When you first open Schumacher's Small is Beautiful two things immediately stick out at you. The first is the book states “Printed on 100% Recycled Paper” and it's subtitle “Economics as People Matters”. You start reading the book, and you come to realize what a fundamental impact this book has had on both the environmental movement and how people think today.

The thesis of the book argues that small organizations and communities are significantly more functional then large communities. Big cities and big corporations operate wastefully without a human scale or understanding of the intricacies of community. Large scale growth is unsustainable, and large organizations only survive if they break down into autonomous smaller communities.

Schumacher gives many examples of our lack of sustainability, from the urban riots that rocked our country only a few years earlier, to a emptying out of the countryside that's increasingly sprayed with toxins like DDT that's leaving great sections of our landscape bare, to our increasing demand on limited natural resources that may not always be there for our demand.

He also looks at our county's many failed attempts to help the developing world advance. He argues for choosing the right technology that is compatible with a society's values, and balances the need for productivity with the labor resources of a society. It makes no sense, he argues, to lease expensive but efficient tractors to poor countries, when they can employee more and be doing the same task for a lower cost, by using modern hand tools.

He calls for societies to build right size communities, that encourage community participation and involvement by all the various people living in the community. The megapolis of today is an inherently unsustainable product of environmental exploitation. He argues that not only do we need to focus on efficiency, but also what is right for our communities, what gives them the value and virtue that makes our communities both livable and an enjoyable place to be.

In the book's later chapters, he includes several essays written as presentations to various governing bodies on the subject of scale. While these essays are interesting, in many ways they are written in a different style then the rest of the book and are somewhat a distraction from the central thesis.

Regardless, Small is Beautiful is an interesting read that in many ways reads more true today then it some 35 years ago. Our rural communities have become even more depopulated, more exploited, and poorer, while our inner cities have become more overburdened by poverty. Suburbs have become bigger and even more anonymous, in many ways brought on by our obsession with bigness. Oil prices continue to squeeze a nation dependent on the mass-consumption of oil.