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Preface ii - Infinite Development or Impending Crisis.Infinite development! Horrors! - you may say. You may interject and ask: Have we not all been told for the last several decades, by the most prominent of the elite, that large scale development is bad, that industrialization stinks, that mankind has to "lower" its impact on the planet in order to make life on the planet sustainable? We have been told that we need the opposite to industrial development, that we have begun the post-industrial era of environmentalism combined with a service economy and information oriented societies. The presently aimed for utopia is anything but an era of infinite development! Indeed, mankind has been told all this, and it has lived by the degree of post-industrialism, but it has been a murderous degree. The consequences are still being suffered. They are nothing less than genocidal. Nor has the degree, and its enactment, saved the planet. The opposite is true. Poverty oriented (primitive) economies are highly destructive to the land. If there had been no technological progress and large scale industrialization during the last 150 years, there would not be a single tree standing on the face of the planet. It would all have been hacked down for firewood and building materials. The creation of numerous, high-tech, industrially produced materials has taken the pressure of the forests as a resource. In fact, most modern buildings cannot possibly be constructed out of wood. Likewise, the industrialization of electric energy and natural gas has turned the stinking fog bound cities of the past into clean places to live. Everything that society now regards as essential for its quality of life has been the result of extensive industrialization and development. Nor do industries pollute, as the opponents to development insist. Poverty pollutes. Industrial pollution is the mark of what might be called investment starved development, which is focused on looting, where everything is done on the cheap in order to maximize profits rather than to do advance the civilization of society. Free-trade competition between nations of unequal wage-cost production, and unequal pollution control standards, causes the destruction of high-standard industries in developed countries and the creation of stinking industrial hell-holes in poor countries; thus creating an economic shift that creates more pollution, rather than solving pollution. Pollution is the mark of neglect. Advanced industrialization improves the quality of life and the environment of living. The problem is, that this goal is not on the agenda, today. Modern technological advances and industrialization also have had a progressive impact on agriculture to the degree to which it has been pursued. High-yield plant types, together with efficient fertilizers and pesticides have increased production more than ten fold, in some cases, over primitive types of agriculture. The entire planet would likely have to be covered with fields (which is impossible anyway) in order to feed the present world population, were it not for these improvement. And there is lots of room for improvement, yet. Some say that high tech industrialization takes jobs away. This myth is based on a grave deception. Nothing apart from this could be further from the truth. It is the shutdown of industrialization that has created the debt economy, and unemployment, which are now killing people with increasing poverty. Many of the world's most advanced industries have become rust-buckets, or have been converted into amusement parks, all under the dictates of free-trade and financial austerity policies that are strangely accepted by society. People are told that industrialization is not needed, but this amounts to an admission of mental blindness or outright lying. The world is presently grossly underdeveloped. Its infrastructures, where some exist at all, are inadequate and decaying. The water systems of nearly every major city in the West are leaking like a sieve. Some systems are over 120 years old and are far past their design life. Bridges and other civil engineering structures are suffering the same fate. Some have become actually dangerous to use. Traffic, in most cities, is chaotic, and is a hindrance to economic activity rather than a supporter of it. The bulk transport systems that are presently employed are probably the worst possible. The still ongoing regression in efficient high speed rail transport service has forced much of the nations' cargo onto trucks, which now clog up its highways. And this is happening in what we call the industrialized world. The people in rest of the world are much worse off. They don't even have a transportation system, electric energy grids, a railway system that is worth mentioning, or large scale water supply systems, highways, and bridges. || - page index - || - chapter index - || - Exit - ||
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