"Local Heroes: The E.f. schumacher Society"
Printed in MetroLand in December, 2006
The E.F. Schumacher Society, South Egremont, Mass., studies and creates alternative economic models that are community-based, human-scale and environmentally respectful, in the spirit of the society’s namesake, who wrote Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.
‘Study how a society uses its land,” wrote Ernest Friedrich Schumacher, “and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.” Schumacher was a German-born economist and thinker who wrote extensively on land use, decentralization and sustainable communities, and how modern economic theory tended to leave human beings, communities and nature out of its profit- and growth-driven equations. His writings and “Buddhist economics” gained him a loyal following, and after his death in 1977, several of his friends and colleagues founded the E.F. Schumacher Society to keep his ideas alive—and put them into practice.
Besides presenting lectures and educational seminars, and offering researchers the use of its library (complete with Schumacher’s personal archives), the organization researches and develops projects that turn conventional economic theories upside-down and show communities innovative ways to sustain and strengthen themselves. Among the society’s projects: support for a local community land trust, which protects land from the speculative real-estate market; a microcredit program in which citizens help collateralize loans to small local businesses; and, most recently, BerkShares, a regional currency designed to promote buying locally.
“It takes a village to support an organic farmer . . . and a hundred local restaurants,” says executive director Susan Witt (pictured), referring to a statistic she heard that there are a hundred or so restaurants in southern Berkshire County—only four of which are chain.
Witt answers a land-use question by describing one of her favorite places in the world: Lake Baikal in Siberia, the world’s deepest lake, around which the Buryat people, shepherds, have lived for centuries, moving their herds around and keeping the land unspoiled. “There was no private ownership. Today there is private ownership moving across Russia. What would occur if lake frontage of the world’s deepest, most extraordinary lake were divided up into little plots? It would be so tempting to sell these plots to the highest bidder.”
Asked how the mainstream views the society, Witt first relates how a Great Barrington deli owner came to them in 1991 looking for a microcredit loan because banks wouldn’t finance his relocation. Instead, he was offered a more innovative solution: Raise the money himself by offering discounted “deli dollars” to loyal customers. It worked, and the media coverage was positive—except that it offered no context on the theoretical underpinnings of the idea. “Our role wasn’t even covered,” laughs Witt. “It was ‘Local deli owner does good by using yankee ingenuity.’ ”
But the times are changing, and the national zeitgeist may be bending toward ideas like Schumacher’s. “We looked like a curiosity in the beginning,” says Witt. “But the obvious problems that have developed with the global economy . . . have turned more and more people into the recognition of the importance of supporting local economies. So they come back to the Schumacher Society and say, ‘Haven’t you been working on this for 25 years?’ Seemingly marginal ideas have taken on more relevance in mainstream thinking.”
