Our celebration of Small is Beautiful continues in July, focusing on the theme of Developing Convivial Technologies for Right Livelihood. Our participants for this online conversation are introduced below.
Join us Thursday the 20th at 2PM (EDT). As with each of our 2023 Schumacher Conversations, registration is free.
Register here.
“…[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 a new economics in which both people and planet truly matter. At the heart of Schumacher’s analysis lay the issue of technological gigantism: the fact that Western industrialization had resulted in ever-larger mechanization and ever-increasing complexity at the expense of less tangible human 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 emphasizes simple-to-adopt solutions that empower, rather than displace, creative and meaningful labor. Along with 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 from the 1970s onward.
Today, appropriate technologies can 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. (For more background, read George McRobie’s 1982 Schumacher Lecture, “The Community’s Role in Appropriate Technology.”)
JULY PARTICIPANTS
- Dorn Cox is the research director for the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment in Freeport, Maine, and farms with his family on 250 acres in Lee, New Hampshire. He is a founder of the farmOS software platform and Farm Hack, and is active in the soil health movement.
- John Chettleborough is Agriculture and Markets Lead with Practical Action, the NGO set up by Fritz Schumacher in 1966 (originally called the Intermediate Technology Development Group). His current portfolio supports locally-led regenerative agriculture in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
- Toby Hammond is the co-founder and Managing Director of Futurepump, Ltd., a leading manufacturer of solar irrigation pumps designed for one-acre smallholder farmers, mostly in the global south, displacing gasoline-powered water pumps.
- Sebastian Wood is the managing director of engineering practice Whitby Wood, co-founded in February 2016, around people, sustainability and technology. Sebastian sits on the Schumacher Center’s Board of Directors and is a grandson of E.F. Schumacher.
Each panelist is invited to reflect on how Small Is Beautiful connects with their own thinking and activism, opening up a broader conversation on appropriate technologies and right livelihood. An audience Q&A follows moderated by our host, Sebastian Wood.
Register here.
A reminder that June’s Conversation, Creating a Global Renewable Energy Commons, may be viewed here.