"Our present troubles are not due to Nature. They are entirely artificial, genuinely home-made. The very arts and sciences which we have used to conquer nature have turned on their creators and are now conquering us. The present crisis is of our own making; we have brought it on ourselves by allowing our mechanical and agricultural science to develop more rapidly than our economic science. We cannot buy what we produce and are therefore compelled to keep our factories idle and let our fields lie fallow. Millions are hungry, but wheat has to be thrown into the sea. This is where, and the moment, science has brought us.
"What is the remedy? Tolstoyans and Gandhi-ites tell us that we must 'return to Nature'---in other words, abandon science altogether and live like primitives or, at best, in the style of our medieval ancestors. The trouble with this advice is that it cannot be followed---or rather that it can only be followed if we are prepared to sacrifice at least eight or nine hundred million human lives. Science, in the form of modern agricultural and industrial technique, has allowed the world's population to double itself in about three generations. If we abolish science and 'return to Nature,' the population will revert to what it was---and will revert, not in a hundred years, but in as many weeks. Famine and pestilence will do their work with exemplary celerity. Tolstoy and Gandhi are professed humanitarians; but they advocate a slaughter, compared with which the massacres of Tinur and Jinghiz Khan seem almost imperceptibly trivial.
"No, back to Nature is not practical politics. The only cure for science is more science, not less. We are suffering from the effects of a little science badly applied. The remedy is a lot of science, well applied."
Aldous Huxley
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