Looking at the world and seeing it whole...

A very readable Observer article today explains how EF Schumacher, author of the very early sustainability book, Small is Beautiful (1973), is extremely influential, perhaps even a "household god" in David Cameron's reformed UK Conservative Party.

I find this all somewhat unlikely, or at least aspirational, but enjoyed the article for it's biographical detail. Schumacher has always been a great influence on me. I have Schumacher's biography on my bookshelf, as well as Small is Beautiful, but I had somehow missed some of the defining moments, such as his time as a German internee in Britain during WW2.

Small is Beautiful was one of the books that began my career in sustainability thinking back in the mid-1980s. At that time, with Margaret Thatcher's attacks on the communitarian north of England quite rampant, I was still in the service, a young NCO aircraft engine fitter on 111 Squadron at RAF Leuchars, and found myself trying to explain things to myself anyway I could. Leuchars is just five miles from the ancient university at St. Andrews, and I was able to get library privileges there. I spent much of my free time in the library trying to get an education, and trying to understand what was happening to my country.

The squadron was worried about new potential deployments at the time, in the wake of the Falklands War. For a generation the air station had played what was essentially a static role with its defenses pointed across the North Sea to the Tupulov "Bear" bomber bases around Archangel. The Falklands War came as a huge shock to the British military, and the squadron's F4 "Phantom" aircraft were, essentially, useless in that far-flung conflict, lacking any kind of useful mobility. In particular, mountains of equipment were needed, to keep the ground systems running that kept the Phantoms running. One third of the main hangar was given over to ground equipment. As a partial response, I was assigned to go through all this ground equipment and make it ready for more rapid deployment, with boxes, packaging, and so on. I was given a small workshop and a crew of one Senior Aircraftman, and left to my own devices.

That was the British government's first and last mistake as far as young RAF Corporal Womersley was concerned.

The mistake was, the workshop had a desk and a reading light. So on my tea breaks and lunch hours, instead of hanging out in the crew room listening to the other airmen talk about beer, soccer and women, I read. I devoured the likes of Shumacher, Gandhi, and the then-fresh faced, then-young Brit environmentalist Jonathan Porritt (now "Sir" Jonathan), sitting right there at my RAF-issue desk in my greasy RAF workshop, and so slowly became a green.

There wasn't much place for a green in Margaret Thatcher's military, and so I left. Within a very few months I found myself at one of the early sustainable communities inspired by Schumacher, the Findhorn community, also in Scotland. Three years later I was in America, and by the end of the decade had embarked on an academic career in sustainability.

What is interesting to me about this most recent article is how the thinking of the west is beginning to converge on a set of solutions to the current set of problems, and how this is beginning to bring together many of the components of my rather far-flung history.

Because as David Cameron is allegedly reading Schumacher, whose arguments against dependency on non-renewable source of energy would have been anathema to Thatcherite conservative thinkers, he's also sending RAF Tornadoes and Typhoons on what is essentially a air-mobility mission to Italy, to attack Colonel Gaddafi's ex-Soviet air force. That was the mission that 111 Squadron couldn't perform, at the time of the Falklands War. And the mission is being performed in pursuit of an new doctrine in international relations, the "duty to protect," particularly on the part of the United Nations Security Council. This doctrine, essentially an argument for liberal intervention, would have also been anathema to Thatcher-era conservatives. But it's the kind of mission that might have convinced me to stay.

A few years after, the guy I had roomed with during my time on 111 Squadron (and my time on the RAF Leuchars Mountain Rescue Team), then a Sergeant, now retired Warrant Officer "Heavy" Whalley, was the senior RAF Mountain Rescue Team Leader at the Lockerbie Air Disaster, courtesy of Colonel Gaddafi.

Back then, Thatcher had committed the British nation to an energy policy dependent on North Sea oil and gas. The fledgling renewables lobby was still a radical group. The idea that sustainable North Sea energy might mean wind turbines was unheard of.

Today, at home, the new British conservatives are committed to a program of new renewables, smart grid, and energy efficiency redevelopment of the UK's aging fossil-fueled infrastructure, including household energy efficiency, electric cars, rooftop solar, North Sea wind, high speed rail, and on and on. This is expected not so much to drive economic growth, which Cameron is also beginning to formally abandon as a measure of economic sense, but to develop "gross national happiness."

He's taken another leaf out of Schumacher -- "man does not live by GDP alone."

So the new leader of the party of Margaret Thatcher, the party whose earlier political economics drove me out of my first career and even out of the country, is now taking up most of the solutions I embraced back in the mid 1980s. Ironic. But natural, if you think about it.

But all of which would be almost impossible to imagine from an American conservative at this point in time.

What a funny world we live in. After half a lifetime of living on the radical fringe, my kind of thinking is now, essentially mainstream conservatism in the UK.

While here in the US, where the penny hasn't yet dropped, I'm still essentially a radical green.