"The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology"

E. F. Schumacher draws a distinction between the processes governing the natural world and those that drive technological advancement. Nature is characterized by dynamic equilibrium: its ecosystems constantly adapt, finding balance through feedback mechanisms. Populations rise and fall in response to resources and predation, nutrients are cycled and purified through biological and geological processes, and disturbances often trigger restorative actions, forests regenerate after fires, rivers purify themselves over time, and excesses usually provoke counteractions to restore harmony. This is not to say that nature is static or without suffering, but that over millennia, a remarkable resilience and capacity for renewal has evolved, allowing natural systems to persist despite shocks.

Technology, as Schumacher implies, breaks this pattern. Human-made systems frequently lack the inherent self-correcting abilities of nature. Factories, industrial agriculture, and modern infrastructure often operate linearly: resources are extracted, transformed, used, and discarded as waste, with minimal feedback preventing overuse or harm. Unlike a forest, which will moderate its own growth in response to available light, nutrients, and moisture, technological systems tend to amplify negative consequences unless explicitly designed otherwise. Pollution accumulates, habitats are destroyed, and finite resources are depleted all too quickly, because self-regulation is not built into the technology itself.

Moreover, Schumacher suggests that technology magnifies the power of human intention, but not our wisdom. Natural limits are overridden, cycles disrupted, and traditional checks bypassed. Instead of a self-cleansing process, we often see accumulation of toxins, ecological dead zones, or increasingly severe environmental crises. Thus, while humans are part of the natural system, our technologies tend to exist outside its self-healing logic. Recognizing the gap between nature’s balance and technology’s disruptions challenges us to reevaluate the design and purpose of our tools, urging a new approach that learns from, rather than battles against, natural processes.