Satish Kumar: ‘Economy can’t survive without the natural world’ – 9/3/2023 – Environment

“The economy is based on the natural world, so if there is no water, soil, wood, animals, where will the economy come from?”, asks Indian environmentalist and pacifist Satish Kumar, 87, founder of Schumacher College, a renowned college based in the UK.

“The economy is a means to an end, and the end is human well-being and planetary well-being. But we don’t have that”, says the educator, for whom the economy practiced in today’s world has distanced itself so much from its meaning original (eco, from the Greek “oikos”, is home or place of residence, and “oikonomia” is its administration) that should be called “moneynomy”.

Critical of the means of mass production, Satish named his school after his friend and German-born British economist EF Schumacher (1911-1977), author of the book “Small is Beautiful” and for whom economics is a subfield of ecology . Schumacher’s ideas inspired movements such as “fair trade” (fair purchase, in English) and “buy local”, encouraging the purchase of local products.

After welcoming more than 500 Brazilians to its campus in southwest England, in 2014 a Schumacher College unit was opened in Brazil.

Satish says that humanity today lives a fantasy separation between human being and nature. For him, the lack of understanding of this interdependence is at the root of the current climate crisis.

“Man has enslaved nature, as if it had no life and could be exploited endlessly”, he says. “We see nature as something separate from us, something inferior. But we are nature too.”

The environmentalist, who became a Jain monk aged nine, advocates reducing economic growth, excessive production and consumption. He proposes what he calls “elegant simplicity”, a low-impact way of life, focused on “being” and not on “having”, which is the title of one of his few books released in Brazil by Palas Athena.

At the height of the Cold War, Satish initiated a peace march, inspired by the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi. He left India, penniless, and crossed 8,000 miles and three continents on foot and by boat over two and a half years to meet leaders of the nuclear powers of the day in Moscow, Paris, London and Washington.

His philosophy is the subject of the documentary “Teaching Nature”, by Lucas Barragan, which is now premiering in Brazil on the Aquarius platform, the same platform that will launch in April the film “Amor Radical”, by Brazilian Julio Hey, about the life journey of the Indian activist . Satish comes to Brazil in 2024 for the launch and a series of conferences and meetings.

Satish assesses that Brazil must prioritize the fight against hunger and the protection of its biomes and indigenous peoples. “Brazil must not destroy its forests to export food to China.”

Read below excerpts from the interview given to Sheet.

His school honors an economist who considered economics as a subfield of ecology. Why?
Because the economy, without nature, is not an economy, and cannot survive. Schumacher said that the economy is a means to an end, and the end is human well-being and planetary well-being, keeping nature intact, without pollution, without waste, without excessive carbon emissions. Schumacher said that the economy is at the service of people and the planet, not people and the planet at the service of the economy.

Mr. defends an integral and practical education. How does this model serve the challenges of the contemporary world?
Our conventional education, created during the Industrial Revolution, is obsolete. She thinks that young people have no body or heart or hands or legs, and only teaches the head, and only half of it. We all have two hemispheres of the brain. The left is the rational hemisphere. Law is the hemisphere of imagination, art, relationship, compassion. Our education has spent billions just educating the left half of the brain. This is tragic.

Education shouldn’t just be for jobs, it should be for life. Most jobs are very destructive. They pollute, waste and only see nature as a resource for the economy. So we need a revolution in education to make it centered on nature, life and the Earth. Nature’s book is the greatest book we have, and children have to experience this: it cannot come from books or the internet, but from experience.

Climate emergencies have intensified, thanks, according to you, to a war between humans and nature. What is this war?
The war with nature is treating it as if it had no life and could be exploited endlessly. We enslave nature, we see it as something separate from us, something inferior. But we are also nature.

What is the role of the Covid pandemic in this war against nature?
I believe the reason we have a pandemic is because we are invading and destroying the wild. Wild animals and wild viruses enter the food chain, and we have Covid. Which, therefore, was produced by man, by the expansion of agriculture and monoculture. Nature does not like monoculture, it prefers biodiversity.

To avoid future pandemics, we need to reduce our impact on the environment and our meat consumption and have organic, more humane and smaller-scale agriculture.

Climate conventions try to engage countries in containing the world temperature to a growth of 1.5ºC. Is there reason for optimism?
It’s a good thing that the UN, governments and companies are focusing on climate change. But they are doing it wrong. Instead of reducing their footprint on the planet, they want to find technological solutions. And you can’t solve the problem with the same idea that caused the problem in the first place.

This idea of ​​unlimited economic growth is not possible, but it is the focus of all countries and companies. Growth has become a god or a religion. There is no such thing as infinite economic growth on a finite planet. We need growth in well-being, in human relations, in health, in art. We don’t have that. We have more and more sick people, physically and mentally. This is not wellness. Our oceans are full of plastic, our rivers are full of sewage, our soil is full of poisonous chemicals and fertilizers.

Mr. preaches elegant simplicity as part of the solution to this impasse. What is that?
It means that we need to have a simple life so that others can live simply. Today, a very wealthy part of society is spending a lot of money on everything. The consumer society is the engine of economic growth and therefore promotes consumerism.

The advertising industry creates cravings for things you never knew you needed to buy and is sowing the seeds of hunger and inadequacy, fear and inferiority complexes, self-doubt and greed. Why have so much if you can only wear one dress or one watch at a time? We have money, we have cars, we have houses, but we don’t have time.

If you live simply, you consume less of nature’s resources. We have to remember that less is more: being more and having less. Elegant simplicity is good for nature, society and yourself.

Brazil was particularly affected in the pandemic years, both from a human and environmental point of view. After being a leader in the environmental field, what is Brazil’s place today in this debate?
At the moment, you have a good president and you also have a great minister of the environment, Marina Silva — she’s wonderful. Brazil is a very fortunate country as it has a large expanse of land and smaller population compared to India and China. Therefore, you can afford to have more forests and protect the Amazon, plant more trees and have perennial food. Why should Brazil destroy its forest and its environment to produce food for China, the United States or other countries? Especially while Brazilians are starving.

No one should go hungry. All other things are secondary. The production of good quality food must be a priority. And for that, agriculture must be valued. At the moment, growing food is seen as hard work by uneducated, poor and backward people.

Brazil should take more people to the countryside, where they will be healthier, in contact with nature. Farmers are the future of Brazil because food is fundamental and comes first. If farmers are down, Brazil will be down. If farmers are up, Brazil will be up.

And what is the place of India, one of the powers of the multipolar world, and one of the biggest consumers of coal in the world?
India is copying the Western system of industrial production, consumerism and economic growth and has forgotten its culture. Although the new government [do nacionalista Narendra Modi] extol that we are Hindus, he set aside Hindu traditions and values. The government is Hindu in name only — it has adopted a Hindu chauvinism. Hindu values ​​are simplicity, non-violence, harmony with nature, equality. The country has just landed on the moon while children are hungry in the streets and people live in slums. I’m not proud of it.

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Satish Kumar, 87, was born in Rajasthan, a state in India that borders Pakistan. At the age of nine, he became a Jain monk (religion from the 6th century BC). At 18, he joined movements for agrarian reform in India, and, in 1962, he started a peace march that crossed three continents in two and a half years. He moved to the United Kingdom in the 1970s, where he founded the magazine Resurgence & Ecological, a reference in the field of environmentalism, of which he is now editor emeritus. In 1991, he founded Schumacher College, a center for sustainability studies that has become a global reference on the subject. He published ten books, of which “Simplicity Elegante” and “Solo, Alma, Sociedade” were released in Brazil, both by Palas Athena, and “Bússola Espiritual” (ed. Pensamento).