Should arguments for degrowth be anthropocentric or ecocentric? And what does this mean in practice? There is an interesting discussion going on, starting with two recent court rulings in New Zealand and India about rivers being granted personal rights. We present an article by Ashish Kothari, Mari Margil and Shrishtee Bajpai, first published for The Guardian. Several geographically-distant but related events signalled a dramatic mind shift in humanity’s troubled relationship with nature last month. First, the New Zealand parliament passed the Te Awa Tupua Act, giving the Whanganui River and ecosystem a legal standing in its own right, guaranteeing its “health and well-being”. Shortly after, a court in India ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and their related ecosystems have “the status of a legal person, with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities ... in order to preserve and conserve them”. The history of the rivers makes these proclamations remarkable. The Ganges has long been considered sacred and millions of people depend on it for sustenance, yet it has been polluted, mined, diverted and degraded to a shocking extent. The Whanganui has witnessed a century-old struggle between the indigenous Iwi people and the New Zealand government over its treatment. Notably, the Iwi consider themselves and the Whanganui as an indivisible whole, expressed in the common saying: “I am the river, and the river is me.” Rivers are the arteries of the earth, and lifelines for humanity and millions of other animals and plants. It’s no wonder they have been venerated, considered as ancestors or mothers, and held up as sacred symbols. But we have also desecrated them in every conceivable way. Can giving them the legal rights of a human help resolve this awful contradiction? Perhaps, if we are able to think beyond the material limits of how we relate to nature, we can encourage political and economic measures to create a deeper and more ethical relationship. New Zealand and India have recognised the intrinsic rights of rivers, beyond their use for humans. Both recognise rivers as having spiritual, physical and metaphysical characteristics. These crucial extensions of law are based on ethical principles rarely recognised since the industrial age, but this is how indigenous peoples have long treated nature.
Last summer, Matthias Schmelzer and Andrea Vetter, both from the Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie in Leipzig, published the book ‘Degrowth/Postwachstum’. With this book, they provide the first introduction to degrowth in German. For lack of a good German translation of ‘degrowth’ they use ‘Postwachstum’ more or less as a synonym. First they describe how our societies came to depend on growth, and they...
Eine Auswertung ist ein schwieriges Genre. Bei MOVE UTOPIA, dem fünftägigen Zusammen!Treffen! für eine Welt nach Bedürfnissen und Fähigkeiten, ist es eine Herausforderung: Über 1000 Menschen aus sehr unterschiedlichen Bewegungen trafen sich – manche für mehr als eine Woche, einige nur für einen Tag–, um der Vision einer tauschlogikfreien Gesellschaft nachzuspüren. Schauplatz des Treffens war de...
Wir alle benutzen täglich Modelle, um unsere Umwelt zu erklären. Ein Beispiel: Ich gehe davon aus – und bin mir dabei ziemlich sicher –, dass ein Baum wächst, wenn er genug Wasser, Nährstoffe und Sonne bekommt. Ich habe dabei ein simples Modell eines Baumes im Kopf, ohne genau zu verstehen, was in dessen Wurzelwerk, Stamm, Blättern und Zellen so alles passiert. Unser Modelldenken nutzen ...