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His interest is not atavistic. He was not interested in using the stuff of olden times but rather creating stuff that solved problems humans have always and will always have. Explicitly contrasting them with computers, Baer wrote, “Another recent tool—the vise grip—could have been made and appreciated 100 years ago after a few moments’ demonstration and explanation. How deep into history could you carry an idea and have those who saw it say, ‘Of course, why didn’t I think of that?’”3

For Baer and many appropriate technologists, tools were the permanent technologies. They were the perfect expression of a solution to a material problem—and they were measured by the length of their use, not by their newness. In answer to the question historian Carroll Pursell raised about what, exactly, appropriate technology was appropriate for or to, the answer was: all humans, regardless of their position on the gradient of time. The attitude goes right to the heart of the difference between “tool-freaks” and technologists. Tool makers were after timeless things; technologists were after new things made for the perpetual right-now.

Discussion of tools and “access to tools,” the goal of the Whole Earth Catalog, dominated thinking about appropriate technology. The new field was a unique synthesis of “unbridled technological optimism” with the desire to create systems that would not enthusiastically destroy ecological systems. Even technology-phobic communards “enthusiastically embraced” tools. “What was so appealing about Whole Earth for intentional community builders was the blending of the primitive and technological, the time-tested traditions alongside the new wave,” wrote historian Andrew Kirk, author of Counterculture Green.4

James T. Baldwin, Whole Earth editor who was one of the most important practitioners of appropriate technology, explicitly argued against any sort of rush to return to old practices, lamenting that so many people began to turn away from new stuff and ideas. In the introduction to the book he coedited with Stewart Brand, Soft-tech, Baldwin wrote,

Technological excess begat antitechnological excess.... There are people who champion a return to the ways of our forefathers, but this has not turned out to be much of an answer. Our grandparents were in many ways worse than ourselves. They saw forests as endless and topsoil beyond measure.... There are lessons in the past, but we shouldn’t and can’t go back.5

What direction should American society take, then, if not backward to our forefathers nor forward into the techno-future? Baldwin and Brand offered their own take on appropriate technology, hoping “alive, resilient, adaptive, maybe even lovable”6 tools would beat out the old, ossifying power plants. The goal was to make technology more natural, but others had their own formulations. E. F. Schumacher, for example, who was incredibly influential, railed against “ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment.” Instead, he argued, “wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.”7

Schumacher added another requirement to this new appropriate technology: “suitability for small-scale application.” Drawing on the ideas of political scientist Leopold Kohr, he wrote that “small-scale operations, no matter how numerous, are always less likely to be harmful to the natural environment than large-scale ones, simply because their individual force is small in relation to the recuperation of nature.”8 Although one wonders if he was familiar with the American automobile when he wrote those lines, the desire for small-scale, “organic” technologies shot through environmentalists who were most interested in energy issues.

A set of intertwined beliefs came to circulate among these alternative energy proponents. Technology critics