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About Sam Bliss

Events • 06.10.2020

Degrowth resonates: a reflection on DegrowthFest 2020

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By: Sam Bliss

On August 14th, an uprising of art installations and happenings emerged in the Old North End neighborhood of Burlington, Vermont. Two days later, they all disappeared. Through these art pieces, community members and local organizations explored today’s tensions and possible paths toward desirable futures. Burlington residents navigated the neighborhood on self-guided tours, following a m...

Blog • 28.11.2019

A Green New Deal for an ecological economy

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By: Sam Bliss, Leah Temper

Introducing a series of proposals for a truly transformative GND The Green New Deal is on everyone’s lips and policy platforms. Liberal pundit Thomas Friedman coined the term in 2007, and Left parties in the UK called for a Green New Deal during the recession that followed the 2008 global financial crash. Last year, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez rebooted the idea in the United Sta...

Blog • 19.10.2018

Gathering degrowth in the American pluriverse

Degrowus2018 haymarket

By: Sam Bliss

“When you told your friends and family you were going to a degrowth gathering, they asked, ‘What is degrowth?’ How did you respond?” The 2018 degrowUS gathering from September 28-30 2018 in Chicago began with this question. The first day’s thirty-odd attendees wrote their responses on sticky notes as they scraped the last bites of lunch off the dishes the event’s organizers had told them to ...

Blog • 19.10.2018

Gathering degrowth in the American pluriverse

Degrowus2018 haymarket

By: Sam Bliss

“When you told your friends and family you were going to a degrowth gathering, they asked, ‘What is degrowth?’ How did you respond?” The 2018 degrowUS gathering from September 28-30 2018 in Chicago began with this question. The first day’s thirty-odd attendees wrote their responses on sticky notes as they scraped the last bites of lunch off the dishes the event’s organizers had told them to ...

Blog • 05.12.2016

Degrowth in the US: Thinking smaller where everything is big

By: Sam Bliss

Things are big in the United States of America. Returning home after a year away reacquaints me with big detached single-family homes, big single-occupant vehicles, and big single-species grass lawns. I find wider roads, longer distances, larger supermarkets, and more stuff everywhere. As a student of ecological economics, it makes me a little anxious. Such individualistic extravagance isn’t e...

Blog • 11.01.2016

My Journey toward degrowth

By: Sam Bliss

By Sam Bliss Growth means a process of increasing in physical size. When we think of economic growth, it is difficult to fathom what exactly grows, since 'the economy' is an invented concept that describes billions of human interactions as if they were one giant entity. But gross domestic product is a rate -- the total money value of economic activity per year -- and thus growth really means ...