Archive for April, 2008

Armenia and Global Issues

by Tom on Saturday, April 12th, 2008

Last night I revisited the venue in Yerevan where Andy and I gave a presentation back in February. Common Ground is the project of a local NGO to provide an open forum for interested people from all backgrounds to discuss today’s issues and attend presentations in English. The organiser, an Armenian woman who grew up in Manchester, England, introduced the event for this evening - a showing of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. (more…)

Small is Beautiful

by Andy on Friday, April 11th, 2008

These are some quotes from E.F. Schumacher’s series of books, Small is Beautiful:

“The most striking about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one’s ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.”

“Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.”

“The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion – political or otherwise – which suddenly seems to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to our existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies one of the great dangers of our time.”

More here…

All Change

by Tom on Monday, April 7th, 2008

It’s spring again (in Armenia, at least - still snowing in England, I’ve heard)! The last of the ice melted away a couple of weeks ago, and all over the country grass and leaves are emerging from flower-beds and trees. Winter is finally behind me. Sitting in my standard-issue former-Soviet-Union flat, complete with regular water failures, no heating or gas, and dodgy wiring, I can relax. (more…)


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