PETER VAN DRESSER

By Paul Henrickson, © 1980 2008

Thoughts generated on my contact with Peter amounts to an outline, a skeleton, if you will, of a portrait of a man of medium stature, benevolent, gnome-like and weathered, who looks out at the world with the compassionately intellectual attitude of a prince, observing the disastrous greed of the powerful manipulators of complex systems.

This man is Peter van Dresser, solar engineer, architect, decentralist libertarian and, perhaps, the twentieth century prototype of the meek destined to inherit the earth.

Peter van Dresser, a quiet unassuming man who lives modestly in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his second wife, Florence. His occupation as solar architect and ecological planner accounts for only a portion of the respect others, from many parts of the world, have for him. The practical modesty of his architecture may account for the absence of the attention such architects as Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff, Buckminster Fuller or Paolo Solari have achieved. The Van Dresser architecture is characterized by its functional simplicity an terms of the energy to make it work.

More than anything else it may be the philosophy of respect which attracts people to him. This philosophy is both a conservative one, emphasizing preservation through the development of a bio-technical society in which both man and nature may be well served, and a radical one which stresses the importance of dismantling the current urban industrial system.

Van Dresser was pointing our as early as the 1930’s that the economic system defined progress primarily in terms of a gross national product and turned its back to evidences of ecological transgressions. Van Dresser asks us to consider that while we may have more money, more goods and more services are our lives really richer?

Peter was born in New York City in 1908, the son of a portrait painter and a writer. He attended Cornell University where he studied engineering and architecture. He also dropped out of that university during the 1930’s to begin what he described as a life-long search for Utopia. Most of his life, he claims, has been laying the groundwork of a personal and a regional economy outside the urban industrial system.

This led him to a variety of living environments, first aboard a thirty-two foot ketch which was his home for several years moving along the Atlantic coast, next he was in Florida along the borders of the seminal everglades, next he was in the Delaware Valley and for the past twenty-odd years at the 7,000 foot level of the New Mexico Rockies.

While he grew up in New York and went to school in the city during the winter he spent his summers in the bosom of the New England country-side. He now sees the combination of these experiences…the sophisticated urban life of New York and the more self-involved and independent life of rural New England…as providing him with the necessary sensual information for making important value-decisions concerning the way man might best orchestrate his life.

Peter’s present life-style is a combination of material modesty and creative and intellectual richness. His adobe home in Santa Fe is hidden among other attached structures all of which have more direct sunlight than his own. This fact is a source of ironic amusement to him as it is solar energy which is his major concern. Fortunately, this situation is only temporary for he is building a prototype model of a functioning passive solar structure on his property in El Rito some miles north of Santa Fe. Nevertheless it is from his Santa Fe home that he generates creative and economical solar-oriented solutions for comfortable and civilized human life.

It is from his Santa Fe home that he develops contacts with a wide range of energetic young intellectuals representing a variety of disciplines and countries, a varying number of whom will meet with him and Florence for Sunday brunch at one of Santa Fe’s hotels.

Since these brunches begin around 9:30 in the morning and frequently do not end before noon it could appear that the van Dresser congregation is in rivalry with the many churches, cults and sects which

exist here. There is, in fact, a similarity between the van Dresser eucharist and the more customary ones in that both are concerned about moral behavior.

There is also a distinctive difference in that van Dresser believes he knows how a technologically moral life may be had on earth now without the disruption of an atomic armegeddon. And there is another difference in that the good in man is recognized, by Peter, more readily than the bad. As a result one comes away from these Sunday communion breakfasts with a sense of great self-esteem. This is an

unusual and worthy talent which makes this Peter a cherished companion. Peter, the Pantocrator, who with one hand he blesses and with the other he instructs.

Here is a gentle, mild-mannered person, standing five feet eight inches who grows in heroic proportions as he, by degrees, reveals the openness of his spirit. The scope of his concerns indulges his companions with his lucid and intelligent conversation and provides a demonstration of his patience with man’s vanities…although he rarely mentions them. While he may not be a model of perfection, he satisfies as an example of a spiritual man.

Van Dresser objects to the destructive employment of research results. In the 1930’s he was working on a non-military research related to rocket propulsion mechanisms with the American Rocket Society’s Experiment Committee. He broke his association with this group when members

agreed to work for the military. Now, after four decades he is a major focus here and abroad of a new generation of world nurturers concerned with the development of a style of survival consistent with the philosophy of man and material.

This is one example of van Dresser’s determination to match his actions to his morals. It may be instructive to compare van Dresser to Von Braun who worked on rocketry systems in Germany during the Second World War. It was Von Braun who was instrumental in developing the V-2 rocket used against the residents of London during the blitz. After the defeat of Germany it was Von Braun who was spirited away to the United States where he continued his research programs culminating in the impressive outer-space explorations.

The basically more apparent nature of man’s aggressiveness as opposed to his gentleness can be observed in the rewards of riches and reputation accorded Von Braun compared to their absence in the van Dresser personal environment, Von Braun is known to few outside his discipline while Van Dresser’s associates reads like a Chaucerian pilgrimage.

The contrast between the activities of the two men is dramatic. Where one is intent upon “the conquest of space” the other acquiesces to its benefits. The lesson of the fall of the tower of Babel or of Icarus may not have been learned, but the facts point up a distinguishing van Dresser characteristic. This is his belief that it is in the best interest of mankind that he utilizes the world’s resources in such a way as to leave their functions intact. Any utilization short of that may be more a function of engineering ego than of engineering reason put to the service of mankind.

This is a philosophy related to that of the American Indian who acknowledges the nature of the animate, the inanimate and the forces which govern our environment. The differences in the behavior of the early American Indian and van Dresser are that this twentieth century man is profoundly practical if not profoundly religious. It is simply an act of folly to kill the goose which lays the golden eggs and it is practical to preserve the usefulness of what is useful.

There is the matter of commercial drama and misuse. It has been largely the operations of the commercial world which has led us into the belief that scarcity is related to value, while what is common, abundant or readily obtainable has little value. One effect of the acceptance of this view is that it provides some with an opportunity to exercise power over others who lack and desire whatever the commodity may be and it subjects them to social, financial and political manipulation…a situation history ought to have taught us was dehumanizing to both groups.

The displacement of our attention from the real to the phantom is lamentable for other reasons as well. When it occurs we seek the fleeting, the difficult and the dramatic while the simple and the more beautiful solution remains ignored. Such a situation creates a mentality of power over the human and the material world and it is a response of fear and of guilt. On the other hand were we to develop an attitude of being able to share resources and technology we might enjoy the climate of trust…a climate that would free us for additional creative adventures.

It seems a matter of reasonableness for van Dresser that the libertarian concepts of free-enterprise and personal and corporate independence be balanced with the practical benefits to be derived from cooperation. The key seems to be the acceptance of the finiteness of certain resources, and the recognition of the distribution of talents, insights and sensibilities throughout the population. The answer to the problem of attaining a culturally rich, materially secure, and politically free life lies in the recognition that man and his environment are interrelated and in a clearer understanding of how the values are now hold dear night otherwise is ranked.

This then seems to be a matter of a roaming gaze or a single focus on values. Van Dresser sees that many of man’s problems stem from a tendency to over specialize. A world has, thereby, been created which emphasizes fragmentation and reductionism. “Our mechanistic ordering of man’s activities”, he states, “is often hostile to the interplay of natural processes and to the inner needs of man himself.”

Evidence of this can be seen in the exploitive industries which have polluted our waterways, the air above our cities, created sprawling megalopolises. Isolated man from man, man from woman, artist from scientist and a great percentage of human kind from their natural environment are a part of his interests as well. This has been accomplished by a megatechnism which has produced a whole pseudo-world of plastic throw-away packaging and gadgetry.

Van Dresser’s comments confirm the vision of conspicuous consumption drawn by Torstein Veblen where a vicious consumerism exacts its pound of flesh and degenerates the sensibilities. “Man”, says van Dresser, must learn to live within the life of balance of the biosphere without exploiting destructively either nature or his fellows.”

While it may not appear libertarian to advocate public ownership of resource it makes sense to the extent that we may have reason to question most men’s commitment to moral behavior. The enigma is clearly identified if one has even experienced frustration with bureaucrats, the usual functionaries of public ownership. In order to avoid the nationalization of resources as well as the incompetence of massive bureaucracy and it’s deliberately manipulated biases it may be desirable to organize a decentralized system or authority and production.

“How does it happen”, asked van Dresser the humanist in 1938, “that while inventors, researchers, engineers are unanimously striving…and succeeding amazingly well…to make machines and processes, more defined, more flexible, we find it necessary to construct a social order more rigid, top-heavy and complex?”

It becomes apparent that van Dresser is ultimately concerned with the sound management of energy…human as well as natural and mechanical…and this is most assuredly accomplished in an atmosphere of flexibility. It is not only industrial and governmental bureaucracies which unnecessarily encumber efficient action, but “science”, he says, “is more and more crystallized

and codified into formal schools, disciplines and systems.” Such is the fate of all persons. Institutions and processes which fail to creatively renew themselves.

The anti-creative and ant-productive nature of a bureaucracy can be seen in its biased and conveniently rigid performance of its determined and outlined duties. The bureaucracy is inventive in its methods of aggrandizement. It was created as a mechanism to providing technical assistance to policy makers but developed its services so expertly that it not only files and types but controls access to records upon which sequential decisions must be made. It regulates the flow of business and creates filtered access to its upper echelon membership.

Functioning in this way it is frequently the bureaucracy who strangles opportunity and the proper exercise of thought and action.

Let us consider the parasites of commerce and the deceit of the G.N.P. On national and international levels one can observe the rise of occupation auxiliary to the productions and services being offered. The Korean bribes are a notable example. Among the more obvious is the business of advertising itself with its promises, enticements, and the created and fear-supported pressures of peer approval.

While these parameters of industry may create more jobs and a greater flow of cash and this influence the index of the Gross National product, they are not, in themselves, directly productive, certainly not in the sense that they produce more at less cost. And as for the G.N.P. itself we find that we must revise our understanding of what it is. We cannot consider it an index of economic and social health when it rises in response to every social riot.

It is probably truer that these auxiliary occupations and deceitful measures if economic health are counter-productive to the extent that they necessitate the search for a broadly based market which, in turn, involves the mass transportation of goods over long distances by truck, rail or plane. In their turn these involve the use of more oil, gasoline and the expenditure of greater and greater amounts from the public coffers for the support of transportation facilities.

After all, this dramatically complex structure often ends up as a systematic method of transporting coals to Newcastle ass for example, with the instance of Washington state apples being shipped to West Virginia which can very easily grow its own. It is a similar story with the federalization of welfare programs where the deceit becomes manifest in the weakening of local capabilities and initiative.

“With each year,” van Dresser points out. “The regional community becomes more dependent on the intricacies of continental merchandizing” (The Alaska Pipeline is an example) “and the instabilities of a consumerist society geared to a self-destructive dynamic of perpetual material expansion.” He sees the solution being the development of regionally based economies, “adapted to the conservative sustained yield of biotic and “flow resources” of their locales, and moving towards a de-involvement from bulk dependence on any megalopolitan industrial

system. “The need for a self-affirm alternative to the exceedingly mechanistic vision of progress which dominates us is urgent and intensely practical.”

The creative life, van Dresser believes, is an aide to understanding existence. The notion of having right at hand the essentials for a good, full and rich life is indeed attractive. It is even more desirable when it is realized that the diminishment of s dependence on others not only relieves extremely controlled pressures, anxieties and fears but it ennobles the independent and the creative spirit.

The 1973 Arab boycott of oil shipments to the United States ought to have demonstrated the reasonableness of diversified and decentralized sources of essential commodities. A decentralized system might also encourage a richness of aesthetic variation and cultural expression resulting in a broadening of aesthetic perception and appreciation. “Men”, van Dresser states, “reach their full stature, not when they are well-fed and hygienically housed and taught how to do routine tasks obediently and well. For spiritual maturity they require to be creative masters, to exercise science and artistry on some scale however small…and this is what the industrial technology cannot permit except to a tiny fraction of the working population, which grows steadily smaller as decentralization and coordination proceed.”

The moral imperative of science is to benefit mankind both physically and spiritually. The technology spawned by a portion of aesthetic discoveries feels no such compulsion. Scientific attitudes, properly identified, are, by contrast, open flexible and freedom conferring. These characteristics ought, ideally, of an operational political life, but as we have seen it frequently is not.

An economy functioning for a political rebirth is a van Dresser vision. As early as the 1930’s van Dresser wrote of the relationship between economies and political system. Fascist totalitarianism, far from representing an outburst of revolutionary social tension, which, once released, will spread like wildfire around the planet is actually the organized struggle for survival of two or three highly specialized economic communities caught and squeezed towards extinction by slow but irresistible changes in the configuration of world economy…it is the spastic reaction of a dying organism.”

The obligation to be a good steward of the earth is deeply felt by van Dresser, but felt more strongly aesthetically than dogmatically. As a scientist he is attracted to beautiful solutions to problems and distressed by those which are awkward or functionally over-elaborate.

When he writes about these matters he is a sensitive poet-ecologist who “weeps over the corpse of a prematurely deceased automobile discarded because it lacks the most current, largely

useless and inefficient improvements; what housewife as she discards the gutted tin can, ponders the diminishment of the world’s coal and iron and tin deposits? What householder, as he apportions the seven pounds of Sunday newspaper sees dreary

wastes of cut-over timber land?...we have carried to a high state of perfection a technique of systematic waste that is unique in the history of the world…twenty-five

percent of manpower is lost through the production of ‘ilth’ unnecessary and actually harmful goods and services…the policy of employment through waste is not successful

but in addition it also creates moral and spiritual havoc”. This observation was made more than forty years ago in the Decentralist magazine Free America long before the

current upsurge in concern for the environment.

Elementary needs and human dignity illustrate van Dresser’s goals and those who accept the concept of caring for one’s brother by means of supporting the numerous welfare programs would

be reminded that “the decentralist organization would suggest that the expropriated laborer must be replaced by the self-dependent citizen in control of his own economic destiny.” He would urge the adoption of a decentralized democracy. “A reorganization

of industry and technology among all the great nations on a non-exploitive, non-monopolistic and non-centralist basis so that foreign markets and raw material sources

would not be necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy”.

A decentralist position, van Dresser admits, raises difficult questions in the area of military defense. In an early Free America article, that the well-evolved decentralist economy would be

capable of competent defense against conventional military invasion…perhaps in the manner f the Swiss army plans. It would probably not be well adapted to mounting a

powerful offense in the blitzkrieg tradition.

And he considers as well the recent development of annihilation by atomic missiles for which there seems no real defense against on any level or scale of technology. Our daily hope in this

direction, he argues is in the global development of regionalized, non-exploitive economies which will ultimately neutralize the have/have not tensions which now

polarize nations. The question, one feels, is complex and not at all easily resolved. The complexity of this question illustrates the massive destructiveness of not only warfare itself but in the feelings and the postures on has in the preparation for it. The need to

prepare for one’s defense is a drain on creative energies.

The psychology of fear is enervating for the farmer, the artist, or the scholar. The prospect of rising up a breed of warriors is repugnant. Dependence on a wholly automated defense system

would commit us totally to the requirements, mercies, and malfunctions of a cybernetic industrial system…the very antithesis of what we hope for.

As awesome as the idea of an orderly process of decentralization may be there are indications that a growing number of people consider that the process would be useful. Ironically, even

the two great super powers are themselves victims of the centralized syndrome and have considered the wisdom in diffusing the results of their military technology. While

they appear unable to follow through in political, economic and other industrial enterprises, a process that would amount to the dismantling of the empires, they have

recognized both the limits and the dangers in the presently operating system.

Van Dresser emphasizes that the present system leads ultimately to disaster whether that be by another and final great war, a series of minor wars triggered in response to an expansionist

economic system, or, avoiding these drastic developments, a prolonged industrial and societal collapse caused by a failure in the precarious balance of forces characterizing

the urban industrial system. The van Dresser argument stresses the obvious, that a regionally oriented bio-technical economy would be less subject to disaster and that

were a disaster to occur the economy would be better able to effect a rapid recovery.

Van Dresser is not arguing for parochialism but for the more efficient employment of energies, goods and services. One manifestation of a decentralized society, as he sees it, would be a proliferation of small but culturally rich small urban centers ultimately replacing the

megalopolitan morass. While such centers may not embrace such grand institutions as The Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Opera, the Chicago Art Institute, a prototype of the

possibilities already exists in Santa Fe, New Mexico where van Dresser has chosen to live. There with an urban population of under 50,000 there functions an internationally

famous opera, several symphonies, a chamber music festival, Indian arts and crafts, five functional museums, three colleges, several private schools, thirty-odd art galleries and

four or five bronze founderies.

It is in this same community and its regional setting that there exists a long established pattern of diversified husbandry and small scale industries which is one of van Dresser’s preferred

choices. It is this sort of organization, van Dresser claims, which gives support to the self-reliant individual capable of thinking for himself because he is not a product of over

specialization and who is, therefore, better able to adapt if faced with the unexpected.

Van Dresser suggests that there may be social benefits to a varied indigenous resource-based community in that it assists the development of varied life-styles and consequently

encourages an enrichment of experience through enlarging understanding of other’s occupational needs and interests.

On the other had the, the result of monopolistic control of essential commodities and energy sources out line the familiar profile of exploitive monoculture, or, as I had written in an earlier

draft “ of social and political blackmail.” I am emphasizing the editorial change here as a means of illustrating the differences between Peter and myself. Peter much preferred the gentler description while I

maintained we must call a spade a spade.

Such views create the impression that van Dresser is a very cautious man, interested in neither the extremes of exploitive luxury nor that of demeaning poverty, both of which he sees as

the inevitable periodic result of the mismanagement of resources and the consequently unrealistic social structure based on the “myth of their inexhaustibility”.

One may point out as an example, that recent dumpings of Japanese steel in the American market at below production costs may have saved Japan’s full employment percentage and

avoided, for them, a glutted domestic market, but this action may have threatened the

United States with these ills. Ironically, at the same time, we hear that the steel industry itself may be a dying industry.

Van Dresser asks : “Is our civilization actually destined to approximate these super mechanical utopias which are now (1939) the popular fashion, with their arrogant towering cities, their

mighty systems and engines for the mass exploitation of the earth…in short, their sterile reduplications of delusions of imperial grandeur and collective might which was hoary

when Rome was a tribal village?”

And he wonders that “if we have permitted something to destroy the unique economic structure of the original United States, that structure, however imperfect, that structure made possible

the growth of a self-dependent citizenry which could conceive and put into execution the idea of self-government, then can we expect to wage anything but a losing fight for

democracy? How can we expect, in the long run, to achieve anything but some sort of ersatz government as plutocracy, bureaucracy, technocracy?”

While the quietness of spirit surrounds the man Peter van Dresser, whose physical discomfort is not unlike that of Job, his present efforts, consistent with all that has gone on before, are

taking form at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico where four passive solar residences prototypes are under construction.

This practical demonstration…part of a grass roots movement in the southern Rockies towards a renaissance of the earlier self-dependent economy…has helped trigger international

interest in the possibility of an ecologically and ethically balanced society of the future which may well move this mountain of wasteful techniques and processes now

characterizing many of our industries as well as our political and social manipulations.