David Holmgren & Bill Mollison: Permaculture

Biography

David Holmgren was born in Fremantle, Western Australia in 1955. He joined the Environmental Design School in Hobart, Tasmania in 1973, where he met Bill Mollison, who was then a lecturer at the University of Tasmania. Holmgren started writing a thesis on sustainable agriculture and, with additions from Mollison, this text became the legendary book Permaculture One, published in 1978. Holmgren has gone on to establish his own permaculture settlement at Melliodora and the larger eco-village of Fryers Forest. He works as a permaculture consultant, author and trainer.

Bruce Charles 'Bill' Mollison was born in 1928 in Stanley, Tasmania, Australia. He claims to have spent his life up to the age of 28 as “living in the bush or on the sea”, hunting or fishing. He became a scientist with the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Tasmanian Inland Fisheries Department. He began teaching at the University of Tasmania in 1968 where he met David Holmgren. He started lecturing on Permaculture in 1976 and, following Permaculture One’s publication, he resigned his position in 1979 to develop and teach practical permaculture courses full time. He received the Right Livelihood Award in 1981.

Contribution

According to Holmgren, “The word permaculture was coined by Bill Mollison and myself in the mid-1970s to describe an "integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man". Mollison claims “I coined the term ‘permaculture’” for the system the two jointly developed, which he describes as “a framework for a sustainable agricultural system based on a multicrop of perennial trees, shrubs, herbs (vegetables and weeds), fungi and root systems”. The word itself is a contraction of the words ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’.

Holmgren later defines permaculture as "consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs", but he goes on to say “more precisely I see permaculture as the use of systems thinking and design principles that provide the organising frame work for the above vision”. Mollison talks of permaculture being like aikido, working with the natural systems and turning adversity into strength, unlike conventional agriculture which he likens to karate, trying to kick and punch nature.

"All my life we've been at war with nature. I just pray that we lose that war. There are no winners in that war..." Bill Mollison

The archetypal permaculture set up resembles a small holding arranged in concentric rings, or zones. The dwelling at the centre of the system is surrounded by the crops and animals requiring most attention with more self sufficient systems in the outer zones. This simple ring system is distorted by radial sectors that reflect natural conditions, such as wind, sun, fire, water and slope. Within each resulting area, the system is designed to maximise the use of natural synergies and to exploit the “stacking” of plants ie their different vertical layers, the natural foraging of animals, and the edge effects where different eco-systems meet. Each element in the design ideally provides at least two functions (eg fodder and nitrogen fixing) and each function should be provided by at least two elements for resilience. These design principles were laid out by Holmgren and Mollison in the now out of print ‘Permaculture One’ which went on to be something of a counterculture classic.

It is not clear how close the two men were or are. In “Principles & Pathways” Holmgren refers to “an intense but relatively brief working relationship with Bill Mollison” before going on to refer to “[Mollison’s] charisma, his ego, and his abrasive and confrontationalist manner” Certainly they appear to be chalk and cheese in terms of personality - in the Foreword to the same book Prof Stuart Hill contrasts Holmgren - “the modest, reflective, thorough, follow through person” - with Mollison - “the wild ideas man with the public persona”. It also appears that they see permaculture from quite different perspectives.

Mollison’s point of view appears to be an extension of his own martial arts analogy above – permaculture is a fairly fixed framework to be taught by elders to newcomers who through study and practice can pass on the system to the next generation. Indeed he is reported to have attempted to protect the word ‘permaculture’ legally as he felt the interpretation of some proponents was diluting the core framework.

When a reviewer described Mollison as “seditious” his riposte was:

I teach self-reliance, the world's most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.

Demonstrating his pithy humour, he went on to declare in the same interview:

I hate lawns.

Holmgren, on the other hand, appears to see permaculture as more of a philosophical mindset to be applied across all aspects of human activity. Holmgren's main theoretical inspiration has been the American ecologist Howard T. Odum and his use of ‘emergy’ (embodied energy) to design systems. In Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, Holmgren lists 12 design principles:

• Observe and interact
• Catch and store energy
• Obtain a yield
• Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
• Use and value renewable resources and services
• Produce no waste
• Design from patterns to details
• Integrate rather than segregate
• Use small and slow solutions
• Use and value diversity
• Use edges and value the marginal
• Creatively use and respond to change

But in its attempt to apply permaculture principles more widely, “Principles & Pathways” exposes the limitations of Holmgren’s experience. While the application of the principles to Australian agricultural practice is assured, much of the rest of each chapter is, in my opinion, rambling and often self-indulgent. In particular, when he ventures into the industrial field, his lack of practical experience is exposed, relying on tenuous examples or simply quoting Amory Lovins. My view is that these principles can be, and to an extent have been, applied to the wider field of sustainability, but Holmgren’s attempt falls short.

The biggest external criticism of permaculture itself is the lack of scientific assessment of its effectiveness either in terms of productivity or ecological protection. While researching this profile, I tried searching academic literature and found no meaningful results. A lack of academic interest in permaculture is of course not the fault of its originators, but it is odd. But it makes assessing the impact of Mollison and Holmgren in quantitative terms difficult.

In summary, the two men have provided an sustainable horticulutre/agricultural/self sufficiency design framework which many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have engaged with to some extent or another. This new way of thinking (in modern cultures at least) of working with natural systems rather than against them, is clearly laudable - even if Holmgren may have over extended himself later. Permaculture principles underpin the Transition Movement which, at the time of writing, is developing into a popular movement to address the twin risks of climate change and peak oil.

M King Hubbert: Peak Oil

Biography

Dr Marion King Hubbert, known to all as “M King”, was born in Texas in 1903. He studied for undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Chicago getting his PhD in geology and physics in 1937. He taught geophysics at Columbia University until 1941 then joined the United States Board of Economic Warfare before becoming a research geophysicist with the Shell Oil Company in 1943, where he made his famous predictions about the ‘peaking’ of US oil production. After he was retired from Shell in 1964 , he became a senior research geophysicist for the United States Geological Survey until he retired again in 1976. He also held professorships at Stanford University and Berkeley during this period. Hubbert received the Rockefeller Public Service Award in 1977 and Columbia University's Vetlesen Prize in 1981. He died in 1989.

Contribution

Hubbert made many contributions to geophysics, but his name will live in perpetuity as the man who gave us the bell shaped oil production curve that bears his name and, as a consequence, was a substantial contributor to the hotly debated topic of ‘peak oil’.

In 1948 Hubbert predicted, for any given geographical area, from an individual oil field to the planet as a whole, the rate of petroleum production of the reserve over time would resemble a bell curve (strictly speaking a logistic distribution curve). This became known as the “Hubbert Curve”. Based on his theory, he predicted in 1956 that petroleum production would peak in the United States between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. This and later warnings were dismissed, if not ridiculed, at the time as other predictions of oil peaking had proved false. When US oil production did indeed peak in 1970, Hubbert was proved correct. The Arab oil embargo in 1973-74 and the resulting energy crisis led to an national interest in energy efficiency. In 1975 the US National Academy of Sciences acknowledged that Hubbert had been correct and that the Academy had been wrong in its own predictions.

In 1974, Hubbert projected that global oil production would peak in 1995 "if current trends continue". Two years later he modified this to say that the actions of OPEC could flatten the curve and delay the peak by a decade. The peak oil debate has continued to the current day and it is difficult to judge whether Hubbert was ‘right’. The whole issue is a political and economic hot potato as our modern economy is built on a supply of cheap fossil fuels.

Governments around the world use the International Energy Agency (IEA) outlook for their economic planning. In 2008, the IEA predicted that there would be no peak until 2020. This conclusion was disputed by the UK Energy Research Centre and the Swedish University of Uppsala who concluded that “we are already in the peak zone”. This debate got more controversial in late 2009, when the Guardian newspaper reported that two “whistleblowers” claimed that the IEA had come under undue pressure from the US Government to present an optimistic scenario. One was quoted as saying "we've already entered the peak oil zone." If these earlier peak dates are correct, then Hubbert's 1976 prediction isn't far off the mark.

In 2005, the US Government commissioned a report into peak oil known as the Hirsch report after its lead author. It concluded that the peak was coming soon, but the actual date was unimportant as it would take at least a decade to prepare for the decline in production, so there was no case for delaying preparations. Hirsch also demonstrated that where production had peaked, it was not obvious even a year beforehand and the descent could be rapid – in the UK production fell away in just a year.

Other commentators disagree with Hubbert’s theory. A 2006 report by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) concluded that a peak will not occur until 2030 and at that point oil reserves will undulate along a plateau for decades. They conclude that Hubbert’s curve falls away too quickly and cannot be applied to global reserves. They, and others, point out that technological advances means that more oil can be extracted from each reserve and include the role of unconventional oil reserves like tar sands and coal to liquids. Critics have countered CERA’s approach saying they haven’t released the data behind their analysis or factored in the likely high cost of unconventional fuels. Reading the company’s press release, the company appears churlish to point out that 2005 US oil production is 66% higher than Hubbert had predicted in 1956. After all, he got the peak spot on, and he was correct in his conclusion that very soon after the peak US production would drop so far that the country would be dependent on foreign imports. It should be remembered as well that it is half a century after the prediction was made and few human predictions have been that close over that timeframe.

Whether the IEA data has been massaged or not, or whether Hubbert’s analysis does or doesn’t prove valid at the global scale, it is surprising that Governments have not engaged in the peak oil debate the way they have with, say, climate change, given the risks involved. Even a 2020 peak requires action by 2010 to prevent chaos in a decade. Hubbert himself would have recognised this form of denial:

"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know."

Hubbert’s main contribution as a green guru is to bring some rigour to the analysis of the exploitation of non-renewable resources. His curve translates the abstract concept of finite resources into the concrete language of the technocratic world that policy makers inhabit. His 1970 prediction was pretty much bang on - given the number of variables involved, the uncertainties and the long timeframes, this was quite remarkable. Of course, if political action is taken to conserve oil (eg OPEC rationing, the US energy efficiency drive in the 1970s) the actual oil production curve will obviously change. But with the whole global economy based on a supply of cheap oil, we may live to regret ignoring the fundamental message that oil will peak.

There is some irony in Hubbert being employed by Shell during his most famous predictions. The oil giant was found to have been exaggerating its reserves in 2004, and had to downgrade its claims twice by 20%, causing a furore amongst shareholders. At the time of the Hirsch report it had one of the most optimistic views of a possible peak (2025), although Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer stated in 2008 that the peak could be as early as 2015.

Hubbert’s curve has also been applied outside the oil industry. It has been shown to fit patterns of other non-renewable resources like minerals, and has even been applied successfully to renewable but depletable resources including fisheries and aquifer water.

The man himself is reported to have been “abrasive and having a short temper. He did not suffer fools gladly and was always a centre of controversy”. Given what he was up against, these “flaws” may well be seen to be strength of character in years to come.

Herman Daly: Steady State Economics

Biography

Born in 1938, Herman Daly is one of the pioneers of environmental economics. His book “Steady State Economics” was released in 1977. He taught economics at Louisiana State University for twenty years. In 1988 he became Senior Economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank where he developed its policies in relation to sustainable development before leaving to take up his current post as a Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He is a recipient of the Honorary Right Livelihood Award (Sweden's alternative to the Nobel Prize), the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Norwegian Sophie Prize.

Contribution

Daly’s basic maxim is that, as the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth, it must observe the physical limitations that the Earth places on it. This would create a steady state economy, a concept that can be traced back to the classical economics of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

“The global economy is now so large that society can no longer safely pretend it operates within a limitless ecosystem. Developing an economy that can be sustained within the finite biosphere requires new ways of thinking.”

Daly argues that the current economic system only worked at a time when, say, the amount of fish you could catch was determined by the number of boats you have, whereas today the limiting factor is the number of fish in the sea.

He developed the idea of “uneconomic growth” – the point at which the negative impacts of each unit of growth outweigh the benefits of that growth. Further beyond this point comes the futility limit where increased growth is not adding any benefit whatsoever.

"There is something fundamentally wrong with treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation."

The current economy, according to Daly, resembles an aeroplane in that to stay airborne it must move forwards. This analogy sums up the current paradox in the world economy. We have been unable to decouple economic growth from resource use and/or environmental damage. Past a point of sufficiency (roughly a GDP of $7,500 per person), there appears to be little or no increase in quality of life as the economy grows. So we destroy the planet just to maintain quality of life. On the other hand, if an economy starts shrinking, as we have seen in post-Soviet Russia and a number of failed economies, quality of life falls rapidly.

The challenge is to redesign the economy to be more like a helicopter – able to stay aloft without having to move. Daly suggests this state would resemble the Earth itself, constantly changing and evolving, but with a stable overall size. In this model, the production side of the economy would be designed to maintain the goods and services we require rather than drive the economy itself. Durable goods would be leased rather than sold, shifting towards a service economy.

Daly’s time at the World Bank appears to have been frustrating for him. At his leaving address, he asked the Bank to adopt four policies, presumably having failed to get them adopted during his tenure. The four were:

1. Stop counting the consumption of natural capital as income.

2. Tax energy and material extraction, not income.

3. Maximise the productivity of natural capital and invest in increasing it.

4. Move away from globalisation and towards national production for internal markets.

Afterwards, Daly is quoted as saying the audience reacted to his speech “much better than I had hoped”. He was optimistic that the first two points could be adopted and possibly the third, but that the last would be “a real battle”.

Unfortunately, Daly’s words seem to have largely fallen on deaf ears. For example, one of the four elements of the UK Government’s definition of sustainable development is “maintenance of high and stable levels of economic growth [and employment]”. When the UK Government’s own Sustainable Development Commission produced a report in 2009 on steady state economics entitled “Prosperity Without Growth?”, the Treasury’s response, according to the Commission’s outgoing chairman Jonathon Porritt, was “a weird mixture of hostility and indifference”.

Donnella Meadows described Daly as “depending on your point of view, either the most dangerous economist in the world, or the most visionary”, but a more pessimistic verdict might be “the most ignored”. The world nods as if to say “you’ve got something there” and then goes back to business as usual.

Arne Næss, Deep Ecology

Biography

Arne Næss (pronounced ‘Ness’) was born in Slemdal, near Oslo, Norway in 1912. He studied philosophy, with an initial focus on the vagueness/preciseness of language. He became a professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo in 1939 but left academia in 1969 to pursue his environmental passions. Næss took part in a protest in 1970 against the building of a dam in a Norwegian fjord. During the protest he chained himself to the rocks of a waterfall and was removed by police, but succeeding in stopping the development.

In 1973 he published the first description of deep ecology, the branch of green thinking with which he will always be associated. He believed that eco-philosophy was personal and developed his own which he called Ecosophy T.
Outside philosophy, Næss’ great passion was for mountaineering and he took part in a number of significant expeditions. The love of mountains was influential in his work – the ‘T’ of ‘Ecosophy T’ stands for the Tvergastein mountain hut in the Hallingskarvet massif where he spent much of his time contemplating nature. He has also stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Norwegian Green Party.

He was knighted by King Harald in 2005 and made a commander with star of the Royal Norwegian order of St Olav First Class. He died in 2009 at the age of 96.

Contribution

Arne Næss invented the concept of deep ecology. The basic difference between deep and shallow ecology is that the latter takes an anthropocentric (human-centred) view of the world, whereas deep ecology is eco-centric, placing equal value on non-human organisms and, indeed, physical features. A shallow ecologist would tell us to respect biodiversity as we might find the cure to cancer deep in the rainforest, whereas a deep ecologist would argue that protecting biodiversity is a moral imperative - full stop.

"[we should] not only protect the planet for the sake of humans, but also, for the sake of the planet itself, to keep ecosystems healthy for their own sake".

In 1973, Næss published the eight basic principles of deep ecology:
1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital human needs.
4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
5. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.
7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.
8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.

Næss was fundamentally a philosopher and his work draws heavily on the teachings of Spinoza and Gandhi. To explain in detail his personal eco-philosophy, Ecosophy T, is impossible here. But essentially the core element is the aim of Self-realisation where the capital ‘S’ on ‘Self’ refers to our position in the wider world (the ‘ecospheric whole’) rather than an ego-driven, internal ‘self’. Acting in a way which will harm the wider world, or if we do not know whether it will harm the wider world, breaches the idea of Ecosophy T.

Three important principles (or ‘norms’) of Ecosophy T are the natural principles of complexity, diversity and symbiosis. These are supported by a secondary level of norms of decentralisation, autonomy and self-sufficiency. In turn, a third level of political principles are no exploitation, no subjection, no class societies and self determination.

Intuition is also an important element of Ecosophy T. Like EF Schumacher, Næss believed that our use of science is too often blind to the limitations of that science – we have to be aware of what cannot be quantified or otherwise measured. Intuition must fill in the gaps. In the introduction to Næss’s most important book, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, the editor describes Næss breaking off from an hour long lecture to pluck a leaf from a potted plant. He held it up and told the audience “You can spend a lifetime contemplating this. It is enough. Thank you.”

Næss was clear that Ecosophy T was his own personal eco-philosopy. The use of the T qualifier gives space for others to develop Ecosophy A, B, C, P, Q or R (presumably he chose ‘T’ as it is more outward looking than ‘A’ or ‘N’ – more Self than self.)

As a guru, Næss invented the whole idea of ‘deep ecology’ which underpins much of the thinking of environmental protest groups. However, the extreme fringes of the movement like Earth First! and the animal rights movement have used the equal rights for non-human species principle as an excuse for sometimes violent direct action, conveniently ignoring Næss’s Gandhian non-violent principles.

Deep ecology has variously been dismissed as ‘inconsistent rubbish’ and ‘eco la-la’, but to me it is a valid world view, if one which is more eco-centric than my own. I agree with the moral right for a species to exist (although as a meat eater I do not extend this right to individual organisms) and I strongly believe in Næss’ theory that not only are we are part of nature, but that nature is a part of us. You only have to stand at the lip of the Grand Canyon or watch a whale breaching from the sea to experience our spiritual affinity with the natural world.

On a practical level, whether you agree with deep ecology or not, it does exist. Those in Government and industry who take an anthropocentric world-view would benefit from an understanding of an eco-centric viewpoint to help avoid or defuse conflicts with the environmental movement. And if you want to understand it, the teachings of the master are the best place to start.

© 2009 Terra Infirma all rights reserved

James Hansen: Nasa Climatologist & Activist

Biography

James Hansen was born in Iowa, USA on 29 March 1941. He took bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees at the University of Iowa before joining Nasa’s graduate programme. His work started with modelling the climate of Venus and before long the models were extended to analyse Earth’s climate. In 1988 he testified to the US Congress that there was a long-term upward trend in average temperatures and that this was largely due to man’s carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. In the next 20 years his modelling developed in sophistication and his predictions became ever more bleak. In recent years he has stepped outside the world of science and become involved in a number of environmental campaigns to the delight of activists, disdain from some in the scientific community and even more opprobrium from climate change sceptics.

Contribution

In Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, there’s a short clip of Senator Gore in a 1989 hearing bullying a civil servant into admitting that the science of climate change was being systematically suppressed within the US Government. Fast-forward twenty years and that same civil servant is arrested with actress and activist Darryl Hannah for trying to block the destruction of a mountainside to access coal. Google “James Hansen” and you will be met with an outpouring of professional and personal abuse – “the high priest of global warming alarmists” is one of the more polite descriptions. Why would so many go out of their way to make such personal attacks on a professor with over 30 years’ experience in his field and an impeccable track record in academic publications? The short answer is that Hansen has never been afraid to lift his head above the parapet.

Hansen’s scientific contribution to the climatology of Earth emerged from his analysis of the atmosphere of Venus. In 1974, a team of NASA scientists including Hansen published the GISS atmospheric circulation model for the Earth’s climate modelling, a major breakthrough in the field. This model has been through several stages of development as the science of climatology evolved. In 1981 Hansen was lead author for a paper in the journal Science concluding that the anthropogenic (man-made) contribution to global temperatures would become significant much earlier than previously thought.

In 1988 Hansen made his famous presentation to the US Senate that carbon emissions from man’s economic activity were contributing to a long-term change in climatic conditions. At this moment, the whole concept of climate change came out of the academic and environmental backwaters and into the public domain - and the bearpit of US energy politics. Hansen began his address by summarising three conclusions:

1. The earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time since measurements began;

2. This warming can now be associated with the greenhouse effect with a 99% confidence.

3. The warming is already severe enough to start causing dangerous impacts such as heat waves.

Hansen presented three different scenarios to the Senate, relating to different levels of future carbon emissions and the effect of a potential volcanic eruption which did indeed come to pass. However when Patrick Michaels, a consultant representing oil industry interests, made a statement to Congress ten years later, he compared only one of Hansen’s predictions, which excluded the eruption, to what had happened in the intervening ten years to ‘demonstrate’ that Hansen had been 300% out in his analysis. As Hansen’s ‘eruption prediction’ was pretty close to what had transpired in that decade, Michaels lied by omission. This groundless attack on Hansen’s scientific competence is still a prevalent myth circulating in the ‘denialosphere’.

In 2005, after a speech warning of the impacts of climate change and alleging many of the implications of his work had been watered down by the powers that be, Hansen was informed by senior staff within Nasa that there would be “dire consequences” if such statements were repeated. A number of subsequent media interviews were cancelled by senior staff.

The attempts at censorship didn’t work, or even made things worse for the would-be censors, as Hansen has since broken out of the constraints of the traditional scientific and became a public voice calling for urgent action and attacking vested interests. He has lambasted fellow scientists for refusing to go public on likely sea level rises, claiming that they will predict catastrophic changes in private but are too frightened to publish their findings.

In 2008 he entered the public arena completely with his high-profile intervention in the trial of the ‘Kingsnorth Six’ Greenpeace activists who had shut down a power station in the UK. He testified of the dangers of climate change and the activists were found not guilty. He used the resulting publicity to call for the CEOs of fossil fuel companies to be “tried for high crimes against nature and humanity” and attacked them for trying to suppress the evidence. These blunt statements are a stark contrast to the careful, measured approach he took in his 1980s publications and presentations. Indeed, one media appearance where he came close to likening coal trains to the trains used to transport Jews to their death during the holocaust led to a retraction and an apology.

Hansen’s entry into the political/activist arena is an interesting one. He justifies it by saying that it is the right thing to do under the circumstances, which he claims are more urgent than ever.

"We must raise the pressure to do what is right – for our children and the planet – not for the wallets of the few.”

Environmental activists are jubilant that they have the heavyweight backing of someone with the scientific track record to justify their actions. But there have been grumblings from the scientific community that these actions conflict with the role of a scientist. Certainly his enemies can now use his ‘political’ activities to cast doubt on the objectivity of the evidence he has been presenting for the last 30 years. Should he sit back and risk being ignored, or stand up and be counted?

There are few other scientists whose contribution to the understanding of man-made climate change could be argued to be equal to Hansen’s. But he is included here for his role in developing the science and bringing it to the attention of the public and politicians – despite the backlash and personal abuse he has received in the process. One thing is certain, his story isn’t over yet.

© 2009 Terra Infirma all rights reserved

EF Schumacher: Small is Beautiful

Biography

Born in Germany in 1911, EF “Fritz” Schumacher studied in the UK and USA. Interned during the second world war in a work camp, he became enchanted with the benefits of organic farming over factory farming. After the war became a British citizen and rose to the post of Chief Economic Advisor of the National Coal Board, a role he held for two decades.

In 1955 Schumacher went to Burma where he despaired of the impacts of globalisation on a Buddhist country. As a result, he wrote ‘Buddhist Economics’ which became one of the essays in his key publication ‘Small Is Beautiful’. In 1965, he set up the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now called Practical Action), to develop “intermediate” or “appropriate” technologies for developing countries. Small is Beautiful was published in 1973.

Schumacher died in 1977 in Switzerland while on a lecture tour. His legacy lives on in the ‘Schumacher Circle’ of organisations including the Schumacher Institute, Schumacher College, Practical Action, the Soil Association and the New Economics Foundation.

Contribution

Small is Beautiful was compiled from a number of speeches and essays written over a decade and then cobbled together to form a narrative. As such, there is a gentle repetition of ideas by their application in a number of contexts rather than a linear narrative. The book is highly philosophical, arguing that the metaphysical context of scientific and economic analysis is lacking, ie why we assume that economic growth is always good, and that our inherent assumptions about many of our economic policies are misaligned with societal and environmental concerns.

A key theme of Small is Beautiful is to bring spiritual elements to economics, whether that is from Schumacher’s own Christianity or the Buddhist philosophy he encountered in his time in Burma. Most notably he proposes that the Buddhist principle of non-violence should be a guiding light – non-violence in terms of the impact of activities on society or the environment. For example, he argues that industrialisation of agriculture is a violent act on rural populations (by causing unemployment and migration to cities) and the natural world.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.”

The major environmental economics point Schumacher makes is that we are treating natural resources as income rather than capital. Capital is depleted as it is used whereas income is renewable. He continued by attacking the assumptions that Gross National Product (GNP) as a measure of well-being and that economic growth is always good. He despairs of the lack of questioning of traditional economists and politicians:

“We assume that having more material goods will make us happier. Economists never take it upon themselves to challenge that assumption.”

He points out that not all economic activity is equal. Voluntary good works do not get counted in economic activity while ‘bads’ like having to clean up pollution do contribute to GNP. He applies this qualitative approach to employment as well stating that work should not just be about exchanging time for money, but must be spiritually fulfilling. He laments the deskilling in much of industry and in particular agriculture.

He sees nuclear power, in particular burdening future generations with the risks of nuclear waste storage, as the most violent act, in his words “…infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated by man. The idea that civilisation could sustain itself on the basis of such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual and metaphysical monstrosity.”

Schumacher’s solution to these problems is Intermediate or Appropriate technology. This involves small(ish)-scale businesses producing high quality goods from local resources using labour intensive and highly skilled methods. Schumacher particularly proposes this for third world development, and suggests that in the developed world, large businesses should be discouraged or part-nationalised to ensure they meet the needs of society.

The timing of Small of Beautiful was appropriate as it coincided with the 1973 oil crisis. The 1970s was a time of concern that natural resources were running out fast and Schumacher’s arguments chimed with that thinking.

“Nature knows when to stop. We haven’t learned that yet.”

However by the 1990s, predictions of resource depletion had not materialised, shifting environmentalists’ attention from resource consumption to pollution. The pendulum has swung back recently with current concerns over peak oil, peak plutonium, peak fish and peak pretty much everything else. So Schumacher’s ‘depletion of capital’ argument has become very relevant once again.

As with all such controversial and groundbreaking contributions, there was a backlash from mainstream economists, including a 1996 book entitled “Small is Stupid” which made the case for economies of scale and economic growth.

One issue with any book of this era is that the impacts of information revolution had not been anticipated. PK Prahalad has demonstrated that providing mobile phones and internet access to very poor third world farmers and businessmen can allow them to compete more effectively by allowing them access to vital information such commodity prices and weather reports. Whether information technology is a type of appropriate technology or a violent technology destroying local culture is an interesting question, but one which can never be considered by the man himself.

In terms of impact, Schumacher’s work is enormously influential. Small is Beautiful ranks alongside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the modern environmental canon. The reflective, metaphysical nature of his thinking can make the book difficult to penetrate and does tend to appeal to the deep ecology end of the green spectrum. Despite this, Schumacher Circle organisations such as the Soil Association and the New Economics Foundation are influential players in mainstream politics, and Small is Beautiful has been an influence on major figures such as Jonathon Porritt who wrote a foreword to the 1993 edition.

Strangely for a book this influential in green thinking, only about a third of Small is Beautiful directly concerns environmental issues. The remainder considers the influence of size on communities, third world development and organisations. Schumacher’s other books, a Guide for the Perplexed and Good Work, do not address the environment significantly, but focus on science and humanity. So it is in those few pages of a relatively short book that Fritz Schumacher made his mark on the green movement.

© Terra Infirma 2009, all rights reserved

Rachel Carson: Silent Spring

Biography

Rachel Carson was born in Pennsylvania in 1907. Childhood fascinations with nature and writing lead her to study English then Biology. After a stint at the US Bureau of Fisheries and its successor the Fish and Wildlife Service, she started writing on natural history in the 1950s with her famous sea trilogy, covering all aspects of marine life. But it was her 1962 book, Silent Spring, on the impact on nature of pesticides and other toxic man-made substances, which catapulted into the vanguard of environmental thinking. The book has been named as one of the 100 most influential ever, and led to the banning of many such substances and inspiring a grassroots environmental movement. Carson was diagnosed with cancer during the writing of the book, and her illness slowed its final drafting. Following extensive treatment, she died of a heart attack in 1964. Time Magazine named her as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th Century (having denounced Silent Spring as “unsound” at the time of its publication).

Contribution

The publication of Silent Spring is often held up as the birth of the modern environmental movement. Its title comes from the short, apocalyptic opening chapter which describes a fictional small American town where pesticides and herbicides have destroyed the natural environment – there are no birds to welcome Spring. This vision was inspired by the after-effects that the blanket spraying of any ‘pest’ or ‘weed’ with insecticides and pesticides in the 1950s was having on the wildlife of vast tracts of America and much of the world.

The bulk of the book explains how these chemicals work and what their effect is on different aspects of the biosphere including water, soil and air. Carson points out that the simplistic safety tests for pesticides did not take into consideration the following key factors:

• bioaccumulation: a 0.02 part per million dose of chemicals into a lake can result in a fatal 1600 part per million concentration in the blood of a grebe as the chemicals concentrate up the food chain;
• ‘the cocktail effect’: where combinations of chemicals can have a toxic effect many times the effect of either individually;
• longer term effects on cells such as genetic damage and cancer.

These issues were understood by the scientific community, but were not more widely appreciated. Carson also points out that the blanket spraying approach is useless in the long run. Due to their short lifecycles, insects develop resistance very quickly, sometimes within months whereas creatures higher in the food chain (including humans) may take thousands of years to adapt. In addition, the chemicals often knock out the target pest’s natural predators and sometimes by destroying one creature, they open an ecological niche for an even worse pest.

For a reasonably technically-minded book, Silent Spring became very widely read, appearing as a Book of the Month Club selection and in serialised form in the New Yorker. It sold a million copies in the 16 months after its release.

The response to Silent Spring from the chemicals industry, associated Governmental departments and the press was predictably ferocious. The problem for the industry was that their pillorying of a modest middle-aged naturalist as “hysterical” and “communist” simply drew more attention to the book, and the damage caused by these chemicals. They had another problem. Carson had been meticulous about the precision of her research and many in the independent scientific community stood up and agreed with her analysis.

And President John F Kennedy was listening. He commissioned a scientific review which endorsed Carson’s conclusions. DDT was banned for most uses in the USA in 1972 and the ban has been credited with the comeback of the bald eagle and other endangered species. Many other countries, including the UK, banned it soon afterwards. DDT and many of the other chemicals identified in Silent Spring were banned for agricultural purposes globally in 2004 under the Stockholm Convention. Silent Spring is also credited for the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency, splitting the enforcement of environmental standards from the departments supporting agriculture and industry.

The philosophical influence of Silent Spring was an awakening to the reality that we cannot simply obliterate the parts of Mother Nature that we don’t like. We are part of the myriad cycles of natural systems whether we like it or not. These complex webs of cause and effect can mean what appears to be a short term ‘good’ (eg destroying a ferocious pest to improve food yields) can turn out to be an medium-long term bad (eg by destroying the pest’s predators, the pest can bounce back stronger than ever). As Carson herself puts it:

"The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of 
the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed 
that nature exists for the convenience of man."

Silent Spring is cited as an influence by Al Gore and Arne Næss amongst many others. Writing in the Guardian in 2002, poet John Burnside liken Carson to ‘Tank Man’ in Tiananmen Square, a lone frail figure halting the juggernaut of the chemicals industry in its tracks.

Silent Spring is still a bête-noir of the anti-environmental movement. Many of the same individuals and organisations who form the climate change denial movement coruscate her for sentencing millions in developing countries to be victims of malaria when, they say, DDT could have saved them. And it’s personal. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s pro-DDT website is not called “SaveThePoor.com” or “BringBackDDT.com”, but “RachelWasWrong.com”.

One woman. One book. One hell of a difference.

© Terra Infirma 2009, all rights reserved