Appropriate Technology: Development and Social Change

On a sprawling hacienda just outside the southern Nicaraguan coastal town of San Juan del Sur, a lanky North American engineer and machinist named David Parkhurst has established a workshop for repairing windmills. In the 1930s, about 5,000 U.S.-made Chicago Motor Company windmills were constructed on Nicaragua's Pacific coast to pump water for livestock. Today, more than half of these windmills are broken, victims of time and the U.S. economic boycott. For David Parkhurst, windmill repair represents an important contribution to Nicaragua's agrarian economy: access to potable water is a problem for the rural population, especially since heavy utilization of pesticides by U.S. agro-export firms prior to 1979 polluted much of the available groundwater.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.