The Most Important Number in the World

Dear Friends,

Concept2 Rowing and the Craftsbury Green Nordic Racing Program are organizing a worldwide rowing/skiing challenge that will cover 350 million meters all before October 24. Volunteers in Panama City’s Parque Nacional Soberania gathered to plant 350 native species trees and almost doubled their target. Community members are gathering in Vancouver for a 350-person salsa dancing extravaganza. Five thousand school children in the Netherlands created a giacantic installation using their bodies as the medium, highlighting Holland’s trademark windmills, and featuring one important number - 350.

Why 350? It is the number leading scientists have indicated as the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide (measured in "Parts Per Million") in our atmosphere. We have already exceeded that limit. But renowned environmentalist and author, Bill McKibben is urging a world-wide effort to reverse the current course of climate change. His campaign is named 350.org and will culminate on October 24th with citizen actions in communities around the world.

It is not too late to join the campaign, lead an initiative in your community, or support an action already in progress. To see what others are doing, find projects near you, or learn more about the implications of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, go to: http://www.350.org/mission

For two decades, Bill McKibben, has used his skills as a writer to enlighten readers about global warming and advocate for creative responses to the problem. His books include “Deep Economy” (2007), “Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community” (2007), and “The End of Nature” (1989). In 2007 he organized Step It Up -- the largest coordinated demonstration against global warming in American history.

Now he is organizing 350.org, an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis--the solutions that justice demand. Its mission is to inspire the world to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis—to create a new sense of urgency and of possibility for our planet. In order to bring together the
public, media, and our political leaders behind the 350 goal, McKibben and friends are harnessing the power of the internet to coordinate the October 24th planetary day of action, six weeks before the world's leaders meet in Copenhagen to formulate a new global treaty on carbon emissions.

Events are scheduled at hundreds of iconic places around the world - from the Taj Mahal to the Great Barrier Reef – with local community efforts across 100 countries. The Day of Action will showcase the tremendous efforts of existing individuals, organizations and communities working to tackle climate change from the ground up, joining them together on a powerful platform borne of hard science and inspired activism.

Please join us on Saturday, October 17th in welcoming Bill McKibben at the 29th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures. He will be joined by speakers Benjamin Barber and Alisa Gravitz. The location is the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Tickets are 25 BerkShares/Dollars (15 for members of the E. F. Schumacher Society, seniors, and students). We recommend registering in advance.

For more information on the event or to pre-register please visit:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org

Email: efssociety@smallisbeautiful.org

Or call (413) 528-1737.

Best Wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

Transitioning to a New Economy

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce speakers for this year's Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture program on October 17th in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and invite you to attend (http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/events/29th.html). Bill McKibben, Benjamin Barber, and Alisa Gravitz have each made important contributions in articulating characteristics of a new economy.

Over the past year we have all watched in amazement as the old economy unraveled before us—banks failing, established corporations seeking bankruptcy protection, unemployment increasing, climate change progressing unabated, and governments nervously printing currency hoping to buy their way out of these problems. The urgency of shaping a new economy—one that is fair and sustainable, that functions within ecological limits, and takes into account people and cultures throughout the world—has never been clearer.

A successful transition to a new economy in which people and the earth have a higher priority than financial return will require a restructuring of institutions and governance frameworks; changes in values and behavior; hard decisions; and decisive actions on the part of individuals, communities, civil society, firms and governments throughout the world. If such a transition is to be successful, it will need to be rooted in robust systemic analysis, employ effective hard-hitting advocacy, and offer proven, practical solutions. In addition, it will require a coherent and encompassing narrative that is both compelling and accessible and that draws together the various components of a complex picture in such a way as to stimulate and support action at all levels.

Parts of the new economy are already known and underway.

In North America, Wendell Berry is our finest poet of a new vision, describing the mutual support at the heart of a community economics in his stories and essays about rural life. Jane Jacobs vividly paints the picture of vibrant, complex, import-replacing city regions as engines for diversified production in her “Cities and the Wealth of Nations.” David Morris’s Institute for Local Self Reliance is developing local and national ordinances that encourage rather than discourage small business development. Judy Wicks has united green entrepreneurs in regional Business Alliances for Local Living Economies. Peter Barnes reminds us that land and air and oceans and minerals are all part of the commons and as such their use should be limited, with income derived from their use distributed to all stakeholders. Gar Alperovitz has long articulated the benefits of distributed ownership and has promoted the tools for accomplishing such shared wealth. Winona LaDuke is re-inventing the economy of tribal nations by regathering lands lost to tribal control and reintroducing traditional production methods. Majora Carter and Van Jones understand that green jobs—retrofitting homes and workplaces to make them more energy efficient and restoring polluted sites—can help to renew our inner cities while providing dignified employment opportunities. Amory Lovins’s Rocky Mountain Institute is exploring technologies for a new economy and how to make such products economically viable. The Center for a New American Dream and Green America are teaching the individual and corporate consumer to change long-established patterns of buying to cause less impact on the Earth. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers are making the growing of food a visible process and educating a new generation about the importance of sourcing food locally. Wes Jackson’s Land Institute is challenging our agriculture system’s dependence on annual crops by breeding perennial grains; his is a 100-year vision. Woody Tasch’s Slow Money Institute and other innovative social investment groups are devising how to finance a new economy. The Transition Town movement is energizing discussions in town after town about what citizens can do to reduce dependency on global imports and return to using locally sourced goods. Local currencies such as BerkShares have captured the imaginations of activists and economists alike as an effective tool for keeping wealth circulating in a region and effecting greater economic self-determination.

Academic institutions such as the Ecological Economics program at the University of Maryland under Herman Daly, Robert Costanza’s Gund Institute at the University of Vermont, and Neva Goodwin’s Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University are reshaping the study of economics to factor in the social and environmental costs of production. Hazel Henderson, a pioneer thinker on green economics, continues to influence a younger generation to challenge existing financial systems and create change. Joseph Stiglitz is setting an example for fellow economists to rethink all established economic assumptions in order to forge a new economy. Gus Speth, Bill McKibben, David Boyle, Peter Victor, Benjamin Barber, Michael Shuman, David Korten, and Juliet Schor are among a growing list of authors writing about a new economy, and through their writing, building the imagination to get us there.

And there are others.

What is needed now is some entity to bring these various organizations and individuals together, to frame a common story, to tell it in multiple voices, to strategize the steps towards implementation, and to take collective action to achieve the transition.

We see a New Economics Institute as a collaborative, open, inclusive, value-added think tank working closely with existing organizations and research programs to:

1. Identify and fill gaps in knowledge;

2. Package together various presently isolated strands of work into a coherent and encompassing narrative;

3. Present these so as to achieve maximum impact on public and political debate, individual and business behavior, and public policy;

4. Support existing organizations by building the profile of a coherent new economics; and

5. Build a network of fellows from partnering organizations to engage in specific projects, research, or campaigns.

Building a New Economics Institute

In "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered" economist Fritz Schumacher drew from a broad palette to develop what he called "an economy of permanence." He wove together culture, society, ecology, scale, technology, and governance as necessary and related factors in shaping a new economy.

The E. F. Schumacher Society in the Berkshire region of western Massachusetts has a thirty year history of building on Schumacher's interdisciplinary approach to economics—stewarding his library and archives, providing a venue for new voices in the field, convening conferences, publishing papers, and transforming ideas into action through model economic programs in its home region. It is gaining extensive media recognition for its work on decentralizing and democratizing the institutions of land, labor, and capital.

In its twenty-two years of work similarly borne out of Schumacher's thinking, the New Economics Foundation (nef) in London (www.neweconomics.org), has developed an impressive record of applied research and public policy initiatives at the local, national, and international level. nef is acknowledged by British media as the voice of a New Economics. Its diverse campaigns have gathered organizations together in common cause and have bettered the lives of people in small villages around the world and in the neighborhoods of bustling European cities.

The E. F. Schumacher Society and nef recognize that their combined fifty-year history of providing the theory and application of a new economics on both sides of the Atlantic, uniquely positions them to contribute to the building of a new initiative. Accepting this responsibility, the Schumacher Society is partnering with nef to form the New Economics Institute, a US based organization. We will keep you informed of developments.

A friend commented that what she likes about the proposed Institute is that it is addressing multiple issues from one root source—the transformation of our current economic system. That engages and inspires her, as it does us.

We welcome your comments and support.

Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

When you damage the outer world, you damage the inner world

Dear Friends,

Father Thomas Berry first spoke for the Schumacher Society in 1984, then again in 1991, and finally in 2004.

An inspired student of Teilhard de Chardin, he was deeply in love with the planet itself, as a living being. Its visible signs of deterioration grieved him. Concerned, he thought at first to use his gift of speech to describe the scope of Earth's devastation, believing that such a picture would lead his listeners to acts of restoration.

But his approach, he admitted candidly, had the opposite effect. His audience grew depressed and disempowered.

So instead of a history of destruction, he began to describe a Universe that might be -- a future Ecozic Era in which human-earth relations were again in harmony. And this Universe Story moved his audience to new action. Neglected lands of monastaries and convents were put in fruitful production growing vegetables for the local region and creating sites for affordable housing. Groups met in church basements and Grange halls, in town meetings and UN gatherings to discuss their responsibilities to shape a healthier world for the children, because of Thomas Berry.

Thomas Berry passed away in June of this year, but the example he set also applies to those concerned to shape a new economy—one that is fair and sustainable, that functions within ecological limits, and takes into account people and cultures throughout the world. We could, with justice on our side, focus on what is wrong with the current economy. Or we could take another path and strive to come together, consumers and producers, in our neighborhoods, towns, and regions, to implement new ways of conducting economic life based on a vision of possibility and right conduct. Thomas Berry never tired of pointing to such small examples that add up to big results.

We are pleased to share Nic Tuff's 2006 interview with Father Berry (see below) as a small way of honoring his large influence on the life of the Schumacher Society and to declare openly, that we miss him.

Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
(413) 528-1737
www.smallisbeautiful.org
* * * * * * * * *
A Conversation with Thomas Berry by Nicholas Tuff [Abridged]
June 28th, 2006

NT: How does the Universe Story that you developed with Brian Swimme fit in with the cosmologies of other religions?

TB: The Universe Story is the [creation] story as understood by the scientific world. The scientific world has been able to identify the stages through which the Universe has passed in 4 ½ billion years.
There are several ways in which you can approach the telling of how the Universe came into being. The scientific story is the account that emerges from an examination of the Universe as it communicates to us at the present time. It is a technical story told by measurements and numbers. It tells us something about the mechanics of the Universe, but doesn’t say anything about meaning.

Cosmology means, “understanding the Universe.” The scientific story cannot help us understand the essential things, like meanings or values, but it can tell us the mechanics of how things function. It can help us with medicine. It can help us with communications. It can help us by giving us the means to travel. But it cannot guide us in how to use these instruments.

There is another way of understanding the Universe—the way in which we experience the wonder and the majesty and the awe. Language is our way of understanding the Universe. Science in this sense doesn’t give us a meaningful language. It gives us language as measurement, but not as meaning.

We’ve lost cosmology. We still have religion, but we’ve lost cosmology. When we got Science we lost cosmology, because science began to think that only science gives you the reality of things; everything else tends to be imagination or religious belief, whereas science has this precision and exactness. The sense of the Universe is really what is missing. Science needs to be a function within a cosmology. When science thinks it is a cosmology, science will destroy the planet. When science functions within an acceptable cosmology, it becomes wisdom. At the present time, we either say something is scientific or that it is religious. If we don’t resolve things as science, we say that they are religious.

NT: What is the biggest problem in education?

TB: What I am concerned with in education is establishing an appreciation of Universe as Universe.

Why do you want the children to walk in the woods? Why do you want them to experience the rain and the wind and the dawn and the sunset and the whole amazing flurry of existence. The reason is to awaken in the children a sense of who they are and the context in which their life unfolds. In this way, the integral relatedness of the Universe will be preserved.

The Universe is composed of three aspects: Identity, Diversity and Community. There is no particular value in sameness. Sameness doesn’t add anything. Sameness is a value simply to accommodate what exists, but there’s no enrichment… numerically, sure, but not as a mode of being. Children need to be educated about the three aspects. They need to learn that to be is to be unique. We must foster these ideas of identity, diversity, and community: people are not the same.

One of my main interests of late is law. Every being has rights. People have figured out human rights. Animals and birds and rocks and rivers also have rights. Everything has rights.

What do I mean that everything has rights? A tree needs tree rights. A bird needs bird rights. The rights of a tree are not appropriate for a bird. Everything has its rights by the same source: that which brought them in to being.

To say that something exists is true, but not the same. Persons need to learn how to be different, to develop their own individuality, and talents. Identity requires an inner core of meaning independent of everything else, but the differance needs to be bonded with relatedness. A person needs to be distinct, but also needs to identify with otherness to make community. And that’s education.

Humans need to develop as humans. They are different from other modes of being and need to be identified as different, but then they need to relate to other modes of being in a positive way that’s beneficial for everybody. So the child needs to relate to otherness in a positive way, so it creates community.

It is this sense of the Universe that is lost. We have so exaggerated the value of the human that instead of relating positively, we are relating negatively, in an exploitative way, to otherness.

NT: So would you say this is our greatest challenge?

TB: Our greatest challenge is to fulfill those three roles (Identity, Diversity and Community). We must face this greatest challenge not simply as individuals, but also as a species. Species need to relate to other species, and humans need to relate to the other modes of being, because we are nothing without everything else. If you damage the outer world, you damage the inner world. You can not succeed when you are harmful to the other species. It is a losing game if you are harmful to the surrounding world.

NT: This makes me think about how much indigenous communities have to offer us.

TB: Indigenous communities, at their best, are fulfilled [in these three roles]. Indigenous communities have this intimacy of relationship, and understand the roles that people play. Again, that’s the value of roles, of people being trained to fulfill a certain role. I think it is good that we aren’t overly fixated on specified roles in education, but on the other hand, it is regrettable that a person grows up with no particular skills to their larger life purpose.

NT: So offer them tools.

TB: Offer them tools, but also strengthen their vision, whereby they can fulfill their own inner spontaneities that they inherited with their life program.

NT: I am curious what you think about what is going on today [in 2006] in politics and with the wars in the Middle East?

TB: I think it belongs to an age of ultimate devastation… I believe I put it in my book, "A Dream of the Earth," that what is happening is that we are making the planet Earth uninhabitable by anything. We are just devastating planet Earth… and I don’t know of any other species that has had this effect on other species. There are conditions--physical, biological conditions that disturb the life systems of species--but the idea of something like this happening… I just don’t know.

What I say is that we have gone through three phases of life. The Paleozoic, the Old Life period, which terminated several hundred million years ago, 220 million years ago, when 95 percent species became extinct. The Middle Life Phase, the Mesozoic, which terminated 75 million years ago… that’s when the dinosaurs died out, when some 60 percent of all species became extinct. Then it was the Cenozoic, which was the recent life period. We are terminating the recent life period after some 75 million years, and, I suggest that we are entering an "Ecozoic Era." We are leaving one phase and entering another. We are entering the fourth biological age.
What I am suggesting is that we have to restore some kind of Human-Earth relations. It’s the only remedy I know. That is where the problem is. That is where the remedy is.