Eric Britton founded EcoPlan in 1966 to provide an independent international forum of observation, reflection and counsel on issues involving technological change as it effects people in their daily lives. A common theme in all his work is the strategic adaptation of technologies, business procedures, human practices, and institutional structures to changing technological, resource and environmental requirements. And to changes in perceptions and values. Because he has been utterly flummoxed by the situation of a world with some many bright and able people, and such mediocre public policies and practices (he refers to this as the "brains on the knee syndrome"), he has spent quite a lot of time working to create problem-solving networks, including some mediated by electronic means. The Commons is one example of how he thinks this might be made to work.

Britton did his undergraduate studies in physical sciences at Amherst College, was a Ph.D. Can. in the Graduate Faculty of Economics at Columbia University (as a result of this he sometimes signs himself, "Almost an economist"), and has been a visiting lecturer at numerous US and European universities. While he earns his living as an advisor and consultant to international business and government, like Arthur Okun and a few others he suspects that there may be a bit more to life than letting the market have its way all the time. Like virtually everyone else in this network he has organized, edited, written and published numerous articles, reports, sections of books, and what have you. Some are better than others. His best print performance to date is not a book but a rough "thinking exercise" initiated for the European Commission in 1993, Rethinking Work: New Ways to Work in a Knowledge Society, which subsequently kicked off the @ Work on the Web program here.

Eric persists in his claim that the main Instruments of the transition to sustainability are three: technology, children and culture. The first, despite being the thing which for the most part has been the cause for much of the present mess, is now an absolutely indispensable central element of the solution path. As to children, he claims that our goal must not only be to make the future fair to and safe for them, but that we must also understand that they are the ones who are going to be most involved in making the necessary transition. In undoing some of the stupid things we have done in our time, and in doing others which we lacked the courage or foresight to deal with. Thus we must find ways to integrate them from earliest childhood into the solution process, including through such things as school programs, children's books, media events and happenings of sorts. Culture? Well, culture is the collective understanding and instrument of all that is important and worth preserving in our society, as well as the means for getting this message across. On one recent and patently unsustainable day on the international scene, he was heard to mutter: "Whenever I hear the word revolver, I reach for my culture".

Selected Keywords:
access, cities, communications, community, demonstration, energy, equity, life quality, management, media, minorities, Mississippi, participation, planning, policy, practice, self-help, sharing, society, sustainability, team work, Third World, women, unemployment

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Updated 31 August 1999