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
After almost a year of tireless work we are proud to present our degrowth library. Here you can find various materials related to the transition to an economy independent from economic growth. The library already contains almost 700 entries, from introductory videos to newspaper articles and scientific publications in different languages. Diverse search options and an extensive list of themes m...
By Giorgos Kallis Well, that was an interesting week! After publishing two rebuttals of the eco-modernist manifesto, I got swirled into twitterlandia, and exchanges with an amazing cadre of characters. First came the leaders of the Breakthrough Institute, with whom I had civilized conversations about the GDP of Japan and whether it is growing or not; the energy return on investment (EROI) of ...
Some people object to the concept of “natural capital” because they say it reduces nature to the status of a commodity to be marketed at its exchange value. This indeed is a danger, well discussed by George Monbiot. Monbiot’s criticism rightly focuses on the monetary pricing of natural capital. But it is worth clarifying that the word “capital” in its original non-monetary sense means “a stock ...
