by E. F. Schumacher · 1973
Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays published in 1973 by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher. The title "Small Is Beautiful" came from a principle espoused by Schumacher’s teacher Leopold Kohr (1909–1994) advancing small, appropriate technologies, policies, and polities as a superior alternative to the mainstream ethos of "bigger is better". Overlapping environmental, social, and economic forces such as the 1973 energy crisis and popularisation of the concept of globalisation helped bring Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful critiques of mainstream economics to a wider audience during the 1970s. In 1995 The Times Literary Supplement ranked Small Is Beautiful among the 100 most influential books published since World War II.…
"Yes, Small is Beautiful was important for me as a lefty-political, as you’d say, in the early 1970s at university. It was one of the first books to suggest to me that there was another way. We were still in the Cold War, there was socialism one side and capitalism the other, and both doing whatever they were doing, and it seemed like a binary world. They were both employing large technologies in similar ways. Then along comes Small is Beautiful , which was literally talking about how things were better if they were smaller, how they were more efficient or economically better smaller. How we could rethink our manufacturing processes, sometimes using alternative technology, and use a whole new language. It was not directly environmentally framed, more socially framed, but it had huge environmental repercussions as well, in thinking about how we run our societies economically and socially and industrially. This opened up a lot of thinking, and I think turned a generation of people who read that book into out-and-out environmentalists. Undoubtedly. I think there are a lot of hardline environmentalists who—I don’t want to caricature them too much—would be really quite happy if humans disappeared off the planet, and left nature in full sway. I’m not one of those. I’m a sustainable developer. I’m a humanist, if you like. I belive we can have humans in some level of harmony with nature, or we can relearn lessons from past civilisations and, indeed, indigenous communties still on the planet today, who are some of the best conservationists anywhere. So I believe we can have people on the planet, and that we shouldn’t be putting fences around forests and leaving them, or at least not all of them. Probably we want to do that with some of the best, but the best route to saving forests is actually to use them sustainably. I think there is potential for us to have a ‘good Anthropocene’, for us to find ways to manage the planet in a way that doesn’t destroy it, but allows for eight, ten, twelve billion people, perhaps, to live decent lives on this planet. I think that’s what we should be aiming for. Whether we will achieve it is another matter, but—despite it all—it’s worth aiming for."
