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).

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

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

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

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

The Suburbs are the Spiritual Home of Overconsumption. But they also Hold the Key to a Better Future

By Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson, The Conversation

Suburban catastrophists such as James Kunstler argue that fossil fuel depletion will turn our suburbs into urban wastelands. But we see the suburbs as an ideal place to begin retrofitting our cities.

December 14, 2018

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

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