Elegant Technology is an attempt to describe the root causes of the industrial-environmental dilemmas facing the developed countries from the point of view of those who invented them. Advanced industrial societies are merely the highest flowering of civilization based on agriculture. But agricultural societies are plagued by a persistence of predators. The most serious predators are human.
Human predation has many manifestations from the crude to the very sophisticated.
The methods used by the predators have included slavery, feudalism, imperialism, usury, ground rents, tithes and taxation. To improve their lives, the producers have resorted to religious movements, cultural challenges and most importantly, radical changes in production. By transferring the burden of predation from their shoulders to the biosphere, the producers gave to the industrial states history's highest general standard of living. A shift to the exploitation of nature clearly has limits. The social and political problems of human predation have not diminished as a result of the industrial revolution.