"beginning with spiritual inquiry"
September 21st, 2005
Dear Friends,
Only two days remain to bid on items in the online auction
to support research and first year development of the BerkShares
Local Currency Program. Publications include subscriptions
to Orion, Resurgence, Yes, Enlightenment, and Vermont Commons;
autographed books by John Kenneth Galbraith, David Rockefeller,
Kirkpatrick Sale, Nancy Jack Todd, and Judy Wicks; baskets
of books from Steiner Books, Lindisfarne Press, Bell Pond
Books, Myrin Institute, New Society Publishers, and Housatonic
Press; and a set of DVDs from Hazel Henderson's Ethical
Markets TV Series. To view pictures and details of
these and many other auction items and to bid, go to:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/auction
Merrian Fuller, the managing director of Business Alliance
for Local Living Economies (www.livingeconomies.org), is
a talented new board member of the E. F. Schumacher Society. Her
interview with Susan Witt for the Summer 2005 issue of
Lilopoh Magazine (www.lilopoh.com) reflects on E. F. Schumacher's
deep interest in the variety of spiritual traditions as
witnessed by the books in his library. This interest
shapes the nature of his essays in Small Is Beautiful which
begin with spiritual inquiry and conclude with practical
steps to transform our economic system to one more accountable
to people, land, and community.
To review the books in Dr. Schumacher's personal collection
you may search the Society's online catalogue:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/library.html
The full text of Merrian Fuller's interview follows for
your interest.
Warmly,
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230 USA
www.smallisbeautiful.org
* * * * * * * *
Rebuilding Local Economies
Merrian Fuller Interviews Susan Witt
Susan Witt has served as the Executive Director of the
E. F. Schumacher Society since its founding in 1980. The
Schumacher Society promotes and supports grassroots initiatives
to develop more self-reliant regional economies. It
conducts lecture, seminar and publication programs, and
develops practical economic tools that have been applied
in communities all over the world.
Merrian Fuller: What drew you to the work of strengthening
local economies?
Susan Witt: I have no formal background in economics,
in fact, I was a literature teacher in a small Waldorf
high school in New Hampshire and I deeply love the world
of great literature. However, I came to believe that
the world's most pressing social and environmental problems
could only be solved through fundamental changes in the
economic system. I heard Robert Swann on the radio
talking about E. F. Schumacher's work Small is Beautiful,
and my course was set. Three years later we founded
a North American Schumacher Society in the Berkshires of
Western Massachusetts.
MF: What insight did you find in Schumacher's work that
moved you to change your life's course?
SW: In his book, Small Is Beautiful, Schumacher offered
us a fundamentally different approach to conducting our
economic life. To arrive at this understanding, he
was not reading books on economics, he was studying the
great esoteric literature from all the world's religious
traditions. His essays begin in spiritual principles
and then lead to economic practice. This seemed to
me the correct progression. At the same time such
thinking is not dogmatic but allows the practitioner to
explore his/her own solutions.
MF: How would you characterize Schumacher's new economics?
SW: Schumacher offered a positive and locally-rooted way
to respond to the problems of a global economy in which
the processes of production are hidden from the eyes of
the consumer, separating people, land, and community. He
advocated human-scaled economic systems, appropriate technology,
cooperation between consumer and producer, and a re-thinking
of the institutions of land and money.
MF: Why do we need to re-think our relationship to land?
SW: We've commodified land, enabling it to be sold on
the market and resulting in the accumulation of land in
the hands of a relatively few. Concentration of ownership
prevents the poor from gaining affordable access to land
to build their homes and earn their livelihood. The result
is great wealth alongside unrelenting poverty. Without
land it is hard to achieve even modest self-sufficiency
and a sense of a dignity. In the Berkshires we face
the problem of rising land prices mostly due to demand
from second home owners, making home ownership and farming
less and less affordable for local people.
MF: How can we make housing more affordable?
SW: One tool we've developed is a Community Land
Trust. The Land Trust concept offers a practical
way to take land off the market, preventing speculation
and artificially-inflated housing prices, and place it
into a system of trusteeship on a region-by-region basis. The
goods created by an individual as a result of labor applied
to land-the harvest from a garden, the home built of wood
from the forest, the sweater knitted from spun wool-is
rightfully private property and may appropriately be traded
as commodities. However, the land itself and its
resources, which are Earth-given and of limited supply,
should be held in trust by the regional community and their
use allocated on a limited basis for present and future
generations.
MF: What about farmland, is there any way to help farmers
stay on the land?
SW: A Community Land Trust can also be used to make farming
possible in place like the Berkshires, where land is expensive. As
with creating affordable housing, the Land Trust can purchase
the land for the community and give the farmers a renewable
99-year lease and the right of ownership over the buildings
and any improvements they make to the land. The farmers
can make it work if they aren't burdened by inflated land
values, and the community gets both fresh, local produce
and the ability to make sure that the farmers use ecologically-sensitive
practices.
MF: How easy are these models to replicate in other
places?
SW: Hundreds of Land Trusts have sprung up all over North
America in the last 20 years - so they are obviously replicable
and filling an important need. We also provide all
the legal documents and background materials needed to
start a Community Land Trust on our website so that people
don't have to start from scratch.
MF: You also mentioned the need to re-think our relationship
to currency, can you say more on that?
SW: Right now we have a system of nationally issued currencies
that places the question of who has access to credit in
the hands of nations that over-issue currency out of varied
political agendas, including financing of war-related activities.
This practice creates inflation and deprives regions of
a powerful tool for place-based and culturally appropriate
economic development.
MF: So we should get rid of the national currency?
SW: I don't advocate getting rid of the national currency,
but local areas can be better served by a combination of
local and regional currencies that complement the national
currency.
MF: Can you give some examples?
SW: In one region you can have a paper scrip that
works like a US dollar, but can only be spent within the
region so that wealth continues to circulate and doesn't
leave the community. You can also exchange time in
hours with your neighbors - one program for doing that
is TimeDollars. Local currencies can also be used
to get farmers through the winter by selling vouchers for
their products in advance, or to capitalize local businesses. One
example is a delicatessen that raised funds through the
sale of "Deli Dollars" to its customers. These
notes, dated so that redemption was staggered over a period
of time, were good for meals at discounted prices. This
scrip financing enabled the delicatessen to relocate to
new quarters without having to increase bank debt.
MF: Do you think the world is ready for these sorts of
innovations on a larger scale?
SW: Well, the nature of much of the work we do is locally-rooted
and not intended to grow to a "large scale." However,
many communities are looking for ways to respond to problems
of globalization, the monoculture of large corporations
and growing economic dependence. More and more local
communities are adopting these solutions, so it is growing
larger in that sense--village by village.
