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The Young Green Consumer Guide
Books become championed for political impact. Some have greatness thrust upon them. Others, here and there, are quietly cherished individually. This is the case for The Young Green Consumer Guide (YGCG). Maybe it was Tony Ross’s energetic, colourful, Quentin Blake-like inked watercolours that affixed the publication in my consciousness. I picked it up as a 10-year-old. It told me what I could do to save the planet: “practical action”. How I was surprised, at the age of 11, to manage my school’s first ‘green audit’… It was the first time the teachers had been asked by a pupil to quantify their school’s waste-water usage!
The triangular yellow tab in the book cover’s top right-hand corner was not ‘new edition’ or ‘25% discount’, but “The WORLD needs your help” (their caps). The book must have been pivotal in developing ecological awareness in more than a few of my contemporaries. Perhaps Zack Polanski came across the YGCG when he was young. His style owes something to its matter-of-factness.
The book certainly encouraged me to inform and persuade others to assess environmental impacts. What happens if I throw away my toothbrush? Would all the Earth’s household rubbish piled up really stretch to the moon? What is acid rain? How are corals affected by calcification? All these questions, and more, were so concisely answered that – imitation being the sincerest form of flattery – when I edited my first publication at the age of 14 (for my Devon magazine) I explained how we villagers were ‘frazzling’ the ozone layer. I then issued guidance to my fellow parishioners on what they could do to help patch it up.
The YGCG introduced youngsters to concepts such as energy conservation and non-renewable resources. A reader would then be equipped to understand how these principles sit within the dialogues of today… A young people’s edition of Resurgence & Ecologist, anyone?
Small is Beautiful
As an independent researcher unconnected with Schumacher College, I thought a brief appreciation of E.F. Schumacher’s seminal work might be an amusement to those closely associated with the institution and the Resurgence movement. The German-born naturalised Briton was chief economic adviser to the UK National Coal Board. This status forcibly underlines his book’s arguments. One of the central precepts – perhaps the central one – of Small Is Beautiful is not to confuse capital (one’s house) with income (one’s work), fossil fuels, being the Earth’s (Nature’s) capital, unwisely being treated as income. These words carried special import during the ‘oil shock’ of the early 1970s. Human-centric solutions were unfashionable. Refusing to recognise local, regional centres of economic development, Schumacher argued, drove India’s rural poor into vast conurbations. I saw this for myself at a village polytechnic in Uttar Pradesh in 1997.
Schumacher represents clear common sense: the reader warms to his precepts as to a talisman. He was not preaching to the converted. Remember that his contemporary audience were casting about to make money in the burgeoning 1970s world of profit-driven multinationals. They may have been almost outraged by his ideas. It’s not too extreme even to parallel Schumacher’s quiet reason with that of John Milton, whose 1644 prose masterpiece Areopagitica firmly persuades his English readers that they would be right to extinguish the life of their king if that monarch exercised tyrannical power.
Schumacher’s writing is neither a dry economic tract nor a breathless salesman’s prose. If one word could crystallise the respect Schumacher commands, it would be mana: a New Zealand Maori term roughly translatable as the respect owed to a purveyor of wisdom. Without intention to unduly flatter, it is a quality afforded also to Satish Kumar for his work not least in editing Resurgence, this publication itself part of a powerful effort to diffuse Schumacher’s coherent principles in order to aid a wider public understanding.
The Young Green Consumer Guide by John Elkington, Julia Hailes, Douglas Hill and Tony Ross. Victor Gollancz, 1990. ISBN: 9780575047600
Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher. Blond & Briggs, 1973. ISBN: 9780856340123
