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This chapter talks about liberation technology as a term for a situated theory of communitarian tool-use, developed in the activist and philosophical work of Seneca leader John C. Mohawk, also known as Sotsisowah. Discrete from other ways of thinking about machines and freedom, liberation technology more closely resembles the techniques and tools of what Maria Mies and Carol DeChellis Hill, in very different registers, called a politics of subsistence. When politics of technology and survival are seen as largely local, there remain ways to flourish at a subsistence level on the outer edge of the technologized world. Liberation technology grants that there is both value and risk in having nothing, or almost nothing. It names the basic material and collective strategy that can facilitate a transformation of shared life even under extremely exploited conditions. It is a hybrid concept, coined by Mohawk in a speech before the UN in 1977, which synthesizes liberation theology with appropriate technology, and might lead to unexpected kinds of shared belief and action.

This chapter examines the World Health Organization's (WHO) policies that attempted to regulate the behavior of multinational corporations in developing countries. In particular, it discusses three WHO initiatives that were in line with the principles of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and that were vigorously opposed by pharmaceutical companies: a model list of essential drugs, intended to help developing countries to purchase drugs rationally; programs supporting the local manufacturing of drugs; and international codes of conduct for regulating the marketing practices of the infant formula sector and the pharmaceutical sector. The chapter shows how the WHO leadership applied the logic of appropriate technology and technology transfer to the issue of drugs in a way that would also make it acceptable to the pharmaceutical industry.

This chapter discusses how radio activists formed close and complex relationships with radio technology. It argues that they constructed geek, activist, and countercultural identities around radio technology. Rather than existing as stable or inherent categories, these identities functioned as social tools; they were resources on which the activists drew. These identities shaped how activists formulated meaning around activism and technical work, with varying consequences. They were also used to enrollmembers of the public into media activism and technical engagement. The chapter introduces the radio station “barnraising,” a major site of symbolic practice for the radio activists in which activists and volunteers worked to put a new station on the air over a weekend.

Home and household practices have become a normatively appealing foundation for environmentalism in the past couple decades. It is at the root of many calls for environmental justice and has been contrasted to the “trouble with wilderness.” While many regard “home” as an alternative form of environmentalist rhetoric, it is this attention to practices in actual home that now seems ascendant. Yet the question of how to conceptualize household practices is fraught. On the one hand, they have been characterized as generating obligations of citizenship. On the other, they have been criticized as the individualization of responsibility associated with consumerism. This chapter argues that viewing the home and household as a prominent site for social reproduction can help us to better understand both their possibilities and limitations as a basis for social criticism and change. Lessons are drawn from the author’s involvement with a decidedly unconventional “home” – the Campus Center for Appropriate Technology (CCAT) – a decades-long student-run experiment in sustainable living at his university.

Chapter 2 contextualizes planetary improvement within the rise of business environmentalism over the latter half of the 20^th century. Through the re-appropriation of well-established critiques of the industrial economy, any lingering anti-systemic orientations (as well as any interest in appropriate technologies) are recast in terms of a creative, Schumpeterian entrepreneurialism focused on deploying clean technologies at a planetary scale. The surprisingly obtuse concept of “impact” reveals an emotional and aspirational force underlying participants’ commitment to cleantech entrepreneurialism. Impact refers both to the possibility of socio-ecological disruption, or the ability to make an impact-beyond-capital, as well as the possibility of market disruption, or the ability to make an impact-as-capital. In a series of vignettes, startup entrepreneurs, consultants, and investors explain why they do what they do, how their work is entrepreneurial, and why they have not chosen to pursue four distinctly less impactful alternatives: boring industries represent participation in the status quo of a not-clean business-as-usual; small business represents a scale of operation that is inconsequential relative to planetary-scale problems; hippies represent the irrational excesses of “too much” environmentalism detached from practical business sense; and Wall Street represents a narrow focus on money-making that blinds people to important nonfinancial considerations.

This chapter presents examples of innovative technologies for low-income and disadvantaged people. Such innovations often offer unattractive prospects for profit and require collaboration between private industry and governments or nonprofit organizations or foundations. Most innovations, from cars to computers, are first marketed to high-end consumers and later trickle down as lower-cost products for mass markets. For orphan technologies like a malaria vaccine or fly- and odor-less latrines, there is no “Cadillac” product to amortize research and market development costs, but focused R & D can produce simple, cheap, effective products. Sometimes, an existing product can be repurposed, as when a cell phone becomes a tool for mobile finance or a livestock deworming medicine becomes a cure for human elephantiasis. Other times, a brand-new intervention is needed, as with smokeless, fuel-efficient wood stoves. Big problems require big programs. The CGIAR supports a worldwide, near-billion-dollar-a-year network of international institutes for research on smallholder agriculture in low-income countries.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of broadcasting and regulation relevant to the birth of the Low-Power FM service in 2000. It discusses technical and political formations that preceded LPFM activism, including “microradio” and pirate broadcasting, Indymedia and the anticorporate globalization movement, ham radio, citizens band (CB) radio, and the Appropriate Technology movement. It introduces the research site, the Prometheus Radio Project, and discusses their activities in the period addressed in the book, which included combating media consolidation, pursuing legislation to expand LPFM, and building new LPFM radio stations.

Despite an accelerating pace of growth over the past decade, apart from China most low- and middle-income economies have seen an increase in the number of people living below $1.25 per day. The development agenda therefore necessarily has to engage with the trajectory of growth. One important determinant of the structure of growth is the path of innovation. The locus of global innovation in the twentieth century meant that the bulk of innovation was inappropriate for meeting the needs of the poor. However, a series of disruptive factors are nudging innovation in new and potentially redistributive directions, as appropriate technologies will increasingly be driven by the market in developing countries rather than by non-profit organizations, especially if policies will help to speed up the diffusion of new efficient appropriate technologies, hence contributing the adoption of pro-poor growth strategies in low- and middle-income economies.

The final two chapters examine those factors that constrained the adoption of new technologies and the assimilation of new knowledge and expertise. Despite the centrality of technological change after 1870, it was not universal, uncontested, or unilinear. Technology and investment capital spilled over Mexico’s borders and washed across the landscape; in some places, this inundation settled and pooled; in other places, it evaporated and left few marks. Chapter 7 examines the obstacles to technological change: those factors that delayed the adoption of new technologies, that impaired their use or productive capacity in Mexico, or that prevented their adoption altogether. It focuses especially on the economic and social contexts for new technologies imported into Mexico and the ease or challenge of fitting within new markets and “production ecologies.”

The paradigms in US legacy sectors have implications beyond America’s borders. Most poor, developing countries lack the technological and innovative capacity to strike out in fundamentally new directions, and largely accept the direction of innovation charted by the technologically advanced countries. In agriculture, the availability of input-intensive technology helped to shape the Green Revolution that saved developing countries from hunger and starvation, although at some cost to their environment. US industrial agriculture continues to impose itself beyond its borders, pushing developing nations to approaches less suited to local conditions. In energy, cheap, often subsidized fossil fuel and readily available technologies based on cheap energy have displaced labor in low-wage economies when simpler technologies might have been appropriate had they been available. The rise of India and China as innovative developing countries, however, may increase the number of innovations specifically directed at the needs of poor countries.

This final chapter explores ideas previously taken up and relates them to political theory, democratic deliberative politics in particular. Up to this point, these ideas have been presented as theoretical contributions to both participatory governance and the relocalization movement. The discussion here seeks to extend the theoretical perspective more specifically to a number of important but relatively neglected traditions in democratic political theory, especially as they relate to ideas taken from the writings of Bookchin and Sale. This involves the theories of associative democracy, insurgent democratic politics, and participatory or democratic expertise. These theoretical orientations are provided as steps in search of a broader environmental political theory that can address the democratic struggles that are anticipated during the socio-ecological climate crisis ahead.

In the 1960s and 70s an ad hoc collection of countercultural designers united to celebrate the partnership of made and born, science and craft, nature and culture working toward an early version of the sustainability ethic. They chronicled their achievements and fostered their networks through a series of influential publications including, Shelter, The Whole Earth Catalog, Sunspots, and the California Water Atlas. These efforts represent a creative cohort’s important effort to use their academic scientific training and technical expertise outside the confines of the university or corporations. This ecologically inclined group of countercultural bricoleurs worked to revive an earlier tradition of design science and eco-pragmatism to help expand environmental culture beyond politics, aid green design enthusiasms, and foster “natural capitalism.”

This chapter examines the visioneering of John Todd and the New Alchemy Institute. In the 1970s this group of counterculture scientists and back to the land advocates founded their own scientific institute on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Merging scientific research with a compelling vision of a sustainable “space ship earth,” the Institute straddled the supposed boundary between NASA research and countercultural rebellion. Guided by their charismatic leader, Dr John Todd, the New Alchemists deftly drew financial and political support from the Canadian government and prestigious institutions while working closely with Stewart Brand and the appropriate technologists associated with the Whole Earth Catalog. The group used this support to build its iconic Arks and to pioneer green architecture and aquaponics on Cape Cod and Prince Edward Island. The work of Todd and his New Alchemists highlights the intimate relationship between advanced techno-science, countercultural visions of social transformation, and activist state which made the dizzying experimentation of the long 1970s possible.

Holograms increasingly inhabited new cultural niches that were at odds with their origins. Competing notions about appropriate science and applications of holograms fostered distinct communities in new milieus. This chapter argues that these currents liberated holograms to play a more engaging role in popular culture over the following two decades. Schools of holography sprang up during the early 1970s to teach hologram-making. Instead of practising a tame version of modern science, these explorations encouraged reinvention of science for new purposes. This social environment favoured holograms of new types, uses and symbolic meanings. From grade schools to college, holograms also began to infiltrate conventional teaching. Schools began to incorporate hologram experiments to stimulate students and inspire technical careers, just as promoters of earlier technologies had done. Technical hobbyist networks sprouted, spawned by courses, enthusiasts’ newsletters and exhibitions.

Over a billion people don’t have access to a safe water supply. And a third of the world’s population lacks basic sanitation with the result that more than 2 billion human beings are afflicted with infections that result in diarrhea and other diseases. Tens of millions of them die every year. Improving this state of affairs poses a massive challenge. Take sanitation: What if we could provide basic facilities for all those people over the next 20 years? You’d have to hook them up to the sewer system at the rate of half a million a day. We know how to install individual toilets and sewage pipes, but a project on that kind of scale is way beyond our capabilities. It would not only require new technology but a huge amount of money and political will, too. The challenges for providing all humanity with access to clean water are similarly gigantic. It’s not a matter of scarcity. There is enough drinking water for everyone on Earth even as its population continues to grow. According to the United Nations, a human being needs 20 liters of drinking water a day to live healthily. Every year, 100,000 cubic kilometers of rain fall on the earth, which translates into 40,000 liters per person per day. That would be plenty even if you only manage to tap a tiny fraction. Sufficient drinking water is available for all even in the driest regions of the earth. The problem is one of quality: People don’t die of thirst; they die from drinking water that’s not safe. The use of water for agriculture is another story. Roughly 70 percent of the human use of fresh water is for farming. People rarely realize just how much water agriculture requires. It takes 1,000 liters to grow the wheat for a single kilogram of fl our, for instance. Other products soak up even larger amounts of water. A kilogram of coffee needs 20,000 liters, and a liter of milk takes 3,000—mostly for the cattle feed and the grass consumed by the cow.

The UN’s Second Development Decade strategy aimed at 6 per cent annual economic growth and greater equity among social groups. The Survey supported the call for a New International Economic Order, a radical reorganization of global relations. But global turmoil frustrated most of these goals. The resultant shift towards monetarism slowed global growth, especially in poorer countries, greatly enhancing their debt servicing problems. Successive issues of the Survey called for equitable global expansion, greater policy coordination, more concessional financing for developing countries and reduced trade barriers. Here, the Survey was often ahead of its time. It argued for the basic needs approach, appropriate technology, rural–urban balance, and prudential borrowing. It said little or was silent about the role of women, dependency theory, and the limits to growth in this decade.