Localists and greens engaging with conservatives: Where to start.

A comment from April 2020

Conservative gardener with child

That Joseph Pearce senior contributor to the Imaginative Conservative online magazine – a one-time far-right head-banger, Catholic convert and now prolific man of letters – co-wrote the sequel to Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful with Barbara Wood Schumacher, should be enough to pique the interest of any green, environmentalist or degrowther. Schumacher’s book was the single most influential and popular contribution to limits-to-growth economics of the 1970s – an economics ‘as if people mattered’. The current edition of that book has an introduction by Jonathon Porritt – the most august and serious public spokesperson for green economics and deep sustainability in the United Kingdom. The overlap – this link between Pearce and Porritt – is not accidental. Schumacher’s work owed a great debt to the social catholic vision of distributism rooted in the teachings of Pope Leo XIII (encyclical Rerum

novarum 1891) and Pope Pius XI (Quadragesimo anno 1931), and po…