SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

A couple of years earlier I had worked with the economist E.F. Schumacher in making the filmOn the Edge of the Forest. It was about the management of the forests of Western Australia and in it he described the waste of resources he saw, the potential for smaller scale technologies, the importance of planting trees and of course the forest settings around us.

Schumacher’s most famous bookSmall is Beautiful: Economics as if People Matter2 begins with this stunning statement,‘It is one of the myths of our time that the problem of production is solved.’ With Western society awash with ‘stuff’ it is easy to think the opposite: that producing goods is definitely not a problem; if anything, production is too successful. However Schumacher was referring to the likely failure of large scale industrialisation over time. Modern industrial production is deformed by its grossly unsustainable approach to resources and energy use, as well as the de-humanising effect of mass production. In an extreme example, close to a quarter of a million people, housed in dormitories, work at a single electronics manufacturing plant in China. Meanwhile, in Australia, it is a challenge to buy any locally manufactured goods.

As the first Western thinker to distinguish renewable and non-renewable resources3, Schumacher was a proponent of a different notion of productivity to the current economic thought that equates productivity with maximum output of goods. For Schumacher the role of production should be to provide full employment for all who need it by means of a technology that is cheap enough to be easily accessible, suitable for small-scale application and compatible with the human need for creativity. In other words the purpose of productivity is the maximisation of wellbeing rather than the output of goods and profit. Schumacher called his approach Buddhist economics (although he was a Catholic) because it is based on a concern forRight Livelihood. Thus human work should not only produce useful goods but also develop our faculties and diminish ego-centrism by working cooperatively.Jobs are boring and stultifying.

Work is satisfying.

In the Schumacherian worldview, alienation from Nature is a result of the disconnect created by modern production systems and city living where we are kept at pleasant temperatures with plentiful food only a short walk, or in Australia, drive away. Nature has become an object of reverence outside ourselves and our daily lives, to be enjoyed on short holidays to remind us of the reality of our urbanity.

The ideas that most influenced me concerned the notion of Appropriate Technology; the fact thatSmall Is Beautiful was not anti-development, and that it was probably the first seminal work on sustainability for an industrialised society. The book didn’