There has been talk recently both in the UK and the US of rebalancing the economy; that seems to mean trying to make the economy less dependent on financial services and encouraging manufacturing. Or it could also mean, in the UK, redressing the balance between the relatively affluent south and the north, where unemployment is higher.

This talk does not go nearly far enough; there is not just one balance, or even two, that need to be restored but several. The term that the radical historian and ecologist Ivan Illich (1926-2002) used in his wide-ranging book Tools for Conviviality (1973) was “the multiple balance”. In fact Illich identified six “mutually reinforcing stresses, each distorting the balance of life in a different direction”.

The first balance that is out of kilter, according to Illich, is the “precarious balance between man and the biosphere”. Before such issues as acid rain, ozone depletion and global warming had hit the headlines, he was raising the alert about a planet threatened by uncontrolled emissions of polluting gases and poisons and overextraction of resources. Such alerts strike us as old hat nowadays, but what made Illich especially challenging was his refusal to go along with conventional remedies. He saw that anti-pollution technology, when not accompanied by a profound shift in values, simply tends to “shift garbage out of sight, push it into the future, or dump it onto the poor”.