Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Today I’d like to call attention to a fantastic collection of 29 original essays, The New Systems Reader: Alternatives to a Failed Economy, edited by James Gustave Speth and Kathleen Courrier and published by Routledge.
We could live in a highly educated, technologically advanced society with zero poverty and zero hunger, all with significantly less resources and energy than we presently use.
When we talk about a system beyond economic growth, we don’t have to refer to an abstract future. There are myriad existing examples of projects, mindsets, and approaches beyond economic growth — and not all fit easily into the ‘sustainability’ box.
With 10,000 uses, hemp is one of the most versatile plants to grow—and in many ways can be a catalyst for change for Native peoples.
In order to overcome social and environmental injustices, we have no choice but to abandon the naturalized and structuralized notions that equate GDP growth with social progress and sincerely aim to conceive of alternatives.
At its most distilled, “degrowth” refers to a process of reducing the material impact of the economy on the world’s many imperiled ecologies, abandoning GDP as a measurement of well-being, and forging an equitable steady-state economy.
If you are trying to prove something is true and certain facts get in the way, it’s almost always useful to exclude them. This is apparently what technology cheerleader Andrew McAfee has done in his recent book “More from Less,” which claims that advanced economies have been dematerializing for something like the last 40 years.
But without a bold vision that’s inclusive and down-to-earth enough to make intuitive sense to the great majority of Americans, not even the best of strategies will be enough to carry the day.
The CUP programme advocates an Ecosocial Transition based on a degrowth of the economy in terms of energy and materials.
Against the grain of “There-is-no-alternative” discourse, such a platform can be successful without focusing on profit-making. BeWelcome.org offers lessons for other endeavors promoting the Commons.
The love, nurturing, empathy, and mutual support of the care economy can serve as a catalyst for broad systems change in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Discussions of the threat to liberal democracy have neglected perhaps the most surprising source that is one of the major arcs of history of the last three decades: globalization.
