Wade Greene

A recent brief hit of the New York theatre was a short production called The Water Engine. It’s a modern morality play of sorts, set largely in a 1930’s radio studio, and its theme, in the fashion of morality plays, is simple but loaded: a man invents an engine that runs on water. The industrial powers find out about the device and they dispatch the inventor to his creator, presumably burying his invention along with him. An artists’s concept of the world’s first solar electric power plant depicts a “power tower” amid a field of mirrors or “heliostats.” Courtesy of Martin Marietta Corp. There are camp and other ironic over tones to the plot that ultimately complicate the point of the play, but its scenario comes close to what many members of a growing counter- technology movement see as the threatened fate of their budding counter-technologies. The term “appropriate technology” – “AT” for short – is the one commonly used by and applied to the movement. The movement’s movers generally use the term to mean