"Toward a Liberatory Technology" as well an inage of techno-peasants in a
golden age of humanity.

 A recent document from the state of California Solar Business Office,
 titled RENEWABLE ENERGY AND BIOREGIONS: A NEW CONTEXT FOR PUBLIC POLICY,
 shows the potential for putting social ecology into practice in the planning
 and implementation of energy use. The pamphlet develops the bio-regional concept
 as a basis for public planning of energy use and concludes with a comprehensive
 action plan which includes local control, decentralized power sources, develop-
 ment only within the natural carrying capacity of the region, and clear goals
 and timetables for the move to renewable sources of energy.

 While this document reveals the potential for change in public policy
utilizing the principles of social ecology, a major research effort "in the
national interest" should be directed to the establishment of a human community -
viable and well documented designed and operating in a bio-region on the
principles of social ecology. To this end, I would propose regional, long-term
study areas in several significantly different bio-regions. Each would be
carefully studied by a broad-based community in the area consistent with the
parameters of the bio-region. Each researcher would live in and be a functional
part of the community to be established in each study area.

 I believe only through the establishment of such NSF-funded "research vessels"
can we truly begin to approach the necessary interactive study-implementation-
evaluation process necessary for a significant breakthrough in this critical
area. Clearly, incremental change of the society at large will be the only way
broadly based change will take place, but the successful functioning of these
Columbias could galvanize the imagination of the nation, in a way comparable to
the flight of the space shuttle. I believe we need data on the nature of the
relationships between the ecological parameters of a given area and the social
organization which can develop, and we need to create a platform to examine
differences in substance between community life using these decentralized forms
and existing social forms. But more than data, we need a positive actualization
of the potential for harmonizing humanity and nature, a reality that people can
see, touch, believe in.