Professor’s Research Focuses On Sustainable Economic Practices in Guatemala
John Abell seeks economics where people matter.
Since 1993, John Abell has traveled regularly to San Lucas Tolimán in the mountains of Guatemala to conduct research on the small community’s efforts to become more self-sufficient. Led in large part through a 50-year effort by a Catholic parish with ties to a diocese in Minnesota, community efforts in San Lucas also apply sustainable development practices: utilizing available resources without compromising the environment for future generations.
“Coffee was simply one of the many things that they were doing right,” said Abell, an economics professor at Randolph College. The community he studied used similar organic, shade-grown methods to Pura Vida. “For me, it was one of the first times where I’d ever really seen economics that was 100 percent human centered.”
Abell has been influenced in part by the British economist E.F. Schumacher. His book, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, a collection of essays published in 1973, stresses that the well being of a community, along with ecological and environmental concerns, should be factors when considering the methods of production.
“I think economists have become more in tune, just like the rest of the population, with environmental matters,” Abell said. “For years, environmental economics has been a legitimate field of study.”
