1. Home
  2. Authors
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).

degrowth graffiti

Is the Economic Shut Down what Degrowth Advocates have been Calling For?

By Samuel Alexander, Resilience.org

When an economy contracts involuntarily, that is called a recession or, if it lasts long enough, a depression. Nobody advocates for such unplanned economic contraction because that has all sorts of negative social effects, including rising unemployment, stress, and poverty. So we must never confuse degrowth with recession.

  • March 24, 2020
Walden Pond

Access to Land Plus a Participation Income Could Change the World

By Samuel Alexander, Alex Baumann, Resilience.org

In this article we’d like to offer some new thinking: a policy proposal that we feel has the potential to be transformative. At its simplest, our proposal involves providing self-selecting unemployed public housing residents with a basic, living wage.

  • March 3, 2020
Ted Trainer

The Simpler Way: Editors’ Introduction

By Samuel Alexander, Jonathan Rutherford, Resilience.org

The Simpler Way is an ‘eco-anarchist’ vision of a world where self-governing communities live materially simple but sufficient lives, in harmony with ecological limits. Central themes discussed in the following pages include a radical critique of consumer capitalism; the need for fundamental system change; and a transition theory based on building a new society from the grassroots up.

  • February 28, 2020
Extinction Rebellion

The Rebellion Hypothesis: Crisis, Inaction, and the Question of Civil Disobedience

By Samuel Alexander, The Simplicity Collective

The main argument of this essay is that XR and rebellions like it are almost certainly going to grow in coming months and years as more people around the world become politically frustrated, angry, scared, and directly impacted by inaction in the face of today’s overlapping ecological and humanitarian crises.

  • September 18, 2019
For sale sign

Access to Land is a Barrier to Simpler, Sustainable Living. Public Housing could Offer a Way Forward

By Alex Bauman, Samuel Alexander, The Conversation

There is a very powerful reason we are currently unable to move toward a simpler and sustainable society: the costs of securing access to land for housing often mean only the relatively affluent can afford such “green lifestyles”. In response to this problem, we offer some ideas to show how public land could be used for sustainable forms of community-led development.

  • August 22, 2019
bookcover

This Civilisation is Finished: Excerpt

By Samuel Alexander, Rupert Read, The Simplicity Collective

When I look at the world today, I see the vast majority of academics, scientists, activists, and politicians ‘self-censoring’ their own work and ideas, in order to share views that are socially, politically, or even personally palatable.

  • June 17, 2019
Windmill

The Energy Descent Future

By Samuel Alexander, Joshua Floyd, The Ecologist

This leads us to the view – open to change through ongoing learning of which actual experience related to the realisation of post-carbon societies will be central – that humanity’s best course of action is to act in the present as if renewable futures will entail energy descent. 

  • January 3, 2019
×Close