Dr. E. F. Schumacher: Author of the Book Small is Beautiful

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As he became more and more involved with this concept, Schumacher's speeches on the subject began to be picked up and printed as articles by MOTHER-type publications in England and other parts of the world. "Before long," as he tells it, "I was faced with the choice of merely continuing to talk about intermediate technology . . . or actually doing something with it."

And so, with less than $300 (which he had received for delivering a lecture), E.F. Schumacher founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) in London in 1965. The organization was set up to "facilitate the flow of practical information about these technologies, conduct original research into new tools and methods, and in some cases take on the actual manufacture of IT equipment"

Schumacher is justly proud of his group's revival—among other activities—of a pre-Industrial-Revolution metal-bending tool which costs only about $20 and can be worked by two people with no electricity, gasoline engines, or other supplemental sources of power.

Another example of IT at its best is the Schumacher organization's answer to the problem of a Zambian egg packer. The firm needed a machine that would produce egg trays. But when it asked a Western company to design the equipment, it received a proposal for the constructionof a monster that would stamp out one million trays a month. "This was far beyond the needs or the resources of the Zambian packer, so we designed a mini-plant that was just what the firm wanted. And our little plant was soon ordered by other Third World countries... then by the Canary Islands, Spain, Ireland, Canada, and even the United States. This and similar experiences soon taught us that the so-called 'advanced' nations frequently need as much help in scaling down their technologies as the emerging countries need in scaling theirs up. ..

Great numbers of people in the advanced nations abruptly reached that same conclusion on October 6, 1973. . . the day the Arabs "turned off the oil" : That single action by a handful oftill-then relatively unimportant sheiks suddenly and unceremoniously rubbed our advanced" noses in the folly of organizing our whole society around machines (instead of people) and of basingit on distant and non-renewable (instead of local and renewable) resources.

Interestingly enough, E.F Schumacher was one of the very few citizens of the Western world who were not surprised by the oil embargo. As a matter offact, he had predicted the possibility of exactly that sort of action more than 15 years before it took place. In a paper delivered to the Federation of British Industries Conference on April 10, 1958, Schumacher had said:

The forecasts made by responsible agencies of Western European fuel consumption during the next few decades point to an ever growing gap between requirements and indigenous supplies, a gap which could be closed only by oil imported mainly from the Middle East. Quite apart from the balance of payments created thereby, a development of this kind—I suggest—would mean the end of Western European independence. The whole Western European economy would become so vitally dependent on Middle Eastern oil that anyone in a position to withhold or even to disturb these supplies would be Europe's master. If present plans are carried through, the position will be irretrievable within twenty years from now. Western Europe will then have attained a position of maximum dependence on the oil of the Middle East precisely at the moment when the first signs of a world oil famine become visible.

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