Radical Thinkers and Doers

In his most famous book, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, E F Schumacher argued the modern obsession with economic “growth”, achieved via bigger and better technologies, is killing the world. We need first to ask fundamental questions of an essentially metaphysical kind: What are our values? What do we really care about? What really matters? In particular, says Schumacher, we should be seeking as the Buddhists recommend “to obtain the maximum of wellbeing with the minimum of consumption”. Small is Beautiful was published in 1973 and the world has changed radically since then – and, says Neal Harris, senior lecturer in sociology at Oxford Brookes University, Schumacher’s ideas are not above criticism. But, says Dr Harris in this interview with Colin Tudge, Schumacher’s central message is now more relevant and urgent than ever.

In 2007 Chris Smaje gave up his comfortable and pensionable job as an academic in sociology to embark on a year-long tour of Canada with his wife Cordelia and their three sons – and then the Smajes started a market-garden/smallholding near Frome in Somerset where they have lived and worked ever since. Along the way Chris wrote two highly successful books. In the first, Small Farm Future, he argues that the future of farming, and indeed of the world, must lie with small farms – and not with the high-tech industrial monocultures that are now becoming the norm. The second, Say No to a Farm-free Future, is in large part a riposte to George Monbiot’s widely publicised thesis that the world would be better off if there were no farms at all – just factories producing provender of a kind from bacteria.

In this webinar, Chris discusses his experiences as a small farmer in an unsympathetic economic climate, and his grand ideas for a future, agrarian world.

In conversation with Colin Tudge, Josiah Meldrum and Nick Saltmarsh, co-founders of the pioneer company Hodmedod’s, discuss their crusade to raise the profile of the world’s pulses – beans, peas, lentils, chick-peas. They could and should play an even bigger role than they do in the world’s diets – and Britain could and should grow far more of them, in far greater variety. As always, we have much to learn from all the world’s cuisines.

In the first of our new series of conversations with radical thinkers and doers, Colin Tudge talks to economist Ann Pettifor, director of Policy Research In Macroeconomics (PRIME). Ann is one of the few people in the world who really understands how the global economy works – and it doesn’t work in the interests of humanity or the natural world.