1975 with the first publications related to the space colony concept. This was a proposal to build gigantic satellites to house hundreds and even thousands of persons as permanent residents in a space industrial system that would construct solar power satellites from raw material obtained from the moon and nearby asteroids (2). This extravaganza of technological ideas coincided with the emergence of now familiar features of the political culture of the 1970s: the energy crisis, broad public involvement in policy issues, the environmental movement and the “small is beautiful” idea. Energy for the most part had lain in the recesses of American political consciousness prior to the oil embargo of 1973. Supply was relatively automatic and at reasonable cost; hence there was little felt need for active public involvement. The shock of abrupt scarcity and high prices however made energy a main course on the table of national policy overnight, and the environment for public discourse was essentially negative. Something had gone wrong; the consumer was suddenly at a disadvantage and the nation vulnerable to hatreds internal to the Middle East. The energy supply system and its institutions were instantly made the center of hostile attention. A hallmark of the system was large institutions, be they multinational oil corporations or electric power companies. Concurrently, disillusionment with the Vietnam War had spawned broad public participation in policy issues which manifested itself in activity ranging from street demonstrations to forcing intense Congressional scrutiny of Executive actions. As a result, some policy items requiring highly specialized knowledge that at one time would have been handled dispassionately by a relative handful of professionals became the focus of citizen interests groups and emotionally charged discussion. This phenomenon particularly touched public policy related to high technology. This stemmed in part from the very visible destruction caused by U.S. high technology weaponry in an unpopular war. The negative view of technology in this case spread to the other areas and generally made high technology questions candidates for citizen group activity. Intimately tied to technology issues was the birth of the environmental movement. The origins of the movement in the latter 1960s are related in part to a Thoreauvian theme that periodically re-emerges politically in American culture and manifestations of large scale pollution in certain sections of the country. The environmental movement include a wide range of opinion, from pragmatic solutions for local pollution problems to tum-the-clock-back pastoral living philosophies. It was the quintessence of broad public involvement in policy issues and was especially active with energy and technology questions. In approaching these questions sectors of the environmental movement adopted the “small is beautiful” concept which originated from the work of Ernst Schumacher (3). Its central thesis was that the rise of large scale and complex institutions to meet energy and other human needs was fundamentally unnecessary, exploitive and antidemocractic. It disrupted basic human relationships with nature and the individual's control over his or her destiny. Simplicity, small scale, conservation, and symbiosis with the forces of nature were hallmarks of the “small is beautiful” concept. In regard to energy the concept called for conservation and the use of renewable resources as opposed to the depletion of nonrenewable sources such as fossil fuels. A catalog of technological devices was suggested which utilized the daily heating of the sun and were in the hands of individuals or small communities. The devices became known as “soft technology” and the older system of large scale energy supply known as “hard technology” (4). Not surprisingly the Solar Power Satellites (SPS) became emeshed into the general debate of the latter 1970s. There was a schizophrenic quality in the discussions.
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