Sustainable Development, One Inventor at a Time

It may seem counter intuitive, but development is the key to saving the world. As the literacy rate and employment opportunities increase, especially for women, the size of families drops, and resources that are no longer needed just to stay alive are diverted to discretionary spending, like environmentalism. It's hard to save the planet when you're just keeping yourself going.

Big development projects often end up lining the pockets of corrupt leaders, and the need for bottom-up development is so well known at this point that it doesn't require me to get up on a soapbox about it. Small things can make a big difference to those at the subsistence level. Things like the peanut huller developed by a retiree, Jock Brandis. It seems that women feed their families and make extra cash selling peanuts and other nuts, but hulling them is a time-consuming task. Brandis' sheller is easy to build of inexpensive materials, and he makes the plans freely available to all. It's only one of the things that the Full Belly Project is working on now. The Wall Street Journal has this article about Brandis.