From the text: The Manifesto has already received strong criticism from an array of commentators, but none of these assessments has yet critiqued it from the perspective of “degrowth,” which is an approach that sees the transition to sustainability occurring through less environmentally impactful economic activities and a voluntary contraction of material throughput of the economy, to reduce humanity’s aggregate resource demands on the biosphere. From a degrowth perspective, technology is not viewed as a magical savior since many technologies actually accelerate environmental decline. With these disagreements in mind, a group of over fifteen researchers from the degrowth scholarship community has written a detailed refutation of the Ecomodernist Manifesto. . .
Authors and Endorsers: Jeremy Caradonna, Iris Borowy, Tom Green, Peter A. Victor, Maurie Cohen, Andrew Gow, Anna Ignatyeva, Matthias Schmelzer, Philip Vergragt, Josefin Wangel, Jessica Dempsey, Robert Orzanna, Sylvia Lorek, Julian Axmann, Rob Duncan, Richard B. Norgaard, Halina S. Brown, Richard Heinberg > Full article
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 Ashish Kothari If sheer enthusiasm can deliver ‘another world’, the opening rally of the World Social Forum in Tunis on 24th March held much promise. Thousands of women and men, young and old, vociferous and quiet, a colourful multitude of sloganeering, banner-holding, dancing and singing braved rain and well-below expected temperatures to march from the historic Bab Sadoun to the iconic Ba...
Interview with Ole Bjerg Ole Bjerg is associate professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He writes for the ephemera Journal and is one of the organizers of the conference "Organizing for the post-growth economy". He gave us a short interview for the Stream towards Degrowth. Imagine we're living in the future, say in the year 2030, in a time of well-being. Humanity enjoys a good life ...