NATURAL RESOURCES ARE 'OUT' 

Adults often complain their children move through changes or fads between daybreak and dusk. What was in on Tuesday is "ancient city" by Friday. Get prepared to experience the same thing in your working life as large industries and businesses everywhere go through wrenching and previously unexperienced radical changes.

Natural resource industries are finished! Lumber is no longer needed in the same volume as in the past. It's being replaced by "advanced materials" that are superior in many ways. The "Wild fisherman" is going the way of the buffalo hunter as genetic engineering and new forms of offshore aquaculture produce the same "wild" fish for a fraction of the cost of boats and men chasing a vanishing stock. The hard-rock miner is also an endangered species as molecular engineering replaces, from thin air (much like trees) atom by atom and molecule by molecule, what we previously dug out of the ground. This will not be easy to take but forewarned is, at least partially forearmed. Cedar shakes are now illegal in several huge California counties because in hot dry regions they turn into kindling. Spun-carbon fibres, mixed with new forms of concrete, are being used in ultramodern Japanese buildings. The buildings are lighter (less steel necessary), stronger and cheaper than with previous materials. The lighter weight results in less cost to build on landfill sites. Ceramic homes contain $207 worth of wood, while your house probably contains about $8,500 worth of lumber. The ceramic house is guaranteed for 20 years, requires no fire insurance and has a lower mortgage rate (because of reduced risk with manufacturer's guarantee).

Scientists said lobsters could never be raised in captivity. It is now done in Japan. King, or spring salmon are raised in net-guarded fjords (with processing plants on nearby shore) and in huge off-shore contained fisheries and soon-to-be in underwater "ranches" -- under floating cities!. In both cases there is no cost for feed -- it's natural.

World wire services recently carried pictures of the IBM logo -built atom by atom into molecule by molecule until it was large enough, with plenty of magnification, to see. This is just the beginning. New materials can now be created, much like DuPont did with nylon when they replaced silk stockings, from atmospheric materials at a much lower cost than the hard natural way of the past. All this is not new. But this time it is happening faster and in more places than ever before. Back in the 19th century, cottage industries grew rapidly with the introduction of such technological developments as the spinning wheel. Before it faded from the scene improvements had reduced the time it took to spin 100 pounds of cotton from the original 50,000 man/woman hours it took in India to 300 hours with the greatly improved British loom and then down eventually to 135 hours thereafter. The more efficient spinning process reduced the cost of cotton cloth by 85 percent and changed the way people dressed! This fantastically successful cottaged-based industry finally lost out because of size-restraints; it was unable to adapt to the economies of scale possible with the then emerging large factories of the industrial revolution.

Today the reverse is in effect as small, electronically-equipped home-based operations, that comprehend "economies of scope", accomplish in their new information environment what previously took large numbers of staff and large areas of space to produce and store. Small scale is more appropriate for the current age just as large scale was more in keeping with the Industrial Age. The technological environment has changed. What once favored "big" now favors "small". Fax versus the post office; electronic publishing versus the Gutenberg format; colorful, dynamic, interesting visuals versus dull, dry, static print; optical and crystal storage versus libraries and books. World-wide instantaneous communication brings electronic newspapers, magazines and letters via computer modem or fax. Videoconferencing via satellite or fibre optic cable runs roughshod over telex, cable, telegraph or letter. Such changes will continue to occur even faster as the global ISDN (Intergrated Services Digital Network) "electronic highway" falls into place.

If you are involved in any of the sunset industries above, plan fast to change before it happens to you and you then are just one of thousands trying to adapt. Today the lucky ones in sunset industries are those who get fired first.

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