2023-09-04 16:35:00
“The economy is based on the natural world and therefore if there is no water, land, wood, animals, where will the economy come from?” asks Indian environmentalist and peace activist Satish Kumar, 87, founder of the Schumacher College, a prestigious UK-based sustainability institution.
“The economy is a means to an end, and the end is human well-being and the well-being of the planet. But we don’t have it,” says the educator, who maintains that the economy practiced in today’s world has moved so far from its meaning original (eco, from the Greek “oikos” means home or place of residence, and “oikonomia” is its administration) that should be called “moneyronomy”.
A critic of mass production methods, Satish named his school after his friend and German-born British economist EF Schumacher (1911-1977), author of “Small is Beautiful” and for whom economics is a subdiscipline of ecology. Schumacher’s ideas inspired movements such as “fair trade” and “buy local,” which promote purchasing local products.
After welcoming more than 500 Brazilians to its campus in the southwest of England, a unit of Schumacher College in Brazil was inaugurated in 2014.
Satish affirms that at present humanity lives a fictitious separation between the human being and nature. For the environmentalist, the lack of understanding of this interdependence is at the root of the current climate crisis.
Translated by AZAHARA MARTIN ORTEGA
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