Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [8]
Transplanted to the American soil, these ideas took the form of utopian adventures. Dozens of them sprung up all over the nation, but particularly in what was then thought of as the West: Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.3 While wages were rising,4 disturbing things were happening to the people who were paid that money. The average life expectancy of even native-born white American males started to drop around 1800 and did not recover fully until the 1940s. Beginning around 1830 children were, on average, a little shorter than their predecessors, a sign that the extra cash in their pockets was not improving their health and well-being.5 Incredible dislocations were beginning to occur in American society, and many could see that these changes were just the start of a much greater movement.
Anxiously looking over at the industrial towns of Great Britain, Americans saw coal-burning centers like Manchester and London shrouded with a permanent cloud of smoke and soot.6 The working classes of the cities were unhealthy and dying, with their children toiling in factories. Quantitative standard-of-living measures aside, the unique horrors of the British cities of the early industrial period were well known.7 The factories were the world of Oliver Twist and his trembling voice, asking, “Please, sir, I want some more.”8
The American utopias were direct antecedents for Etzler’s ideas. In the year he wrote his book, Etzler spent time at the German-Christian utopianist George Rapp’s community “Economy.” He also hung around New Harmony, Indiana, a thirty thousand–acre township that Rapp had sold to the wealthy British factory reformer Robert Owen. Owen’s experiment, like many others of the time, failed miserably, devolving into petty squabbles in only a few years. Many of these early socialist communes were detailed in 1870 by John Humphrey Noyes, himself a founder of an oddly successful utopia with an open-marriage policy.
Noyes, like Etzler, found the communes’ insistence on working the land both boring and wrong-headed.9 They were back-to-the-landers, not manufacturers. “Almost any kind of a factory would be better than a farm for a Community nursery,” he complained. He mocked the lack of technology on the communes of the day, lamenting that “the saw-mill is the only form of mechanism” often seen. “It is really ludicrous to see how uniformly an old saw-mill turns up in connection with each Association, and how zealously the brethren made much of it; but that is about all they attempted in the line of manufacturing. Land, land, land, was evidently regarded by them as the mother of all gain and comfort,” Noyes complained.10
Etzler agreed. Surveying the social utopian scene of the 1830s, Etzler found something lacking: proper attention to the role of energy. If they wanted to change the world, he contended, the communitarians would need power—and lots of it. Coal did not appeal to him as an energy source, as he saw “industrialism as a vicious energy monopoly. Nothing but the cost of coal dictated that the Many would sweat for wages in factories owned by the Few.”11 Renewable energy, however, fell everywhere on everyone. It was an unlimited, democratic source of power.
In the way that Marx (another Hegelian) believed the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie and remnants of aristocracy, Etzler believed that this energy source would displace fossil fuels and human power. All that was needed was to change the technology that humans used to power their civilization. In other words, change the energy system and we could change the way that men related to each other. Evil would ebb and perfection would rush into the society.
So before industrialization had fully washed up on the shores of America, Etzler had hit upon the pursuit of a more perfect power. The wind and the sun and the waves, Etzler wrote, “are more than sufficient