Publication Types: Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture

Economic Globalization: The Era of Corporate Rule

NINETEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1999 Salisbury Congregational Church, Salisbury, CT

Long in the forefront of the anti-globalization movement, Mander sets forth in clear and impassioned terms the devastating effects of the current global economy—”the most fundamental redesign of the planet’s systems since the Industrial Revolution”—and shows how such measures as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment are designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. But he also shows the steps that can be taken by individuals and groups in opposition to globalization to protest and resist its domination and raise the fundamental question, “Who should make the rules we live by?” Delivered just a few weeks before the massive protest demonstrations in Seattle in November 1999, Mander anticipates the powerful forces that gathered there and suggests ways in which the anti-globalization movement can continue to make its voice heard and its truths manifest in future struggles.

The Friendship Club and the Well-Springs of Civil Society

NINETEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1999 Salisbury Congregational Church, Salisbury, CT

A senior program officer at the Bradley Foundation, Schambra focuses here on creating the conditions for people to practice the art of self-governance in small face-to-face communities. Taking as his model the Friendship Club, a small self-governing community of drug users and street people in Milwaukee, he shows how these people have cultivated new attitudes and virtues without making themselves into the “grateful clients of credentialed experts.” This level of civil society, he notes, can be murky and disorganized, but the existence of an institution that is their own is worth much more to seemingly powerless disadvantaged people than the benevolent ministrations of the bureaucratic social agencies delivering services and benefits.

A Map: From the Old Connecticut Path to the Rio Grande Valley and All the Meaning In Between

NINETEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1999 Salisbury Congregational Church, Salisbury, CT

”I come to you from a place where the earth is pink”—thus Glendinning begins her warm evocation of Chimayó, the village in New Mexico where she lives. She contrasts the way in which the Europeans who invaded America (including her ancestors) regarded place as the battleground for empire and exploitation while the Chicano people she lives among—the “down-to-earth people”—live in a place-based, bioregional, community-oriented, ecological society. They are trying to resist that empire, fighting against Wal-Mart and the Bureau of Land Management and the developers stealing from their ancient land grants. But however ugly and powerful the forces of what Glendinning terms the “global economic empire” may be, the challenge to them is based on a deep feeling for place that she calls “a map of love;” in today’s world, as she puts it, “loving the earth is a political act.” And this map, she shows, can apply to all of us, no matter where we live.

The Company We Keep: The Case for Small Schools

EIGHTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1998 Salisbury Congregational Church, Salisbury, CT

Meier argues that at the heart of civic life are responsible relationships; we learn by the company we keep. She goes on to contend that our system of large schools tends to discourage responsible interactions by their very scale. Not content to just criticize, she outlines the steps she and her colleagues have taken to shape small schools within the public school system, increasing continuity of staff, more interaction among age groups, and a sense of community.

Flapping Butterfly Wings: A Retrospect of TRANET’s First Twenty Years

EIGHTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1998 Salisbury Congregational Church, Salisbury, CT

Ellis spent over twenty years searching out the people and organizations with the best applications of appropriate technology. He recorded and circulateed his findings through the TRANET newsletter, thereby helping facilitate the person-to-person exchanges that empower small communities around the world to successfully solve technological problems at the local level.

Buddhist Technology: Bringing a New Consciousness to Our Technological Future

SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1997 Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

A leading physicist and humanist, Zajonc focuses on the relationship between technology and work on one hand and right values and livelihood on the other. He shows how traditions and culture once provided a right moral context for work, but now that context has been broken apart by the dramatically increasing capacity of amoral technology to replace human work. Citing fascinating examples from literature and mythology, Taoism, and Studs Terkel, Zajonc makes a powerful case for the restoration of the links between technology, love, and beauty that must be re-established if we are to be fully human.

How the Conquest of Indigenous Peoples Parallels the Conquest of Nature

SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1997 Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

Mohawk urges that we step back and ask ourselves, What costs are we really paying for as participants in a world market economy? The trend of Western civilization, he argues, has been toward a politics of conquest and plundering of both people and the planet. Blending social history with an ecological perspective, Mohawk draws parallels among various cultures in order to expose the philosophy underlying global capitalism and its institutions. As an alternative Mohawk recommends rebuilding cultures and economies around localism and regional self-sufficiency, in the process encouraging local production for local consumption.

The Wisdom That Builds Community

SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1997 Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

Watson relates the story of an urban community that came together to reshape its destiny. Starting with shovels and garbage bags to clean up abandoned lots, residents formed the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, which used the structure of the Community Land Trust in acquiring lots that now support hundreds of units of renovated owner-occupied homes, a productive greenhouse, locally-owned businesses, and reinvigorated neighborhood pride. In telling the story of Dudley Street, Watson describes his own background as an African American growing up in Cleveland in the 1960s. Seeing the ecological degradation surrounding him, he grew to become a leader in the environmental movement, later returning to the urban landscape with a richer understanding of the complex issues needed to build sustainable communities.

The Assembly: A Tool for Transforming Communities

SIXTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1996 First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Stockbridge, MA

Anderson highlights the necessity in the fight against poverty to first and foremost organize communities and let them decide their courses of action for themselves rather than designing and imposing programs from outside of the community. He puts forth the Assembly as an organizational concept suited to this purpose. The Assembly is rooted in Thomas Jefferson’s vision of wards acting as small, engaged republics.

Moving Toward Community: From Global Dependence to Local Interdependence

SIXTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1996 First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Stockbridge, MA

Founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, Norberg-Hodge presents an eloquent argument in favor of worldwide action to oppose the global capitalist economy and its monoculture with revivified and strengthened local economies and communities. Drawing on her experience, particularly in Ladakh in northwestern India, she shows convincingly how much of a menace to tradition and stability the newly powerful global economy is, how destructive of culture as well as environment. But using her experience there in local organizing and cultural survival, she also demonstrates that it is possible to resist international pressures, raise awareness of the dangers of foreign influences, and create grass-roots initiatives for local empowerment and self-sufficiency.

Reclaiming Community

SIXTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1996 First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Main Street, Stockbridge, MA, United States

Morris, co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, believes that we can create an economy as if community mattered. However, the central and most determining feature of modern economies is the separation of those who make the decisions from those who feel the impact of the decisions in their communities. He suggests that the resolution of the tension between the globalization of economies and the localization of politics lies in E. F. Schumacher‘s call for local production for local consumption. We need to restore authority, responsibility, and capacity at the local level by instituting new rules to encourage production methods that are accountable to community and place in order to create strong, self-reliant, and enduring communities.

The Garden Project: Growing Urban Communities

FIFTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1995 Yale Law School, New Haven, CT

Delivering a powerful message that is moving, hopeful, and urgent, Sneed shows that bringing people out of the jails and off the streets into the garden can be transformative in both the human and natural realms. Her personal story is equally compelling as she tells about overcoming life-threatening illness, poverty, a skeptical bureaucracy, and the resistance of co-workers to her creation of a gardening program within the San Francisco jail system. Through their work in the garden and Sneed’s untiring efforts on their behalf, she has taught the participants a better way to live.

Distributing Our Technological Inheritance

FOURTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1994 Yale University, New Haven, CT

Arguing that our current sophisticated technology builds on a history of scientific achievements which are rightly our shared cultural inheritance, Alperovitz then constructs a philosophical argument for broad distribution of the profits earned from the capitalization of this technology. In the process he examines some of the practical ways that such distribution can be achieved.

The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr

FOURTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1994 Yale University, New Haven, CT

More than any other thinker of the twentieth century, Illich has challenged institutional bureaucracies and provided a strong voice for small communities. In this lecture, he reflects on Kohr’s efforts to lay a foundation for an alternate to economics and traces historic attitudes of proportionality, scale, reasonableness, and economic scarcity.

Voices from White Earth: Gaa-waabaabiganikaag

THIRTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1993 Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, Prospect Street, New Haven, CT, United States

LaDuke, an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) member of the White Earth Nation, is a strong and clear voice for the return to traditional land-holding patterns of her people. She explains how, in order to sustain the life of the Anishinaabe, her people need different kinds of land: the lakes for harvesting wild rice, the forests for hunting, and the meadows for gathering herbs. The earlier artificial allocation of square plots of the White Earth Reservation to individual tribal members and the loss of the Anishinaabes’ land through sale to outsiders has resulted in a mosaic of land use that separates the community from its traditions. Her own work is devoted to restoring the integrity of the White Earth Reservation by repurchasing sold land and holding it in a community land trust arrangement so that it may be productively used without fear of loss. The story she tells is a moving one and provides a practical approach to healing a wounded people and wounded land.

Becoming Native to this Place

THIRTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1993 Yale University, New Haven, CT

Co-founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and pioneer in sustainable agriculture, Jackson is here too a pioneer—for sustainable communities. Years of seeing the harm done to his beloved prairies through the implementation of corporate agricultural practices determined his dramatic move to the small, almost abandoned town of Matfield Green in the Flint Hills of Kansas. Instructed by the history and traditions of the people who lived there before him, Jackson has undertaken to renew the town on an ecological and sustainable basis. It is a large undertaking, and it may not be successful; however, he has only one choice and we with him: to try. His lecture is a powerful affirmation of this spirit of renewal.

Ecologically Sustainable Economic Development: Not Just Another Pretty Face

THIRTEENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1993 Yale University, New Haven, CT

Davis devoted his MacArthur fellowship to mapping the watershed of Lake Baikal, the largest fresh-water source on earth. Using zoning methods, conservation easements, and the community land trust model for the productive land, he implemented a sustainable economic development plan for the watershed to ensure the protection of this important world resource in the face of the many changes in the former Soviet Union. Davis’s motto, “Listen to the land, listen to the people,” helped him to create cohesiveness among the various interest groups, including emerging regional government authorities, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, academicians, and representatives from foreign countries. His approach is highly effective and his lecture an important addition in a series on environmental issues.

The Right Livelihood Award and Further Initiatives for a Sustainable Society

TWELFTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1992 First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Stockbridge, MA

The Right Livelihood Award, known as “the Alternative Nobel Prize,” was established in 1980 “to honor and support individuals who are finding practical solutions to the most urgent challenges facing us today.” Von Uexkull describes the Award and many of its recipients, including those who are working for human rights and justice, environmental protection, and spiritual regeneration. The Award is one of a number of initiatives launched by von Uexkull, who believes that the only way to address today’s environmental, economic, and social ills is to “set up shadow institutions, in order to create a new and alternative mainstream and to give it as much energy and standing as possible.” He concludes with an appeal to “create the foundations for a sustainable world order without delay” and a proposal for a democratically elected People’s Council for Global Sustainability.

Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered

TWELFTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1992 First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Stockbridge, MA

“For the most part . . . we are still educating the young as if there were no planetary emergency.” Yet, continues Orr, the environmental crisis is “first and foremost a crisis of mind, perception, and values—hence, a challenge to those institutions presuming to shape minds, perceptions, and values. It is an educational challenge.” Our society must embrace and implement new ways of teaching that emphasize and prepare people for ecologically integrated lives and livelihoods. Orr describes the goals and basic tenets of ecological education, presenting five measures that are essential to transforming the modern curriculum.

It’s Healing Time on Earth

TWELFTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1992 First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Stockbridge, MA

The first stage of the James Bay hydro-electric development project submerged four thousand square acres of northern Canadian forest. In the past eighty years the global population has tripled and the population of California has gone up by a factor of twelve. We may already have destroyed the botanical ingredients of a cure for AIDS. Brower delivers these and other stories of the ecological destruction taking place in all parts of the Earth, embellishing his narrative with stories of people working for ecological restoration and examples of the “miracles of wildness.” He also identifies a strong public wish to assist with ecological restoration and urges us all to participate in restoration projects.

The Ecozoic Era

ELEVENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1991 John Dewey Academy, Great Barrington, MA

We presently face a radical transition in Earth’s history. “[W]e have already terminated the Cenozoic period of the geo-biological systems of the planet . . . . A renewal of life in some creative context requires that a new biological period come into being, a period when humans would dwell upon the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner.” Berry outlines the conditions required for the emergence of an Ecozoic Era, a time for healing the damage done to Earth and learning to live in harmony with it again. Drawing on the experience of Native Americans, he urges renewed understanding of the Great Story: the combined stories of community, Earth, and universe. Berry calls on Elders of the Tribe to inspire future generations with this vision, since only with a new myth to replace the current entrancement with a destructive technology will they “be able to endure the pains of transformation” sure to come.

Making Amends to the Myriad Creatures

ELEVENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1991 John Dewey Academy, Great Barrington, MA

The purpose of the rapidly growing discipline called ecological restoration is to heal damaged landscapes by reinstating their original plant and animal communities, thereby making amends for humankind’s degradation of ecosystems. Thousands of people nationwide are involved in this rigorous, labor-intensive, painstakingly slow work. Mills, a leading figure in the bioregional movement, describes the difficulties, pitfalls, and rewards in store for those who return a given area to its earlier biological diversity, stability, and beauty. She shows that protecting wilderness is not the only motive behind restoration: another is to regain a sense of belonging to and depending on one’s local ecosystem, with the hope that “cultural interaction with [it] will inculcate a moral restraint on the impulse to control and determine, to expand and exploit,” resulting in a sustainable way of life for future generations.

Women and the Challenge of the Ecological Era

TENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1990 John Dewey Academy, Great Barrington, MA

The era of greed and dominance must end. In the Ecological Era, according to Jackson, “we must learn from nature and from women in order to transform our destructive patterns . . . . The first step . . . is to cultivate and elevate in importance some of the qualities and values most generally associated with women that can help us abandon our suicidal patterns.” We can then “combine what we have learned in the ecological era and what we have learned in the feminist era to respond to environmental crises.”

The Columbian Legacy and the Ecosterian Response

TENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1990 John Dewey Academy, Great Barrington, MA

The 500th anniversary of the “discovery” of America motivates Sale, author of The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, to reassess the legacy of European settlement and domination, finding it dangerously inadequate. As a countermeasure to this heritage and as a practical step toward an ecological future, he proposes the creation of small-scale communities to be called ecosteries, modeled on the monasteries that arose after the fall of Rome but devoted in our day to ecological protection and restoration as well as the preservation of the knowledge necessary for that work.

The Management Explosion and the Next Environmental Crisis

TENTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1990 John Dewey Academy, Great Barrington, MA

Ehrenfeld examines the consequences of “the extraordinary proliferation of administration, of bureaucracy, of management, the increasing percentage of people in our society who control events but do not themselves produce anything real.” He gives examples of management that has become itself a raison d’etre, grown far beyond a size appropriate to its necessary modern-day role. When management grows so large, “it appropriates and stifles the life of the society.” He then gives several suggestions on how to curb managerial excess, with the admonition that “[t]o survive with the many good features of our society intact and with our environment in a liveable condition, we must solve the problem of bureaucracy before it solves itself . . .” because “management, like anything undergoing perpetual growth, will eventually bring itself under control by running out of resources.”

Why Small Is Beautiful: The Size Interpretation of History

NINTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1989 John Dewey Academy, Great Barrington, MA

“The answer to all questions underlying all our problems today is the size factor—not unemployment, not warfare, not juvenile delinquency, not business fluctuation, not Black Mondays, Black Fridays, or Black Tuesdays.” According to Kohr we must reduce the huge size of modern nations in order to reduce their negative consequences. Using anecdotes and analogies Kohr shows why small is beautiful. Just as the small size of a harbor will diminish the power of great swells arriving from the open ocean, so can small communities lessen the impact of our global society’s ocean-sized operations. This is the “harbor philosophy”; its application, says Kohr, is “the only prospect that will enable human society to survive.”

Bringing Power Back Home: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale

NINTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1989 John Dewey Academy, Great Barrington, MA

Although for generations the government of Vermont rested with the administrators of its 246 towns, the past thirty years have seen a slow but steady growth of central power. According to McClaughry, Vermonters are in danger of losing true citizenship and therefore of losing their democracy as more and more decisions affecting their lives are made by distant functionaries. “[T]he place where you belong and where you recognize those who belong and those who are strangers, where the good of everyone is tied together in an interconnected web that is ruptured only at the peril of everyone in the community—that is where citizenship resides.” Reiterating the central theme of The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale (co-authored with Frank Bryan), McClaughry calls for a federation in Vermont of new political bodies called “shires,” which would be big enough to take back the powers lost to the state and small enough to allow direct citizen participation.

Development Beyond Economism: Local Paths to Sustainable Development

NINTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1989 John Dewey Academy, Great Barrington, MA

Henderson evaluates the need for a broader definition of economic development, one which measures progress and prosperity by social as well as by traditional econometric measures. “Guiding societies by today’s over-aggregated indices is like trying to fly a Boeing 747 with a single oil pressure gauge! The social indicators debate is about disaggregation, revealing overlooked detail, locally and sectorally, and adding a whole row of additional gauges to . . . societies’ ‘instrument panels’ so as to plug feedback into decision-making with more precision and timeliness.” Henderson describes her experiences in developing countries that are trying to act independently of “Eurocentric industrial development theorists” in order to gauge economic progress more accurately and respond to their countries’ real needs.

The City and the Farm Crisis

Sixth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures September 1986 Arch Street Friends Meeting House, Philadelphia

All of us together—city people and country people—have to eat. The most significant aspect of the agricultural crisis, Berry argues, is that we rely on others, namely large-scale farmers, to produce food and carry out land stewardship on our behalf. He believes that it’s dangerous to depend upon the industries that are involved between the grower and the eater of food, such as the transport and chemical industries. If we have to use the land, he says, we have to use it well; we have to use it lovingly. More small-scale farmers are needed who will stay in one place and learn to care for the land and respect its limits, then pass along that knowledge to the next generation. By joining together as producers and consumers, we can support local farmers and protect them from being washed away by bankruptcy. Berry praises the Schumacherian ideal of local independence built on local resources. He believes that nothing could be more hopeful than the idea of a healthy local food economy.

Towards a Politics of Hope: Lessons for a Hungry World

FIFTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1985 Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

According to Lappé, economic rules taken as dogma have allowed an increasing concentration of decision-making power over wide-scale food production and distribution: that power has come to reside largely with land-owning minorities, with “governments beholden to self-serving elites,” and with the international corporations that dominate world trade. The roots of hunger, she says, are not to be found in the scarcity of resources but in the scarcity of democracy. A “politics of hope” working toward food for all must encourage trust in our deepest moral sensibilities.

An Ecological Economic Order

FIFTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1985 Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Todd believes that a “new sustainable economic order can be established with ecologically based enterprises.” Ecology as a basis for design, he says, “is the framework of this new economic order. It needs to be combined with a view according to which the earth is seen as a sentient being, a Gaian world view, and our obligations as humans are not just to ourselves but to all of life.” Todd sketches some of the ideas and technologies developed by the New Alchemy Institute and Ocean Arks International, organizations that have made tangible progress—in soil recreation, water purification, resource recovery, etc.—toward reversing environmental degradation and restoring diversity in a sustainable ecological economic order.

John Deere and The Bereavement Counselor

FOURTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1984 Yale University, New Haven, CT

Just as the sod-busting steel plow was destructive of the healthy agricultural development of Wisconsin, modern service technologies such as bereavement counseling can be destructive of the natural caring web of community. According to McKnight, costly service technologies are often counterproductive, resulting in a community’s loss of traditional wisdom and social commitment. He recommends the recultivation of social forms that do not replace consent with control, replace diverse cultural behavior with service monopolies, or turn citizens into mere clients and consumers.

Green Politics: The Spiritual Dimension

FOURTH ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1984 Yale University, New Haven, CT

Spretnak proposes that the spiritual dimension of the Green politics movement is both non-sectarian and also acknowledges the teachings within various religious traditions that support the Green vision, though they are not always emphasized. Both sources can help Greens move society beyond the patriarchal, anthropocentric, spiritually barren, media-shaped values of the modern technological world. Welcoming the spiritual dimension enriches the Green vision of recognizing interrelatedness, cultivating ecological wisdom, achieving gender equality, and more fully developing social responsibility.

The Economy of Regions

THIRD ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1983 Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA

According to Jacobs the healthiest economic regions are those which have strong and innovative import-replacing cities of their own. The economies of such city-regions are shaped and reshaped by complex, economically enlivening, interrelating forces originating within their own regions. Such regions, she says, become capable of producing amply and diversely for their own people and are not passively manipulated by specialized economic forces from distant cities.

Mother of All: An Introduction to Bioregionalism

THIRD ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1983 Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA

Sale argues that while the positive accomplishments of modern science are undeniable, the failures and dangers of the mechanistic, scientific worldview are such that the only sane path, the very path of survival, is “to once again comprehend the earth as a living creature.” To begin to move toward this vision of the living earth, he says, we must get in touch with and understand the natural conditions of the specific place in which we live. Sale outlines four basic determinants of any organized civilization—scale, economy, politics, and society—and demonstrates how bioregionalism is an appropriate organizational model in each area, with historical validity and a workable vision for the future.

The Community’s Role in Appropriate Technology

SECOND ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1982 Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY

Founder with Fritz Schumacher of the Intermediate Technology Development Group in London, McRobie discusses the role of intermediate technology in building self-sufficient regional economies. He explains that engineers should be trained to scale down their designs to meet the cultural, economic, and natural-resource conditions of local place. When engineers design to save energy and capital rather than to save labor, the resulting technology facilitates the creation of large numbers of workplaces rather than centralizing manufacturing. McRobie sees intermediate technology as a tool to redistribute wealth, giving back to communities, families, and local organizations the power that has gradually been taken from them.

The Family as a Small Society

SECOND ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1982 Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY

Boulding argues that the household unit because of its scale, authenticity, and depth of relationships can be an effective tool for social change in the local community. She contrasts “global systems” with “planetary systems”. The military, international corporations, and global markets which make up global systems she describes as serving institutional interests. The network of nongovernmental organizations which make up planetary systems and whose members are small-scale household units have roots in and serve actual places. Boulding has faith in the endurance of this “planetary localism.”

Call For a Revolution in Agriculture

FIRST ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1981 Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA

Jackson points to agriculture—in particular to the methods of till agriculture, which cause soil loss and destroy the soil’s water-holding capacity—as our “number one environmental problem, aside from nuclear war” (and today he would undoubtedly add global warming). As practiced, modern agriculture undercuts the very basis of its own existence and thus jeopardizes the future of the human population. At the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, Jackson and others are working toward a sustainable system of agriculture based on patches (rather than fields) of perennials (rather than annuals), a system “that is at once self-renewing like the prairie or forest and yet capable of supporting the current human population.” He urges that we stop using the reductionist language of science and economics in our studies and applications of ecology and instead use language and metaphors that spring directly from nature.

People, Land, and Community

FIRST ANNUAL E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURES October 1981 Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA

Berry delivered this lecture as one of the three inaugural E. F. Schumacher Lectures in 1981. A farmer, poet, essayist, he speaks about what links us to a home place and how that connection results in a “husbandry” that benefits people, land, and community.