Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Degrowth, I believe, is at a critical cross road – advocates must now choose to continue to regard degrowth as an unending thought experiment, or to take degrowth into communities of ordinary folks.
The truth is that when this nation chose to eliminate four million farmers (with their families, hired help, buildings, and boundaries) on the advice of the colleges of agriculture, the agricultural bureaucracy, and the agribusiness corporations, it committed a sort of cultural genocide.
The land wisdom of peasants and indigenous people is ultimately the land wisdom we moderns have to learn, not by some magic process of technology transfer but by long cultural development, starting now.
What is clear to me is that to be ‘just’ we need to be acting alongside people and with awareness of our connection to all others, human and otherwise. Justice is lost when we lose sight of the bigger picture.
A political strategy that builds a future based on the common good beginning in the places where we live can meet this need, and potentially help avert worst case scenarios.
We need to believe in people if we, the people, are to have any hope for ourselves and for humanity.
Our identification with a separate sense of self will no longer be the organizing principle for life on Earth. Our evolution as a species and as a planetary culture depends not only on our realization of this, but our embodiment of it. Living our lives in a profoundly transformed way and connecting our communities in service to Mother Earth is where hope can be found.
Through interlocking explorations of climate change, existential crisis, class conflict, mass extinction and granular insights into energy and resource availability, this book lives up to its name. It is not just an explication of potential futures, but a guide to how we might navigate them.
Our current forms of work, and the double exploitation they involve of planet and people, are at the heart of the climate crisis: ecological justice also requires social and economic justice.
Things that seem permanent within the narrow confines of the fishbowl may look completely different (fleeting) in a broader perspective, once the fishbowl construct runs its course. Expecting otherwise seems crazy to me.
Asher, Jason, and Rob lay bare the stats on everything from human population, energy consumption, global GDP, greenhouse gas emissions, and the size of cars and cruise ships, before concluding that the global economy should be named after the Wendigo from Algonquian folklore.
We are all on a journey, one that’s sure to be met with extreme weather, tough times, and untold obstacles. We hope you’ll share some of your journey with us, as together we’ll stand a better chance of arriving at the destination we aim for: a sustainable, equitable society that works for all.
