On June 6th we will once more celebrate the Global Degrowth Day (GDD). On this day, like last year, we want to show that there are alternatives to the capitalist growth society and that a good life for all is possible! This time of multiple crisis can be overwhelming, but it is also a crucial moment to re-think how we live and how societies are organized. Degrowth is a powerful tool to examine the origins of the several crises we face. It is time to demand and build new roots for a new future, built around values of solidarity, justice, care, wellbeing and sufficiency. Despite coronavirus, there are Global Degrowth Day events planned around the world. See a full list here. Many of these Global Degrowth Day events will be livestreamed, but some will be live, face-to-face, with the appropriate measures for social distancing.
Self-limitation is not about constraining, but about defining collectively as societies our limits. Political ecology ‘has made strong arguments against natural limits’ and is in friction with ‘degrowth’s .. urgency of less’, writes Paul Robbins. Indeed, political ecologists developed the field as a response to 1970s neo-Malthusianism. Nancy Peluso, Lyla Mehta or Betsy Hartmann have exposed ...
The arrival of smartphones, self-driving cars and the Cloud are all symptomatic of a profound shift that is re-writing modern society from within: the Fourth Industrial Revolution. New technologies claim to provide answers to a host of problems, but is technology unbound always a force for good? In the first of a three-part series on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, EcoPolítica’s Paz Serra...
By Giorgos Kallis The ecomodernist manifesto is the latest and most visionary document under the auspices of the ‘post-environmentalist’ think-tank the Breakthrough Institute. I first heard the Institute’s founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger speak at Berkeley some eight years ago, presenting their case for the “death of environmentalism” (hence the ‘post’ prefix). For half of the p...
