This time of year the dark arrives early and doesn’t leave until almost 8 am. There is only a little more than a week left before solstice. And then the days begin to lengthen once again.
At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream.
― Essays of E.B. White
But right now it’s still the time of
Darkness Rising
here and perhaps in the world as well.
This week I came across an article about economist, E. F. Schumacher that took me back in time. I first became familiar with Schumacher’s ideas in my college student days. He wrote Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, at a time when we hadn’t begun to think about climate change but we were worried about world population growth and how to feed everyone in the world sustainably.
It was 1974 when I first read the book and I became enamored with Schumacher’s ideas about “appropriate technology” and “Buddhist economics.” I still have a copy of Small is Beautiful on my bookshelf. When I review it now I find it as revolutionary today as it was almost 50 years ago. Sadly few of his ideas gained traction in the world despite their wisdom.
What seemed so evident to early readers of Small is Beautiful still seems painfully opaque to the world today. When the book was first published, many thought that change would come about through insight, logic, compassion, and reason. Increasingly, it seems that change will come about after we have exhausted every other theory of greed and gain, and the winds of change are no longer metaphorical, but force five hurricanes destroying whole regions. That the world should become so immune to its own losses seemed inconceivable 25 years ago. Now that we have re-learned how remarkably obtuse humankind can be when dazzled by monetary and material gain, we must shine the light all the brighter on the singularity and prescience of Schumacher’s work and vision.-Paul Hawken in “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered: 25 Years Later… With Commentaries”
As you watch the news this week about the COP28 summit, and about everything else that’s happening in the world, think about the idea that small is beautiful and that we each have the capability to do some small thing to create a light in the darkness.
Here are a few quotes from Small is Beautiful to ponder this week…
…we are estranged from reality and inclined to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves.
…
No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.
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Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful. Peace, as has often been said, is indivisible – how then could peace be built on a foundation of reckless science and violent technology?
…
How can we disarm greed and envy? Perhaps by being much less greedy and envious ourselves; perhaps by resisting the temptation of letting our luxuries become needs; and perhaps by even scrutinizing our needs to see if they cannot be simplified and reduced.
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…the effort needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption.
…
Everywhere people ask: “What can I actually do?” The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.
— E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful
May each of us be a small light in the darkness.
May you walk in beauty.
Squirrel tracks in the snow
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