# Small is Beautiful

Man is small and, therefore, small is beautiful.

“Small is Beautiful” by Ernst F. Schumacher

Schumacher published “Small is Beautiful” in 1973, based on awareness of the problem of how to secure and expand humanity in modern society. This book coincided with the environmental pollution that became a social problem mainly in developed countries. At the same time, the United Nations Conference on Human Environment was held in Stockholm and the Stockholm Declaration was adopted (1972), and the world was trying to move forward toward building a framework for a sustainable society on a global scale. However, there still were continuous mass production, mass consumption, and mass disposal, in a way that could not be called sustainable. The book says that these human activities and technologies cause a crisis of eating up limited natural resources.

The book says that people find little satisfaction and lose their humanity because such modern style of production splits the work that used to achieve humanity and life satisfaction into pieces of work. This is the first crisis that the world faces. The second crisis is the ones of the environment that supports human life but now is showing signs of collapse. The third crisis is the depletion of natural resources.

Schumacher writes that we should create “intermediate technology” that is appropriate for humans. This way of thinking is summarized by the words “Man is small and, therefore, small is beautiful,” which became the title of the book.

In this book, Schumacher also makes some epigrams. Schumacher sais that it is too optimistic to expect that we can deal with the destructive forces by solving environmental destruction, conserving wildlife, discovering new energy and achieving agreements on peaceful coexistence.

The moral choices, he says, are necessary and it is possible to obtain justice (justitia), courage (fortitudo), and temperance (temperantia) with knowledge (prudential).

These are virtues that are absolutely essential for the continued existence of civilization.

# Section 2 Evaluation of Sustainability and Consideration of Quality of Life

### 1. The Current Status of the World’s Sustainability

“As seen in the previous section, the life satisfaction is based on stability of the following three viewpoints: sustainable environment, economy and society.” In order to evaluate whether human life is sustainable or not, it is necessary to consider whether each of the following systems have been established and maintained: an environmental conservation system that allows the consumption of natural resources at an acceptable level of the Earth’s environment (environmental sustainability), an economic system that enables fair and appropriate economic activities (economic sustainability), and a social system that will ensure fundamental human rights and cultural and social diversity (social sustainability) (Figure 1-2-1).

In this sense, it is possible to think that the environment is the foundation of our society and the economy, because if environmental sustainability is lost, it will lead to degradation of our life and depletion of natural resources, which would affect social and economic sustainability.

Dynamics in society and the economy affects the environment. For example, demographic dynamics is one example of important worldwide social changes in recent years. The world's population, which was 3.7 billion in 1970, sharply rose to 6.8 billion in 2009. According to estimation by the United Nations Population Division, the increase of the world's population has continued driven thus far by population increases in China and other East Asian countries, and India and the other Central and South Asian countries. From today until 2050, the population increase in East Asia will slow down, but the population in Central and South Asia will continue its remarkable increase, and the population increase in Africa will accelerate (Figure 1-2-2).

As for economic trends from 1970 to 2009, China had particularly remarkable growth in GDP, and Asia's economy is growing, mainly in East Asia (Figure 1-2-3). Meanwhile, in Africa, GDP is not growing in comparison