Indigenous environmentalism: For a political economy where people (and planet) matter

Abstract

This article investigates how well E. F. Schumacher’s ideas travel beyond his own time and place. To do so, I contrast the environmental critique offered by Schumacher in Small is Beautiful with contemporary forms of everyday environmentalism provided by Indigenous communities in Latin America that form part of a response to processes of ongoing territorial dispossession. In exploring how well Schumacher’s ideas travel to Latin America, I argue that there are seemingly a significant number of similarities between these forms of environmental politics. However, they can be understood in two different registers. I submit that Schumacher’s environmental critique and political project remains at the level of idealism and contains a variety of elements that remain contradictory for a progressive praxis. By contrast, Indigenous environmentalism in Latin America offers a materially-grounded, structural critique of colonialism that concomitantly offers a new notion of a community-based revolutionary subject. It therefore provides a stronger basis for realising many of the goals Schumacher had in mind. Nevertheless, I conclude that whilst important and necessary, this mode of resistance remains insufficient on its own to achieve an alternative political economy where people and planet matter. For this to be realised, a more encompassing counter movement remains vital. The mantra of ‘small is beautiful’, therefore, still needs to grasp the scale of the ecological crisis.

Introduction

An important issue that has been raised in political discussion is how well social theory can travel, both in terms of shifting to new geographical locales and to new temporal contexts (Morton, 2007, p. 354, 2013; Said, 2000). In the contemporary era, there are numerous examples of important social theorist’s work ‘travelling’ beyond their initial context to inspire change in others or to serve as an important means of interpretation (Goodwin, 2018; Hesketh, 2019; Salem, 2021). The ongoing revolution in Rojava, for example, is frequently said to be inspired by the work of Murray Bookchin in terms of its major ideals and organising principles (Cemgil & Hoffmann, 2016).

This article investigates how well E. F. Schumacher’s ideas travel beyond his own time and place. It has been argued that whilst some of Schumacher’s ideas such as those of ‘Buddhist economics’ did not travel successfully, other ideas of his, including those linked to appropriate technology and localised forms of development, have provided an important foundation for alternative, green political projects (Albo, 2007, p. 341). Specifically, there is evidence that Schumacher’s ideas have had an important influence in Latin America. The Schumacher Centre for New Economics promotes his ideas worldwide, including in Latin America. More concrete examples of Schumacher’s influence in the region include (but are not limited to) the Barefoot College Latin America, an offshoot of the broader Barefoot College. Having opened in 2022 in Guatemala, it is focused on issues of rural development and education and works closely with Indigenous communities. It is explicit in taking inspiration from Schumacher in thinking about issues such as appropriate technology. ¹ Another example is Practical Action’s Latin American branch. ² They draw upon Schumacher’s core principles to solve problems of poverty. They have worked in Latin America in countries such as Bolivia and Peru, linked to small farming communities. ³ Beyond this, of course, there are many groups and movements that utilise Schumacher’s ideas without explicitly referencing him, but rather thinking and practising development a ‘Schumacherian way’.

However, as well as thinking about how theory might ‘travel’, there has been concern that such a focus can lead to Eurocentric diffusionism (Chakrabarty, 2000). This might ignore the production of knowledge by local groups that should not simply be read as an imitation of already existing knowledge, but rather is their own creation. In this article, I seek to overcome such a binary by exploring the connection between Schumacher’s ideas and contemporary Indigenous environmentalism. I argue that Schumacher’s economic critique of capitalism contains important proposals that remain worthy of consideration in our present age of crisis. However, I also reveal some limitations to his thought in terms of its broad utopianism, moralism and lack of a theory of agency. By bringing Schumacher into conversation with contemporary Indigenous struggles, I demonstrate how the latter develop many of the same environmental critiques as Schumacher, but do so from a basis in material struggle and collective enunciation. For those interested in furthering a Schumacherian political economy, many Indigenous struggles offer a contemporary and concrete manifestation of such ideas in reality, but generated through their own ‘everyday environmentalism’ as a form of resistance.

My intention in this article is to both consider the situated environment from which Schumacher wrote and analysed his contemporaneous societal problems (and for which he sought a solution) and then to contrast this with a divergent mode of environmental critique stemming from Indigenous social movements in Latin America in our present time. What then is the basis for my comparison? We are in a period of global crisis for which it is vital that we find a solution. Following Jason Moore (2015, p. 4), I would argue that our contemporary crisis should be understood as ‘not multiple but singular and manifold’. This view rejects the dualism of society and nature, often found within environmental thinking. Rather, in this viewpoint, we must understand capitalism not simply as an economic system but rather as a ‘a way of organizing nature’ (Moore, 2015, p. 2). Both Schumacher and many contemporary Indigenous communities in Latin America today provide a window from which to analyse the destruction of nature under capitalism and to consider alternatives to this. I will demonstrate, however, that they provide a form of environmental critique in two very different registers: whilst Schumacher’s critique and proposals remain tied to a utopian, moral and idealist critique of capitalism, Indigenous communities in Latin America are able to provide a materially-grounded, structural critique of colonialism that springs from social relations of production and reproduction. This, I argue offers a better starting point for constructing a progressive politics where people and planet matter. I should be clear from the start that I do not have much personal interest in Schumacher as an individual. This is not an article that dwells on his intellectual biography. Rather, I am interested in the substance of the critique of capitalism that was articulated in Small is Beautiful and how we can find resonances with similar themes today. Following Coleman and Rosenow, I refer to such resonances as ‘echoing reference points’ (Ansems de Vries et al., 2017, p. 105) and will return to these later. I also wish to highlight the limited (and at times contradictory) nature of Schumacher’s critique of capitalism and how these can be potentially overcome in if we instead look at how theory is produced via concrete struggle.

The article is organised as follows. First, I briefly discuss the nature of social theory in times of crisis as a means of establishing a connection between Schumacher and contemporary Indigenous struggles. Here I make the case for an incorporated comparison between these different time periods. Second, I highlight some of Schumacher’s radical ideas about transformative politics within his broader environmental critique of capitalism. However, I highlight the idealist nature of his politics and its limitations. I contrast this with contemporary manifestations of everyday environmentalism from Indigenous communities in Latin America, situated within the context of neo-extractivist development. I contend that Indigenous resistance can be understood within an eco-Marxist social theory which offers a stronger basis for both understanding, analysing and constructing radical alternatives. Finally, to evaluate how well Schumacher’s ideals can travel, I explore three echoing reference points between Schumacher and contemporary Indigenous community-based resistance in more detail before offering some concluding remarks about the necessity of situating radical human need at the heart of political economy in order to confront the scale of our environmental problems.

Social theory and the crises of capitalism

Fifty years ago, when Schumacher (2011) wrote Small is Beautiful, there was a clear period of global crisis. It was in this febrile atmosphere that the modern environmental movement was beginning to find its voice. Movements from the 1960s concerned with nuclear disarmament, gender and racial equality and anti-imperialism had laid the groundwork for thinking about radical politics beyond the dominant visions in both the Western and Soviet bloc. The turbulence of the 1970s saw two major oil shocks – resulting in a major rise in the price of oil – first in 1973 in response to Western powers’ support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War and, second, in 1979 following the Iranian Revolution. These oil shocks stimulated debates about energy usage, capitalism and democracy. Major environmental groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were formed in 1971, and new ideas about how to reflect on environmental issues were proliferating, evidenced, for example, in James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’ (Lovelock, 1979; Lovelock & Epton, 1975). Finally, there were calls for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). Growing out of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development and the Non-Aligned Movement, the NIEO was essentially a manifesto for a new trading order taken up during the 1970s by developing countries which included demands to provide fair prices for primary commodities, greater control over natural resources, debt relief and regulation of global corporations, all to address structural conditions of poverty in the global political economy (see Amin, 1979). Schumacher’s critique of capitalism and its attendant forms of social organisation as well as his proposals for a new form of political economy therefore need to be historicised from this broader setting of crisis and contestation of which he was a part.

Since this time, the world has demonstrably become more, rather than less capitalist, as confirmed by the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of ‘actually-existing Communism’ in Eastern Europe, as well as the market reforms of Deng Xiaoping in China which opened the country to become an integral component of the global political economy. Fast forward to our present day, and we are in a clear time of ecological crisis as confirmed by numerous reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ⁴ This has clearly been linked to the dynamics of capital accumulation on a global scale (Moore, 2015). Our contemporary era can thus be thought of as one of crisis with multiple manifestations (Bieler & Morton, 2018). It is in this context that I want to explore the contemporary political resistance of Indigenous communities across Latin America to neo-extractive development. This is because the rapacious desire for natural resources has created a new ‘extractivist imperialism’ (Veltmeyer, 2012). This must be understood in relation to the broader spatial practices of capitalism which is an inherently expansive system (Hesketh, 2017). As McCarthy (2015, p. 2487) notes,

A central theme in critical geography over the past several decades has been the effort to understand how control over space and the reconfiguration of geographical relationships can serve to alleviate crisis tendencies – that is, to provide a ‘fix’ for them.

My comparison is therefore a mode of what McMichael (1990) calls ‘incorporated comparison’. This allows comparisons to be conducted across time and space where the key dimensions are neither separate nor uniform. Rather, the basis for comparison is in relation to a major historical problem – in this case environmental crises linked to the ruinous dynamics of capital accumulation. Different instances of this are thus being compared across time and space. Environmental struggles in Latin America should be seen as part of the same general crisis of capitalism that Schumacher discussed, simply in a new temporal and spatial context.

However, while capital does indeed try to pursue a ‘spatial fix’ to overcome its crisis tendencies, we need to also heed the warning from Doreen Massey (1995, p. 7) that ‘[T]he world is not simply the product of capital’s requirements’. We therefore need to consider the narrative from the point of view of subaltern struggles and the possibility of learning from the ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledge’ (Aparicio & Blaser, 2018). It is for this reason I turn to the resistance of Indigenous peoples in Latin America who are the leading social force opposing this ‘spatial fix’ and who instead offer counter spaces of resistance to projects that threaten to dispossess them of their territories (Hesketh, 2017). In this sense, Indigenous resistance to dispossession can be read ‘as an enacted and embodied mode of structural critique’ of contemporary capitalism (Nichols, 2020, p. 85).

Indigenous communities defending their right to territory and nature have been at the forefront of the struggle against neo-extractive development in Latin America, as they have born the major costs from such a model of development (Veltmeyer, 2012, pp. 61, 75). Organisations such as Global Witness (2016, 2021) have widely reported that extractive development worldwide is fuelling both human rights abuses and the killing of Indigenous peoples, as they seek to defend nature and their way of life. Although frequently elided from an account of global politics, it has been argued that ‘[A]t a theoretical level, indigeneity forms a unique positionality that contests hegemonic accounts of the world system’ (Picq, 2018, pp. 11–12). There is thus much to learn from Indigenous struggles in a time of crisis. This is important because as a variety of contemporary theorists have pointed out, we cannot theorise based only on the limited experience of European history if we are interested in emancipatory knowledge (Chakrabarty, 2000; Quijano, 2000). Arturo Escobar (2020, pp. 49–50) has precisely argued that it is territorial struggles linked to Indigenous resistance that ‘are producing among the most insightful knowledges for the cultural and ecological transitions seen as necessary to face the crisis’. While Small is Beautiful does contain reference to non-western societies (including Buddhist economics and unemployment in India), these were somewhat scattered rather than systematic reflections. Furthermore, for all the interesting critique that Schumacher provided of capitalism, he was primarily concerned with ‘western man’s attitude to nature’ (Schumacher, 2011, p. 3). I believe this is significant not only in showing the limited geographical basis for radical action, but equally it is demonstrative of the fact that Schumacher’s conception of agency was rooted in moralism and voluntarism.

Schumacher: In and beyond his context

Let us begin with situating Schumacher in and beyond his context. The major tools for thinking about how to do this are aptly provided by Morton (2007, pp. 15–36) who distinguishes between an austere historicism and an absolute historicism. Whereas an austere historicism contends that ideas can only be analysed in the historical circumstances and contexts that they were written, absolute historicism allows us to appreciate ideas in and beyond their context. Absolute historicism does involve an appreciation of the genesis of ideas and their context but also allows such ideas to address similar circumstances in new temporalities. My approach is thus one guided by absolute historicism.

At the heart of Small is Beautiful, there is a concern for human welfare and flourishing. I do not intend to provide a major overview of all the book’s themes in this section but rather to capture the main essence of Schumacher’s critique of his contemporary society, as well as revealing some potential limitations of this social theory. Schumacher’s appraisal of capitalism revolves around the destruction of nature and the irreplaceable loss that the pursuit of profit and wealth above all else brings. Schumacher’s proposals were thus one’s for living modestly and where humanity was seen as a part of nature rather than a force outside of it that seeks to exercise power over it. He suggests three concrete proposals for the future. These are (1) biologically sound production in agriculture, (2) the use of small-scale technology in industry with the goal to provide work that is enjoyable and finally (3) to establish forms of collective ownership (Schumacher, 2011, p. 9).

As the title of the book suggests, Schumacher (2011, p. 51) is also critical of the notion that a bigger concentration of economic activity is desirable. Instead, larger units of production are argued to lead to a loss of community. This fed into his critique of the nation state. Schumacher was strongly pro the possibility of succession or autonomy, arguing that what mattered more was the viability of people, not states or nations. Instead for him, the far more important issue was whether people were able to stand on their own feet (Schumacher, 2011, pp. 54–55). Albo (2007, p. 340) thus notes that Small is Beautiful is one of the most important texts ‘in making localism both a virtue and a socio-economic strategy’. Finally, Schumacher was interested in the question of uneven development. He critiqued the iniquitous use of primary resources by wealthy countries and wanted to see development projects in poorer countries move away from mega-projects and from purely quantitative measurements and abstractions, to ones grounded in stability and happiness (Schumacher, 2011, pp. 96, 156–160). This should involve the use of ‘appropriate technology’ rather than simply the transference of the most advanced technology to the developing world. Schumacher was critical of the latter in that the employment possibilities generated and the type of work to be undertaken were often suboptimal for the needs of the majority of the population. As noted in the introduction, many of these issues raised by Schumacher can be said to have travelled to Latin America. At times, this explicitly owes an intellectual debt to Schumacher’s work, and other times this is more in a sense of common overlap. The latter I would argue is the case in respect to the contemporary demands from many Indigenous communities in Latin America. What then is the issue with Schumacher’s social theory?

The prime issue I would seek to raise is that Schumacher’s environmental critique of capitalism remains within the realm of idealism. Small is Beautiful was aptly described by Susan Strange (1974, p. 104) as ‘a collection of modern sermons’. Whilst this was intended as praise, it can be argued that its largely moralising critique is a weakness that, furthermore, contains some potentially reactionary elements. To be clear, this is not to claim that Schumacher offered no practical solutions for societal change. One can read a range of initiatives within this text (and applied after) that think about societal transformation. Rather, when I refer to Schumacher as an idealist, I mean to say that his theory of social change is reliant upon the role of ideas to be transformative blueprints. This stems from a political position that advocates ‘helping’ people, not one that theorises their collective self-emancipation. What is offered is a ‘generous’ diffusion of knowledge (without critical reflection on how this serves to reproduce a colonial episteme) (Schumacher, 2011, pp. 164, 167).

For instance, whereas Marx and those writing within the Historical Materialist tradition would identify the imperative for growth within the dynamics of capitalism as a mode of production, for Schumacher (2011, p. 23), such structural issues are elided in favour of explanations linked to moral attributes like ‘greed, envy and a lust for power’. The text is devoid of reference to class, either as a means of social antagonism or as a mode of collective agency. Meanwhile, the development of communication and transport are seen by Schumacher not as a form of liberation but rather as creating ‘footloose’ people that undermines a sense of community. However, such a fixed distinction between rooted and mobile peoples has the danger of ignoring the power dynamics of migration (often rooted in colonial modes of political economy) and reinforcing ethnocentric viewpoints (Shilliam, 2018, p. 144). Finally, Schumacher (2011, p. 79) bemoans the loss of ‘our great classical-Christian heritage’ and sees this as providing a superior ethical guidance for development. Small is Beautiful therefore comes perilously close to what Chaia Heller (cited in Bookchin, 1988) called ‘eco-la-la’. That is to say, it offers a half-baked, quasi-spiritual, idealistic critique of environmental injustice, incapable of providing the tools to address the ecological crisis that we face, with the issue of political agency left to a question of pure voluntarism. However, I do not want to dismiss Schumacher entirely. Rather I would suggest placing his work within the same lineage that Marx and Engels (2000, pp. 268–269) referred to as Critical Utopian Socialism. The substance of this critique was that such proposals (1) relied not on collective actions for self-emancipation but rather on the visions of particular individuals, (2) that radical action was disavowed in favour of small-scale experimentations and finally that (3) society at large was appealed to with no distinctions made with respect to class. Nonetheless, Marx and Engels were happy to concede that such proposals still contained important values in that ‘They attack ever principle of existing society’ thereby providing valuable critical resources for us to reflect upon. I wish to treat Schumacher’s ideas with a similar degree of critical respect. We can find his ideas and critiques important but think there is a superior way for such ideas to find critical purchase in terms of their transformative possibilities.

In what follows, I will examine the ways in which a similar (but not identical) set of ideas about the environment and development are currently being articulated by Indigenous communities in Latin America in response to a growing sense of crisis (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018). Following Loftus (2012, p. x), I term this response ‘everyday environmentalism’ which brings together the socio-natural and the ‘conditions where environmental knowledge is produced’. As opposed to the idealism of Schumacher, Indigenous environmentalism therefore has a clear material basis, which I explain via the insights of ecological Marxism. By surveying the cartographies of Indigenous resistance and their ‘everyday environmentalism’, I explore how this might lead to a rethinking of our notions of democracy and political community and provide the basis for an alternative political economy from below. Whilst this overlaps with some of the same ideals Schumacher had, it is ultimately derived from a material basis of struggle and as a collective project for the future. For those interested in Schumacherian ideals, one can see these being developed further and in a superior fashion with this collective mode of enunciation.

At this stage, it is vital to confront the potential objection that in crafting this argument I essentialise Indigenous struggles (which arguably remain plural and distinct). To this objection, I would offer the following response. First, whilst Linda Tuhiwei Smith (2022, pp. 6–7) has cautioned that the term ‘Indigenous’ can treat as a homogenous collective, what are highly distinct people, at the same time, she notes that the term ‘Indigenous peoples’ not only conveys diversity but ‘has enabled the collective voices of colonized peoples to be expressed strategically in the international arena’. In a similar vein, my usage of Indigenous resistance in this context is derived from situated positionality and is invoked for strategic purposes. Unpacking this point further, Alfred and Corntassel (2005, p. 597) have argued that ‘Indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped and lived in the politicised context of contemporary colonialism’. As a result, they point out, ‘[it] is this oppositional place-based existence, along with the consciousness of being in struggle against the dispossession and demeaning fact of colonization by foreign peoples that fundamentally distinguishes Indigenous peoples from other peoples of the world’. If Indigenous peoples are indeed facing structural processes of dispossession (Coulthard, 2014, p. 7), then contemporary forms of Indigenous resistance to that dispossession can equally be interpreted as a form of structural critique (Nichols, 2020, p. 85). This crucially means that examples of resistance cannot be reduced to individual instances of it, as to do so misses the wood for the trees. As Nichols (2020, p. 87) explains, ‘A structural critique of dispossession is characterised by synoptic evaluation: we are not concerned where with one particular event or action taken in relative isolation but rather with the overall effects of a macrohistorical process’.

Let us now turn to analysing the regional setting in which this Indigenous activism of ‘counter dispossession’ is taking place in Latin America to explain this further.

Indigenous movements in the regional conjuncture

Indigenous dispossession has seen a long arc in the history of Latin America. This has involved a strengthening of a centralised state and private property at the expense of Indigenous communal property and territories (Castro & Picq, 2017). This process continues in the present via the logic of neo-extractive development. There is, of course, a long and bloody history of natural resource extraction from the region (Galeano, 2008). However, Indigenous communities have, with differing degrees of success, sought to contest this and retain access to their communal lands. ⁵

In the present time, Latin America is currently home to the largest volume of environmental conflicts anywhere in the world. According to the Environmental Justice Atlas, there are 960 such ongoing environmental conflicts taking place. ⁶ These must be linked to the model of development that has been pursued throughout the region for the past two decades. I would describe this as the regional panorama of neo-extractivist development (Hesketh, 2023). What is the meaning of this? Neo-extractivism refers to a development paradigm that has taken place in Latin America since the early 2000, in line with what Maristella Svampa (2012) has referred to as the ‘commodities consensus’, meaning a broad agreement that development is to be derived from the large-scale exportation of primary commodities. This was fuelled by demand from China and to a lesser extent India which helped to raise the price of primary commodities in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This led to governing regimes in Latin America shifting their development strategies into the extraction of natural resources (Veltmeyer, 2012, pp. 58–59).

This is not simply a straightforward story of oil, gas and mining, although these activities certainly form part of the commodity frontier landscape. Neo-extractivism, however, also involves major investments in agriculture and agro-industry, which is focused towards the export sector. This must be seen as an important transformation of domestic food regimes into a global one (Wittman, Powell & Corbera, 2015, p. 2034). The expansion of the resource frontier is thus based on the continuous search for what Moore (2015) describes as cheap nature and cheap energy, essential to the continuance of capital accumulation. Whilst Latin America does of course have a major history of exploitative development based on natural resource extraction, the alleged difference with past extractive forms of development is supposedly a new focus on the state working in a cooperative relation with transnational corporations to use taxes from extractive industries to fund social programmes targeted to the poor (Burchardt & Dietz, 2014). Rather than a passive state of old, the state is now more active and interventionist within the framework of extractive development (Gudynas, 2009, p. 195). This was, and indeed is, integral to the legitimacy of many so-called progressive governments in the region, as they are able to redistribute rents from extractive industries to subaltern social groups (Angosto-Ferrández, 2021).

Broadly speaking then, neo-extractive development entails projects of place-making, as it seeks out cheap nature as the pivot of further capital accumulation. It reproduces Latin America’s subordinate role within a global division of labour, as a ‘nature exporting society’ (Coronil, 1997, p. 7). Neo-extractivism can usefully be seen through the conceptual lens of what Rob Nixon refers to as ‘slow violence’. Although not forgetting that at times, this model of development displays visible and immediate forms of dispossession, sometimes capable of gaining media traction, slow violence is an appropriate term owing to the long history of incorporation into world market structures that has made the commodification of natural resources and cheap labour seem like an inescapable development path. As Nixon states (2011, p. 2), slow violence is ‘a violence that occurs gradually out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’. In this case, it is a violence that is portrayed as a development model, and this process bears the stamp of continual colonial relations, which are built on the denial of alternative Indigenous socio-spatial practices (Hesketh, 2023). This occurs primarily due to the increased confluence of interests between transnational capital on the one hand who are pursuing profit and the national-state on the other who is seeking increases revenues from resources extraction (Veltmeyer, 2012, p. 65). Extractive development is presented as a necessary policy to reduce poverty. The negative environmental consequences are either denied, minimised or accepted as part of a greater overall good (Gudynas, 2009, p. 205). In this situation, communities opposing this mode of development become named as an enemy and as obstacles to progress (Riofrancos, 2020, p. 12).

There is an important discursive disconnect to be highlighted here, as many Latin American governments have seemingly recognised the claims of Indigenous peoples and their claims to territory. Indeed, 14 out of the 24 nation states to ratify the International Labour Organization convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples are to be found in Latin America. ⁷ However, in practice, many governments have pursued strategies of ‘resource nationalism’, and Indigenous claims to territory and natural resources are thus seen as an impediment to nationally oriented development. This creates a situation which Banerjee (2011, p. 330) refers to as unequal sovereignty whereby ‘Indigenous populations are stripped of their economic rights, livelihood rights and resources rights in the name of development’.

Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, it is vital that we do not simply tell a story of Indigenous victimhood. This allows dominant forms of power to be the only reference point rather than framing Indigenous actors as exercising important forms of agency (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005). At times, this involves struggles to simply obtain greater benefits from extractive industries, as there are few other options available (Dayot, 2023). ⁸ However, there is also another story to be told which involves important projects of counter-spaces on behalf of Indigenous communities and a revival of ‘communities of life inspired by Indian epistemes’ (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018, p. 63). This involves a defence of nature, a reclaiming of territory and an assertion of an alternative cultural way of being. This desire for an alternative form of sovereignty has of course been expressed since the time of colonisation, but the renewed focus on natural resource extraction and the extension of new resource frontier has created major forms of socio-environmental conflict. In this conjuncture that Indigenous movements have ‘become the axis of resistance and social struggle’ (Zárate Huayte, 2015, p. 28).

In contrast to the idealism of Schumacher, Indigenous environmentalism is a political response to material circumstances. As Arboleda (2020, p. 221) has argued, ‘there is a close relationship between the intensification of extraction and social mobilizations in Latin. America’. For example, socio-environmental movements have arisen directly in response to neo-extractive development. These have been characterised by assembly style decision-making and demands for autonomy (Svampa, 2012, p. 20). Others have cited growing forms of collective consciousness or what has been called a ‘communitarian revolutionary subject’ that asserts an alternative to our present social and environmental crises (Barkin & Sánchez, 2020). Such forms of community resistance, which have been expressed throughout Latin America, must be interpreted as struggles for life which have become increased threatened with intensified modes of capital accumulation (Arboleda, 2020, p. 223; Nash, 1994). Escobar (2020, p. 43) has concluded that territorial struggles in Latin America by Indigenous communities are crucial for thinking about issues related to the environmental crisis precisely because they are ‘uniquely attuned to the needs of the earth’.

Such struggles can be read through the social theory of eco-Marxism. A key component of this is an expansive analysis of the contradictions of capitalism to include not only capital production but also the wider environmental conditions of such production (and their underproduction). Moreover, the locus of resistance is shifted in an eco-Marxist analysis from a purely workplace issue (as the centre of exploitation) to communities’ conditions of reproduction (O’Connor, 1998, pp. 161–165). Whilst, like Schumacher, eco-Marxism argues that the Earth should not be treated as a storehouse of resources used for profit, its politics are explicitly grounded in global majorities of women, peasants and Indigenous peoples and their experience of oppression (Salleh, 2017).

I now seek to show how through their contemporary contestation of neo-extractivist development, Indigenous movements in Latin America, whilst providing ‘echoing reference points’ to a number of Schumacher’s key concerns, provide a better material grounding for thinking about radical politics. I break these down into three key areas: units of authority, technology and living well. The intention of this is to show how, for those interested in Schumacherian modes development, can see these principles not simply travelling but being reinvigorated by Indigenous environmentalism. Rather than mechanistically applying the transcendental principles of a European thinker, Indigenous environmentalism represents a form of knowledge ‘born in struggle’ (Santos & Meneses, 2020).

Echoing reference points

Units of authority

As was made clear in the earlier section, Schumacher (2011, pp. 47–49) rejected the received wisdom that stated that only larger units of authority could be prosperous, critiquing what he called the ‘prevailing idolatry of giantism’ and arguing that ‘[i]t is necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness – where this applies’. In terms of his social theory, Schumacher was highly influenced by Catholic social teaching. This not only influenced his ‘moralism’ but also his ethics of development (largely based in virtues), and most importantly for thinking about scale, the principle of subsidiarity. The latter was his attempt to negotiate the issue of how smallness related to a wider politics of scale. This held that in principle, the burden of proof was on those who wanted to deprive a lower level of organisation of its competencies and functions (Schumacher, 2011, p. 204).

Since the 1970s in Latin America, Liberation Theology has echoed similar themes of bottom-up, decentralised organisation and has worked closely with poor Indigenous communities. Indeed, Latin America today is one such place where the virtues of smallness be seen to apply, precisely as Indigenous everyday environmentalism challenges the cartography of the nation state most frequently with demands for increased autonomy. As Rivera Cucicanqui (2018, p. 33) has argued, ‘The view from the small can be subversive’ to the dominant ideas of ‘big development’. Instead, Indigenous modes of resistance often ‘gives rise to post-national constellations from below’ (Picq, 2018, p. 168). Neo-extractive development – which often includes major associated infrastructure – undermines the capacity for alternative, territorially based forms of citizenship claimed by numerous Indigenous communities throughout Latin America. It does so by undercutting the material basis of sovereignty and refusing to engage with alternative epistemologies and ways of being. It is for this reason that the urgency of territorial control (which includes an assertion to the rights of the subsoil) is now used as a democratic bulwark against environmental destruction. Examples of the recovery of the smaller units of Indigenous authority abound throughout the political geography of the region (Arboleda, 2020, p. 223). To provide just one example we could cite the revival of the ayllu in Bolivia as a form of political organisation that has been taking place since the 1970s. This is a model of organisation based on the pre-Hispanic past of Indigenous communities, collective ownership of land that is inalienable and where kindship ties are fundamental to the political system (Choque & Mamani, 2001, p. 207). The ayllu has been a space of resistance to colonial hegemony and serves as an autonomous space for knowledge production and enacting an alternative cosmovision (Fernández Osco, 2010, pp. 29–30).

This of course does raise the issue of scale and whether Indigenous movements for territorial autonomy are necessarily limited in their scope if they do not organise at a greater scale. However, Indigenous resistance in Latin America is the starting point for this debate, not its end. For example, there have been major discussions about the degree to which the ‘community-popular’ could replace the national-popular as a networked form of alternative politics (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2014), whether the ayllu structure could form the basis of a broader new mode of territorial politics (García Linera, 2015), and lastly to what degree such struggles in Latin America are emblematic of new modes of subaltern resistance worldwide, thus with the potential to create socio-spatial linkages (Arboleda, 2020, pp. 207–208).

Technology

Schumacher (2011, p. 120) made the impassioned argument for what he called ‘technology with a human face’. This was so human beings could work in harmony with technology rather than being dominated by it. For Schumacher, not only should human beings resist such domination, but the poor adoption of technology threatens broader environmental breakdown as well as the exhaustion of non-renewable resources. He also critiqued the blind faith in scientific progress, arguing that we only displace confronting a problem based on the future optimism of a solution. How does such as critique find similar echoes in contemporary Latin America?

The Green Revolution in Latin America furthered the neo-colonial political economy that created large-scale export-oriented production on the one hand and small-scale production for domestic consumption on the other hand. The deleterious consequences of this helped inform the consciousness of contemporary ecologically movements. As Carruthers (1996, p. 1009) explains, ‘in environmental terms, the drive towards development had resulted in degradation so severe that many local ecosystems were fast approaching or passing critical thresholds, beyond which future resource utilisation might be seriously jeopardised’. Furthermore, neoliberalism further integration with the global market and undermined diminishing bases for subsistence production, which itself often operated to contain broader social protest (Nash, 1994). Alongside this visibly environmentally destructive mode of accumulation however, there are more seemingly ambiguous policies perused via contemporary ‘green extractivism’. This is highly relevant to consider when reflecting on Schumacher’s notions on technology. Contemporary policies such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), for example, are explicitly framed within a discourse of sustainability, which also promises to provide technology transfers to the Global South. The CDM emerged from the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997 and was further refined by the Marrakesh Accords in 2001. It is the most extensive of all carbon offsetting arrangements. The CDM has two chief purposes. The first of these pertains to developed countries and facilitates the production of carbon credits in the form of Certified Emissions Reductions. The second pertains to less developed countries and aims to promote sustainable development in these nations via investment and technology transfer to help provide carbon offset through avoiding what would otherwise be business as usual (Böhm & Dabhi, 2009, pp. 9–11; Bryant et al., 2015, p. 2048; Bumpus, 2012, p. 13). To this end, the CDM has proven to be the ‘largest source of mitigation finance to developing countries to date’ (Boyd et al., 2012, p. 1). The CDM incorporates both ‘green’ technology designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and the trapping or destruction of greenhouse gas emissions, which includes so-called carbon sinks, established through forest growth (Checker, 2009, p. 43). A key element of the framing and rationale are in terms of environmental justice, namely, to achieve ‘sustainable development’ for countries of the Global South via technology transfer, while reducing counter-factual carbon dioxide emissions (emissions that would otherwise occur in lieu of this). However, the reality of this has been quite different. As Cabello (2009, p. 200) has argued, the CDM ‘masks a mechanism for land grabs, local conflicts and pollution, dispossesses local communities not by conventional forms of property rights but by the application of ownership constructs at the global level’.

Far from the Schumacherian ideal of creating sustainability on a small scale, the agrarian transition in Latin America has proceeded by reducing support to small agricultural units. ‘In fact’ as Wittman et al. argue (2015, p. 2035), ‘privatization in land and agricultural services and the growth in scale and industrialization of Latin American agriculture have contributed to the creation of the most unequal rural sector in the world’. In relation to wind power, for example, whilst seemingly benign, the reality has often been rather different (Hesketh, 2022). This is again linked to differentiated sovereign capacities vis-à-vis the state and Indigenous communities. The expansion of wind power, for example, brings with it both infrastructure and claims to territory on which to build that infrastructure. This has often undermined Indigenous collective claims over territory and natural resources. As Avila (2018, p. 609) explains, ‘claims of local communities strongly focus on the challenges to maintain both their livelihoods and cultural identities, including communal institutions, self-determination and cultural autonomy’.

Technology is therefore not rejected, but rather is desired only on the basis of it being appropriate to the satisfaction of Indigenous life. This link between Indigenous capacities to sustain their material way of life and the appropriate use of technology has long been recognised (Carruthers, 2001, p. 358; Riós, 2012, p. 105). In terms of furthering Schumacherian principles, I would argue that the major contribution of Indigenous Environmentalism is to move beyond the essentialised and fixed conditions of needs that Schumacher’s (2011, pp. 165–166) original analysis implied. Instead, the question of what technology is desired and needed results from collective deliberation about how to live. This brings me to my last echoing reference point of living well.

Living well

Throughout Small is Beautiful, Schumacher critiques the notion that progress and happiness should be thought of in purely material terms. ‘The substance of man’, Schumacher argues, ‘cannot be measured by Gross National Product. Perhaps it cannot be measured at all, except for certain symptoms of loss’ (Schumacher, 2011, p. 8). This point is linked to his broader critique that the mimesis of western patterns of development in terms of the demand this would place on the world’s resource and nature. This is basically a questioning of the assumption of infinite growth in a finite world (Schumacher, 2011, p. 17). This theme is expounded further in the section on Buddhist Economics. Although, as I noted in the introduction, this does lack a deep engagement with political economy or subaltern thinkers, the emphasis is on the notion that a cultural way of being should be incorporated into the form of economic development. Schumacher (2011, p. 38) does not use the term living well but interestingly does use the Buddhist concept of ‘Right Livelihood’. This involves considering elements of enjoyment of work and the aim of maximum well-being.

Such a theme does have important echoes in contemporary Indigenous movements, where this has become a major organising principle of resistance and transformation. Opposed to extractive development, for example, is the Indigenous notion of ‘living well’ (often referred to as sumac kasway, buen vivir or vivir bien). Anchored in Indigenous forms of knowledge, this was, for example, incorporated into the new Bolivian and Ecuadorian constitutions (in 2009 and 2008, respectively) and sought to question traditional developmentalism and westernised forms of modernity (Gudynas & Acosta, 2011). Referring to the issues pertaining to the quality of life, it includes the central importance of the community for well-being, which in turn includes the role of nature. As Gudynas (2011, p. 444) explains, ‘well-being encompasses not only persons, but also crops and cattle, and the rest of Nature. The classical western dualism that separates society from Nature vanishes under this perspective’. Inherent to the very notion of ‘living-well’ is a geographically and culturally situated understanding of what this means. Ubiquity of practice should therefore not be confused with an essentialised understanding.

Of course, putting into practice this notion of ‘living well’ has been a deeply contested process, and tension often exists between a statist understanding versus a more autonomist, Indigenous understanding of living well (Alderman, 2021; Radcliffe, 2012). The latter’s understand of living well precisely often conflict with the statist model of neo-extractive development. Instead, decolonial projects for living well and respecting nature have largely come from Indigenous communities on the front line of resisting such extractive development. Once, again however, this is demonstrative of the fact that such notions such as living well, to the degree that form part of an environmental critique, are generated from collective material reality, and not posited as abstract idealisms to be put into practice. It also shows how such a concept becomes enriched through this struggle to incorporate claims around decolonisation, racial exploitation and inequality.

Conclusion

A critique beloved by the right-wing is to ask, where have projects of socialism or communism actually worked? If we ignore for a while that the answer to this is in fact a great deal more complex than the question suggests, it is high time the question was also asked of capitalism. Given what we know about the destructive implications of capitalism upon nature, can it really have been said to have historically worked? Whilst many social theorists acknowledge the links between capitalism and the ecological crisis within the Anthropocene (Chernilo, 2017; Luke, 2017), others have gone further and called for our present crisis not to be labelled as one of the ‘Anthropocene’ (which equates the crisis to an essentialist view of human nature) but rather as one of the Capitalocene, which locates the crisis centrally within the dynamics of this mode of production (Moore, 2015, p. 173). This also directs us to name this as the problem to be overcome with a different form of social organisation.

The current state of the world – and what feels like an impending ecological catastrophe on a global scale – calls, I would unashamedly say, for a politics of hope and inspiration. Many of us remain in search of that inspiration. Therefore, papers such as these in this special edition, which come to evaluate Schumacher’s text Small is Beautiful, do not do so out of a detached academic curiosity, but rather to think about generative resources for critiquing our present society and thinking about alternatives to it. I have made it clear that I do not want to approach Schumacher’s ideas uncritically and without a sense of contextualisation. However, at the same time, I do believe that a number of his strands of critique retain relevance 50 years on and are worth revisiting. For that reason, I have sought to explore to what degree his ideas travel and retain relevance. Linking Schumacher’s environmental critique to today’s Indigenous movements, as I have shown, is the thread of capitalist crisis and ecological destruction. I have also argued that, in shifting our gaze to the non-Western world, we can learn a great deal with new knowledges and vocabularies of resistance born through struggle. This is important if we are to overcome a purely Eurocentric diffusion of a western thinker and instead look at how concepts are generative from and enriched by the activity of social movements.

However, I would finally argue that whilst important in its own right, Indigenous community-based resistance on its own is not sufficient to address the scale of the present ecological crisis. As Huber (2022, p. 242) has starkly put it, there is a danger of ‘an environmental ideology favouring small-is-beautiful, localist solutions while the larger planet burns’. The challenge in the current conjuncture is to politically link movements of urban workers, rural Indigenous communities and those dispossessed and precariously living, to find a collective political voice (Arboleda, 2020). As Schumacher (2011, p. 5) himself said, ‘To do something on a small scale is one thing: to do it on a gigantic scale is quite another’.

Ultimately for me, the value of appraising Small is Beautiful 50 years on is the same search for a political economy that does not view human beings and the planet as disposable for the short-term search for profit. In brief, it is the search for a political economy where people and planet matter. Indigenous resistance in Latin America remains at the forefront of this struggle to think about alternative ways of being in the world.