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Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

I've always romanticized the late '40s and '50s - the cars, jazz, the open roads and lack of pollution. Now there are more vehicles, less hitchhikers, more billboards and power lines and stuff. People wrote wonderful long letters that took months to receive, and now everything is email.

For example, it's only about 20 years ago the people in that community would have got telephone lines, and it would be only about in the 1950s that electricity came to that part of the world. Television wouldn't have come till 1970.

When I joined Ford, in the late 1970s, I felt strongly we could not forever be a huge user of natural resources without there being consequences. But I was alone in my thinking in those days.

We lived in a farm village, and no one could afford to buy a car or to fly. We were envious. We couldn't afford any toys. I couldn't imagine making a real car.

I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars.

How we get power, how cars are powered, when the technology and resources to have something that is infinitely better, we still use old-school technology. We're still using that same exact structure.

I knew trucking was growing. It grew from the Second World War to the time that I bought the bridge. There were interstate highways being built. I thought there was opportunity.

Our society wants things to grow, and our society wants things to become bigger and bigger. Everything has to be put under the spotlight.