Tag: Nature
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Small is Beautiful, pt. 6
My final post on Small is Beautiful. Other posts on Schumacher can be found here. Schumacher includes another section, on Social Organization, that I won’t survey in detail, primarily because I found it to be the least interesting in the book. I imagine there’s quite a bit of sophistication that I missed, therefore, and don’t…
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Small is Beautiful, pt. 5
An attempt to get back to writing regularly here, perhaps futile. My last post on Schumacher was in January, so I’ve lost the thread a bit, please bear with me. Previous posts can be found here. One of the things I most appreciate about Schumacher is that he takes the challenge of technology seriously. The…
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Small is Beautiful, pt. 4
[previous entries in the series: part 1, part 2, and part 3] Not content to offer mere diagnosis, Schumacher dedicates considerable space in Small is Beautiful to concrete proposals for reform. Recognize the importance of education, technology, and social organization (here, he is primarily thinking of large scale organizations, corporations, government, etc.) to modern society,…
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Small is Beautiful, pt. 3
[Part 1], [Part 2] Schumacher was an economist, and thus some of his most penetrating analysis comes in his section on economics and the evils attendant therein. First, in keeping with the materialistic orientation of the world discussed in the previous post, we see that, in a materialist world, the gravest error is to fail…
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Small is Beautiful, pt. 2
[part 1] Been busy and only going to get more so through the month of November, so this series on Schumacher is likely to be pretty spread out. Apologies. One of Schumacher’s key insights is that the problem of the modern economic system is not simply a crisis in the distribution and use of resources,…
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Small is Beautiful
Beginning another series of posts, this time concentrating on E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. Schumacher was a mid-20th century economist, a student of Keynes, who advised the British National Coal Board (a far bigger deal than the name alone indicates) for decades. Influenced by his study of philosophy, particularly the traditional social thought of the Catholic…
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The wind had a mysterious voice and carried nothing now of the songs of birds, or of the rustling of palms and fragrant vines. Its burden was gathered from a stormy expanse of crested waves and briny tangles. I could see no striving in those magnificent wave motions, not raging; all the storm was apparently…
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Preview of my Kalamazoo paper
Next Thursday, I’ll be presenting at the International Medieval Congress on “Creation and Conversion in Northern Europe.” The general idea is that creation featured heavily in both medieval missionary preaching and in the conception of what those missionaries were accomplishing. The subject was first suggested to me by a reading of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Creation,…
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A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is a classic of environmental literature and is quite good, with beautiful sketches of Leopold’s life and work on a sand farm in Wisconsin and his travels through Mexico, Canada, and the American west. These sketches alone would make the book well-worth reading, but his underlying philosophy is also very…
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Psalm 19, 18 in the Vulgate
The calm dawn gave no promise of anything uncommon…The sunrise we did not see at all, for we were beneath the shadow of the fjord cliffs; but in the midst of our studies, while the Indians were getting ready to sail, we were startled by the sudden appearance of a red light burning with a strange, unearthly splendor on…
Dan Yingst 