ABSTRACT
A conference of ecologists and environmentalists, economists and technologists—convened to illuminate the complex interplay of energy, economic growth, and the environment—should open, not with a declaration of war or of conflicting faiths, but with a declaration of humility. Conceptually, to be sure, we know quite a lot about this interplay—about the processes of resource use and disposal that overload and degrade our natural environment; about the chilling possibility that untrammeled growth and uncontrolled technology could eventually destroy the ecosystem that sustains us; about the methods, both economic and technological, by which man can arrest or reverse the march to environmental ruin; and about the directions of changes in priorities and institutions needed to put these methods to work.
