A new Left has to be an ecological Left, or it won’t be left at all. Environmental change ‘changes everything’ for the Left too, Naomi Klein argued. Capitalism requires constant expansion, an expansion predicated on exploitation of humans and non-humans, that irreversibly damages the climate. A non-capitalist economy will have to sustain itself while contracting. But how can we redistribute or secure meaningful work without growth? There is not yet a concrete ‘economics of degrowth’. Lamentably, Keynesianism is the most powerful tool the Left, even the Marxist Left, has for dealing with issues of policy. But this is an economics of the 1930s when unlimited expansion was still possible and desirable.
Read the whole article in the New Internationalist
Ten years ago G20 leaders committed a staggering $5 trillion of public funds to rescue the banks and restore growth during the largest economic contraction in modern times. The economies of an unprecedented number of countries — and their associated environmental footprints — experienced very low growth over the decade that followed. In a recent study published in the Journal of Cleaner Prod...
The 6th International Degrowth Conference finished on Saturday, the 25th of August with a demonstration under the rain in the center of Malmö. Typical weather for the end of August in Sweden, and very welcomed after the past worryingly dry months. The subtitle 'Dialogues in Turbulent Times' would summarize the week quite well. The strangely hot summer experienced by all of us was frequently ...
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 ...
