A New Peace
by Susan Witt, Executive Director, E. F. Schumacher Society
Comments made at the Global Dialogue for Peace Gathering
September 17-21, 2001, Ashdown Park, Forest Row, Sussex, England
Edited by Hildegarde Hannum
©Copyright 2001 by the E. F. Schumacher Society.
May be reproduced with full reference to its source.
I bring with me to this Global Dialogue the good wishes
of many people in the United States, concerned to find an
image of a new peace while our nation is considering images
of a new war. I also bring personal greetings from Robert
Swann, founder of the E. F. Schumacher Society, to Andrey
Bykov, founder of the Global Dialogue. Bob regrets he cannot
be here.
As we heard in his report yesterday, Andrey Bykov is able
to unite his great vision for world peace with the practical
skills needed to negotiate a limited nuclear disarmament.
In much the same way, Bob Swann has united the visionary
and practical in his own work. I would like to take this
opportunity to tell you of Bob’s life and in so doing
make him a part of this gathering.
Bob Swann served two and a half years in prison during
World War II as a conscientious objector. Much of that time
he spent in solitary confinement, a punishment imposed because
he refused to cooperate with the prison’s policy of
racial segregation. The long hours in solitary gave him
much time for contemplation. Prison was his monastery and
his university. He read greedily and engaged in active debate
about the issues of war and peace with other conscientious
objectors. After much consideration, Bob concluded there
were three root causes of war:
1. The commodification of land, enabling it to be sold
on the market and resulting in the accumulation of land
in the hands of a relatively few. This concentration of
ownership prevents the poor from gaining affordable access
to land to build their homes and earn their livelihood.
The result is great wealth alongside unrelenting poverty.
Without land it is hard to achieve even modest self-sufficiency
and a sense of a dignity.
2. A system of nationally issued currencies that places
the question of who has access to credit in the hands
of nation-states which over-issue currency out of varied
political agendas, including financing of war-related
activities. This practice creates inflation and deprives
regions of a powerful tool for place-based and culturally
appropriate economic development.
3. The loss of community in the face of ever more powerful
global economic interests, which erodes the sense of responsibility
to neighbors and to local ecology that comes with daily
interactions.
When Bob left prison he earned his livelihood as a carpenter
and designer of buildings while continuing to look for ways
to create equitable economies. In the 1960s, as the civil
rights movement grew ever stronger in the southern states,
the old guard saw its own power diminishing and lashed out,
burning African-American churches as a weapon of fear. Bob’s
skills as a carpenter were needed to rebuild the churches,
and he organized crews of black and white Americans to work
together, reforging the courage to struggle on toward peace
and dignity. In the South Bob met Slater King, the cousin
or Martin Luther King, and other civil rights leaders. From
them he learned that African-Americans were being prevented
from fulfilling their dreams because of their inability
to gain access to land. It was a pressing problem that fueled
the civil unrest.
Bob knew of the land reform work of Vinoba Bhave, the
trusted associate of Gandhi. Vinoba walked from village
to village in India seeking a way to alleviate the widening
social discrepancies he witnessed. Wherever he went, crowds
gathered to listen to their beloved spiritual leader. Vinoba
asked boldly, “Those of you with more land than you
need, would you not give your excess to my brothers and
sisters, who have no land to build their homes nor cultivate
their crops?” Moved by the man and his appeal,
wealthy villagers deeded their land to Vinoba so that he
could reconvey it to the landless.
In this way the Bhoodan or Land Gift movement was born.
But soon Vinoba saw that the poor, who did not have the
money to buy tools to work the land and seeds to sow it,
simply sold the land back to the wealthy. They then wandered
into the even greater poverty of the cities. Therefore Vinoba
changed the Bhoodan movement to the Gramdan movement, or
Village Gift movement. The land was given to the village,
and villagers were given use rights. They were not tempted
to trade the land for quick money. If they left the land,
it was redistributed to those who could use it.
Our Russian friends here at this meeting may recall how
beautifully this concept is described in Tolstoy’s
wonderful last novel Resurrection. Tolstoy
outlines a process of redistribution of land in which estate
owners return the land, not to individual peasants but to
the villages. The villages then allocate land use, charging
a rent according to quality of site and soil. The rent supports
schools, health clinics, road improvement, and the general
welfare of the villagers.
With Vinoba’s example in mind, Bob Swann worked with
Slater King to create the first community land trust in
North America to provide farm land for African-American
farmers in Georgia. There are now more than one hundred
community land trusts around the United States.
The Georgia group studied the lease agreements used by
the Jewish National Fund to develop their own legal documents.
A significant portion of the land of Israel is owned by
the Jewish National Fund, which leases the land to individuals
and intentional communities such as a “kibbutz.”
The leases call for private ownership of buildings and other
improvements on the land, but the land itself remains owned
by the Fund. Bob called for a democratically structured,
regional membership base for community land trusts so that
they would remain accountable to the people and priorities
of a particular place.
Turning his attention to the problem of credit, Bob felt
that instead of nations having the power to determine who
has access to credit, it should again be regional communities.
Self-regulated communities striving for self-sufficiency
are best qualified to determine their own need for credit
and the criteria for its issue. Out of this understanding
Bob started what has become known as a local currency movement
in the United States.
A simple way of imagining how a community can issue money
is to think of a farmer. Each spring the farmer needs seeds
to sow the field. A regional community that knows the farmer
and wishes to support a local source of food can band together
and issue credit to that farmer for the seeds. Essentially
the community can create new money, based solely on its
confidence in the future productivity of the farmer. Local
residents recognize that the planting of those seeds will
result in a harvest of crops worth fifty times the value
of the original seeds. They trade in the local currency
without reservation because its value remains sound as long
as it is issued only for productive purposes. Small communities,
once thinking themselves dependent on the largess of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank, can take back
the power to issue their own credit and determine their
own economic destinies based on local resources and local
production.
Bob recommended that while the issue of currencies should
be at the local level, their standard should be universal.
He suggested using a kilowatt hour of electricity as that
standard. Energy is a component of all production; its cost
is a factor in determining the price of goods. At the same
time, energy can be produced in all regions based on renewable
resources, an unending source of wealth for a region. So
while currencies may be created locally, based on factors
determined by the particular needs of the region, these
same currencies can be traded in other regions using a common
international standard.
In addition to land reform and monetary reform, Bob’s
third objective was to develop a means to foster local economies
and local communities so as to bring about an economics
of peace. J. C. Kumarappa, the Gandhian economist, helped
guide this initiative. In his beautiful book Why
the Village Movement is a chapter entitled “The
Role of Women.” He addresses the women of the villages
with these thoughts: “You, my sisters, perhaps it is
your husband who earns the money for your family, but it
is you who are determining how that money is spent; and
in so doing you are deciding the fate of your village. You
may choose to buy the beautiful silk made in France or Belgium,
or you may choose the khadi cloth made by your sister and
your neighbor. When you choose the khadi cloth, you are
investing in more than cloth, you are investing in your
neighbor, her children, and your village. As you watch the
children walking to school in the morning, fed by the earnings
of their mother, you realize that you and they are woven
together through the cloth. You and your village are richer
in proportion to the number of such stories that unite you.”
At the E. F. Schumacher Society we are creating model
ways for consumers to support local producers. Goods consumed
in a region are best created in the region in full view
and with full local knowledge of production methods. A strong
local economy is dependent on cooperative social patterns
and a rich local culture.
An example of this approach is the Community Supported
Agriculture (CSA) movement founded by our late neighbor,
Robyn Van En, at Indian Line Farm. In a CSA a group of families
guarantees a yearly income to a farmer in exchange for a
portion of the harvest. The families work together to create
a situation that invites a farmer to farm by sharing in
the risk of the undertaking. There are now over one thousand
CSA farms in North America alone, and the movement is spreading
as consumers seek a local alternative to factory-farmed
food.
These principles of community self-sufficiency and economic
renewal are at the heart of the work of Malladi Rama Krishna
who is here with us today. Krishna is the new director of
the J. C. Kumarappa Ashram in Hyderabad, India, founded
by Michael Windey of the Village Reconstruction Organization.
But to return to the purpose of this gathering: as the
troubling consequences of the events of the past week continue
to unfold, we are charged with how to initiate a Global
Dialogue for Peace. Bob Swann’s life is instructive.
He was privileged during his time in prison to read and
discuss the writings of some of the world’s great cultural
leaders on the topic of peace, and that led him to his life’s
work of developing practical steps for economic reform.
At the E. F. Schumacher Society we are privileged to be
stewards of Fritz Schumacher’s personal library, which
has a similar story to tell. It is a library of books and
papers, not on economics but on religion and philosophy,
all carefully underlined and annotated. It took a thorough
inquiry into life’s big questions—What is the
role of the human being on earth? What is right conduct
based on that understanding?—for Fritz Schumacher
to develop a new, human-scale, place-based approach to economics.
His now famous essays are collected in Small Is
Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, judged one
of the hundred most influential books of the last century.
It is therefore appropriate that gathered here at this
Global Dialogue for Peace are leaders representing all of
our great religious traditions. Only when we are able to
penetrate into that which is universal in religious thought,
and then link that understanding to a practical knowledge
and affection for local place and local community, can we
build a vision for a new peace.
By all rights this founding of a new peace is a spiritual
mission and at the same time an economic mission, an environmental
mission, and a humanitarian mission. It will require a collaboration
of individuals and cultural organizations working together
to succeed. Its sign of success will be the renewal of local
communities around the world. Both our own village and the
Earth are our home and responsibility. Let us greet one
other in this common citizenship, informed by the lessons
we have learned from living well in a particular place.
Thank you.
"A New Peace" first appeared in December of 2001
in the publication An Economics of Peace, available
from the E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug End Road, Great
Barrington, MA 01230 USA, (413) 528-1737, www.smallisbeautiful.org
