humanist. When Mumford described biotechnics, automotive and industrial pollution had become dominant technological concerns, along with the fear of nuclear annihilation. Mumford recognized, however, that technology had even earlier produced a plethora of hazards, and that it would do so into the future. For Mumford, human hazards are rooted in a power-oriented technology that does not adequately respect and accommodate the essential nature of humanity. Mumford is stating implicitly, as others would later state explicitly, that contemporary human life understood in its ecological sense is out of balance because the technical parts of its ecology (guns, bombs, cars, drugs) have spiraled out of control, driven by forces peculiar to them rather than constrained by the needs of the species that created them. He believed that biotechnics was the emerging answer and the only hope that could be set out against the problem of megatechnics. It was an answer, he believed, that was already beginning to assert itself in his time. It is true that Mumford's writing privileges the term "biotechnics" more than the "biotechnic society." The reason is clear in the last sentence of The Pentagon of Power where he writes, "for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out." Mumford believed that the biotechnic society was a desideratum—one that should guide his contemporaries as they walked out the doors of their megatechnic confines (he also calls them "coffins"). Thus he ends his narrative, as he well understood, at the beginning of another one: the possible revolution that gives rise to a biotechnic society, a quiet revolution, for Mumford, one that would arise from the biotechnic consciousness and actions of individuals. Mumford was an avid reader of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of the organism. Polytechnics versus monotechnics A key idea, introduced in Technics and Civilization (1934) was that technology was twofold: Polytechnic, which enlists many different modes of technology, providing a complex framework to solve human problems. Monotechnic, which is technology only for its own sake, which oppresses humanity as it moves along its own trajectory. Mumford commonly criticized modern America's transportation networks as being "monotechnic" in their reliance on cars. Automobiles become obstacles for other modes of transportation, such as walking, bicycle and public transit, because the