[Lapg] [COMFOOD:] FW: An Economics of Peace

[Ken Dahlberg]

Thanks Diana and Hank for sharing your thoughts.

I had the good fortune to hear E. F. Schumacher at a AAAS panel on 
appropriate technologies organized by Margaret Mead.  I also used his 
book regularly in courses I taught on Appropriate Technology and 
Sustainability.

Another important dimension of Small is Beautiful (which is still worth 
reading/re-reading) is that Schumacher challenged the neutrality of 
technology - particularly in terms of scale.  Politically, he argued 
that both small-scale capitalism and small-scale communism were likely 
to offer healthy economies and ways of life, while both large-scale 
capitalism and communism by their very size made this very difficult.

Clearly technologies are not neutral - despite the political uses of so 
claiming ("people kill people, guns don't kill people" for the NRA).  
When negative "side effects" are recognized, they are rationalized in 
terms of "that's the price of progress."  Technologies directly reflect 
their design principles as well as their cultural and environmental 
roots.  This is why a midwestern plow designed for deep soils, a 
temperate climate, large land plots and maximizing production is a 
disaster when "transfered" to a place like India, where there are 
shallow soils, a monsoon climate, small land plots, and the peasant's 
goal is securing an assured minimum of production.

Schumacher was also instrumental in founding the Intermediate 
Technology Development Group (UK) which sought to upgrade and/or 
develop locally adapted small-scale technologies for the Third World.  
We have another wonderful example of that here in Kalamazoo - Tillers 
International (www.tillersinternational.org) which seeks to upgrade 
animal draft power equipment and farming techniques.  They stress 
blacksmithing as a key to local, self-reliant development.

As far as land use and agriculture, my favorite quote from Small is 
Beautiful is:
"We can say that man's management of the land must be primarily 
orientated towards three goals--health, beauty, and permanence.   The 
fourth goal--the only one accepted by the experts--productivity, will 
then be attained almost as a by-product.  The crude materialist view 
sees agriculture as "essentially directed towards food production'.  A 
wider view sees agriculture as having to fulfil at least three tasks:
	--to keep man in touch with living nature, of which he is and remains 
a highly vulnerable part;
	--to humanize and ennoble man's wider habitat; and	
	--to bring forth the foodstuffs and other materials which are needed 
for a becoming life.
I do not believe that a civilisation which recognises only the third of 
these tasks, and which pursues it with such ruthlessness and violence 
that the other two tasks are not merely neglected but systematically 
counteracted, has any chance of long-term survival."  [From Part II, 
Ch. 2 - The Proper Use of the Land ].

Ken