Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Overcoming our societal addiction to the current system will require a broad consensus and a movement of movements around the shared goal of sustainable wellbeing for humans and the rest of nature.
This article perpetuates this counter-productive bashing of alternatives. At a time where plan B are precisely what we lack, this mentality is tragically uneconomical.
Limits is a transformative word, because it tells us that somebody has drawn that economy in their mind and they have drawn it as part of the biosphere. That is the beginning of a paradigm shift.
In the context of this growing and relevant conversation, Nate unpacks what the degrowth movement is getting right, but also what is missing from the conversation.
In any event, whether or not you believe a paradigm shift is coming, it still makes sense to act as if you do; because, like Pascal’s Wager, the consequences of betting the wrong way are infinitely worse.
That is what might be about to end: The reality that, since colonialism arose in the Sixteenth Century, it has been the transfer of economic value from the Global South which has historically supported the ‘civilised’ lifestyle that denoted The West’s global supremacy.
There is a rumour that is picking up speed in the media, affirming that it is possible to both produce more while polluting less. Some people call it “green growth.”
Land is not just the spot your community sits on. Land holds both history and potential, and is not only a source of security, but also the stage your community plays out their dramas on.
The initiative is called the Common Wallet, and through it our group wants to develop more radical forms of solidarity, kinship, trust, as well as a thorough questioning of and experimenting with different possible relationships to money.
Capitalism in essence is a cannibal, primed to guzzle its own conditions of possibility.
Though, ‘Overshoot’, is ostensibly a book about biophysical limits, the theme that runs through it is about the human propensity for denying obvious facts: Our ability to deceive not only others, but more importantly, ourselves.
Only by defying the persistently narrow choice between ‘growth’ or ‘degrowth’ in forms that are categorically given, can the twin faces of colonial modernity in technocratic consumerism and environmental authoritarianism finally be confronted and transformed.
