The fourth part of Small is Beautiful is much more important for modern audiences than much of the rest of the book. E.F.Schumacher's essay on Buddhist economics has historical significance as it sent a whole generation scuttling off to the Orient but Schumacher always preferred the Homecomers to the Onward and Upward Brigade. His Catholic theology, much of which is synonymous with the best of Western philosophy, provides the intellectual underpinnings for Small is Beautiful and for its follow-up, the Catholic primer, Guide for the Perplexed.
There is a lot of bad Catholic thinking and much ignorant nonsense preached on God’s authority by other Christian churches, particularly those obsessed with The Book of Revelations. However truth can be found in the strangest of places. Certain aspects of the Creationist worldview, for instance, deserves serious consideration because it has kept alive some of the questions about the historic fossil record, raised in the 1950s by Immanuel Velikovsky's books, Worlds in Collisions (1950, ISBN 0-963-97590-0) and Earth in Upheaval (1955, ISBN 0 349 13574 6).
Velikovsky argued that the fossil record points not to the current conventional wisdom of gradual geological change over millions of years but to catastrophic change within historic times, with Noah's flood merely the last of several widespread annihilations…before the next one. Professor Einstein even has a walk-on part in the controversy…see Beyond Velikovsky: the history of a public controversy by Henry Bauer (ISBN 0-252-01104-X).
Subsequently in the early 1990s, Maurice Cotterell unearthed corroborating evidence from ancient pyramids in Mexico and Egypt…see The Mayan Prophecies (ISBN 1-85230-888-5). Both the Maya and the Egyptians knew what Velikovsky had rediscovered, understood its causes, and left a record of their knowledge encoded in their pyramids. They associated global upheavals with the long-term cyclical behaviour of the sun's magnetic fields and in particular the regular instability in the 3750 year long cycle which is capable of reversing the Earth's magnetic poles.
These ancient civilizations clearly understood the influence of the sunspot cycles and their related electromagnetic fields upon climate changes on Earth. Schumacher’s Catholic Church may also be endeavouring to come to terms with galactic influences on their Church, its religion and the future of its flock. Many of the sacred books from Mesoamerica were removed by the Jesuits who accompanied the victorious conquistadors. Some were burnt but others would have been removed to the safekeeping of the Vatican vaults.
There is also circumstantial evidence from the Vatican's interest in NASA’s solar data that the obsession of ancient civilizations in the fertility of their crops and themselves was based on the historical memory of its failure. In Appendix 1 of The Tutankhamun Prophecies (1999, ISBN 0-7472-6050-8), Maurice Cotterell published a long essay about the sun (pps. 244-314 in the 1999 Headline edition). The essay ends with a hypothesis the effect of solar radiation on honeybees.
Cosmic rays, clouds and climate is the focus of The Chilling Stars: a cosmic view of climate change by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder (2007, ISBN 978-1840468-66-3). But the authors also summarise the evidence that cosmic rays from outside our solar system have an impact on life on Earth…see, for instance, Starbursts, tropical ice and life’s changing fortune (pps. 156-179 in the 2007 Icon edition) and Children of the supernovae? (pps. 180-203).
The Roman Catholic Church's repeated refusal to countenance contraception also suggests that the Vatican is aware that the historic record reports a periodic fluctuation in fertility. A failure of human fertility for just forty or fifty years would eliminate the human species and recent evidence with other species suggests that reproduction might be much more fragile than we realize.
