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nationalism and progress—with a capital P—would have seemed quaint. Herman Daly, a radical economist, who was very prominent in the alternative energy circles of the early 1970s, attacked the very notions of economic growth. “As [another economist] so bluntly put it in defending growth: ‘Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable,’” Daly told a Senate committee in 1973. “We are addicted to growth because we are addicted to large inequalities in income and wealth. What about the poor? Let them eat growth! Better yet, let them feed on the hope of eating growth in the future.”8

Daly ended up being quoted by Amory Lovins, Hazel Henderson, and a host of other less prominent environmental sources. Even in the late 1990s “fourth-wave environmentalist” Leslie Paul Thiele could write in his book Environmentalism for a New Millennium, “Environmentalists often find themselves isolated in their reluctance to join the popular celebration of economic growth.”9

Thus, although the new green technologists don’t fit well into the standard stories of the environmental movement, this book outlines a different set of renewable energy entrepreneurs who were driven by goals much closer to Doerr’s than Daly’s. In fact, perhaps the first green futurist, John Etzler, imagined the machines and society that could form “the utopian origins of economic growth.”10

chapter 2

The First Green-Technology Futurist

JOHN ETZLER WAS PROBABLY CRAZY, but not so much more than your average futurist. A friend of John Roebling, who built the Brooklyn Bridge, Etzler weaves in and out of history in the first half of the nineteenth century, showing up in odd locales and never quite being in the right place at the right time. We know him best for a slim, cockeyed volume he wrote in the 1830s called The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men. It came with two afterwords addressed to President Andrew Jackson and Congress. Filled with mental sketches for tremendous machines that would harness the wind, waves, and sun for human purposes, the book rests on an insight blooming with Industrial Revolutionary fervor that has been repeated a million times over by solar advocates:1

The substance of this book is—

1. It is proved that there are powers at the disposal of man, million times greater than all human exertions could effect hitherto. These powers are derived—

a. From wind

b. From the tide

c. From the waves of the sea, caused by wind

d. From steam, generated by heat of the sun, by means of concentrating reflectors or burning mirrors of simple contrivance

The sun and wind and waves represented an infinite power. With such incredible energy stores, the sky was, literally, the limit for Etzler’s imagination. Written at a time when oil hadn’t ever powered an engine and coal use was concentrated mostly in England, his rabid enthusiasm led him to imagine, futuristlike, many components of the high-energy society we live in: plastic-based product culture, industrialized food manufacture, apartments with elevators and air conditioning, synthetic fibers, and huge vehicles that would not need rails to go forty miles per hour. Sounds familiar, right?

“Etzler designed not a world to come, but the world that came,” the historian Steven Stoll concluded. Stoll locates Etzler’s peculiar prescience in “his sense that human happiness would be understood as the application of technology to convenience and leisure.”2

With the right energy sources, of course we’d have anything an able mind or a marketing executive could conjure!

Etzler’s thinking was heavily influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the preeminent German philosopher of the day. Hegel believed human history had an arrow, that it was going someplace, that it was progressive. Even better, the world, as directed by the human mind, was slowly being perfected. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would then turn