the North Pacific cool airs of the evening impinge upon the warm western slopes of all the Pacific islands and upon the West Coast mountains of the United States.

36 In the 1950s physics discovered that temperature differentials are equivalent to electrical-potential differentials and that what we have been calling ‘‘condensation’’ into water of water vapor is, in fact, electrolytic formation of atoms into water molecules. We have heating on one side of the mountains and cooling on the other. This produces an electric-potential differential between the eastern and western slopes as well as between the warm western slopes and the cool Pacific Ocean air.

37 Since what we used to call ‘‘condensation of moisture’’ is in fact electrolytic fixation-the low-floating, West Coast mist clouds of California are produced by the cool airs impinging on the warm mountainside, bringing about electric-potential differential and electrolytic fixation, which produces those lovely mists riding the western mountain slopes, particularly of Southern California, but also of all the western slopes of all the mountained Pacific islands.

38 We next observe the great twentieth-century influx of industry onto the California coast. Overnight settlements became towns and towns became cities, each with its own chamber of commerce doing its best to attract ever more industry. In order to pay for town governments taxes are necessary. In order to pay political obligations the elected town administrations need money to hire people to carry on all the legislatively conceived tasks—some of them necessary, many of them unnecessary, but all requiring large sums of money.

39 The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles government did everything they could to invite industry to move into their domain because industries produce the greatest amount of taxable money-making. Industries also produce jobs and thereby in turn wages that can be taxed. Los Angeles did everything it could to attract industries and businesses. Having many locally occurring petroleum wells, one of the most logical of industries brought into Los Angeles was that of oil drilling, pumping, refining, storage, and shipping, such as those of the concentrated operations of the oil fields and harbor area of Los Angeles’s Long Beach. Los Angeles built a vast number of huge refineries in the southwest part of the city. On its southeastern side Los Angeles positioned its steel mills to satisfy the large demand for steel products in the building of the oil refineries, their storage tanks and pipelines.

40 The fumes from these industries then loaded the mist and the warm airs, and the Sun-exposed upper cloud surfaces and their shaded lower surfaces produced temperature differentials, which in turn produced layer inversion, with the fumes locked in on the underside, which then acted as a widespread lower atmospheric lid, holding the industrial gases and fumes close to the ground through-out the whole Los Angeles basin. Thus smog became an industrially produced phenomenon.

41 Los Angeles’s citizens became politically articulate about this ‘‘air pollution’’ and went to their city government saying, ‘‘We mustn’t have this in our city.’’ The city government then went to the utilities, refineries, and steel manufacturers and said, ‘‘Stop putting your smog-producing fumes into our sky. We’ve looked into the situation and find there exists equipment that makes it possible to precipitate that fume. But you don’t have that equipment.’’ The companies responded, ‘‘If we put in that fume-precipitation equipment, it will cost us so much more to produce here in L.A. than it does companies producing in places that don’t have such controls that we won’t be able to compete in our industry. We’ll be forced out of business. So we’re either going to have to cut out this nonsense about fume precipitation or move out of your city.’’ The municipal government said, ‘‘For Heaven’s sake, don’t leave. Your tax base is essential to our political survival. We’re politicians, we’ll fix it up in some other way.’’

42 Soon thereafter the L.A. city government made the following pronouncement: ‘‘People, the smog is your fault. It’s your backyard incinerators that are producing this smog.’’

43 The people said, ‘‘Sure enough, we are incinerating in Los Angeles. We are in the wrong. We must stop incinerating.’’ So a law was passed saying that nobody could incinerate within the city limits. The people did stop incinerating, and the smog abated—but only in minor degree. The real offender was the industrial fumes. Along came World War II, and the issue was buried under more immediately pressing matters.

44 When World War II was over, great numbers of additional citizens moved into California. Suddenly the smog problem was back, and the whole act of pre-World War II was repeated. The people complained to the municipal government, and the omnichanged government personnel had entirely forgotten about what had happened twenty years earlier. They went after the big corporations, which threatened to leave town, and the city once again pleaded, ‘‘Don’t leave town. We need you here.’’

45 Once more the city blamed the people: ‘‘It’s the fumes from your automobiles that are producing the smog. We have taken samples, with scientific instruments, of the below-the-smog air, which samples when analyzed proved the obnoxious fumes to be those of your automobiles.’’ With their greatest election-fund support coming from the oil men, and with the most powerful regulation lobbying being carried on also by the oil men, the politicians of America took up the cry, ‘‘It’s the automobiles.’’ The people said, ‘‘Why, sure enough. We’ll have to do something about it. We’ll pass laws to limit the level of fumes coming out of each car and require the manufacturers to produce and install special smog-control equipment in each car.’’ The automobile companies loved that. It meant more accessories to be manufactured and sold and an obvious way to rationalize increasing the price of their cars.

46 Christmas and New Year’s Days are celebrated everywhere in America, but Los Angeles, being a relatively new and gigantic social body, is able to alter its celebration customs. The L.A. refineries and heavy industries have learned that the people of California want to take a Christmas vacation. So the holiday becomes a ten-or-more-day vacation starting the weekend before Christ-mas and continuing through the weekend after New Year’s Day. It pays all the refineries and other heavy industries to shut down their plants. As the holiday proceeds, the air gets clearer and clearer, until on New Year’s Day—the traditional Rose Bowl Day—you find throughout Los Angeles a dreamy-clear view of all the surrounding, often snow-capped mountains. If you went out with scientific devices to measure the fume-level from the cars, your instrument would read approximately zero. The only reason that auto fumes were previously measurable was that the industrial-fume-laden ceiling held the auto fumes down and locked them in at the level at which you and I are breathing. I have taken many New Year’s Day pictures from the hills of Los Angeles showing it to be absolutely clear. Then, on back-to-work industrial Monday, you see a vast, molasses-brown cloud rolling in from the southwest gradually to obscure the whole of Los Angeles.

47 There is no question about it. It is the refineries, the steel and other mills, and the public utility fumes that produce the smog. But no municipal government anywhere in America is going to let its industry go away. Therefore, cities are always going to find political ways of absolving the industries while blaming the people. Air does not stay in any one place. There is a preposterously stubborn myth about ‘‘this being my or someone else’s airspace. This is my air.’’ Air keeps moving right through the geometry of our environment to continually re-circle the Earth. The air belongs only to everybody on our planet.

48 We’re going to have to gradually recognize that whatever our central government be—whether it’s our United States government or a world government—it is going to have to put in equipment to precipitate fumes—no matter what it costs. Companies must install the precipitators or be put out of business. No one will be allowed to put fumes into the sky or noxious chemistries into our waters ever again. We do have the well-proven physical equipment to deal with this problem today. At the end of the year, when we figure a company’s taxes, we will rebate the company taxes by whatever the cost of the fume—or chemical-precipitating equipment and the cost of its operation may be. All companies will be able to compete on a fair basis despite the initial and operative cost of the equipment. But the valuable recovered chemistries must be turned over to the government by the companies. Society must become aware of the high value of these recovered chemistries. For example, the amount of sulphur coming out of all the chimneys around the world annually exactly equals the amount of sulphur mined from the ground and purchased annually by industry to keep its wheels turning. The computers will quickly show that the value of the recovered chemistries turned over to the government will more than pay back the cost of their rebates to the industrial companies. The computers will also show that the reduction in cost of respiratory ailments and other deleterious smog effects brought about by elimination of the smog constitutes an out-and-out profit to society.

49 The recirculation of metals and other chemistries is now being handled only by what we call ‘‘mongers.’’ Before World War I society wrongly assumed that metals and chemicals traveled only a one-way street to the rusting dump heaps. A company that produced iron assumed it to be consumed like food or rusted away until it had entirely disappeared. All physical substances were assumed to be entropic—i.e., to waste away, never to return. It was not until the enormous amounts of metals produced in World War I began to come back again into the market in the 1930s that those concerned with such matters began to recognize the economic advantages existing in obsolete-form metals returning as scrap, which metals were more highly refined and concentrated than were the newly mined ores. Scrap became extremely important.

50 The scrapmongers are in business to make money. They sell their scrap metals only when they feel sure they are getting the highest possible prices. To increase prices the profit-motivated mongers held onto their scrap. As a consequence their yards get bigger and bigger as well as more and more unsightly. This constitutes a blockage in the world’s metals-recirculatory system. This means that world government is going to have to take over altogether all the functions of recirculation.

51 Talking about scrap, which is more accurately to be called recirculation, is analogous to talking about the bloodstream or other circulatory systems of humans and other organisms. We are an integral stage in an omnire-generative cosmic system. The Universe is 100-percent re-generative. Terrestrial ecology has been but is no longer 100-percent regenerative. Recirculation is regenerative.

52 Blockages in that recirculation occur when money-making people, seeking special economic advantage for themselves, hold back the flow of regenerative essentials to increase their prices.

53 Governments are going to have to take over the function of eliminating any and all stoppages in the recirculatory integrity of our planet. All corporations are going to have to turn over to the government all the chemicals they recover by fume precipitation or filtered sluiceway condensations. Hoarding of any kind must be banished from human affairs. Today, in the copper industry, the quantity of recirculating scrap copper is so great that it dwarfs the newly mined copper production, which provokes the world copper-mine-owning cartel into maintaining a powerful Washington lobby that seeks to increase government stockpiling of copper.

54 All special-interest lobbies are entropic. Class-one evolution is progressively eliminating all blockages to recirculation. Regenerative recirculation of metals has the unique function of realizing the twenty-two-and-one-half-year recirculation cycle. It is these cyclically produced technological gains that make it possible to take care of ever-more humans at ever-higher standards of living with ever-less pounds and volume of matter and ever-less ergs of energy and seconds of time per each technical-function performance. I was able to arrive at that figure of a twenty-two-and-one-half-year metals-recirculating cycle in 1936. I was working for the Phelps Dodge Company, who had asked me to give them some prognostications about the uses of copper in the future of world industry.

55 Copper is the most plentiful of the most efficient electric-power-production and -conduction metals. World War I was a power-production war. And copper is the most plentiful of non-sparking metals and is therefore logically employed in connection with gunpowder-handling equipment such as the shells inserted into the gun breeches. Because of these facts, the demand for copper in 1917 was epochally great.

56 Not long before World War I and its huge demand for copper, copper ore-to-pure-metal reduction by the vastly less expensive flotation process and the also much less expensive electrolytic refining brought the cost of mining and refining copper so low that the cash value of the average amounts of recoverable gold and silver co-occurring with the copper—which gold and silver are automatically purchased by the U.S. government mint—exactly paid for all the mining and refining of the copper itself. The whole price paid for copper was profit. The mineowners then decided to mine only when the prices bid for copper were at a peak. The prices bid always peaked in wartime. With World War I over the world copper cartel waited and worked for the start of World War II.

57 In the 1930s the big copper companies were badly bothered by the influx of copper scrap into the marketplace. Up to the time when I came to study the copper situation, the rates of evolutionary change were so slow that the mineowners had no idea that the copper they sold would ever come back on the market to disturb their price.

58 By 1936 the copper price controls were completely challenged by the scrap influx. Phelps Dodge asked me to do some research on the problem, so I reviewed all the known, published data of the metals world. In the metals world very accurate records are kept about how metals have been and are now being used. Very profitable publications are maintained by the affluent metals businesses.

59 Very accurate inventories exist detailing, for instance, how much of any given metal is built into an automobile. In 1936 there was only about thirty pounds of copper in each American automobile. Copper is expensive, and the auto manufacturers try to keep the use of expensive metals to a minimum. However, considerable copper is used in a gas station—for instance, in all the gas-tank-filling nozzle equipment-because it is non-sparking. You couldn’t possibly use a sparking metal such as steel around gasoline.

60 I was able to arrive at that previously undiscovered twenty-two-and-one-half-year recycling figure by very carefully integrating the total inventory of the in-use tonnages of metals in all the main categories of their use-for instance, the inventoried copper in all extant buildings, in old roofings, gutterings, and flashings, brass pipes, and so forth. The total inventory of copper in old buildings, both business and residential, is an inventory that becomes obsolete and is scrapped and recirculated on an overall average of once every fifty years. Within the building category copper comes out faster from big city buildings than from single-family country residences.

61 What makes obsolete any of the major categories of metals in use is the rate at which the new technologies occur that make obsolete the older technologies. In the electronics industry there exists only a two-year lag between the discovery or invention of new functions and improved techniques and their acceptance and employment by the electronics industry. This short lag is occasioned by the fact that the physical phenomena involved operate at sub-visible-to-humansight levels. This means that the behaviors are considered only on a basis of figures. If this one works better than the others to a sufficient, numerically expressible degree without lowering contiguous behavioral efficiencies, it can be reliably calculated that adoption of the newer facility will produce universal advantage. No human opinions on the merits or demerits of the discoveries and their invented technical realizations are involved.

62 In the aeronautical arts—airframe, power plant, instrumentation, airport facilities, and ground-controlled flight-pattern technologies—there is a five-year gestation period between invention and industry’s adoption for use. The discoveries and technical inventions in the aeronautical arts are both visible and invisible. When invisible, the decisions to adopt are made scientifically through instrumentally derived numbers—where visible, the decisions are made on past experience and opinionated comparisons. Where there is room for opinion and personal prejudice, the decisions to reject or to adopt take longer. The more science and the less opinion is involved, the quicker the new technology is adopted. It is the rate at which new inventions are adopted that spells the rate of obsolescence of the technologies they are to replace.

63 By taking the invention-gestation rates in the different industries, which we’ve discussed elsewhere in this book (two years in electronics between invention and use, five years in aviation between invention and use, ten years in automobile manufacturing, fifteen in railroad, twenty-five years in big buildings, and fifty years in single-family dwellings), we integrate the amount of copper in each use-category and their respective number of years of use, and thus find the average rate at which copper (and all the metals) come back as scrap to be every twenty-two and one-half years.

64 The unprecedentedly great World War I copper production occurred primarily in America. In one year, 1917, humanity took more copper out of the ground, refined it, and put it to work than had been cumulatively produced in all the world throughout all previously recorded history’s years.

65 This produced in 1917 a vertical cliff on the ‘‘all-history charts of world copper production.’’ Adding twenty-two and one-half years to 1917 would bring the date of reappearance of the crest of that 1917 world-record production scrap to July 1939. So I told Phelps Dodge in 1936 that three years later, in July 1939, they were going to be overwhelmed by scrap. Meanwhile, I became the science and technology consultant on the editorial staff of Fortune magazine in 1938. In July 1939 the head of research for Phelps Dodge called me up on the telephone and said, ‘‘Bucky, your twenty-two-and-one-half-year scrap-return prediction is absolutely right. Go down to the New York docks and observe.’’ I did so. Alongside all the great cargo ships were cargo barges filled with scrap metals, piled enormously high.

66 Copper is plentiful enough to be trustworthily used but scarce enough to be used only in the most efficient planner. Copper is a sensitive metal—the so-called bellwether of the metals. Whatever copper does indicates exactly what the other metals are going to do in the price and production markets; for instance, steel scrap was also coming back at exactly the same rate as copper—twenty-two-and-one-half years after production from newly mined ore. Hoping to protect their anticipated very high prices when World War II came along, and all unbeknownst to the general public, all the U.S.A. metals owners in 1939 were selling all their scrap metal to Germany and Japan to fire back at America two years later when World War II did come along. It was not a moral thing for the scrapmongers to do. The public in general had not the slightest idea what was going on—the American business public didn’t catch on to the idea of metal-scrap re-circulation until long after World War II was over. The American and world public at large have not as yet caught on to the significance of recirculating scrap metals making almost obsolete further mining of metallic ores in general. The authors of the Club of Rome’s ‘‘Limits to Growth’’ Change: Add to Bibliography had never heard of scrap-metals recirculation.

67 I now point out again that with acceleration of ephemeralization—doing more with less—came the acceleration of the rate of gaining information on how to do more with less in the invisible world of electronics, metallurgy, chemistry, and atomics. By the time the metals came around in their twenty-two-and-one-half-year cycles, we had learned so much more that we could take care of many more people at a much higher standard of living with the same amount of metals. Wherefore, as we have earlier pointed out, metals became the very bloodstream-of-realization of class-one evolution—which class-one evolution is nature’s way of taking care of ever-more people at ever-higher standards of living accomplished with the same quantity of metal-until all are cared for, at ever-higher standards of living, without further thought of anyone having to earn that right to live. This coming realization of sustainable physical success for all humanity has been earned by all the lives of all people in all past time.

68 I am progressively reviewing the evolutionary integration of all these now-timely and available technologies that together produce a situation unlike any encountered ever before in this planet’s multi-billion-year history—that of all humans becoming economically sustainable at higher standards of living than ever known and doing so without consciously earning that living. Meanwhile the people have begun recirculating around the world, introducing their thoughts and experiences to all countries. All the great religions have become transnational, each operating in every country permitting them so to do. Backed by wealthy central headquarters, various of the most powerful religions of history were amongst the first to send their monks and missionaries around the world to build the strength of their parent organizations. Not only the religions but all the big ideologies have now become transnational. Neither ‘‘free enterprise’’ nor ‘‘socialism’’ recognize any geographical limits. Today, big business, as detailed in ‘‘Legally Piggily’’ (Chapter 3), Change: Add ref is completely transnational.

69 Now only the world’s people are left bound within their respective 150 national pens. The separate national pens were evolutionarily logical in former times, when nature deployed all people so that they could learn how to cope only under the special conditions occurring at specific loci around our planet Earth. But now the full family of different experiences and the therefrom-developed technological artifacts are being integrated by class-one evolution.

70 Something transcendental to any organized human planning happened in America in the early 1930s, something that exhibited the cosmic-scale qualities of class-one evolution. The record of consistently increasing plannual immigration to America and the United States since the Mayflower landed in 1620 peaked in 1910 at over a million persons a year. In the early 1930s, however, for the first time the number emigrating began to exceed the number immigrating to America. A 300-year pattern had reversed. The people of the world had come in to the United States, had cross-bred, and had started to become outbound again, but this time as cross-bred and as yet further cross-breeding world people.

71 Overall class-one evolution, as manifest in Chapter 1 Change: add ref of this book, showed us how humanity first established itself in the southwestern Pacific Ocean (Austronesia) of planet Earth. It showed us how, having built rafts, Pacific Ocean humans drifted north and eastward on the Japan Current to Alaska and then southward along the west coast of North and South America, then westward again to where they had started. This drift pattern left small colonies vast millennia ago, whose progeny are now inter-mixed with much later arrivals.

72 Next came the westward, overland migration. Artifacts of history show us how people-pioneering ever westward and mildly northward—coped as successfully as they did. In due course the swords and later the guns of the ever-faster-westward-colonizing or gypsying human families and individuals offered protection against unfriendly intruders until the colonies gradually developed common defense on an ever-larger scale. Mobile tribal hordes eventually became settled farming nations, and then built up so-called national defenses. We have reached the class-one evolutionary point now in the last half of the twentieth century where the largest and most powerful abstract institutions-religious, financial, and political—have all become transnational. Humans, trapped in 150 nation-state pens, are being manipulated from outside the nations by big ideological, religious, or big-money interests. The power of lobbying imposed on local governments by big world money or big world ideological systems is incredibly corrupting. Preemption of the metals supply by the expanding arms industry plus the trade barriers prevent the free circulation and recirculation of metals. This means we have 150 sovereign blood clots interrupting our recirculating metals, which would otherwise serve as the industrial, productive lifeblood with which we might realize our class-one evolutionary gains.

73 Class-one evolution makes it clear that all 150 of the world’s sovereignties must go. There was a time when the United States was incredibly powerful—right after World War II. Today most of the people in America still think of their nation as being the most powerful of world nations—ergo, free to make its own most constructive moves. Quite the opposite is now true; as we’ve shown in the ‘‘Legally Piggily’’ chapter, Change: Add ref the United States is both internally and externally bankrupt—it is also overpowered by Russia’s navy and conventional arms.

74 The Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked me to speak to them five years ago, as documented in the Congressional Record of May 22, 1975. They asked me where our country and its people were going, and I said, ‘‘Not only have all the big corporations become transnational and taken all the former U.S.A. gold and other negotiable assets with them, but they have also left all the world’s people locked into their 150 national pens, with those 150 nations blocking the flow of lifeblood metals without which we cannot realize the increasing know-how of all humanity. Very soon the nation-state sovereignties will have to be eliminated,’’ or humanity will perish. A nation’s dictator need not consult with his people at all. A dictator can make a deal with another dictator to give up their respective sovereignties. A dictatorial party, such as the Russian Communist party, which is composed of only 1 percent of the Russian people, can make a deal with other dictators or dictatorial parties to give up their respective sovereignties. In a quasi-democracy such as America the president or prime minister’s first oath of office is to protect the nation’s sovereignty against all foreign incursion.

75 If any president of the United States or prime minister of any other quasi-democracy even so much as discussed possibilities of desovereignizing, he or she would be immediately impeached. In discarding its sovereignty the United States of America faces the most difficult of all situations. Therefore class-one evolution is about to put the U.S.A. out of business through international bankruptcy. This will be a powerful example of class-one evolution at work. The bankruptcy need not be the end. It is simply nature’s way of ridding the planet of the most powerful of yesterday’s sovereignties and thereby setting off a chain of 149 additional desovereignizations, altogether removing the most stubborn barrier to the free circulation of the Earth’s world-around metals, foods, and income energy supplies and people.

76 We are now in a position to get rid of the 150 sovereignties and have a recirculatory, interaccommodative, world-around democratic system.

77 We now have the immediately realizable capability to exercise our often-repeated option to make all the Earth’s people physically and economically successful within only a decade by virtue of the already-executed fifty-year critical path of artifacts development which has acquired all the right technology.

78 In support of that statement we will now examine a live case history of ‘‘critical path’’ planning that I engaged in thirty-eight years ago on behalf of Brazil, a plan whose full-scale realization was set for 1993. Because this plan is successfully gestating at a rate that indicates fulfillment by 1993, it should give high credence to the whole of this book.

81 We have already noted in Chapter 5, ‘‘The Geoscope’’ (p. 429), Change: Add ref that at Churchill and Roosevelt’s pre-World War II secret meeting in the Bay of Fundy, Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s grand strategy, which called for the initial landing of the Allies’ armed forces in Europe’s ‘‘soft underbelly’’—i.e., landing in Sicily from the North African coast.

82 As we have also noted, implementation of the ‘‘soft-underbelly’’ strategy called for the U.S.A.’s swift extension of its radio-triangulated surveying from the already radio-triangulated northeastern U.S.A. to be extended south-westward through Mexico, Central America, Venezuela, and Amazonian Brazil to two of easternmost Brazil’s South Atlantic coastal points—Pernambuco (Recife) and Rio. Next, Pernambuco and Rio were radio-direction-finder-triangulated with Ascension Island in the mid-South Atlantic. Ascension Island was next radio-triangulated northwardly with Dakar on Africa’s northwestern coastal bulge and northeastwardly with Lagos on the coast of Africa’s Equatorial Gulf of Guinea. These two adequately-far-apart African points were finally radio-intertriangled with two North African Mediterranean coast points occupied by the U.S. armed forces.

83 What has not been recounted, which is of great relevance to this book, is the story of the price Brazil’s then—dictator President Vargas demanded of U.S.A.’s President Franklin Roosevelt for permission to do all that comprehensive radio surveying over Brazil. What Vargas wanted in exchange was a well-informed and far-forwardly-sighted plan for the industrialization of Brazil.

84 Roosevelt’s staff gave the planning task to the U.S. engineering company that had organized many of J. P. Morgan’s foreign, electric-power-generating, private enterprises. Vargas rejected their planning as prejudiced exclusively in favor of U.S.A. capitalism’s exploitation of Brazil.

85 At this point the U.S.A. secondhand-machinery business heard through the J. P. Morgan engineering firm that Brazil was considering a comprehensive industrialization.

86 This seemed their opportunity to realize an enormous profit on their gargantuan inventory of secondhand machinery of all kinds, which the dealers had bought at super bargain rates as the U.S.A.’s industrial economy was swiftly modernized for its World War II needs. Vargas saw through their scheming and would have none of it.

87 Vargas then told Roosevelt that he—and his Brazilian advisors—had read all the known authoritative publications by the Russians and other experts regarding the Russians’ successive five-year incremented planning of comprehensive industrialization. Vargas and his experts were convinced that much was omitted by those publications regarding the behind-the-political-scenes master strategy of conceptioning and realization of the successive planning stages under the special physical circumstances of Russia’s geography and its adjacency to capitalist economies controlled by those who were hostile to communism.

88 As inspection of my Dymaxion Sky-Ocean World Map will disclose, the whole northern periphery of Russia is in the Arctic and has no adjacent enemy lands. The length of this most-often-frozen northern border of the U.S.S.R. constitutes more than half of all its periphery. The other half is mostly in desert and mountain land. Consequently the U.S.S.R. had relatively few vulnerable, natural border entry points to guard. With a population in the 1920s of 150 million—95 percent illiterate, hungry farm workers, whose lives were to be reimplemented and reorganized into a primarily industrial economy—the U.S.S.R. required instant adoption of a schedule of ‘‘first things first’’ to be accomplished, followed by a logical sequence of successively most important acquisitions and functioning capabilities. During the first two of the U.S.S.R.’s five-year-plan realizations approximately eighteen million of their population had to die of starvation in order to obtain their final goal, which was to produce a thereafter-ongoing adequacy of life support for all. The price to be paid in human want and suffering, great as it was, seemed a pittance in comparison to continuance-to-eternity of the ‘‘life-grinding-to-death’’ agrarian serfdom.

89 Under the circumstances of millions dying and many millions more in want, enemies of the attempt by communism to demonstrate that it could produce a better life for its people than that enjoyed elsewhere—which would, however, take two whole generations to prove-obviously produced a highly subvertible social condition, provided only that enemies could readily penetrate and themselves subsist under the restricted life-support condition. Study of the world map shows that Russia’s limited physical access gave their five-year planning the optimum chance of succeeding.

90 Such information as the foregoing discussion of the U.S.S.R. border-control conditions was typical of what Vargas found missing in all the then-published data regarding the U.S.S.R.’s undertaking.

91 Vargas reminded Roosevelt that, coincident with the 1929 economic Great Crash of the Western world, Russia’s first five-year plan had discovered much gold and that the U.S.S.R. had been able to make gold pay for contracts with the theretofore leading but in 1929--33 idle primary production corporations of the U.S.A. These contracts sent proven-‘‘know-how’’ engineering teams to Russia to supervise the building, equipping, and start-up of prototype factories in all categories of industrialization: hydro and steam electrical generating, mining, blast furnaces, steel and other metal producing, glassmaking, cotton and wool fabricating, petroleum producing and refining, etc. Vargas said to Roosevelt, ‘‘Almost all of those U.S.A. corporate executive engineers must as yet be alive. Being so expert, they must all be performing very responsible tasks in the U.S.A. today. What I would like you to do for Brazil is to have someone in the U.S.A. contact and interview all those U.S.A. engineers who took part in the across-the-board Russian five-year plans’ technical initiations.’’

92 Vargas felt that those U.S.A. engineers must have learned a great deal more about the realities of the U.S.S.R. five-year planning than could be found in the literature.

93 The White House sent this task to the engineering department of the U.S.A.’s Board of Economic Warfare for action. As head mechanical engineer of the board, and in consideration of my background—as, for instance, in plotting the forward trends of world industrialization for the Phelps Dodge Company (at the time the third largest copper producer in the world) or my experience as science and technology consultant on the staff of Fortune magazine—I was given the task prescribed by Vargas.

94 The first thing I did was to contact Loy Henderson of the U.S. State Department, who had occupied the U.S.A. ‘‘desk’’ in Moscow in 1929 before ambassadorial relationships were established with Russia by Roosevelt in 1934. Henderson located for me a member of his 1929 Moscow staff, a man named Habicht who had handled all the travel arrangements for all the U.S.A. engineers who went to Russia in fulfillment of those prototyping contracts. Through Habicht I learned who all those engineers were as well as which ones were most esteemed by the Russian engineers with whom they dealt. I was able to locate them all in the U.S.A. By 1943 most were heads or senior vice presidents of their original companies. All agreed to hold interviews with me, since I had U.S. presidential authority. Thirty-two individuals in twenty-one corporations were interviewed, all of whom had participated in the first three of the successive five-year plans of the U.S.S.R.

95 My commission was not only to seek non-published angles on the U.S.S.R. planning strategy, but also to interpolate the principles into a plan for Brazil, where the geographical conditions were exactly the opposite of Russia’s. Anybody could enter Brazil from almost any direction. Since that was so, I had to develop use of the principles in an altogether different manner. I inverted the equation. If you couldn’t keep exploiters out, you made it easy for them to come in, and if foreign interests wanted, for instance, to explore for and produce important metals for export, they would be permitted to do so provided they also produced for Brazil a stockpile quota, which would always provide Brazil with a quantity of that metallic element equivalent to 2 percent of the quantity of that element known to exist on planet Earth—since Brazil’s population was 2 percent of the world’s population.

96 To prepare myself for serious discussion of such comprehensive world industrial planning, before leaving Washington to visit these U.S.A. engineer executives I contacted the presidents of the four leading U.S.A. foreign-engineering-project corporations. All four of them had heard that Brazil was considering adoption of a plan for comprehensive industrialization.

97 I asked each to give me a statement of the primary tasks to be accomplished in the industrialization of Brazil, listed both in order of relative importance and in order of production inception. All four corporations, eager for such business, submitted cogent lists.

98 I then started on my succession of interviews. The following surprising experience occurred as each of my successive interviews commenced. The corporate engineering officer I was interviewing would say something like this: ‘‘When I was starting that factory in 1929, the Russian team with which I worked would keep reminding me that we were not only building a cotton mill (or whatever type of production unit they were the experts for), we were also building a fortress.’’ My interviewee would say: ‘‘I thought they were crazy talking that way. But now, today, look at those headlines in today’s paper. My factory is indeed serving as a fortress. It is under attack by Hitler right this minute! What else did they say to me of importance to which I tended to pay little or no attention?’’

99 This startling retrospective realization on the part of all my interviewees greatly enlivened their memories, and their recalls were many and highly relevant.

100 On the day following my recording of these Russian experiences and recalled strategic principles, I would dis-cuss the application of their recalled Russian planning-strategy principles to the industrialization of Brazil, a matter in which these corporation officers were also inherently interested.

101 I then returned to Washington and wrote a plan for Brazil based on all I had learned. I had my plan typed in a narrow vertical column on one side of legal-size paper, leaving plenty of room for readers’ note-making. Copies were sent by registered mail to each of the thirty-two interviewees. Each returned their copies with many marginal pencil notes: ‘‘Good,’’ or ‘‘I didn’t say that,’’ or ‘‘This is what I said about that…’’ I then rewrote the whole plan, throwing out any items that did not have a sponsor from amongst the U.S.A. corporations’ leading engineering executives. I then sent the only-by senior-engineering-executives-sponsored inventory of items of the plan to all thirty-two of the interviewees.

102 Their responses to the first draft were:

103 2 were unequivocally against it.

104 2 were cranky in their letters for extraneous reasons, but distinctly in favor of various items.

105 7 were without comment.

106 4 did not express themselves in their covering letters, but indicated approval by comments written on page margins of my texts.

107 17 were unequivocally for the document, as indicated both in their covering letters and in their itemized comments—proving that the outline did properly report and interpolate the ‘‘area of agreement’’ (17 of 21 firms or offices favored the outline). They itemized a total of 13 objections and gave 146 itemized approvals, covering 125 individual paragraphs in the outline, and made 52 suggestions for additions or modifications.

108 Just as my plan was complete, Vargas was deposed as president of Brazil. Forwarding of it to Brazil’s new political leader might well be construed as an affront. The president of one of the major U.S.A. corporations involved in my ‘‘Compendium’’ thought so well of it that he took it informally to leading industrialists and powers behind the political scenes of Brazil. From time to time in the subsequent thirty-seven years I have heard of features of my plan being manifest in Brazil’s economy.

109 In March of 1980 I was invited to visit Brazil by the Chamber of Commerce of São Paulo, its leading commercial-industrial city. I thought of the ‘‘Compendium,’’ which had been sitting in my files for thirty-seven years. I had Xerox copies made and took them with me to Brazil and gave copies to many of its economic leaders. It was their consensus that the plan is now appropriate to their needs in almost all ways. They felt it to have been significant that I had thirty-seven years ago recommended that they switch their energy fuel from petroleum to alcohol, which is exactly what they are now doing.

110 The ‘‘Compendium,’’ as I called it in 1943, and the 1943 reaction to it on the part of leading U.S.A. corporations’ engineering vice presidents, now follows. No alterations have been made. It is printed exactly as typed in 1943. Not included are approximately 100 pages of the developmental phases of the undertaking, which included letters from individuals, etc.

111 A COMPENDIUM OF CERTAIN ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES PERTINENT TO BRAZIL’S CONTROL OF IMPENDING ACCELERATION IN ITS INDUSTRIALIZATION

112 Accrued to Experience of U.S. Engineers and Firms Who Participated in the First Three of Russia’s Graduated Program of 5-Year Plans

113 *

114 August 13, 1943

115 R. Buckminster Fuller

116 Chief, Mechanical Engineering Section

117 U.S. Board of Economic Warfare

118 AS A DIGEST OF THE INVESTIGATION, thoroughly documented in the main body of this report, the following ad-monitions, listed in order of interdependent significance, may be forwarded to those Brazilians concerned with control of their future industrialization as truly representing the majority opinion of the U.S. engineers concerned and experienced in this field.

119 Number One, it was pointed out by all those interviewed that Brazil must make its own plan.

120 This must be realistic and not a matter of their being coerced into some foreign-designed role, wrapped up under a Brazilian label printed elsewhere. No matter how excellent the consultative advice they may obtain from experiences outside their economy, they must themselves insure the success of their own program by the inherent strength of their own authority, which in turn must derive from specific requirements of their own political trend and from a deep consciousness of the adequacies of their own declared purposes and sequitur decisions.

121 It was also the consensus of opinion of the interviewed engineers that: in order to plan successfully, there must be more than a singleness of purpose; there must be a dramatically tangible objective.

122 Determination to raise the standard of living or to ‘‘do good’’ in this world lends no specific design guidance, which latter is essential to effective economic planning.

123 Obviously everyone must do a certain amount of eating and sleeping. They have been doing that for a long time and will continue to do so in some degree without any planning.

124 It is the conditions under which the planned-for lives are to be lived, as determined by the tangible objectives, that in turn determine the set of physical principles most expediently to be employed.

125 With a dramatically tangible objective or, better, a progressive series of tangible objectives to be reached and passed as milestones, any sincere planning, no matter how relatively immature, so long as it springs from an educated base, will provide successful survival in some measurable degree superior to any unplanned overall existence.

126 INTERPOLATED CONCLUSIONS:

127 A workable, overall objective of air-minded Brazil upon which to pyramid its successive stages of plan would be:

128 To make Brazil the leading skyport of the world. This, of course, means in effect a network of airports, which, in the world integration trends, are functionally called for by the fact that Brazil will represent the in-creasing air switchyard for (A) all the tropical air traffic which will be advantageously west-bound on the trade-winds from the Near East, Europe, and Africa to the Americas, and (B) north-and south-bound Pan American traffic.

1.

That all highway systems shall radiate from the air and water ports of Brazil to its natural resources. That the initiative of individuals tending to explore for resources may thus be expedited.

2.

That Brazil, because it is unfeasible to maintain closure of its borders, employ that fact to advantage, instead of opposing it ineffectively, and therefore plan to make Brazil the easiest country in the world to come to or leave—in effect a nation-wide, ever-renewing world’s fair. This should help keep their external purchasing power high. Since Brazil’s boundaries touch those of every other South American country except two, community of interest, specifically pertaining to modernization, must be stimulated throughout all South American countries to prevent border animosities—no trade barriers, etc., as with Canada and the U.S.

3.

That they should subdivide the whole geographical area of Brazil into approximately 300 small resources—exploration areas of approximately 10,000 square miles each, efficiently interconnected and balanced for interdependence, so that they may never become politically disunited, i.e., Silver, Cotton States, etc., in U.S..

4.

Each area should contain its own super airport center or city. These would be centered approximately 100 miles from each other in all directions.

129This distance is chosen as representing the practical horizon relay distance for an eventual electron-ics, television, and power network. The means to create this transit system should be established and the Brazilians should apply their surplus human energy to the procurement thereof or there will be no appreciation nor understanding of how or why they became so blessed.

5.

That each area not already searched be explored radiantly from the airports.

6.

That in choosing the appropriate locations of the decentralized industries, and in determining the methods of original development, stockpiling, and production of discovered resources, that the decisions always be predicated on ‘‘work’’ surveys which will determine approximately the most efficient overall expenditure of energy to the total econ-omy.

7.

That by virtue of the manifold, super airport network development, amplifying Brazil’s already established 500 airports, the population will be decentralized from the southeastern coastal area throughout the whole of the country in such a manner that the center of the population will trend towards its geo-graphical center, an essential to stabilization of the economy and to its economic security and its most efficient development energy-wise.

8.

That Brazil must, without vacillation, determine upon the specific mathematical language of its industrialization.

9.

It was the consensus of opinion that they should standardize on the metric system, to which U.S. producer (but not consumer) industries are already adjusted.

10.

That they nominate immediately 60-cycle generation of power. (This choice in power standards will coincide mathematically with requirements of the decimal system of 12, should the latter continue, as indicated by present trend, to be scientifically desirable in Brazil.)

11.

That in order to take advantage of the present state of industrial and scientific advance throughout the world, Brazil rent out to appropriate, skilled U.S. engineering firms the development of all its resources to the raw or stockpile stage. This should in no way be construed to re-fer to their production organizations for domestic consumption. The contracts will be kept in force by virtue of guaranteed schedules of performances; they shall be subject to strict regulation in the matter of labor conditions, interchangeable standards adopted by Brazil, monetary exchange rates, etc., the profits of export of natural resources to be retained in Brazil and ‘‘plowed back’’ into further development of resources.

12.

That all equipment brought in by these concerns shall, if the development leases are terminated, remain in Brazil as part of the nation’s accruing resources; that equipment be admitted duty free.

13.

That the rental for these concessions shall be paid to Brazil not only in (A) United States dollar credits, but also in (B) increments in kind of the respective resources thus developed.

14.

That the schedule of increments shall be such that Brazil’s approximate proportion of world population (i.e., 2%) shall be protected and instrumented in such a manner that the known world quantity of each resource element involved shall never be reduced to less than 2% remaining available above grade in concentrated storage within Brazil. This increment must be provided to Brazil before any product may be taken out of Brazil. Thus, as Brazil’s industrialization develops, no matter what the design configuration may be, its proportion of the world’s chemical element resources naturally occurring within its borders will re-main such that its population may enjoy no less than the average standard towards which the whole world trends, i.e., towards equilibrious per capita distribution of the chemical elements serving in industrial functions enjoyed by an increasing proportion of all population--therefore, towards dynamic equity of all elements per world person in mutually enjoyed services.

15.

That the choice of optimum overall sizes of equipment and choice of process methods, etc., be left entirely to the discretion of the licensees. This will eliminate this always inadequate phase of detail planning from government officials, leaving technical expediency to private initiative.

16.

That Brazil recognize:

17.

That at present the best world source for industrial tools, power, and prime movers is the U.S., by virtue of the most recently overhauled and integrated standards attained by the U.S. economy for war purposes, and to the superior interchangeability of parts developed by the U.S.

18.

The highly developed psychological relationship of the worker and the segregated mass functions of each industrial operation designed into U.S. tools and at present providing the highest overall rate of service or product output per worker, and percentage of overall horsepower effectively distributed per unit operation in the world.

19.

That this initial outfitting at the hands of unit economies shall not be an exclusive, long-time policy, but merely an initial efficiency.

20.

That the number one natural advantages to be thus developed will be those of energy sources of all categories. Increments from these energy developments are to be considered in terms of a continuing energy income, to be rapidly amplified by a concept of energy re-investments for the whole economy. That the power of the Amazon watershed be harnessed and considered by designers as an integrated, moving assembly line for finally carrying forward whatever its major heavy products may be as a feeder gravity assembly line, possibly for mass-production house-assembly line.

21.

That the number one immediately available physical resource to be developed (over and above those already functioning) is that of Brazil’s hard woods.

130That complementary to the hardwood product developments, phenolic resins and other appropriate plastics and adhesives essential to fabrication of compound curvature plywoods be domestically developed to satisfy the manifold structural and container and vehicular body functions hitherto satisfied essentially by the materials used by expediency in much earlier industrial economies.

131That the weight-strength factor of such compound curvature hardwood plywood be recognized as providing an advantage over any of the production steels or aluminum alloys yet developed, while at the same time embodying superior rigidity and other successful features relative to proofness against fire, insects, moisture, corrosion, distortion by heat, etc. Speaking by and large, ‘‘equivalent’’ design solutions in compound plywood weigh 1/6 those of solutions in steel; 1/3 those in aluminum alloys.

22.

That insofar as possible, all domestic requirements be solved through the most modern or even new designs for the employment of these integrated, lightweight plastic products-plywood being in effect a plastic material reinforced by wood-fiber.

23.

That Brazil, being by natural geography the beneficiary of vast annual vegetable increment, determine upon a national fuel policy developed from alcohols derived from vegetable sources, and that vigorous continuing research be maintained in the direction of new vegetable alcohol sources and products.

24.

That a national policy of accelerated universal education be incepted, augmented throughout by the latest moving picture techniques developed for war instruction, particularly relating to translation of theoretical knowledge to technical application.

25.

That individual moving pictures be developed relative to each and every external mechanical function of man: (1) a picture for the best use of all simple tools, then (2) their extension into the machine tools, (3) always compounding the use of the machine tools with the inherent mathematics.

26.

The conversion of all principles of physics and theoretical chemistry into moving picture demonstrations and their further integration through pictures into pilot plant and mass production tool-up processes.

27.

That all primary school work be completely integrated with the vestibule schooling of decentralized local industries, the present war trend be amplified to include their concomitant industrial nurseries, and the whole industrial activity be considered in effect an extension of the old household life, or its subsequent pre-industrial guild life. In effect, that the industrial world and home world are to be realistically integrated to provide improved conditions for both.

28.

That Brazil recognize that the standards of industry are now advanced by prosaic efficiency requirements of the war to realistically include physical conditions so complementary to the human as to make these industries in effect as pleasant if not pleasanter work than hitherto characterizing work organized solely within the home.

29.

International exchange of students in advanced education. Government must subsidize building and equipping technical schools-even subsidizing students if necessary at first.

132 Change: Fix numbering scheme

133 Brazil should consider the leased development services of U.S. engineering firms or any consulting services rendered by the latter to Brazil’s planning authorities to constitute not an admission of weakness on the part of Brazil, but, on the contrary, to represent the availment of a natural scientific principle often employed but never before clearly comprehended as such; i.e., that the function, for instance, of U.S. engineers in Russia was not so much the well-advertised service of providing the original ‘‘know-how,’’ which knowledge Russians could in time have as well gained by traveling abroad, but one of functioning as an unprejudiced third party concerned only with operation of physical laws, who, not even comprehending the local tongue, could unconcernedly break the ice jams of political theory or expediency in an unorthodox planner, thus providing gains that might otherwise be greatly delayed or never attained, because the stranger could break the rules with impunity.

134 As a corollary to this ‘‘relentless robot’’ sort of function—‘‘jamming ahead with the work, irrespective of personal feelings or local precedence’’—there was also available to Russia in the U.S. services the incalculable advantage of a scientific perspective upon their plans, developed from outside the framework of reference, the number one essential of all scientifically determined progress.

135 This perspective ability, gained by foreigners upon any economy, has been well known; for instance, to classical students of government and history. At the turn of the present century, English scholars considered Professor Lowell of U.S.’s Harvard University the greatest living authority on English government and legal precedent. At the same time U.S. authorities recognized Lord Brice of England as the greatest authority on U.S. political history and government.

136 We here in the United States are today receiving, from Japan in particular, a mortally expensive lesson on the subject of the advantage gained by international perspective. Japan’s keen appraisal and selection of the essences of our industrial advantages, from out their settings of concomitant disadvantages—the latter bred out of local cultural habits—provided the means for Japan’s accelerated advance into a challenging position of our economic prerogatives, despite inferior original position in natural resources.

137 In other words, Brazil should confidently expect the U.S. engineers to do in many ways a better job for them than those same engineers in many instances did for Russia. Under the outlined circumstances, Brazil may expect from U.S. an even more up-to-date industrial bill of fare than has ever before been concocted, even for the latest war effort, if they will leave the decisions on technical organization of resources development to those American engineers, reserving for Brazilians themselves the philosophy of consumer utilization of their resources, i.e., complete determination of the design of domestic services and products.

138 BIG ‘‘DON’T’’:

139 Number one error in ‘‘plan’’ principle discovered by U.S. engineers in Russia was that of their ‘‘economic planning.’’ The Russians divided their whole program into ‘‘economic’’ and ‘‘technical’’ categories. The economic was supposed to come first. The economic planners made the mistake of assuming that the configuration of the latest worldwide industries as discovered at that moment would never change. The economists supposed that by analyzing each industry by materials employed that they could deduce the final technical requirements.

140 Theirs was a static viewpoint. They never got to first base.

141 To comprehend their failure in this division one must inspect our own important errors. Many ill-advised public relations councilors in the United Nations [i.e., Allied Nations] thought that their great productive machine could be valved over to production of any product at a moment’s notice, like a soda fountain. Thinking themselves wiser than their engineers, they failed to understand that each product must be tooled from the bottom up; that none of the production setup, even including its buildings, would be subject to conversion to production of other products.

142 It was those non-mechanical-minded political economists who brought us into the costly mess of non-preparedness.

143 It was economic planning of political economists in Russia, completely unversed in theoretical, let alone practical mechanics, that almost lost their cause before it was started. The latter decided, for instance, to mass produce tractors, simply because these fitted the political propaganda need of wild promises to farm labor whose support they wooed. They gave priorities to tractor production materials and great tractor factory buildings before considering acquisition of production tools, and the machine tools which must come ahead of them, and the steel which must come ahead of the latter, etc. The plant went tractorless for years after building completion and finally functioned best as a fortress at Stalingrad. Some said this was because the Russians had slyly planned for it. This was not so. It was just thoroughly over-built on paper, which made it a good fortress. Russia got the tractors all right, in the end, but only after introduction of proper engineering methods at U.S. urging which comprehended the completeness of tooling-up problems.

144 This kind of ‘‘economic planning’’ would, if incepted in 1500 A.D., have assumed that the power utensil industry was the final word of the Almighty on how to solve all equipment problems. It would have started all economic analysis with inspection of the type and content of materials in coaches, sedan chairs, doublets, and have then attempted to say that cumulative totals of lead and tin equivalents represented the desirable priority stockpiling out of which to evolve their forward economy. This accountant type of economist, unfamiliar with mechanics as a dynamic experience, but glib with the classifications, al-ways fails as a planner. Such men were essentially responsible for the progressive failure of the U.S. banking system to anticipate the needs of science-borne industrial evolution. They did not recognize it as a continuing process. They looked upon it as a fixed or finite investment.

145 Amongst the very real accomplishments of U.S. engineers in Russia was their hard-won success in converting the Russians from European professional engineering practices, which conveyed university science and engineering graduates directly to responsible positions. It was unheard of that such graduates should soil their hands.

146 Now, as a result of American engineering intercession, all Russian science, engineering, and technical students must after graduation spend two complete years in out-and-out shop and field jobs as laborers and mechanics’ helpers. As a result of the lessons of error in the five-year plans, U.S. engineers say that if anything the Russians have now carried this practical side of all education too far.

147 In this connection a measured drawing replica pre-pared by technical accountants and draftsmen for Brazil of U.S. industry as is would be as lifeless an affair as was accomplished by the U.S. architectural profession for three-quarters of a century following the Civil War. Their measured copying of the classical ‘‘orders’’ of European architecture was not only inappropriate, wasteful, and useless, but it had the deleterious effect upon U.S. culture of adopting false standards and an inferiority complex regarding its own innate character and ability. The effect of this was to obscure from public recognition the fact that the ‘‘unarchitecturalized’’ engineering forms and buildings springing up to house a new industrial society were the un-presuming and unique architectural form of their own—grander than any before conceived in history. It took the perspective of clever designers in the very Europe from which U.S. professional architects were copying the ‘‘orders,’’ upon the U.S. industrial engineer’s forms, to discern the birth of a healthy new modern architecture. They adopted its form, superficially called it international architecture, and the U.S., still not realizing that they were responsible for the creation, asked these European designers to come over and command their architectural schools.

148 It is necessary that Brazil comprehend distinctly that much of the present industrial configuration of the U.S. economy is that of the nineteenth-century scaffolding work, so to speak, surrounding the net final twentieth-century structure just emerging.

149 In this connection the railroads, for instance, represented a horizontal scaffolding for temporary delivery services to set up an economy that could then graduate to a modern trackless and wireless economy.

150 Brazil can now adopt these emerged features because they are now developed to a prefabricated, know-how-degree as a finished phenomenon, eliminating the necessity of re-enactment of the many errors and experiences developed prior to the present state of overall advance.

151 In this connection it must be remembered that the railroads were first conceived as means to a nationwide real estate development. Because they were so wastefully heavy, they could not pay for their own development except in the terms of the land value increments accruing to the rights of way. They were therefore bonded for half centuries ahead to be financed out of the wealth they would indirectly open up. This expediency, however, served to get the people distributed over the land that they might further explore and develop the resources whose raw or unconcentrated products were then carried great distances to highly centralized and relatively inefficient cramped plants of the industrial east. If technology had been sufficiently advanced, the automobile would have done this much more thoroughly and quickly.

152 By the railroad means of primary decentralization of national personnel, the American center of population was moved westward approximately 500 miles in the course of a century-and-a-half. Russia, with a relatively minor percentage of the per capita railroad development of the trackless land and air transports, moved its center of population one thousand miles eastward in twenty-five years, while at the same time producing in accelerating volume for the present severe war.

153 This proved that the deployment of the people to the maximum of land area development does not spring from an initial transportation advantage provided exclusively by railroads. A modern railroad coach with one passenger weighs 140,000 pounds per passenger. The weight per passenger fully loaded is 3400 pounds. This is greater than the weight per passenger when a 1942 automobile carries only one person; i.e., 3000 pounds. Fully loaded, the average pre-war auto weighs only 600 pounds per passenger. Post-war cars promise to reduce that average to under 300 pounds. Overall, door-to-door weight per passenger mile-per-minute of postwar air transport will provide advantage over the auto or railroad in ratio of better than ten to one.

154 It must be remembered that the railroads were developed to a design level, in the course of a century, competent to carry the structural and mechanical equipment and maintaining consumables of a civilization averaging many times as heavy and several times as bulky per unit of function as that comprising our present-day mechanical environment, and hundreds of times the weight and bulk per unit of function of the now increasingly complete equipment of air-borne armies.

155 Houses and buildings, man’s largest and heaviest category of per capita controlled environment, so far but meagerly developed industrially, have averaged, throughout the 75 years between the Civil War and the beginning of present hostilities, a hundred tons per capita, whereas environment control design now well-developed for airplanes, whose stresses in the air or in landing are many times those to which houses may ever be subjected by hurricane or earthquake, nonetheless make possible man’s comfortable ascent in minutes from tropic heats in the area of 150°F. to stratosphere temperatures of minus 65°F. This new range of environment control built lightly and sinuously into airplane enclosures indicates postwar housing solutions distinctly advanced in every standard of performance, yet weighing only a few hundred pounds per capita. Thus post-war human container weights of possibly one-quarter ton per occupant are to be compared with the lightest wallboard prefabricated structure of 1942, which weighed twenty-five tons (not including foundations), or better than five tons per capita, while the so-called permanent housing structures of 1942, including their foundations, still averaged in excess of 100 tons per capita and will be obsolete in ten years.

156 In order to comprehend the overall foot-poundage significance of transition from a rail-borne to an air-borne economy, it is necessary to envisage this vast change in tonnage per capita inherent in the changing design throughout all services which will be automatically propagated by the mass production industry of such light-weight housing. This industry is certain to take up the slack in world industrial production capacities and know-how created not only by the negative factor of war’s end but by the most positive and dire necessity of rehousing the multi-millions of world’s people, a rehousing whose standards progression will go on to rehouse the better than two billion population. This will be the greatest industry in all history. Brazil, with its Amazonian watershed, its hardwoods, its aluminum, its superior paper-making potentials (for paper will play a major role in the new houses), is in a unique position of advantage to initiate this industry on the scale required. Its network of jungle airport, scientific, tropic stations and exploration centers, and mechanical-chemical prototyping laboratories should divide up the problem.

157 It is further pointed out, to bring this prognostication home, that the highest building rate ever attained in the U.S. provided only 280,000 single family dwellings in one year; 1/4 the number required by annual marriages; 1/6 that required to offset annual disaster losses and complete obsolescence—a rate inadequate to total emergency. Such methods, which failed miserably to keep pace with civilization from 1913 on, obviously could not cope with a totalized world housing problem.

158 Realistic planning on the part of Brazil means taking advantage in advance of this vast accrual of overall foot-poundage saving per unit of designed environment control. If so, it is simply indicated that air transport can be relied upon by Brazil as the major category of direct physical communication. Air communication may be appropriately augmented in descending order of importance by roadways, waterways, cableways, and only in instance of highly specialized requirements, by railways.

159 Emerging from an era of steel surplus, shut-down, and scrap-dumping, in which millions were spent to find out how many things could be built of steel, such business being secured on our ‘‘substitute’’ basis by price and service advantages, we came sharply into the war-caused short-age of steel. It became our job to supply half the world’s inherently wasteful, though efficiently energy designed, steel requirements of war. Despite the strong need, it is only within recent months that steel has been importantly reduced in building, so strong were designing habits and so difficult to change were labor and building codes.

160 In the course of abandoning all-steel buildings, and then steel structural buildings, for reinforced concrete and brick, first steps in real steel economy were taken by the engineer designer, Albert Kahn. These were effected through continuously welded steel reinforcing rods for large spans. Further steel reductions were effected by others through stressed steel wire reinforcement.

161 Opening just this month is the first steel-less bomber production plant of the Douglas Aircraft, designed and erected by Austin Company at Des Plaines, Illinois. Despite increasing spans unknown to prewar industrial requirements of 150 and 200 feet, with straightaways of several thousands of feet, the Austin Company provided a superior truss construction of laminated wood members not only for the roof but for all structural columns. Steel was eliminated even in the flooring, concrete aprons, and footings, without deleterious effect.

162 This was not a compromise. It was better building. The equivalent insurance rates indicated equal fire safety to that of a steel building because the structure was completely equipped with sprinklers linked up by plastic conduit. Practically the only steel used in the plant was for tools and equipment.

163 The tremendous advantage to Brazil, with its hardwoods so eminently suitable for building, as determined by the Ford Company in its Brazilian operations, that is implied in this change of affairs, freeing their industrial growth from any limitation by steel except for use in tools, is evident. It is even indicated that the bases, arbors, and frames of the machine tools themselves, etc., which were formerly made of heavy steel casting and in recent war years were increasingly fabricated out of welded steel sections, could now be expeditiously supplanted in many instances by compound curvature, conical or cylindrical form, phenolic resin laminated hardwood structures. This would eliminate another important category of heavy steel tonnage.

164 STANDARDS:

165 While a great deal of additional information was received from the interviews in connection with ‘‘optimum’’ versus ‘‘elephantine’’ or ‘‘insectine’’ sizes of equipment, to be amplified in production capacity by batteries of such optimum units—such as a thousand-ton blast furnace; 50,000 k.v.a. horizontal generator; grain storage in progressively decentralized 30,000 bushel silos, country-town elevators of half a million bushels and central market elevators of 1, 2, and 3 million bushels, etc.—these are, of course, only dramatic items amongst millions of optimum standards developed to high degree by the war effort.

166 Whether determined by guesswork or hard research, for Brazil to depend solely on the efforts of U.S. engineering concerns themselves, whose whole organization is given to maintenance of the latest stage of advance in such matters, is, in any event, inappropriate. This is the consensus of the interviews.

167 It is worth noting that there has been a long-time trend to increasing decentralization of such industrial operations into the foreign countries by the specialists in such fields, in lieu of the constantly decreasing foreign investment of dollars in uncontrolled operations.

168 SAFETY FACTOR:

169 In spite of a clearly defined trend of the major opinion cited in this report, it is worth noting that Russia’s first five-year plan was characterized also by complete modernization of their existing industrial plant structure. Their 1914 industrial status was approximately that of Brazil’s present stage of industrialization. A broad picture, with ample safety factor for present emergencies and future development, was demonstrated by the Russians, who renovated many old plants and augmented them with much new equipment in European Russia west of the Urals.

170 East of the Urals Russia built its brand-new economy, literally growing its towns out of scientific exploration stations. To this new Russia they shifted their new tools from the European theatre when the enemy advanced and allowed their renovated old industry to take the gaff, essentially liquidating their ‘‘foothold’’ plants of the first five-year operation.

171 In the same way plans for realistically improving Brazil’s present industrial plant may be considered as the stepping-stone of the moment, which Brazil can well afford to scrap when its brand-new scientific industry of the hinterland has gained youthful strength.

172 USE FORCES-DON’T FIGHT THEM:

173 Most urgent scientific admonition towards successfully realizing any plan is to take advantage of each of the trends and to develop them, no matter that it may be in a novel manner, towards the advantage of the populace concerned.

174 There is no reason, for instance, why Brazil should not develop from the start a completely smokeless industrialization providing a high standard of living. The smoke characterizing early industrialization of the North is now a mark of unattended inefficiency to northern engineers—important byproducts are being wasted, environment frictions are being increased.

175 The area of dense jungle-land of Brazil is greater than half of the U.S. It has been penetrated by few of the Brazilians, who, living in the cooler south east, speak of it as the ‘‘green hell of the North.’’ Ford officials say that most Brazilians inquire of them with as much wonder regarding the vast reaches of Brazilian jungles as do New Yorkers regarding the North Pole. Certain it is that the jungle in no way lends itself to the easy, speculative wanderings of homesteaders and prospectors.

176 An entirely different means for deploying the Brazilian population over the whole of their land for purposes of its development must be devised from those which augmented the pioneering of the U.S., Canadian, and Russian hinterlands.

177 Almost so simple that it will be shunned by those who prefer to plan the hard way, in order to take advantage of their hard-earned specialized experience of the past, is the technique now provided by modern warfare that would approach this whole Brazilian jungle-land from above, bombing it open, then parachuting in with well-planned hand equipment and personal protective devices to carve out a complete polka-dot pattern of island airports over the whole country, into which pattern mechanical devices would be fed progressively as parachute deliveries graduate to plane-landed deliveries, etc. Each area would receive its quota of machine tools, drafting equipment, air conditioning, etc., and then its engineering and designing personnel would amplify the hold on the jungle. This ‘‘island’’ network of ‘‘tropical research and development stations’’ should form the nuclear structure for the new Brazil.

178 Dramatically emphasized by its absence was any discussion on the part of American engineers of aid to Russia in establishment of communications services, beyond Russian consultations in New York with the Radio Corporation of America. The wireless had supplanted almost completely the wired technique of early American communication. Russia was able to adopt an electronic stage of wireless communication without re-exploring the arduous step-by-step advances in communication by wired means. In the same way it is quite as practical for Brazil to consider accelerated development of its lands by an essentially trackless scheme. They will be able to buy, post-war, if not later manufacture for their own account, thousands of helicopters, which would make this form of functional exploration highly effective and easy to integrate.

179 INEXHAUSTIBLE WEALTH OF SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLE:

180 Distinguishing characteristic of this digest is that it takes heed of the war’s number one lesson, i.e., the advantage of employing science to satisfy needs stated as functions. Any economy, irrespective of the relative quantities of traditionally esteemed elements in its physical resources inventory, can outperform, per capita, any other economy in direct proportion to the degree of the initial control in planning conceded to science by politics-that is, ‘‘outperform’’ as measured in terms of services and satisfactions produced per potential consumer.

181 That Germany will probably be smothered by the Allied war effort should not be allowed to obliterate this lesson. The United Nations’ already developed fuel and hydraulic generation flow and potential manpower, as well as its physical resources in most of the traditionally important economic categories, outranked Germany’s initial inventory by one hundred to many hundreds percent. Advancing the physical odds constantly, which is what the continued war effort adds up to, does not change the fact that Germany’s operational set-up of overall scientific ingenuity forced the world race committee (in order to maintain its prerogative) into repeatedly calling for new run-offs, at the same time rearranging the handicap until, in a finally ‘‘recognized heat,’’ at last won by the United Nations, the handicap ratio was equivalent to starting Germany’s horse at scratch in a one-mile mark. And because in the end sheer preponderance of physical advantage volumetrically smothers the scientifically engineered combustion, that blanketing must never be allowed to blind the world to the technical significance inherent in the demonstration. This is it: by discovering the sources of energy available (and every major economy has a scientifically potential superabundance); by decentralizing and mobilizing parts fabrication and arranging a shifting foci of assembly to adjust to expediency, production may start with any one of a number of alternative raw sources of the atmosphere, vegetation, water, metallic ores, woods, etc.

182 Concentrated energy in stabilized potentials, in the form of coal and oil, are great conveniences and represent a head start, but no more than that, to science. Thus is independence of immobile structure, tracked, wired, localized, frozen investment accomplished. Thus the economy divests itself of slavery to obsolescence. Thus is energy constantly remounted to provide the human intellect with the greatest hitting power, or an over-alert morphology.

183 Scrap elements everywhere, even in the form of bombed equipment and fired munitions, only represent an increased abundance of highly concentrated raws, ever more widely distributed. Scrap, actual or potential, i.e., in junkyard or in obsolete building, machine, or fixtures, it must be realized, is a ‘‘mine above ground’’ in highly concentrated forms of the original chemical elements which had been ‘‘reworked’’ by nature many times before man ‘‘worked’’ them. The ninety-two ‘‘elements’’ are never ‘‘secondhand.’’ They are primary ‘‘electrical behavior’’ patterns. Energy to rework them is plentiful. They should always be rearranged in their most efficiently useful condition to the service of man. This is pure mathematics. Any evolutionary outcropping of the newer, more efficient arrangement can never be long suppressed.