ABSTRACT
A gentle ecological romanticism encourages people to assume that primitive populations lived in harmony with nature. According to this assumption, the Old Stone Age hunters identified themselves completely with the animals and plants in their surroundings, and they never engaged in actions which alienated them from their environment. Scientific technology rapidly became so powerful that technological civilization appeared to be capable of uninterrupted progress. Everyday life in the first half of the twentieth century seemed indeed to justify the confidence of utopians, because the achievements of scientific technology commonly went far beyond the most optimistic dreams of the experts. Much of this technologic utopia is within the domain of scientific possibility, and yet there is hardly any chance that it will come to pass, at least for several generations. One of the reasons is simply that human beings select among the possibilities offered by scientific technology and that what is possible does not necessarily appear desirable.
