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 InternationalistBy Kiran Pereira If you want to know the ‘most consumed raw material on earth’ look no further! Sand and gravel have overtaken even water on this front. Yet, not many people would think about sand unless they wanted to go on holiday to a beach! This resource exerts a hegemony that is unrivalled. From the mundane to the mystical, the uses of sand are far too numerous to list exhaustively here. ...
By André Reichel In the discourse on degrowth – the deliberate and planned downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet – the notion of »sustainable development« has sort of a bad rap. In fact, sustainable degrowth is intended to replace sustainable development as the central concept under which ecological...
Von Fabian Scheidler und Andrea Vetter „Entschulung ist die Grundvoraussetzung jeder Bewegung für die Befreiung des Menschen“, schrieb der heute fast vergessene, einst weltberühmte Querdenker Ivan Illich 1971. Illich wurde in den 1970er Jahren mit Büchern wie Entschulung der Gesellschaft und Die so genannte Energiekrise zu einem der Vordenker sowohl der Freilerner- als auch der Postwachstums-...
