Susan Witt has served as executive director of the E. F. Schumacher Society since its founding in 1980 and has led the development of its programs.
In his book, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, Dr. Schumacher argued for a system of diverse regional economies based on social and ecological principles. The Schumacher Society was organized to implement these ideals. It maintains a research library, organizes lectures and seminars, publishes papers, develops model economic programs, and provides technical assistance to groups working to build sustainable local economies by linking people, land, and community.
While overseeing the national educational programs of the Schumacher Society, Susan Witt remains deeply committed to applying Schumacher's ideas in her own region of the Berkshires. She is the founder and administrator of the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires, and in that capacity has been responsible for many of the innovative financing and contracting methods that the Land Trust has implemented to create more affordable access to land for the residents of its region. She is founder of the newly formed BerkShare local currency program and of its predecessor organization the Self-Help Association for a Regional Economy (SHARE) a micro-lending program for small businesses. In 1992 she was elected the first woman president of the Great Barrington Rotary Club. She is a board member of the Great Barrington Land Conservancy and an advisory board member of The Orion Society publishers of Orion magazine, of WAMC Northeast Public Radio and of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE).
Her essays appear in Rooted in the Land edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1996); People, Land, and Community: Collected E. F. Schumacher Society Lectures edited by Hildegarde Hannum (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1997); A Forest of Voices: Conversations in Ecology edited by Chris Anderson and Lex Runciman (Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, CA, 2000); Environmental Activists edited by John Mongillo (Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, CT 2001); The Money Changers: Currency Reform from Aristotle to E-cash edited by David Boyle (Earthscan Publications, London, UK, 2002); in the 1999 edition of Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered by Ernest Fritz Schumacher (Hartley and Marks Publishers, Point Roberts, WA and Vancouver, BC, 1999); and The Essential Agrarian Reader edited by Norman Wirzberg (University Press of Kentucky, 2003). Ms. Witt speaks regularly on the topic of citizen responsibility for shaping local economies. Her work has been described in various radio, TV, book, magazine, newspaper, and on-line interviews.
Susan Witt received a B.A. in English Literature from Boston University and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of New Hampshire. She studied Waldorf Education at Emerson College in England.
She names among her primary influences: Jane Jacobs, Leo Tolstoy, Simone Weil, Martin Buber, Robert Swann, Rudolf Steiner, her co-workers, and the board and members of the E. F. Schumacher Society. She loves her hillside home, her garden, her Great Barrington community, and she loves to travel.
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Susan Witt interviewA
This is a wonderful interview with Susan Witt, which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in transforming capitalism. I was particularly inspired by the last section of the interview from page 14 onwards, where she describes her encounter with the land stewarded by Wendell Berry. She coins the term " Shining Landscapes " to convey the effect that devoted stewardship of the earth's resources has on the landscape itself. I have encountered the same phenomena where human activity transforms and ennobles the earth, rather than corrupting it. Her fine, intuitive observation reveals the generative power of loving attention that permeates the piece of land tended by Wendell Berry. The reference to Martin Buber's words gives added context to her experience: " our responsibility on earth is to awaken the sleeping spirit of things and raise it from stone to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to speaking being ".
Tom.
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