The Second Luddite Congress met for three days, in April 1996, in Barnesville, Ohio.

It was convened by the conservative Quaker Center for Plain Living, but the 250 "citizen delegates" represented many faiths, and none, as well as most of the states and many slots in the economy. At one point, someone stood and said, "I'm one of the enemy: I work for an engineering firm." No one took him for an enemy but for someone, like the rest of the delegates, skeptical of unrestrained technology and looking for a just response.

There never was a First Luddite Congress, though perhaps a thousand people gathered on April 15, 1812, in Stockport, Cheshire, and made plans to meet again more formally. Nor did the Luddites have a national organization, though the British government acted on the presumption that they had. The Luddite machine smashings of 1811-13 were local and populist, and left behind them no ongoing movement or official creed. For 180 years, Luddite remained on the fringes of common usage as a word for an irrational and violent fear of machines.

Especially violent: even after Luddite was formally resurrected by Chellis Glendinning in a 1990 manifesto published in the Utne Reader, it has been hard to free the name from the aura of lynchings and midnight havoc. Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine opened an interview with Kirkpatrick Sale by asking, "Other than arson and a lot of vandalism, what did the Luddites accomplish in the long run?" Sale—whose history of the Luddites, Rebels Against the Future, was one of the congress's occasions—answered that the Luddites had raised the question of industrial culture itself, of its meanings and costs. This is what Glendinning meant by Luddite: someone sharply awake to the ways "mass technological society" threatens family, community, and health; someone willing to dissent from the robot enthusiasm with which new technology is adopted.

The congress was conscious of both implications of Luddite—of the loyalties and militancy the word originally represented and of the suspicion others would inevitably feel. We were the more aware of this suspicion because the congress opened, by chance, a few days after the arrest of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. In fact, the Unabomber's style of solitary, vicious banditry is not the original Luddite style at all; it was open, communal, and careful to distinguish between machine and person. Nor would the Unabomber have been comfortable at the Second Congress. Its delegates—"neo-Luddites"--called not for an uprising but for a "Revolution of Hearts" through neighborhoods of belief and practice.

The congress convened in the Stillwater Meetinghouse (built in 1878) of the Ohio Yearly Meeting of Friends, and the sessions had the form of traditional Quaker worship, or of town meetings. We were called to order with a handbell. Children played in and around all the sessions. Many delegates rose to speak, many wholeheartedly and eloquently. They told us they had experienced the poisons and losses of runaway industrialism; that they were monitoring or repairing environmental damage; that they were aware of our cultural losses and feared for their children.

The congress was addressed by Bill McKibben (The End of Nature); the educational activist John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down); Gene Logsdon, the chronicler of traditional crafts; Clifford Stoll (Silicon Snake Oil), Art Gish, the Christian communitarian; and others. Sale keynoted the congress and presided at its final deliberative session. Sale has spent two vocal decades challenging the orthodoxies of the technological culture in such works as Human Scale (1980), an extended, pragmatic argument that smaller is better, and Dwellers in the Land (1985), a study of bioregionalism. Rebels Against the Future is really two projects in one—a freshly researched, crisply told history of a fascinating popular upheaval; and a projection of the Luddite predicament and premise into current conditions, from the first Industrial Revolution of mechanical looms and British capital to the second, of microchips and the global economy.

The Luddites understood, from the start, that the mechanical loom was only a symptom and instrument of a larger change. Loom smashing was as much a form of publicity as a vehicle of policy. Indeed, Sale writes, "the workers' grievance … never was just the machinery," but rather a new "political economy and the … principles of unrestrained profit and competition and innovation at its heart." The new political economy was destroying an older moral economy based in communities, where economic questions like value and moral questions like integrity were answered by common consent and tradition. In the new economy, such issues, insofar as they had meaning, were determined by capital and the good of machinery, and imposed on the workers by force.

And force it was. As is often true in public uprisings, the tools of real violence lay in the hands of the authorities. There was, as Sale shows, no general conspiracy among the Luddites. There was not even a common political program: most Luddites were so far from being revolutionaries that they hoped Parliament would help them. Instead, Parliament attacked them with an army larger than it sent to Spain to fight Napoleon.

The disparity of forces in this domestic war can be seen in what it cost. Beginning in November 1811 in the "Luddite triangle" in Britain's industrial midlands, the Luddites smashed and burned perhaps £100,000 worth of stocking frames, mills, and houses. The government spent roughly 15 times that much to put the Luddites down—that is, in specific terms, to isolate, capture, and sentence about 100 men out of the thousands who had risen.

Sale has told his story well; his research disposes of many myths about the Luddites. What is harder to ascertain is whether the Luddites were being at all realistic in their rebellion against the new industrialism. Were the conditions all that bad? Here there is, as Sale says, a small academic industry devoted to interpreting inadequate data in conservative or liberal ways. But the debate is not merely academic. We base present decisions on our estimates of the past.

A writer like Paul Johnson will draw on scholarly skepticism about the social observations of Engels and others to support his own technological optimism.

Recognizing the project's difficulty, in any case, wielding his own knowledgeable skepticism, Sale has waded into the evidence, original documents as well as modern history. His final picture of industrialism's results is uncompromisingly grim. The Luddites were not, in his account, being melodramatic. If anything, they were moderate in responding to the degradation of life and work, the destruction of community; they were suffering.

What joins their predicament to ours, however, is less specifically social conditions than a common economic principle—the theory that constant technological innovation supported by capital provides, in the long run, a better society by increasing economic productivity. If this theory were correct, of course, there would be less reason in Luddite objections. But we must be careful in testing the theory: for one thing, we must disentangle it from accidental advantages. If it works, it must work apart from extraordinary exploitable resources (like America's) or an empire (like Britain's) built to provide labor and markets at the point of a gun. Such accidents cannot be evidence for the theory; indeed, they show only that it needs inputs of energy and people it cannot provide for itself.

In any case, Sale's judgment is plain: the theory is not only false but responsible for many evils—the snowball process of the destruction of tradition and community, the end of meaningful work (Sale observes that 40 percent of Americans labor at "disposable" jobs), and massive harm to the environment. It is in this predicament that the Luddite protest seems to offer usable lessons—that industrialism is always cataclysmic, that faster economic growth means faster consumption of the world, that an explicit and urgent resistance on the part of ordinary people is appropriate.

Listening to the delegates of the Second Congress, one was struck not by the strangeness of their concern but by its familiarity. We live in a technolatrous culture: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that more sophisticated machines will be built and will change our lives for the better. If we want evidence, the economy seems eager to provide it: the stock market soaring in a "long boom" attributed to high-tech innovations. And yet technology has generated a muted but insistent chorus of dissent.

Observers like Edward Tenner, in Why Things Bite Back, chronicle the daily contradictions, costs, and frustrations of the dream of a perfect technology, its "revenge-effects" on our bodies and minds. Writers such as Neil Postman argue that, by drawing us away from tradition and significant communication, our dominant technology does us moral harm. E. F. Schumacher and his disciples have tried to reconceive technology in forms that would foster community and nurture local life. Philosophers such as Albert Borgmann and Don Ihde (behind whom one glimpses the formidable, ambiguous figure of Martin Heidegger) question the ontology and epistemology of a world of devices and images.

Neo-Luddite questions, however, go further back, to why we want this technology in the first place and whether it does what it promises. Neo-Luddites come closer, that is, to confronting the advocates of advancing technology on their own ground. In The Road Ahead, his wide-eyed survey of the information kingdom to come, Bill Gates notes that some people have misgivings and deals with them as technological optimists have always done: he says that "progress" is inevitable and assures us that we have always managed to adapt to it. What is coming, Gates wants us to believe, is at the same time utterly new and utterly familiar.

In particular, we are going to get more of our familiar consumerism. This is the major benefit Gates promises. In what he calls "friction-free capitalism," I will be able to contact anyone in the world who has anything to sell simply by jotting my want ad on my "wallet PC." Of course, the power to buy anything from anyone must put everyone in the world in competition in the race to use up whatever is available. Gates sees no peril here. "All the goods in the world," he writes, "will be available for you to examine . …It will be a shopper's heaven."

But the competitive consumer market has mined, burned, eaten, wasted, and poisoned so much of the planet in the last five headlong decades that its very endowment for life is depleted. Gates doesn't see this or think it relevant. His technology is protected from criticism by the assumptions of classical economics, which refuses to track "goods" back to their sources in nature. The mesmerizing effect of Gates's vision is so strong, moreover, that even skeptical observers fail to see past it to its planetary effects. Writing in the February 15, 1995, New York Review of Books, James Fallows surveyed Gates's critics (including Clifford Stoll) without ever raising the obvious question: whether we or the planet can afford to have us heighten our economic appetites.

To talk technology is to talk politics, economics, morality, culture, and religion; and this confirms Sale's most basic point about the Luddites: that even in their comparative naivete, they understood it was not machinery itself that posed the danger. For it is nonsense to state the question, as it is so often stated, in terms of being "for" or "against" technology. Technology includes any change we make in our environment with a practical end in view. No neo-Luddite is "against" technology; this would entail being "against" your pencil or your coffee cup.

This does not mean, however, that technology is ever "value neutral," and it is a measure of our confusion that so many well-intentioned people take refuge in thinking that it is. It would be better to say that some machines (not all), detached from the web of human needs, plans, uses, beliefs, and consequences, could be described as morally empty. Most machines seem to have less innate value than trees or faces; they are not embedded, as Heidegger might say, in a world of meanings.

But to detach a machine from the web of uses and beliefs is merely a thought experiment. No actual machine ever exists that way; none, therefore, is value neutral. All machines, as the authors of Responsible Technology insist, embody choices among forms of knowledge and power; all machines impose uses on us; all machines close off some avenues of social action as they open others—and "there is no purely neutral or technical justification for any of these decisions."

The neo-Luddites are not questioning "technology," then, but the technology we actually have and live with. Like all questioners of a powerful status quo, the neo-Luddites will be called idealists and dreamers. In fact, their analysis is far richer and more realistic than Gates's technolatry, because it asks a wider range of questions.

Setting money aside for the moment, what are the broadest implications of our dominant technology, and, specifically, what may be the costs of extending it? Sale summarizes these costs with a kind of tight-lipped severity in chapter 8 in Rebels Against the Future, but we might state them even more concisely in four classes of danger:

• The direct misuse of the planetary endowment for biological and sentient life. Here skepticism about technology overlaps concern for the environment.
• The economic and political inequality, and the physical suffering, of those on whom this technology is imposed and who are powerless to resist. The original Luddites were among these; our examples today are mostly (not exclusively) in the developing world. What we call "development," as Herman Daly and John Cobb remark, is what was called in Europe the "industrial revolution." But the economic historian Peter Mathias points out a crucial difference. The technologies now imposed on small farming or fishing communities are already enormously sophisticated and expensive, and already have control of the global economy and the ears of most of the world's governments. It is not surprising that the descent of these technologies seems inevitable.
• The breakdown of society's capacity to maintain moral and cultural norms for a decent life and pass them on to children. Schumacher was deeply concerned about this, as are Neil Postman and others. At the Second Congress this concern came out primarily in anxieties about education. Hence the power of John Taylor Gatto's revisionist history of American education and its allegiance to economic progress.
• Finally, the religious peril of an enormous, self-sanctioning expansion of human power. The most influential prophet here, of course, has been Jacques Ellul.

In recent years I have talked with many people about these dangers, and the conversation almost invariably pauses here—at a more or less abstract suspicion of peril. What stops the conversation is not lack of comprehension but the difficulty of knowing how to feel: to go on we need a plausible stance, which we feel we do not have.

On the one hand, skepticism about our dominant technology hardly belongs to neo-Luddites alone (nor would they claim it did). Many of us wonder about a social movement of such scope that seems to mandate itself to resist criticism. We may feel that our freedom to exercise responsible judgment has been taken away from us, as if we were children at an increasingly spooky Christmas—so many fascinating gadgets in the boxes, so much darkness outside.

On the other hand, what resistance is sensible, or even possible? It seems impossible to slow the development of technology or even to take its gifts one by one. Technological change is, as Neil Postman says so well, not cumulative but ecological. A new class of device changes the whole felt world, as it changes how almost everything—eating, traveling, working, caring, and being cared for—is done. There seems no way to resist changes so global and yet so intimate. If we sympathize with Bill Gates, it may be (if truth were told) partly in compensation: we hope his enthusiasm is right; we hope the changes may be beneficent. We may envy Gates's ability to shut out the contrary evidence. Any effort to resist seems like (to use Witold Rybzcynski's term) "ghost dancing"—courageous, perhaps, but futile, and so more an object of pathos than of admiration.

Neo-Luddites resist, of course, and believe the rest of us should too. It may be worth repeating that the tone of the Second Congress was on the whole sober and self-collected. No one suggested that we levitate the Pentagon. The delegates included lawyers, engineers, businesspeople, and educators as well as environmentalists and farmers. Their resistance had begun not in countercultural bias but at the point where technology threatened specific instances of family, place, common morality, faith, and the earth's abundance. The confidence to resist arises, that is, when loyalty responds to a rational estimate of danger.

But is the neo-Luddite estimate of danger rational? (Were the Luddites right in 1811?) It would be appropriate here to give a detailed answer, if space permitted; such an answer may be found, with statistics, in the annual reports of the Worldwatch Institute (State of the World 1984, et seq., edited by Lester R. Brown and published by W. W. Norton), which has built a reputation for probity over a decade and a half of cumulative research.

In lieu of detail, this may be said: considering only environmental consequences, it is clear that the dominant technology and its culture cannot continue on their present course indefinitely. Gates's friction-free capitalism will crash into the limits of environmental resources and tolerances long before it puts everyone in the world (assuming this is Gates's true intention) into the same category of consumer. The editors of the British journal The Ecologist have observed that it would take the resources of "dozens of spare planets" just to even out our present inequalities of income at the Western level. And we have no more planets. The fondest boast of the technological culture—that it will, in the end, make everyone as comfortable as North Americans—is not supported by the evidence. It is Bill Gates who is ghost dancing.

It is not doomsday thinking, then, that leads Kirkpatrick Sale, Bob Goudzwaard and Harry de Lange, and many others, to assert that our economic ways must change. It is the numbers in the case. It is also compassion—for our children and neighbors, of course, but also for the nations and people who are falling so quickly and so far behind in the race for new machines and markets. If we doubt that resistance is appropriate, it may be partly that we are blinded by the disparity between what we have and what two or three billion others do not and will never have. What we have protects us, buffers us. We live in the safety zone. Neo-Luddites and others like them are trying to look over the walls.

What they see there are thousands of human social and cultural groups struggling to choose a prudent course in the face of runaway change and the power it confers on others. The neo-Luddite query, at its simplest, is this: Who will choose our vital technology, and on what basis?

Technolatry has its own answer, the one embodied in most of the institutions of the developed world. This answer is that the big decision was made long ago, in favor of ever more sophisticated and expensive devices, and that the smaller decisions will now be made by "qualified" people—by the largely self-selected group of entrepreneurs who nurture new inventions and sell them to the rest of us. These smaller decisions will be conceptually simple: all cultural concerns will be reduced to matters of feasibility and profit; no effects but short-term ones will be considered; and the results will be reported to us in the advertisements. Our only decision—actually, there will be no decision in it—will be to buy now.

But to make technology responsible—answerable to our needs, careful of the approaching limits of the planet, responsive to conscience—such simple decisions must be replaced by complex ones, that include all the things—family, education, nature, faith, and the long-term future—that technolatry ignores. But in what social space will such decisions be made?

The neo-Luddite answer is that they can only be made in the limited, local community capable of thinking together about common concerns. This is not, of course, a new or surprising answer. But the congress was preoccupied with community, for it seems clear that community offers the conditions for an open, responsible, conscientious examination of social change. This is why the congress listened so intently to a Quaker voice, like Scott Savage, and an Amish one, like David Kline. This is why Wendell Berry has identified himself as a Luddite and offered this definition of his commitment: "I am not 'against technology' so much as I am for community."

It is appropriate to quote Berry at this point, for his 30 years' writing was the unconfessed text of the entire congress. Berry's work ties technology to cultural change, political freedom, environmental damage, and the fate of small communities. He has built these connections in Christian ways, moreover, for his root insight is that cultural practice is always moral, and morality, always practical. What you take as the defining relationships of your life—with power, profit, and the abstractions of progress, on one hand, or with communities of faith, specific places, and God, on the other—will finally determine whether your cultural practice can be sustained and for how long. It is a mark of the congress's whole inclination that the question most often repeated was not, "What are machines for?" but the question Berry used to entitle his 1990 collection, What Are People For?

In appealing to community, neo-Luddites are entering a familiar debate among sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers divided between those (like Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Bellah) who rely on community for moral guidance and those (like John Rawls and Derek Phillips) who rely on rights. Berry and the neo-Luddites have something positive to contribute to the debate—the insistence that "community" means communities, actual people living in actual places. In Berry's work, "community" is never abstract, because it is always linked to specific technological and environmental practice. To ignore this, Berry would argue, would be to make the moral and political meaning of community so general as to be moot.

Berry's exemplary communities are the small American agricultural communities whose young traditions of good farming and self-reliance were distracted and then largely destroyed by governmental policy. Berry first told this story in 1977 in his classic The Unsettling of America and has summarized it in his recent collection, Another Turn of the Crank. But neither at first nor now has Berry taken these communities as ideal or offered them, in any simple fashion, as the cure-all for problems in other parts of the world. Their advantage to thinking is that they include, bring into coincidence, problems of belief and problems of practice: their story makes the practicality of morality evident.

And Berry has enriched his account over time. In Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, he distinguished between "community" and the "public." The second is, for him, simply everyone apart from individual and neighborly attachments. It is the space where communities work out their differences. But this public space is largely negative. When it becomes dynamic—when the public interest begins to dictate a form of economy, a level of consumption, or a new class of machine—it becomes dangerous. This is because its economy and technology will not be answerable to any specific place or social group. They will be out of community control; they will be out of control. There will be nothing to protect communities from them, or—since communities protect individuals—to protect people themselves.

Hence Berry's bitter criticism of the global economy. In Another Turn of the Crank, he asks: what will be the effect on agriculture and other productive practices of a market that makes it possible for anyone to undersell anyone else? The answer is plain: the consumption of the planet in an all-out, dog-ravenous competition to lower costs. What Berry opposes is exactly what Gates envisions. But Berry's questions are more complex: not just, what will the effects of this competition be for money, but what will they be for the earth, for education, for democracy, for health care, for religious belief? These are questions a genuine community could answer for itself.

Neo-Luddite hopes for community must face one discouraging fact: the communities that writers like Berry rely on to make humane practical decisions are themselves disappearing fast. The story of this, for the developing world, has been told in Whose Common Future?, a polemical response to the UNCED (Rio Conference) agenda for "sustainable" global development. The frustrations of the Rio Conference are well known among environmentalists, the way the industrial nations, and the United States in particular, excluded the testimony of small racial and national communities and blocked all radical examination of the program of economic growth. Among indigenous peoples, as Whose Common Future? makes clear, this program has meant the end of communities—their subsistence needs overridden by global trade, their inherited places submerged under dams and airports. This survey makes it clear, also, that the transfer of technology from Manhattan to Amazonia has mainly resulted in the transfer of cash the other way.

In the nations of the safety zone, the project is less preserving communities than restoring them. For all the philosophical energy invested in the communitarian debate, most of us know that actual felt community is hardly a fact in our experience. We find ourselves asking, with Deborah Tall, "How do we come to feel loyal to a place and choose to dwell there?"—a question no indigenous people must ask. Even where we face common problems in a common place—to quote a recent, incisive essay by Daniel Kemmis—"We have been practiced in the politics of alienation, separation, and blocked initiatives" too long to cooperate.

Tall and Kemmis write as contributors to a recent collection, Rooted in the Land, edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson, a remarkably broad-minded, practical assessment of communities in America and of their attachment to places. The collection is aware of the communitarian debate and sides with Bellah and MacIntyre; many of the essayists, moreover, are engaged in kinds of work—Kemmis is the mayor of Missoula, Montana—where common vision is a practical necessity. Here we have biologists calling for new research to explain how ecological communities are formed, philosophers trying to explain how a "land ethic" might work, and social activists describing their actual successes in building land cooperatives and local food markets. Rooted in the Land represents the best kind of thinking about these problems, because it starts with a full consciousness of moral tradition and ends with the dollars and cents of putting it into practice.

One of the collection's editors, Wes Jackson, has indirectly responded to Deborah Tall's question in Becoming Native to This Place. With Dana Jackson, Wes Jackson—a research biologist and MacArthur Fellow—founded the Land Institute in 1976 to explore what he called "new roots for agriculture." In challenging the orthodoxy of high-energy mechanized monoculture, Jackson's research was probably neo-Luddite from the start. It has become more so, as Jackson has moved from modeling a passive solar agriculture to thinking about the kind of social life that could support and profit from such a technology. Becoming Native to This Place focuses on Matfield Green, a tiny, dwindling Kansas town where Jackson and the institute are trying the experiment of restoring community.

Jackson calls for a planetary inventory and assessment of technology in view of the approaching end of cheap energy. What this will teach us, he argues, is that we can never know enough to run the earth—only enough to live in small communities in "little places of unwilderness … intensely loved." This means local history, local business, the maintenance of a local cultural life, a "homecoming" major in American education. It means adjusting our cultures to their natural conditions and not the other way around.

It would be impossible to say how many neo-Luddites there are. Several thousand local organizations exist, in the United States and abroad, to serve projects that have the Luddite feel. They include small schools and homeschooling networks, watch groups protecting specific bits of wilderness or common land, activist groups confronting specific cases of industrial damage, communal gardening, and farm markets.

And the movement has already had its successes. Goudzwaard and de Lange record the reinstatement of small farming in western Kenya, where a limit on cropping for export has restored the tradition of labor-intensive, land-careful farming and built schools, health clinics, and locally owned business. The Chipko movements in Nepal and India, and the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka, both inspired by Gandhi's teaching on the renewal of village life, make development the direct responsibility of the villagers affected. In Rooted in the Land, Jack Kittredge chronicles the spread of CSAS (community-supported agriculture) from Japan and Switzerland across the United States. Whose Common Future? records popular resistance to the exploitation of common resources in Bolivia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Ecuadoran farmers, having found that the Green Revolution exhausted their soils and depleted their seed pool, have gone decisively back to native potato varieties and traditional cultivation.

To the technolaters, of course, the fighting phrase here is "gone back." Even setting aside the superstitions of "inevitable technological progress," however, there is one last important objection for neo-Luddism to encounter. It is the conviction, widespread among people of goodwill, that only global development and the newest technology can deal with urgent social problems. The challenge to neo-Luddite thinking is clear: Can better health care, more food, social liberation, and increased political stability be obtained through local, grassroots development with modest capital and smaller, not larger, technology?

This question is answered, powerfully, in Bill McKibben's Hope, Human and Wild. McKibben has written several books about environmental concerns; his most recent, Maybe One (1998), explores population growth and asks us, tactfully but urgently, to consider single-child families. McKibben summarized Hope, Human and Wild for the Second Luddite Congress by telling stories his book tells in greater detail. One concerns city development in Curitiba, Brazil, where technological innovation has been governed by the principle of community preservation. But the more fascinating and apposite story is that of the south Indian state of Kerala. With a dense population of 1,933 people per square mile, an average per capita income of $330 a year, Kerala also has a life expectancy rate comparable to that of the United States, a un-certified 100 percent literacy rate, and a quality-of-life index higher than those of such "miracles of development" as Taiwan and South Korea.

McKibben pounces on the apparent contradiction in these statistics and insists on it: In Kerala, life is poorer—and better. Kerala is a standing challenge to the orthodoxy of technolatry: apparently the elaborate and expensive technologies we wish the developing nations to adopt are not necessary to their social progress.

Even more important for a Christian analysis, Kerala's self-development has stemmed, very largely, from a nineteenth-century religious revival rooted in land distribution. The state's social progress—democratization, education, the liberation of women, the control of population growth—has sprung not from economic expansion based on modern conveniences, but from a passion for justice.

The lesson of Kerala is clearly not that the poor must be left in poverty. Kerala, McKibben admits, is too poor. Its lesson is rather that communities must be allowed room to judge what kind of development they want and can afford. This is a lesson for the first world as well as the third. If, as the neo-Luddites believe, an unexamined, runaway technology will shortly make civilization unworkable, then a community-based resistance is both pragmatic and urgent. It may be that only this kind of resistance can succeed, for only self-conscious communities can be faithful to actual places and ways of life. Through such faithfulness, love becomes a principle of knowledge and of practice—and from love we can derive hope (as McKibben says) both for the human and for the wild.

Lionel Basney is professor of English at Calvin College.

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank (Counterpoint, 1995).

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays (Pantheon, 1993).

Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Beacon, 1989).

The Ecologist, Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (New Society Publishers and Earthscan Ltd., 1993).

Bill Gates, with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, The Road Ahead (Viking, 1995).

Bob Goudzwaard and Harry de Lange, Beyond Poverty and Affluence: Toward an Economy of Care. Tr. Mark Vander Vennen (Eerdmans/WCC Publications, 1995).

Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place (Counterpoint, 1996).

Bill McKibben, Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth (Little Brown, 1995).

Stephen V. Monsma, et al., Responsible Technology: A Christian Perspective (Eerdmans, 1986).

Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age (Addison-Wesley, 1995).

Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

William Vitek and Wes Jackson, eds., Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (Yale Univ. Press, 1996).

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.