Page 10 RAIN October 1979 How to find Good Work, E.F. Schumacher, preface by George McRobie, 218 pp., 1979, $9.95 hardcover, from: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. 10 East 53rd St. New York, NY 10022 Good Work, E.F. Schumacher's last gift ofgood work to us all, contains as ever his talent for cutting through the clutter, translating into universally compelling terms the clear strength of the economies of human scale. But Good Work is especially personable because its narratives are adapted from the many speeches made by Schumacher during his last tour of the United States. In its pages, the man is speaking to us, and he surely has his finger on the truth. Here is that rare animal, a book so lucid and direct that it's best read aloud to a friendtrue-believer or doubting Thomas-to fully appreciate its insights and uplift. A pleasant surprise in Good Work is the addition of Peter Gillingham 's epilogue. It fs, he says, a testament to Schumacher's positive impact on a typical confused, hesitant and self-doubting human. Peter adds spark and helps to localize Schumacher's oft-repeated advice for finding and creating· good work: 1) Inform yourself 2) Support others who are already at work. 3) Initiate where you can and how you can. Excerpted below are some of his down-to-earth interpolations. - .S'A by Peter Gillingham Good Work ... get an atlas and some colored felt pens, and spend weekday evenings for three months marking up the atlas to connect real people with real places. The world will look entirely different to you. Whenever you learn about some interesting project, think of it as part of a specific mini-economy in terms of what is produced and used, where and how it is produced, and what: part it plays in which secto~ both of the mini-economy and of the specific local economy. Think too of the other corners and other "markets" in that mini-economy, whom it could buy from or sell to (or barter), where needs and opportunities may coincide, where you might go to work. Use your purchasing power selectively, both to inform yourself and to support good work in being. Think about how a given purchase or transaction serves to strengthen the metaeconomy or the exhausting economy, how it can be targeted to strengthen something or someone you want to support. Remember Gandhi's remark that if your village barber gives a bad haircut, instead of going to Madras for a haircut from a city barber it is better to patronize the village barber and persuade him to learn how to give a better haircut. All of these things take effort as they become conscious, deliberate economic acts; they also take on reality in your own mind and give meaning where none existed. Pay dues to the half-dozen groups closest to your place (where you are or where you might want to mo:ve) or to your specific interests as you start to identify them through daydreaming. Get yourself invited to one of their work weekends. Do anything that needs doing on the first day; it may be rough or boring, but you thereby pay your dues so you can spcn.d some time the next day poking around and asking questions. Find out what things they wish they could do next "if only." Think constantly in terms of mini-economics, local economies, and diversifying personal and family microeconomics (your own and others'). Identify where you might provide or help find the "if only" for them. Add more pages to your notebook, and mark up your atlas some more as'your own map of reality, conceptual and factual, starts to feed on itself and to grow and reach out. • Remember the three different groups of homecomersthose who remain within the macro-institutions, those who work on them from the outside, and those who go off into the meta-economy- and realize how much they need to work with each other (the second category often provides valuable skills for reducing constraints in any sector or "market" of a minicconomy: getting county commissioners to give a variance or change,a regulation, for instance). You will need to understand the strengths and capabilities and mind-set of each to help bring them together where you can. Don't be put off by the number of people whose professional expertise causes them to focus on a problem rather than on the potential resources to solve it or prevent it from arising in the first place; that is one of the problems with professionalization. And don't be put off by the extraordinary number of people with good motivation and underused vital energies . whose initial idea of the way to make a constructive contribution is criticism. Keep in mind the lethal summary of our whok situation that Hazel Henderson encountered in a bona fide serious question after one of her talks: "Where do you get federal funding for projects in self-reliance?" Our unconscious dependence on or at least in deference to large organizations, the legacy of the assumption that nothing effective happens except through their participation, is in our bloodstream. Self-immunization
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz