There’s lots of talk recently about the wealth of Jeff Bezos. There are maps comparing his wealth to entire countries, a “You are Jeff Bezos” game where you can spend his money on different things - like paying their fair-share of taxes, and a graphic that puts his wealth in perspective. A recurring point is that most people simply cannot fathom the amount of money he has. The number is $150 billion. My favorite attempt to bring the number into human terms is Quartz’s article, “The average US worker would need 10 times the length of all human history to earn as much as Jeff Bezos”. This beautifully captures the point that someone does not simply earn or work for such an amount of money, but rather captures it. We, at degrowth.info, thought a similar calculation would be interesting. We wanted to know how many humble (but hopefully useful) projects like ours Jeff Bezos’ wealth could pay for. In case you haven’t heard already, degrowth.info is improving its site to better support the degrowth community and improve the usability of the platform – this will cost 7,500€.
In two statements, internationally renowned climate-activists Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben have raised their voices to support the mass-action against coal-mining in the Rhineland that will take place right after our summer school. Naomi Klein, author of "This changes everything. Capitalism vs the Climate" emphasizes the importance of the German anti-coal struggle for the global climate: "Ge...
Deschooling as a Path to Social-Ecological Transformation By Fabian Scheidler and Andrea Vetter "Deschooling is at the root of any movement for human liberation", wrote Ivan Illich, today almost forgotten but once a world-renowned critical thinker, in 1971. With books like "Deschooling Society" and "Energy and Equity” he inspired in the 1970s both the emerging environmental movement and the r...
By Matthias Schmelzer The following article is a translation from the forthcoming “Atlas der Globalisierung”, that will be edited by Le Monde diplomatique and the Kolleg Postwachstumsgesellschaften (Universität Jena) under the title “Less is More. The Postgrowth-Atlas” (“Weniger wird mehr. Der Postwachstums-Atlas”. Postwachstum. Degrowth. Décroissance. These are buzzwords of a newly emergin...
