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Samuel Alexander

Dr. Samuel Alexander, co-director of the Simplicity Institute, is a lecturer at the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne, Australia, teaching a course called ‘Consumerism and the Growth Economy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ into the Masters of Environment. He is also a Research Fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. He is author of Prosperous Descent: Crisis as Opportunity in an Age of Limits (2015),Sufficiency Economy: Enough, for Everyone, Forever (2015), and Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation (2013), and editor of Voluntary Simplicity: The Poetic Alternative to Consumer Culture (2009) and co-editor of Simple Living in History: Pioneers of the Deep Future (2014).

Suburban estate

Degrowth in the Suburbs: Excerpt

By Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson, Resilience.org

As we have observed, the suburb represented and accomplished the dialectic of modern urbanism, creating and destroying human possibility. Can we imagine it differently?

  • October 25, 2018

Home Biogas: Turning Food Waste into Renewable Energy

By Samuel Alexander, The Conversation

Biogas is produced when organic matter biodegrades under anaerobic conditions (that is, in the absence of oxygen). This process produces a mixture of gases – primarily methane, some carbon dioxide and tiny portions of other gases such as hydrogen sulfide.

  • January 12, 2018

Degrowth as an Aesthetics of Existence: Part 2

By Samuel Alexander, The Simplicity Collective

If it turns out, however, that neither art nor science can provoke the transformations needed to avoid the looming apocalypse, then the role of the artist will only magnify further, as creative imaginations are tasked with interpreting and understanding civilizational descent in terms that give meaning to the inevitability of suffering; give sense to the pain we will feel (perhaps are already feeling) as global capitalism dies its inevitable death.

  • November 2, 2017

Degrowth as an Aesthetics of Existence: Part 1

By Samuel Alexander, The Simplicity Collective

The purpose of this scoping paper, however, is neither to review the existing literature nor offer another ecological critique of growth, but to extend and deepen the understanding of degrowth by examining the concept and the movement from a perspective that has yet to receive any sustained attention—namely, aesthetics. More about raising questions than offering answers, my aim is to open up the dialogue not close it down, which is to acknowledge that large theoretical territories are traversed without being able to map them all in the detail they deserve. Consider this, then, an invitation to discuss.

  • November 1, 2017

Words for Awakening: Voices of Inspired Revolt

By Samuel Alexander, The Simplicity Collective

Over the last few months I have been working with my co-director of the Simplicity Institute, Simon Ussher, collecting together provocative and inspiring quotes and excerpts from our favourite thinkers and writers, related to the themes of simple living, frugal abundance, money and wealth, crisis, mindfulness, nature mysticism and sacred activism.

  • June 5, 2017
Entropia by Samuel Alexander (book cover)

Introduction to “Entropia”

By Samuel Alexander, The Simplicity Collective

The story I am to tell you in this book is a story about a community that became isolated on a small island in the wake of industrial civilisation’s collapse, during the third decade of the twenty-first century. Those who grew up on the Isle, as I did, sometimes liked to jest that we were the descendents of Plato’s banished poets, but the reality is that our humble story is considerably less romantic, with more grit and tears than any fairy tale could ever allow.

  • April 24, 2017

Democracy at Risk: The Terrifying Power of Big Data

By Samuel Alexander, The Simplicity Collective

Big data refers to the collection of the ‘digital traces’ that we all leave as a result of our online activity. Essentially everything we do online is recorded, from the websites we browse and the terms we type into Google, to the purchases we make and the posts that we ‘like’ on Facebook or ‘retweet’ on Twitter.

  • March 21, 2017

The CSIRO’s Case for ‘Green Growth’ is Flawed

By Samuel Alexander, Jonathan Rutherford, Josh Floyd, Online Opinion

In late 2015 the CSIRO released its Australian National Outlook (ANO) Report ('the Report') which outlined 20 future scenarios for Australia, exploring various global and national sustainability challenges...our new paper argues that even the Report's most ambitious "green growth" scenario is incompatible with long-term sustainability and global justice.

  • February 8, 2017
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