Degrowth and the Carbon Budget: Powerdown Strategies for Climate Stability – Part 2
By Samuel Alexander, The Simplicity Institute
In order to fully understand the necessary scale and speed of action required to significantly reduce climate change risks, citizens and governments must first understand the full extent and implications of the carbon budget challenge.
Degrowth and the Carbon Budget: Powerdown Strategies for Climate Stability – Part 1
By Samuel Alexander, The Simplicity Institute
In order to keep within a ‘safe’ temperature threshold, deep and rapid decarbonisation is required, and yet existing trends show that global emissions are still growing rapidly.
The Transition Movement: Questions of Diversity, Power, and Affluence – Part 2
By Samuel Alexander, Esther Alloun, The Simplicity Institute
This raises the question: To what extent can the Transition movement avoid the pain, hardship, and conflict historically associated with significant social movements...?
The Transition Movement: Questions of Diversity, Power, and Affluence – Part 1
By Samuel Alexander, Esther Alloun, The Simplicity Institute
As promising as the Transition movement may be, there are crucial questions it needs to confront and reflect on if it wants to fully realise its potential for deep societal transformation.
Radical simplicity and the middle class
By Samuel Alexander, The Simplicity Institute
How would the ordinary middle-class consumer – I should say middle-class citizen – deal with a lifestyle of radical simplicity? By radical simplicity I essentially mean a very low but biophysically sufficient material standard of living, a form of life that will be described in more detail below. In this essay I want to suggest that radical simplicity would not be as bad as it might first seem, provided we were ready for it and wisely negotiated its arrival, both as individuals and as communities.
The simplicity exercises: a sourcebook for simplicity exercises
By Mark A. Burch, The Simplicity Institute
This book takes us in a new direction, moving beyond the analytical stage of defending simplicity and criticising growth-based, consumer-orintated economies, toward the recognition that our primary task now lies in actively promoting alternative ways of living through education, not simply research and analysis. Living simply in a consumer society isn't easy, but it just got easier. [Free online book]
Retrofitting the suburbs for the energy descent future
By David Holmgren, Samuel Alexander, The Simplicity Institute
Sometimes well-meaning 'green' people like to imagine that the eco-cities of the future are going to look either like some techno-utopia - like the Jetson's, perhaps, except environmentally friendly - or some agrarian village, where everyone is living in cob houses that they built themselves. The fact is, however, that over the next few critical decades, most people are going to find themselves in an urban environment that already exists - suburbia.