Small Is Beautiful Analysis

The maintenance, and quest for ever-increasing rise, of economic growth is inevitably conducive to grave environmental damage. This results from a variety of factors, including:

1) resource depletion, due to the fact that the available resources are not sufficient to satisfy demand;

2) pollution and related climate variations, due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases, acid rain, poisonous mine tailings and toxic synthetic compounds, alongside callous indifference to environmental damage on the part of some of the world’s most influential governments;

3) the gradual reduction of food supplies, due to eroding farmlands and depleted fisheries among other factors. As E. F. Schumacher maintains in Small is Beautiful (1973), the modern world has treated

It reflects humanity’s innate urge to expand, colonize and control, often by violent means, and, to that extent, it seems hard to rectify. However, humanity is not driven solely by predatory instincts: it is also capable of imagination and creativity, and it is from the foundations provided by these faculties that a new and more hopeful scenario may emanate. Moreover, the frenzied pursuit of instant gratification that characterizes many contemporary societies is not a universal expression of humanity at large. Rather, it is the fruit of a greed that has come to be progressively legitimized and ultimately eulogized within specifically western societies of the late-industrial and post-industrial ilk. To grasp how this situation may be remedied, it is first necessary to examine its philosophical underpinnings. In the West, humanity’s relationship with Nature has been vitiated by an unexamined and hubristic assumption: homo sapiens’s superiority over all other species, which is in effect a denial of human beings’ intrinsic animality, and a spurious justification for the human right to dominate Nature. The faculties evinced by non-human species—autonomous sentience, organizational skills, capacity to develop and flourish—have been denied adequate recognition. All facets of the natural environment have been measured exclusively in human terms, in keeping with the ethos of anthropocentrism. When non-human animals are granted certain “rights,” for example, this concession is not based on a belief in their intrinsic endowment with rights: rather, non-human animals have rights only as long as humans are prepared to grant them this benefit in accordance with the cultural and economic requirements of their