Phil Wilson

Degrowth, I believe, is at a critical cross road – advocates must now choose to continue to regard degrowth as an unending thought experiment, or to take degrowth into communities of ordinary folks.

This method of snatching random strangers and dumping the victims into decision making institutions is, as I have already explained, called sortition – a rather uninspiring label for the most revolutionary idea ever conceived.

Our political culture rolls the dice on climate change, with a strategy of doing (nearly) absolutely nothing, and ecomodernism provides the rhetorical inspiration for inaction.

The Cuban version of degrowth is not affixed to the looming climate catastrophe, but rather, more fundamentally, focused on the fine details of triumphing in a world of chronic deprivation. In Cuba, the US embargo is the mother of invention.

The diseases overrepresented in impoverished communities – obesity, diabetes, emphysema, osteoporosis, HBP, asthma, coronary blockage, mental illness, etc. – are deeply entwined with shrinking habitats and overheated climate. We might even think of poverty and climate as a single, indivisible issue.

Now, fittingly, in our era of collapsing economies, hypertrophied corporations and climate catastrophe, the cosmos embodies our political anxiety.