Greer: The Ecotechnic Future (book excerpt)

…From the standpoint of the far future, in fact, modern industrialism may turn out to be a primitive and vastly inefficient form of the technic society. Like other human ecologies, the technic society can be defined by its energy sources. A hunter-gatherer society uses energy in the form of food, firewood and raw materials taken directly fr.om natural ecosystems. A nomadic herding society also gets its energy from natural ecosystems, but uses livestock as an energy harvesting technology. A village agricultural society does the same thing using domesticated plants. An urban agrarian society uses energy in the form of food from artificial ecosystems created by human labor and supplements this with modest amounts of nonfood energy in the form of fuels, wind, hydropower and sunlight.

A technic society, by contrast, relies primarily on nonfood energy.

Modern industrial civilization is simply a form of technic society that gets its nonfood energy from fossil fuels and maximizes production of goods and services in the usual R-selected way at the cost of vast inefficiency. At the other end of the spectrum is the climax community, the ecotechnic society, which gets its nonfood energy from renewable sources and maximizes the efficiency of its energy and resource use in the usual K-selected way at the cost of more restricted access to goods and services.

If this is correct, our own civilization is pursuing a wholly misguided image of what advanced technology looks like. Since the late 19th century, when science fiction writers such as Jules Verne began to popularize dreams of future technologies,