DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com wrote:
> >Fumento! A few years back I stumbled on the book "Small is Beautiful"
> >by E. F. Schumacher in a used book store. It's full of ideas that, I
> >think, are valuable to anybody in engineering - at least I learned a lot
> >from it and what I learned has been very useful to me.
>
> At which point, it seems as apropos as it ever will to suggest that any
> lbo-ites ever holidaying in the UK might like to drop in at the Centre for
> Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales. It's a group of people
> trying to live by Schumacher's ideas, and is a cracking day out for all the
> family -- if your family is interested in waterwheels and levers & stuff.
> It's a great place.
>
> dd
> __
In the spirit of "small is beautiful" and "appropriate technology" my family moved to Zambia for 3 years (1970) and my father, who was a business man and egg rancher, taught people in the bush about the poultry life-cycle and basic marketing principles. They used material from the ant hills to build brick-style chicken houses. He was able to show many villages how to raise chickens for subsistence as well as the basic marketing principles as they applied to these small, local economies. He showed me several large agribusiness projects that were mostly run by expatriates rather than being set up for the exclusive use of Zambians. They had the latest, large-sized tractors, etc., without consideration of "maintainability" by the locals. It was such a contrast to see first-hand examples of appropriate technology and "inappropriate" technology. -Steve Grube