This Scholar's Award from the NSF's program in Science, Technology and Society supports research that examines the history of the Appropriate Technology Movement in the United States. The Appropriate Technology Movement (ATM) emerged in the 1960s as an alternative strategy for international economic development based on technologies that are small in scale, democratically controllable, low in capital commitment, environmentally sustainable, and adaptable to local cultural conditions. As the movement gained momentum in the late 1960s, appropriate technologists set their sights on the social and environmental reform of the industrialized world as well. This study will examine several topics related to this effort as it unfolded in the U.S., including the ATM's historical connections to the counterculture and the Environmental Justice Movement, its interaction with the state, and its gender politics. Scholarly and popular accounts of the movement are based on an exceedingly narrow body of evidence and are thus burdened by a number of misconceptions: that the movement is a manifestation of romantic anti-modernism and is thus anti-technology and anti-city; that its only strategy for social change is the development and dissemination of "green" hardware; and that it devolved into a new-age fad in the 1970s and disappeared shortly thereafter. This study will gather evidence that may help clear up these misconceptions by drawing on extensive primary-sources. The data sources include oral histories collected from thirty AT organizations in over 20 states, as well as substantial archival research. Examination of this evidence will make possible a more balanced assessment of the ATM's strengths and weaknesses and will reveal that the movement's effort to combine small-scale, community-controlled technology with an array of cooperative economic institutions is deeply rooted in the American populist tradition. This research will also explain why the effort to translate AT principles into public policy has met with only limited success. This research will result in a scholarly book on the history of the American branch of the ATM and will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, activists, and technology-users more generally.
