Yes all sorts of evils occur in large institutions; but if you have ever seen a sweatshop, plenty happens in small businesses as well.

Is the converse true?  That is, while small business/organizations can be very bad to their people, they can also be very good to their people.  But large organizations, with very few exceptions, tend to treat their people like cogs in a machine.

As evidence against the "small is always beautiful" truism, the quoted statement is a legitimate point.  On the other hand, ALL truisms of the format "X is ALWAYS Y" are false.  There are no good one-size-fits-all answers.  The more interesting question would be whether or not there is a good reason to believe that "small is more often beautiful", to which I would argue the answer is "yes", for a variety of reasons.

I hear you loud and clear Gar. I think the size fetish is a great description of a particular enviro perspective.

I'd also add that that there is a little bit of contradiction in the size fetish too. We want a global consensus on environmental protection, but want to devolve our unit of government/regulation/community to the neighborhood? How, for example, are we to manage climate changes with only small scale operations? Can we imagine trying to negotiate climate protection city by city around the globe?  I just don't see it happening. We need a mix of small and large institutions. As Gar points out, large scale institutions are really good at some things (vaccines for example).

Another example of the contradiction is local foods. In Ann Arbor, where I go to school, there's a great farmer's market - it really makes you think the local foods scene is where we should all be heading. But next door in Ypsilanti, where I live, the farmers' market is far less thriving. They're making a go of it, but there's often vendors who bring in store bought produce like bananas. There's often very little local food there. So if we were to decompose the food system in a significant way I would be concerned that the food security issues we see in poorer communities today would just be exacerbated.

Some of the size fetish in my opinion comes from the inability to see how the small system is embedded and supported by the big system. Returning to the local foods example; people often talk about how a major benefit of farmers' markets is the ability to interact with the farmer and the strengthening of community in a market. However, that level of customer service is in part a result of the clientele of farmers' markets and the current economics of farmers' markets. If the local market was the only game in town, we might not find every provider so warm and fuzzy. We would beholden to a very narrow set of providers. In some communities this would work out just great, but in other communities the food supply might become quite tenuous.

Anyway, that's a long winded way of agreeing with Gar. We need all kinds of sizes of institutions. But for whatever size institutions we have - we need better oversight and feedback between people, the environment and our institutions.

I also agree with Gar that scale in itself should not be the key determinant in evaluating a particular  system or technology for a sustainable future.  However, when large systems screw up they can screw up to devastating effect.  Insofar as the new technologies offered for our salvation, when they involve large centralized facilities, will need large corporate entities to own and control them, are we just going to trust that the big investor-owned players like GE and BP who are the most likely candidates for that role are just going to do the right thing?  I think not.  They have hardly earned our trust in careful stewardship of critical resources.  In fact I suspect that the truly key technologies for our long-term future will not so much be in the physical stuff like hydrogen, PV cells and wind farms (important as they may be in the short term, we can assume that better technologies will surely follow) but will rest instead in our capacity to develop human systems for their management and implementation that are as much improved from our current corporate systems as a wind farm from a mid-twentieth century coal plant.  

Is it too much to hope for a technology of corporate ownership and governance that will enable large corporations to be successful and competitive in existing markets while serving a larger good than short-term shareholder profit?  It's certainly time to start thinking how that might look.  It seems to me that coops might well be part of the ownership picture, especially given their long and successful history in rural electric utilities.  In the U.S. we're accustomed to thinking of coops as small neighborhood organizations, but that they can scale up has been well demonstrated in other parts of the world.  And on the governance side the work of John and Miriam Carver (PolicyGovernance.com) seems to heading in the right direction and slowly gaining credibility in the business world.  Any other lights on the horizon?  I feel if it can happen anywhere it can happen here.  Human political history turned an immense corner in 1776: this was the first nation in the world organized from the beginning around theories of fairness, justice, and equitability instead of brute power, inheritance and fealty. The ownership and governance of large corporations will have to go through a similar sea-change if their immense power is not to continue to be deployed at the expense of our common long-term survival.

You are right that large private corporations are not neccesarily the people to trust with these solutions. It is worth noting that if large corporations were going to provide them they have ahd plenty of time. Amory Lovins has made the case for well over a decade that Hypercars could be produced for the same price as conventional ones, but nobody makes them. In general we don't implement anything like the amount of effciency that would be cost effective. Nor do we use wind electricity or solar heat even in the quantities that could compete with fossil fuels today.

The size and growth factor of small will increase the participation of institutional capital and reduce the cost of production.

We've written about the distasteful use of emotion to effect change.  Fear is particularly sour.  Greed is another emotion and corporations are institutions of greed.  Amory has frequently used the profit motive for effecting large efficiency improvements.  I have used greed in the past.  It is a powerful tool.  (I became conflicted with ethical issues concerning shareholders owning workers.)

Nothing starts out big.  All plants start from seeds and grow to compete with big plants.  If the big shade the light then the small die.

Cut down coal and small ideas will flourish, otherwise small ideas will struggle for survival and remain only in niche environments.