As the 50th anniversary of Small is Beautiful, 2023 is our opportunity to advance solutions to today’s social, economic, and environmental challenges that build on Schumacher’s original vision. To do so, the Schumacher Center is convening a monthly series featuring New Economic thinkers, builders and activists from a range of fields. “Schumacher Conversations: Envisioning the Next 50 Years” brings together change-makers whose work today is actively shaping a ‘small is beautiful’ future, organized around 12 key themes and fields of activism.
The theme for July’s Conversation was Developing Convivial Technologies for Right Livelihood. This online Conversation took place Thursday, July 20th at 2PM (EDT).
Featuring:
– Dorn Cox, Wolfe’s Neck Center
– Toby Hammond, FuturePump
– John Chettleborough, Practical Action
– Moderated by Sebastian Wood, Managing Director of Whitby Wood
…a technology with a human face, is in fact possible… it re-integrates the human being, with his skillful hands and creative brain, into the productive process. It serves production by the masses instead of mass production.
— E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful
Small is Beautiful advocated an economics in which both people and planet truly matter. At the heart of Schumacher’s economic analysis is the issue of technological gigantism: the fact that conventional industrialization had resulted in ever-larger mechanization and ever-increasing complexity at the expense of intangible values: community cohesion, local self-reliance, and workers’ sense of agency and satisfaction in their labor.
Appropriate technology (AT) is technology designed to work at human scale. The main goals of the AT movement are to enhance local self-reliance and to harmonize economic activity with ecological health; it’s emphases are on simple-to-adopt solutions that empower, rather than displace, creative and meaningful labor. Alongside Ivan Illich’s contemporaneous Tools for Conviviality, Small is Beautiful catalyzed a broad international discussion and an array of practical innovation in this emerging field.
Today, appropriate technologies may be found supporting transitions toward small-scale renewable energy, manufacturing, and regenerative agriculture. July’s panelists are those championing elegant technological solutions in both under-developed as well as over-developed contexts. Together, their ingenuity illustrates the importance of a “middle way” in economic development — placing efficiency among a more holistic set of human values to encourage more convivial societies.
Our list of aligned organizations for July’s theme can be found here. For more background, read George McRobie’s 1982 Schumacher Lecture, “The Community’s Role in Appropriate Technology.”
