Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The best the degrowth literature has to offer served on a silver platter. That’s how I would describe The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism (June 2022) by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan.
At end of long week I offer a short riff on: What is the Great Simplification? What have I learned in doing the first 25 episodes? What is a framework for responses?
In fact, the only thing we must do is survive this mess. And the best way to do that is to jettison the whole thing and build the lives we need.
Carey King of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin discusses how the last 70 years of economic and population growth have been fueled by the transition to petroleum, how a decreasing supply of it has increased political polarization, and what the future might hold as supplies continue to dwindle.
Today, Peter and I discuss how dopamine, evolution, and modern culture push many of us toward a lifestyle of excess and overconsumption.
An ethical global perspective is necessary today. We must find the unity of Earth and the world. It would be helpful if we had a word, better yet a name, that encapsulates this unity.
The debates on food security versus sustainability in the context of the war in Ukraine have revitalised a longstanding debate on “who will feed the world”.
Standing has just published The Blue Commons: Transforming the Economy of the Sea, a book that synthesizes vast amounts of complicated maritime histories, international law, and ecological science to explain how commoning could curb the market/state’s irresponsible, life-destroying treatment of oceans.
I have organized an event each year for our community around Earth Day for the last ten years. This year I was able to do a live event with an all-star lineup, so I decided to dress it up and make it into a documentary so it could hopefully be more alluring to people new to this line of thought.
Going deep down to undo the foundations of capitalism will require a leap of revolutionary hope in our own capacity to live together differently.
What’s left once you take facts out of the policy debate? Anarchy, nihilism, chaos — just the sort of conditions aspiring demagogues and oligarchs feed off — and get phat while doing it?
If global governments were alive to the nature of the climate, energy and water emergencies upon us, they’d be frantically busy planning how to sensibly and humanely repopulate the countryside and depopulate the cities…
