There’s lots of talk recently about the wealth of Jeff Bezos. There are maps comparing his wealth to entire countries, a “You are Jeff Bezos” game where you can spend his money on different things - like paying their fair-share of taxes, and a graphic that puts his wealth in perspective. A recurring point is that most people simply cannot fathom the amount of money he has. The number is $150 billion. My favorite attempt to bring the number into human terms is Quartz’s article, “The average US worker would need 10 times the length of all human history to earn as much as Jeff Bezos”. This beautifully captures the point that someone does not simply earn or work for such an amount of money, but rather captures it. We, at degrowth.info, thought a similar calculation would be interesting. We wanted to know how many humble (but hopefully useful) projects like ours Jeff Bezos’ wealth could pay for. In case you haven’t heard already, degrowth.info is improving its site to better support the degrowth community and improve the usability of the platform – this will cost 7,500€.
The Degrowth Summer School 2015 took place at the climate camp in the Rhineland. The Rhineland is one of the biggest lignite mining regions, the biggest source of CO2 in Europe. To protest against climate-damaging industry and resource extraction, different movements which have a lot in common and share ambitions get together and work on alternatives and a social transformation. A video by Raut...
By Jeremy Cardonna et al, originally published by the Resilience Blog A group known as the “ecomodernists,” which includes prominent environmental thinkers and development specialists such as Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Stewart Brand, David Keith, and Joyashree Roy has recently published a statement of principles called An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015). Many of the authors of the Ma...
For our Degrowth in Action - Climate Justice Summer School 2015 we are currently looking for contributors to our courses. The summer school will take place from 9 to 14 August 2015 in the lignite-mining region of the Rhineland in cooperation with the annual climate camp. The courses will be at the centre of the Summer School and run for 4 or 2 days, thus giving the opportunity to dive deeper in...
