Since Fritz Schumacher’s seminal book Small is Beautiful in 1973, we have understood that appropriate scale is everything. To define the appropriate scale of economic activity one must examine four things:

  • Needs. What do we actually ‘need’ to make us happy, fulfilled people and what does society wish to become?
  • Means. How much of the planet’s resources can we safely afford to rely on to meet those needs and what is the requisite health of an ecosystem relative to that social objective?
  • Needs/means overlay.
  • Taking those two together, what sets of human economic artefacts, structures and processes are feasible within that requisite healthy ecosystem?
  • How can we use the adaptability and behaviours of human economies to assure they meet their own Wellbeing needs as well as the Wellbeing needs of the planet?

Defining “Needs” is about asking what we need from life, both psychically and physically, not what adverts and marketing tell us we desire.

Defining “Needs” is about asking what we need from life, both psychically and physically, not what adverts and marketing tell us we desire, but what actually delivers maximum Wellbeing for all. Food, shelter, health-care, transportation, warmth, community and friendships are certainly needs. Hummers are not. Means is about just how much planet is left, how much throughput we can safely use to deliver those qualitative increases in service delivery to attain those needs. It is also about leaving enough intact ‘means’ so that future generations can meet their needs.

These are surely more sophisticated and important questions than the one we have become fixated on, that being – “how can we grow, grow, grow?” This shift in focus allows us to look not to ecosystem manipulation (and all its risks and ills) to exploitation of the adaptability of human economies.

The Perfect Storm of issues such as Climate Change and peak oil described in Chapter One illustrates that we are at or beyond a safe level of full use of the Earth and the economy’s expansion now encroaches too much on its surrounding ecosystem. We are thus entering into “uneconomic growth” where we are actually producing “bads” faster than “goods” – only our accounting systems are failing to show us the true costs.

The key question now becomes one of scale – how big can we grow, how much “stuff” can we produce, how much of the world’s resources can we use as fodder throughput for our voracious economy and how much pollution can we inflict on our planet? Or how can we deliver maximum long and happy lives for all within the capacity of the planet?

A zero or close to zero rate of growth has already been experimented with in Japan where, despite near zero growth in the 1990’s decade, the country has done well and indeed experienced somewhat of a cultural and social breather and renaissance.