Introduction
Second Annual GW Climate Action Conference
Small Is Sustainable
May 1 -3, 2008
Thirty-five years ago, following on the 1973 energy crisis, a small but influential book of essays appeared throughout the English-speaking world that made a quiet but profound point --- the scale of human activities is important, both to people and to our planet. Small Is Beautiful --- Economics As If People Mattered, written by economist, planner, and social entrepreneur E.F. Schumacher, made the case that actions taken by individuals and smaller organizations deserved significant attention by economists and other private and public decision-makers.
Indeed, he believed that society depended upon these micro-level entities as foundations for macro-level success. Incorporating scale-oriented issues about pollution and over-consumption, his thesis is relevant to champions of efforts to reduce the human carbon footprint at the small-scale level so that our overall global carbon footprint is itself reduced. Ensuring that both people and planet were honored in an economic system became the cornerstone of Schumacher’s philosophy, and, to a significant extent, the key feature of the emerging phenomenon we now call “sustainability”.
This second climate action conference convenes individuals as global citizens, small group members of organizations and communities, and entrepreneurs and representatives of small-to-medium sized enterprises in the business, academic, government, and nonprofit sectors to achieve three goals:
1) To recognize and leverage the value of small-scale climate decisions and actions;
2) To share our strategies for social, environmental, and economic sustainability related to climate action; and,
3) To map out ways we can continue to collaborate to advance the vision that micro- decisions and actions can have macro-implications for our planet’s climate crises.
Together, collaboratively, we have the opportunity to demonstrate that, for climate solutions, “small” is not only beautiful, it is also “sustainable”.