Discussions about degrowth and all sorts of related topics. This includes UBI, economic democracy, the economics of green technologies, enviromental legislation and many more intressting economic topics.
Commentators across the political spectrum claim that humanity faces imminent collapse due to a “fertility crisis.” Is this mass delusion or cynical propaganda?
Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.”
Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.
It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predic
The End of Big Solutions
The world has changed dramatically since the start of the second Trump administration. But how best to describe this shift? Many see it as potentially the end of American democracy, or the end of the Atlantic Alliance and the United States’ prime role in global multilateral institutions.
Here’s a less obvious take: maybe Trump’s ascent portends the end of Big Solutions. The latter have been necessitated by the eruption of Big Problems—i.e., global predicaments that are potential civilization killers, including climate change, worsening economic inequality, the spread of persistent toxins throughout the environment, and the accelerating loss of wild nature.
Meanwhile, can small solutions work? Many environmentalists have been promoting them all along. There is a rich literature on localization, degrowth, community resilience, and Indigenous attitudes and practices, and small environmental orgs have sprung up to further these strategies. Proponents of small solutions don’t claim that t
Manifesto of the Postgrowth Cities Coalition
Manifesto With our eyes set on a postgrowth world, we must promote: #1 Residential buildings that no longer contribute to environmental destruction, but instead catalyze human and ecological flourishing by helping build communities and reduce the consumption of resources and energy; #2 Transport sys...
For Earth Day, we asked the experts. They shared advice on how to be the best planetary citizen possible.
First, it’s important to understand that climate change is a symptom of a larger issue: ecological overshoot, or the fact that humans are consuming resources faster than they can regenerate and producing more waste and pollution than nature can absorb, said William Rees, a human and ecological economist and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia. The most effective solutions, then, address not just greenhouse gas emissions but overall consumption and pollution.
One of the most effective ways to avoid consumption in the first place, Dr. Rees said, is to have a smaller family. But that might not be a realistic option for many people, for all kinds of personal, cultural and other reasons.
“Take a moment to reflect on what a good life within planetary limits look like,” said Diana Ivanova, an environmental social scientist at the University of Leeds in England. “What does ‘enoughness’ look and feel like?”
A response to Ted Trainer In the series Prospects for Degrowth Mark H Burton Ted Trainer makes some important and relevant points in his critical but friendly discussion of the degrowth movement. H…
That simple aspiration propelled Trump into office, but it is now threatened by his tariffs.
Update: Mindless downvotes will be taken as evidence that degrowthers (of which I am one) are not capable of defending their ideas. What's the point of a community where one only sees things that confirm one's biases? I don't get it. Maybe this lazy tribal attitude helps explain why degrowth is so deeply unpopular.
This seems as good a presentation as we'll get of the case against degrowth. Namely that it's a political loser, the environment be damned. People in this community probably want to read things they already agree with (update - they sure do). I'd say we'd do better by first taking seriously the arguments of the other side. Which appear quite solid, to the point that it's hard to know how to go about countering them.
Some choice excerpts:
Most Americans care deeply about building wealth: Roughly 79 percent describe their money as “extremely” or “very” important to them. Eighty-four percent say there’s “nothing wrong” with trying to make as much money as possible [...
‘Deep Change Theory’ Could Pull Us Out of a Global Climate and Pollution Crisis
A new U.N. report maps a path toward a more sustainable future and challenges society to question basic assumptions and values about the environment, consumption and waste.
A team of international researchers published a new U.N. report Wednesday that adds to the rising scientific call for transformative societal and economic changes to staunch critical environmental threats like global warming, plastic pollution and biodiversity loss.
“The science is clear on what needs to change,” said lead author Caitlyn Eberle. “Stop using fossil fuels, respect and protect nature, use resources sustainably. So if we know what we need to do to change things, why aren’t we doing it?”
The research in the report shows that many of today’s sustainability projects are superficial because they focus on small changes within the system without changing the system itself, she said. A good example is recycling, which is valuable, but doesn’t get to the core issue of why so much waste is produced in the first place, she added. “We cannot expect real change unless we examine the reasons behind our actions and question why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
The process may lead to s
Prospects for Degrowth 2025 - degrowthUK
The first in our series Prospects for Degrowth by Mark H Burton1 These are difficult times indeed, with terrible news on many fronts. What are the prospects for the degrowth alternative as we move …
Towns in Belgium and France have been successfully giving away free chickens for ten years to reduce food waste.
Towns in France and Belgium have been giving out free chickens for years to combat food waste – could the idea catch on elsewhere?
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/35963783
To date, 5,282 hens have been distributed to residents, and not only have the residents received a plentiful supply of free eggs, but food waste has also been averted from landfill as chickens are fed kitchen scraps which would otherwise be thrown away.
How a Basque cooperative is keeping money circulating locally — without creating a new currency.
Shein and Temu are ultra fast fashion giants that have taken the fashion industry to new lows. But what ARE the costs of their unbelievably low prices? And what can we do about it?
We have all been sucked in by those videos circulating online of “My $200 Shein Haul” or “Everything I bought for less than $5 from TEMU Review”, but who actually are the two new giants on the ultra fast fashion scene?
In a world where it seemed the general consensus had shifted towards more environmental and ethical consumption, how have these two brands established a global network reaching 150 countries worldwide, and what is at stake if they continue to grow unchecked?
...
How Are They So Cheap?
Exponential Growth Arithmetic, Population and Energy (Dr. Albert A. Bartlett)
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
For those who prefer to read the information:
https://www.albartlett.org/articles/art_forgotten_fundamentals_overview.html
Ekhilur - a functional degrowth economy in Spain
The Ekhilur Project is showing how it’s possible to develop a viable economic system without the need for growth.
So, I just came across the real, working model of a functional #degrowth economy, using negative interest rates as a key driver.
This is really happening in Spain!
And could be replicated anywhere.
Super interesting.
#ekhilur
The Evolution of Modernity
The human world of the early 21st century is dominated by science, cities, and high technology. However, both our modern way of life and our way of thinking about the world sprang up only within the past several centuries. Compared to our hunter-gatherer forebears, we might as well be from another planet.
Most people who live in industrialized nations now believe that humans are superior to the rest of nature. It is assumed that by using science and reason, along with giant helpings of technology, we can banish scarcity and ignorance. Modernity is thought to be the implicit goal of billions of years of biological evolution.
However, in the last few years a critical discourse about modernity has emerged in books, blogs, and academic literature. For these authors, modernity is the cause of the current polycrisis and the impending Great Unraveling. Modernity is likely to comprise a brief and intensely destructive moment in Earth history, because the way we live is unsustainable not just
The epoch in human history in which the nationalist, patriarchal asshole replaces the neoliberal sociopath as the dominant subject: this is what I call the assholocene
Author is Tadzio Müller
To be sure, this concept has come under convincing criticism, inter alia from the left – firstly, of course, it is not "man" who is in charge, but very specific people, mostly rich, mostly white, mostly male; and secondly, it is not man "as such", but “man on capitalist steroids” who exploits the earth – but it has prevailed against much weaker competition, such as "capitalocene" (my term will of course suffer the exact same fate, but there's no harm in trying ;)), because it articulates a widespread affect, with Freud, a "discontent within the culture", a kind of repressed collective awareness, something like: "Wow, ok, right, we're charge, and, holy crap, are we fucking up this 'world domination' thing." The Anthropocene is thus not only the age of "human" causal and ecological dominance, it is also the age of “repressed failure" of those who were in any relevant way “deciders”. We're in charge, we know that our fossil capitalist mode of production an
Die Wirtschaft zurück auf Wachstumskurs zu bringen, war ein zentrales Thema im Wahlkampf. Problem dabei: Nicht Wirtschaftswachstum ist das eigentliche Ziel von Wirtschaftspolitik, sondern verwandte Aspekte wie Arbeitsplätze oder Staatseinnahmen. Es bleibt zu hoffen, dass die Koalitionsverhandlungen ...
In der Wissenschaft herrscht inzwischen eine große Einigkeit, dass Wirtschaftswachstum an sich kein sinnvolles wirtschaftspolitisches Ziel ist. Denn Wirtschaftswachstum kann immer nur Mittel zum Zweck sein. Meistens sind die Zwecke (Voll-)Beschäftigung, höheres Einkommen, mehr privater Konsum oder höhere Staatseinnahmen. Es geht also nie um Wirtschaftswachstum per se, sondern darum, was mit Wachstum gesamtgesellschaftlich erreicht werden kann.