16. Homage to Windmills

Last summer, to get away from suffocating smog, I drove my family west from Washington, D.C., to Santa Fe, New Mexico. As we crossed the country, our car radio kept us informed about the ordeal of the big cities and their machines. Around us, however, the Great Plains told a far different story. Above all, we marvelled at the sight of working windmills, creaky sentinels of a bygone age. And the contrast left me with windmills on my mind.

Windmills are much, much more than relics. They are symbols of sanity for a world that is increasingly hooked on machines with an inordinate hunger for fuel and a prodigious capacity to pollute.

Ecologically, the windmill is one of man's few perfect devices. It harnesses a completely free resource to pump water under conditions that respect the laws and limits of nature. Consider this contrast: In Arizona, western Texas and many other places of the arid South-west ranchers have long used electric pumps to deplete ground water stored up over the centuries by geologic processes. The costs of such exploitation are now tragically evident. But ranchers who are still using windmills face no such crisis. They are working with nature. And therein lies the message of windmills.

Like water-wheels and sailing-boats, windmills have Zero Environmental Impact (ZEI). They remind us that science can save us over the long haul only if it designs a new generation of machines that come much closer than their predecessors to achieving ZEI.

The automobile is the antithesis of the windmill. It symbolizes our hell-bent rush to increase production, convenience and mobility, with little thought for the trade-offs in fouled air, congested cities and highways, and hundreds of thousands of automobile accidents each year. Like so much of our present industrial technology, the automobile works at cross purposes with life.

I certainly do not propose a return to a windmill economy. In fact, there is no way for us to achieve a low-pollution technology overnight—and Zero Environmental Impact has been an impossibility for human societies ever since they began hunting and burning on the savanna plains of a million years ago. Belatedly, however, we are beginning to realize that our technological skills must be bent toward an accommodation with natural laws—laws such as the recycling of materials. We now see efforts to ban the use of long-lived pesticides, to remove phosphates from detergents, to take the lead out of petrol, to clean up or completely replace the internal-combustion engine. One hopes that these steps mark the beginning of a historic reversal of our "raid-and-waste" style of development.

As I contemplate my family's trip, I cannot help but wonder if I, like that dreamer Don Quixote, have merely been tilting at windmills. Is it only nostalgia that makes me and millions of other Americans hope for a more modest technology? I do not think so. The issue is nobler than survival. It is whether we can equip ourselves to live truly decent lives. If we are to meet this challenge, our inventors and technicians will have to pay homage to windmills. They will have to build us machines that use, not abuse, the unearned gifts of nature.