But energy is more than just an energy problem. The American economist, Ralph Borsodi was one of the first to really come to grips with the issue. He discovered in his lifelong experiments into the economic essence of the good life that the one thing that invariably made everything go to hell in a handcart was for the little individual to connect up to the market. It made very little difference whether this market was local, regional or global. In the long run the market itself was always bad news and 'Production For Use' was the only sane response. In the depression years in the United States many families responded to Borsodi's lead by turning their backs on the high life and heading for the good life back on the land.

Borsodi's underlying message has been lost but others have come along since the 1930s with different personal discoveries but much the same message. John Seymour has spent a lifetime understanding the nature of real wealth and this is why he believes fervently in his ideas of self-sufficiency.

John Papworth has spent a lifetime knocking his head against the brick walls built by the political intrigues of the rich and powerful and this is why he is convinced that competent receivers of power and wealth must be locality-based instead of being at the mercy and whim of outside interests. Sooner or later local people must grab what is theirs. The place people live is their home and it is theirs to do with as they wish. But to be able to, they must create democratic local institutions that are robust enough to ensure that the nexus of power never disappears over the brow of the hill. The natural limit is the parish boundary and the blood cells of a sane civilisation are its villages and urban parishes. Beyond these limits moral forces can no longer call to account the ways of the wealthy and powerful.

Fritz Schumacher also saw clearly what was needed and this was why he devoted so much of his time and energy to practical ideas like the Intermediate Technology Group, the Soil Association and the Scott Bader Commonwealth, decades before their natural gestation rates would otherwise have placed them on the reformer's agenda. And it was not just casual editing in Part II of Small is Beautiful that placed education as the first of all the resources. Hierarchies mattered to Schumacher for he knew that if they were not rightly set then it would not be long before the tail was wagging the dog. Of course industry had a need for resources and for energy resources in particular because 'if energy fails, everything fails'. But after education came land. And by land, Schumacher meant proper farming on good soil and with sound animal husbandry. Such esoteric notions like harvesting wind and growing barleycorn to feed society's mobility cravings had no part in Schumacher's thoughts on the subject.

But the ideas that will ultimately transform our local worlds lie deeper than any of their practical manifestations. One such idea is hidden deep inside Leopold Kohr's writings. Ivan Illich has grasped the quintessential essence of Kohr and has given it the name of social morphology. Here is Illich in his E.F. Schumacher Lecture at Yale University in 1994. 'I see Kohr as the one social thinker who picks up the biological morphology of D'Arcy Thompson and J.B.S. Haldane...Kohr discusses society in analogy to the way plants and animals are shaped by their size and sized by their shape...Kohr's thought resists reduction to any scenario of the future....nor is it oriented towards progress...rather he enquires into the form that fits the size...' Our energy requirements should take a certain form.

We need to think these things through much more carefully before rushing off after the latest brand of snake oil on the market.

© Cinque Ports Academic Inn 2002
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