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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).

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
gas pump

Carbon Civilisation and the Energy Descent Future

By Samuel Alexander, Joshua Floyd, Resilience.org

Our goal presently is to broaden the discourse on energy futures. If we cannot always provide comprehensive answers in the space available, we hope at least to provoke thought about new questions, with the aim of unsettling some assumptions about energy futures presently held with undue confidence.

  • December 12, 2018
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
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