For example, it was not the machine technology of the harpoon cannon or
 factory ship that spell-ed the doom of the great whales, but the social
 technology or mercantilism (Nolfi, 1979). Thus, even though aboriginal
 subsistence fisheries using hand harpoons and oar-driven boats have apparently
 had a sustained relationship with whale populations for thousands of years,
 the fishery for the Biscayne Right whale collapsed in the 12th century after
 less than 100 years using the same hardware. The institution of the commodity
 market for whale oil created an exploitation pressure greater than the
 reproductive capacity and resilience of the species. One suspects that
 industrial society tends to seek primarily machine technological solutions,
 post-industrial society tends to seek social and intellectual solutions.

 Change and choice, then, are essential elements in the implementation of
concepts and technologies to produce a more harmonious relationship between
humanity and the natural world than we presently enjoy. Cultural patterns,
beliefs, value systems, mythology, aesthetics, all influence the adoption of
concepts which may have a good scientific basis. Crayfish farmers in Louisiana
have been slow to adopt the practice of liming ponds, even though the data
says their production will triple, because crawfish have always been lagniappe,
the little something extra for nothing (Nolfi, 1979). Economics and cultural
aesthetics, myth, and the "persistence" factor seem to be more important at
this point in time than kilocalorie counting in decision making.

 Feelings are a very real aspect of appropriate technology. How making
something that allows you to be self-sufficient, or at least to partially move
to take control over your life, makes you feel may be the determinant in the
decision-making process. Thus, the process of setting research goals and
criteria, necessary to develop a program to help us move toward more harmonious
relations between humanity and nature needs to include perspectives broader
than those traditionally relegated to "the sciences."

 Northrup Frye's recent address to the AAAS convention, titled "The Bridge
of Language," makes it clear that the nexus of human endeavor is social
concerns and to this end, human activity, science, philosophy, etc. are
directed. A research agenda for social ecology needs to be inclusive -
generous in its conception and certainly not value free. Thus, poetry which
attempts through description and metaphor to convey nuance, feeling, emotion -
becomes, or at least is potentially, part of appropriate technology. It may
be the only way to convey essential aspects of criteria which differentiate
one technology from another.

 Industrial technology is always represented as "labor-saving" and
salubrious when compared with rawboned appropriate technology alternatives.
Yet Michael Sahlein's STONE AGE ECONOMICS indicates that pre-industrial hunter/
gatherers and early agriculturalists spent most of their lives in what
Huizinga (1970) would call "play": dreaming, telling stories, participating
in ritual, making art. The political scientist Kalinowski believes that
domestication of plants and animals is the product of leisure rather than
adversity, and I am inclined to a similar origin for aquaculture. One begins
to understand the comment by Levi-Strauss that human civilization has been a
long decline since the Neolithic. Northrup Frye sees social concerns directed
toward a human society liberated to play-creativity released in a harmonious
world. This echoes the ends of social ecology presented in Bookchin's essay


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