This weekend saw the Small is… festival take place in the grounds of Practical Action‘s Warwickshire base. The Small is… festival is inspired by the thinking of Pratical Action’s founder E.F.Schumacher and is described on the website as:
A space to share skills, learn about technologies, create networks, develop ideas and be inspired about international development and the planet.
I had read about the festival but Eiffelover and I were unable to attend as we had we had a prior engagement at the very beautiful and inspiring wedding of two lovely friends.
But fortunately I have a hotline to a Practical Action insider (uh, my sister) who sent me the following extract from Andrew Simms’s keynote address. Andrew’s talk apparently focused on the impossibility of maintaining growth in our unique and fragile planet and that transitioning to a more equitable zero growth economy is possible and necessary “…we can do this…and the money is there if you just reorient production and government priorities”.
He gave a lot of emphasis to the ‘well being’ that can be achieved in this transition process and ended with a quote from a speech by the American environmentalist Edward Abbey:
One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.
(From a speech to environmentalists in Missoula, Montana, and in Colorado, which was published in High Country News, (24 September 1976), under the title “Joy, Shipmates, Joy!”, as quoted in Saving Nature’s Legacy : Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity (1994) by Reed F. Noss, Allen Y. Cooperrider, and Rodger Schlickeisen, p. 338 ISBN 1559632488)
I love this quote. On a day-to-day basis it reminds me why how even when I head for my desk each morning I remember to do simple things like enjoy the pleasure of cycling through Highbury Fields and take in my own lunch rather than join the ranks of the desk-bound in the supermarket queues. And more fundamentally it recognises our humanity and our need to cut ourselves a bit of slack – however noble the cause – in order to remember just what it is that we’re fighting to preserve in the first place. Keep body and soul together – active, breathing, blood-pumping, conscious – and whatever you do you can only win.
Rambling out yonder in the Peak District - June 2007
