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 picture above shows some of the statues decorating the northern entrance of the Corvinus University in Budapest where the recent Degrowth Conference took place. The building has not always been a university. It once was a place of trade, and the statues over the entrance depict virtues which, back then, were considered central to trade. Virtues like courage, faith, love and honesty. When di...
By Nina Treu According to recent calculations by the Macroeconomic Policy Institute the Euro-crisis has cost Greece almost a quarter of its GDP. This is the biggest ever recorded contraction of an economy in times of peace. It would be cynical to consider this an example for degrowth (or postgrowth) in Europe. This is certainly not the case. On the contrary, the mission statement of the degrow...
By Ulrich Schachtschneider A new star is born in the sky of the social movements: the degrowth-movement. The traditional left, however, observes this novelty somewhat critically – degrowth being a path that seems possible without the traditional left. Marxist, feminist and anti-racist analyses were largely missed at the latest Degrowth-Conference and where they were present, participants eyed ...
