Small Is Not Always Beautiful

I have my own copy of Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful around here somewhere, but I'm going to resist the notion that I must quote from it directly, as my books are all out of sort at the moment. Instead, I will rely on faint memories from my youth -- which is when I (strangely enough) first read the book. (Kids aren't supposed to be reading about economics!)

I had picked up a paperback copy, somewhere, and ... well, I can still remember the scent of its pages--faintly musty, earthy. This was in the seventies. I must have wondered how a smart, educated adult would discuss people mattering, for that's what the subtitle promised. Even then, before reading his book, I had the sense that the world was somehow up-side-down. It was "the economy" that mattered most, and business (busyness?), and people came in--perhaps--a solid second. That perception is different in a kid who has it than in an adult who has it. Usually, a kid couldn't explain why or how he knows what he knows about an up-side-down world. The kid feels and senses it, anyway.

I remember Schumacher talking about the absurdity of "buscuits" (British for "cookie" or "cracker") being trucked long distance from city A to city B--, and from city B to city A. The buscuit "lorries" would pass each other mid-route, heading in opposite directions. It didn't seem to matter to Business that it would make more sense for people in London to be eating buscuits baked in London and the people in Glasgow to be eating Glasgow buscuits.

The book made a big splash when it was published in 1973, which was also the year of a major oil crisis [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis]. Another major oil crisis occured that same decade [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis].

....

I suppose the point of my riffing and rambling about Schumacher's musty-earthy paperback here is to provide a hint of the personal history of this blog's emergence. A big part of that personal history is my sense that while Schumacher's book was influential in its day, and inspirational for overly curious boys like me, ... well, the truth is that the splash was far too small. Small is not always beautiful.

One of the many themes of Small Is Beautiful was, if I remember right, our need to relocalize the larger parts of our economies. That which can't be localized ought, if I remember right, at least to be regionalized. This was so for various and numerous reasons, but oil figured in importantly. One day the world was going to more or less run out of oil. Or, rather, the upward arcs of supply and demand would some day part ways -- resulting in the price climbing and climbing... and climbing, until POP!, the whole fossily fueled infrastructure sputters and fails.

I think I have always--almost secretly--hoped it would sputter and fail. I was a suburbanite in those years, but mine was one of those rare suburban families which had a significant backyard food garden. We even kept chickens for eggs! But all the while that I was learning hands-on about providing food locally I was also watching the suburban blight overtake the local farms and fields. My friends and I preferred the little patches of near-wild places to play, and they were being swallowed up. Most of those patches had been farmland not too long before. Those farms fed the nearby cities. Their people, that is. The world had made just a little more sense not too long before. You could feel it. But I had missed it. I was too late.

Food, then -- as now -- was cheap. In both senses of the word -- and almost all of it came from far away, because far away meant big industrially scaled farms, whose owners looked upon soil and water and land as industrialists do: as numbers. It was more profitable to sell the small farmlands around the cities for use as suburbs. The numbers prove it.

I have always felt alienated, shoved aside, blighted by that world in which profit (or money, for that matter) matters more than people, land, wildlife, soil, air.... That, of course, is the world of modern industrialism. (I want to say "capitalist-industrialism" but perhaps we are too near the end of the Cold War for such honesty. During the Cold War, to criticize capitalism was to be a "commie," and to be a commie was to be the worst possible enemy of freedom and democracy... and apple pie. And Chevrolet.)

In any case, my almost life-long, almost secret wish for the sputtering and failure of the industrial system is ... well, irrelevant to the salient facts about the conditions impinging upon that system. How I feel about that system has no more to do with its workings than my feelings about the moon and tides decides the facts about orbits, ebbs and flows.

In any case, I don't wish for its immediate and complete collapse! I'd much, much rather see it deliberately replaced. But quickly, before it commits suicide -- which it will certainly do by practicing business as usual.

What I believe about all of this, in a nutshell, is that the era of cheap oil (and cheap energy, more generally) is swiftly coming to an end, and this means that we'd better quickly prepare for a world without it. I am not alone. Many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people around this country and the world are already doing just that. They call their work by various names, "relocalization," "permaculture," "ecovillages," "sustainable communities," .... There are too many names to count. I call them all "the transition movement" (lower case t & m). There is also The Transition Network [http://transitionnetwork.org], which began in the UK, it's most celebrated founder being the delightful and inspiring Rob Hopkins [http://transitionculture.org/]. Transitioners, whether of a capital T or a lower case t type, are all addressing, in their various ways, the twin crises of the fossil fuel era: peaking oil and other energy sources and global warming. It is my firm belief that the situation is quite urgent and immediate -- and that we should not wait a moment to begin transitioning. I propose that we begin with food. For when the fossil economy buckles under the strain which seems very near ahead, we're going to need basics like our post-fossil food supply in place. We can't wait until after the collapse of the fossil economy for that. And if our little city, Santa Fe, can do that? Surely we'll also be addressing other basics in the meanwhile.

Thanks for enduring my rather rough prose. My writing and editing skills need much work, but I've decided to take my own best advice and begin where I am. ... And if you are a proof reader (proofreader?), editor, copyeditor..., and want to volunteer for the cause, drop me a line. And if you want to contribute to the blog as a partner or co-author, please say hello.

And if you just want to learn more on the subject, try these.:

Rob Hopkins' Links Page:
http://transitionculture.org/links/#top-5-links

Post Carbon Institute:
http://www.postcarbon.org/

Transition Times:
http://transition-times.com/colorado

Transition New Mexico:
http://transitionnewmexico.ning.com/

My plan is to very soon provide a long list Santa Fe links to organizations and groups already working on transitioning in Santa Fe. There are many. Thank you all in advance!