News). In the early 1970s, Hess became involved in an experiment with several friends and colleagues to bring self-built and -managed technology into the direct service of the economic and social life of the (at the time) poor, largely African American neighborhood of Adams-Morgan in Washington, D.C. It was the neighborhood in which Hess had spent his childhood. Afterward, Hess wrote a book entitled Community Technology which told the story of this experiment and its results. According to Hess, the residents had a vigorous go at participatory democracy, and the neighborhood seemed for a time like a fertile ground for the growth of community identity and capability. Much of the technological experimentation Hess and others engaged in there was successful in technical terms (apparatus was built, food raised, solar energy captured, etc.). For instance, Hess wrote: "In one experiment undertaken by the author and associates, an inner-city basement space, roughly thirty by fifty feet, was sufficient to house plywood tanks in which rainbow trout were produced at a cost of less than a dollar per pound. In a regular production run the total number of fish that can be raised in such a basement area was projected to be five tons per year." He taught courses and lectured on Appropriate Technology and Social Change in this period at the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont. Nonetheless, the Adams-Morgan neighborhood, continuing on what he felt was a path of social deterioration and real-estate gentrification, declined to devote itself to expanding on the technology. Hence, in his view, a needy community got little value from the application of viable technology. Subsequently, Hess and his wife, Therese, moved to rural Opequon Creek between Martinsburg and Kearneysville, West Virginia, where he set up a welding shop as partial support for his household. He became deeply involved with local affairs there. Hess built an affordable house that relied largely on passive-solar heating, and took an interest in wind power and all forms of solar energy. The house they built was a 2000 sq. ft. sun-warmed, earth-sheltered structure – constructed mostly using their own labor, and at cost of just $10,000 (mid-1970s dollars). They acquired most of the tools needed for the construction, and the appliances needed for a comfortable modern life, second-hand. By the late 1970s, Hess saw solar energy as emblematic of decentralization and nuclear energy as emblematic of central organization. Hess wrote for