Tag Archives: Sustainability

The Mangonomy

The Mangonomy: Celebrating the Mango Economy

By Satish Kumar, Editor Emeritus, Resurgence, U.K.

Satish Kumar, originally from India, is an author, editor, educator, and a world traveler. He lives in the United Kingdom. Photo by Daniel Elkan.

The economy of Nature is regenerative, resilient, abundant and cyclical. Nature produces no waste. In a forest there are no waste bins!

Take for example a mango tree and mango fruit. We invest one single seed in the soil, what I call the Earth Bank. Then there is slow but steady growth. That seed collaborates with the Sun, soil and rain, as well as pollinating bees and orchard keepers, and slowly it becomes a beautiful tree.

Within a few years that tree produces hundreds of magnificent mangoes, not just for one year, but year after year for forty to fifty years. What an amazing return! Each mango is delicious, nutritious, nourishing, fragrant, sweet, healthy, and beautiful to look at. The juicy and tasty flesh is packaged in a soft skin that can be composted to feed the soil. No waste, no pollution, and no plastic packaging. A mango tree gives oxygen in the daytime (which we humans need) and absorbs carbon dioxide for its own nourishment. What a great miracle!

The mango tree and the mango fruit are beautiful, useful, and durable. Artists take pleasure in painting them, photographers take photos, and poets are inspired to compose poems about them. 

Each mango has a seed within it. The one seed that we planted a few years ago has now multiplied into hundreds of seeds! Eventually from one original seed we can create a whole new orchard. No scarcity of seeds. No need to buy seeds. This is the ‘mangonomy’ of abundance.

The mango tree teaches us the importance of generosity and equality. A king or a beggar, a saint or a sinner, a priest or a prisoner, a human or an animal, a bird or a wasp—everyone is welcome to enjoy and to be fed by mangoes.

Never will a mango tree ask you, “Have you come with your credit card?” Everyone is welcome to have mangoes. No discrimination, no judgement, and no money is needed as far as the tree itself is concerned.

A mango tree needs no fossil fuels, no electricity, no wind turbines, no solar panels, and no batteries. It only takes passive solar energy, which is in constant supply. A mango orchard requires no factory floors, no concrete construction, and no infrastructure. Mango trees are self-sufficient, self-managed, and self-contained.

A mango tree gives more than mangoes. It provides branches for birds to nest in. It provides cool shade in hot summer for people and animals to rest, and firewood in a cold winter. At the end of its life mango wood is made into objects of daily use. A mango tree comes from the earth and returns to the earth. During its lifetime it benefits other species and does no harm to anyone.

This is a perfect economy. We humans need to be humble and learn from mango trees in particular, and Nature in general. I have chosen the mango tree to illustrate my point. But this is true of all the fruit trees and shrubs, grains and vegetables, herbs and flowers, and Nature in her entirety. 

Can any factory or industrial plant produce something as beautiful and beneficial, as good and harmless, as valuable and pleasing as a mango? Industrialists, business leaders and politicians talk about ‘the economy.’  But hardly anyone knows or understands the true meaning of economy. Economy is made of two Greek words: oikos and nomos. Oikos means ‘home,’ and nomos means ‘management.’ In the wisdom of Greek philosophers, the entire ecosystem is our home, and management of the ecosystem is the true economy.

But our modern economists, industrialists, businesspeople and politicians are not managing ecosystems. Instead, they are managing balance sheets, business plans, profitability, industrial production, and money supply. This is not the true economy. This is the ‘moneynomy:’  the management of money. They appear to treat ecosystems and Nature as a ‘commodity,’ a resource for financial gain, a means to the end of making money. Moneynomy is misnamed as economy, but, if the truth be told, moneynomy is anti-economy!

A PERFECT ECONOMY

Governments around the world agree on one thing:  economic growth! Whether a government is capitalist, socialist or communist, whether it is Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or atheist, they all have one common goal, and that is the goal of economic growth. All countries live under the dictatorship of the moneynomy. This is not true growth in terms of a true economy. The growth they seek is growth in moneynomy.

In Nature’s true economy or mangonomy there are two types of growth:  vertical growth and horizontal growth. In vertical growth there is an optimum limit. A mango tree on average will grow to become thirty to fifty feet tall and then stop growing. An animal will grow to a certain limited height and then stop growing. A human being will not generally grow much beyond six feet. This is sustainable vertical growth. Then there is horizontal growth. Here we have much more flexibility. Forests, farms, and mango groves are not so limited in horizontal growth. 

The mangonomy is decentralized and widely distributed. No concentration of millions of mangoes on one tree!

LONG-TERM WELLBEING

So-called economic growth is vertical. The rich get richer and richer. There is no limit. Financial wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. Extremely rich individuals of this world pursue vertical growth. Corporations like Amazon, Google and Apple also have vertical growth. For them enough is never enough.

Five to ten countries out of approximately two hundred have much higher economic growth, even though within these rich countries large numbers of people have a very low income and a low standard of living. Many people live in slums, and many are begging in the streets of rich countries. Such economic growth or money growth is largely vertical, without any benefit to a large number of people, and in the long run economic growth of this type also creates growth in pollution, waste and carbon emissions, which are all harmful to planet Earth. 

If we want the long-term wellbeing of the human race and the health of our precious planet, we need to shift our obsession with money management and focus instead on the proper management of ecosystems. Money should be simply a means to an end, the end being both human and planetary wellbeing. That will be the true economy! And the economy needs to be circular—what comes from the Earth goes back to the Earth. Minimum waste, minimum pollution, and minimum carbon emissions.

We can all learn this from a mango tree. Long live the mangonomy!

By Satish Kumar, Editor Emeritus of Resurgence Magazine based in Devon, United Kingdom. Satish is the author of many books, including Soil, Soul, Society and Radical Love, available from www.resurgence.org/shop

Note: This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist Issue 349, March/April 2025. All rights to this article are reserved to The Resurgence Trust and author. To buy a copy of the magazine, read further articles or find out about the Trust, visit: www.resurgence.org

 

Sustainability and Sustainable Consumption

Sustainability and Sustainable Consumption

 By T. Vijayendra, Hyderabad, India

Life on Earth can be divided in two groups—producers (trees and grasses, for example) and consumers (such as animals and human beings). The difference between the two is that producers—like plants—produce their own food whereas consumer species like animals—humans included—live directly or indirectly on food produced by the producer species (think plant life).

To sustain themselves, humans consume goods and services not only from plant and animal sources but also from inanimate sources such as minerals. These resources are either renewable or non-renewable resources. Non-renewable resources, like fossil fuels, minerals, and metals, are finite in nature by definition. In other words, the more we use them, their supply will deplete. Renewable sources, like plants, trees and agriculture, are by definition renewed in nature; both by natural processes and helped by human efforts.

Now, a simple way to explain sustainability:  If we consume resources in such a way that the resources we need and enjoy can also be available to succeeding generations (as well as for all other forms of life) for their needs and enjoyment at a level needed by them and for a foreseeable future.

This issue of sustainability was not a big problem in human history because our population was small and our levels of resource consumption per capita were also small. Today, both the consumption levels and our population have increased substantially. As a result, the way we live and consume resources is NOT sustainable!

To achieve sustainability, the first thing we need to do is we must reduce our per capita consumption. Secondly, more of it should come from renewable resources.

There is an interesting fact about most non-renewable resources. Be it the fuel used for transport (petrol for cars, for example), chemical pesticides in agriculture, cement used in housing and construction, or the plastics used for packaging, they almost always tend to pollute and add to the climate change (and global warming) problem. This is one more important reason for us to reduce the component of non-renewable resources in our consumption.

Value Chain

What is a value chain? It is the chain of values [the term “value” used here is a business term, and not a “value” in the normal sense] added to a product from the source till it reaches the consumer. Let us explain this more:

If we climb a tree and eat its fruit, there is no value chain. But most of us buy the goods we consume. For example, apples are grown on trees in an orchard (likely, in a rural area), picked, packed and transported to the urban centers where we live. In the city we can buy fruits and vegetables either from a pushcart or a farmer’s market, or in a supermarket. So ‘value’ gets added to the produce in a chain consisting of picking, packing, transporting and retail selling. Now, if the apples were converted into apple juice, involving some processing, there would be even more links in the value chain and hence more value would be added.

There is a difference between fruits and vegetables sold by a street vendor (or at the farmer’s market) and in a supermarket. It is not difficult to understand that the “value” added to it in a supermarket is much more. This extra value is called a shelf rent – which can include the rent of the place, worker salaries, utilities, and air conditioning, etc. You might also notice that a big chunk of the difference comes from the non-renewable resources used for transportation and processing, etc., contributing to pollution and climate change. This makes it less sustainable.

We can add some more attributes to sustainability. Instead of an apple, suppose it was a locally produced vegetable or fruit, and sold directly by the person who produced and harvested it. It will then have much less value added, and it will be more sustainable.

We can extend this logic to other sectors of our activities. Locally produced food is more sustainable as we have seen above. Similarly, mud houses, straw-bale houses, or houses made using local materials like bricks or wood can be more sustainable, not only because of the material used, but also because less energy is used in heating, lighting and keeping them cool during the summer months (or warmer in cold climates). In fact, heating and air conditioning uses a lot of energy.

To mention another example, neighborhood schools can reduce transportation costs and so would more use of bicycles for small distances. In many cases, sustainable products are more ‘expensive’. While ‘value added’ can be calculated, price is determined by a variety of unpredictable factors, which have a lot to do with politics and the prevailing social order in human societies.

To work towards sustainability, we can use these four general principles:

  1. Consume less.
  2. What we consume should have a higher proportion of materials from renewable resources.
  3. The value chain from the source to consumer (or end-user) should be as short as possible, so that ‘value addition’ is reduced. That is, we need to consume local products as much as possible.
  4. The components of the value chain should use as little of non-renewable resources as possible. For example, the transportation can be done with animal carts or bicycles or hand pushed carts. The packaging can be minimal. Consumers can carry their own bags—paper or cloth bags—instead of plastic carry bags and so on. The main idea here is to reduce waste by recycling and reusing resources, or closing the loop in the resource use cycle.

Our power plants, factories, automobiles, machines and buildings need to be adapted so they use predominantly renewable energy resources instead of non-renewable resources that come from underground (fossil fuels) and emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants when burned.

Acknowledgement

The main ideas of this article were developed by Soujanya Mantravadi in 2017 for a talk on International Hawkers’ Day at Lamakaan, Hyderabad, India.

T. Vijayendra (b. 1943) is political-social activist, living in India. He divides his time between an organic farm at the foothills of Western Ghats of South India, and watching birds, writing fiction and educational articles at his home in Hyderabad. He has published several books. He has been a ‘dedicated’ bicyclist all his life; he has never driven a fossil-fuel based vehicle (automobile). Email: t.vijayendra@gmail.com

An earlier version of this article was also published in CounterCurrents.org (an online journal, published from Kerala, India) along with the above photo of street vendors of fruits and vegetables in Hyderabad, India.