Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
While degrowth in Europe is often framed as a deliberate choice, Japan’s version is distinctive – and instructive. Japan offers a rare set of living experiments in how communities can actually function, and even thrive, without growth as the organizing goal.
Thessaloniki’s grassroots food networks offer a glimpse of what food systems organized around care and democracy, rather than profit and endless growth, can look like.
All land was Indigenous once. Now, over half of the world’s ‘green’ metal projects are on Indigenous territories, from lithium-driven ecosystem collapse in the Andes to more than 100 proposed lithium mines across the US.
Beyond living standards, economic growth has shaped how societies cope with shocks and distribute gains. As growth weakens, these less visible functions may prove just as consequential as its economic effects.
Economic growth does not increase our well-being. It drives environmental damage and will inevitably slow as we hit resource limits. Yet many countries, companies, and individuals remain fiercely attached to growth. This article uses systemic analysis and System Dynamics diagrams to explore why we keep pursuing more, despite what we know.
In the final part of this three-part interview series, Richard Heinberg reflects on decades of ignored warnings about energy descent and economic collapse, calling for a voluntary relocalization of economics and politics.
A critique of contemporary food and energy analysis, this essay argues that many proposed solutions to food insecurity and fossil fuel dependence remain trapped within the assumptions of growth and technological complexity. Instead, it calls for a more honest reckoning with ecological limits, inequality and the possibility of a lower-energy, more localized future.
The Transition Towns movement has helped popularize local resilience, but current movements stop short of the structural change required. In a world of overlapping crises, it calls for more radical forms of economic relocalization and material simplicity.
In this interview with 15/15\15 magazine, Richard Heinberg argues that current transition strategies ignore a central reality: replacing fossil fuels is not enough without reducing overall energy use.
As housing costs rise and populations age, underused space in existing homes offers an overlooked solution. In-home suites can provide affordable housing, support aging in place, and strengthen community ties while making better use of what we already have.
The airwaves and internet are filled with “solutions” each day to the myriad interlocking environmental and resource limits humanity faces. A very tiny number call for extraordinary reductions in consumption. The rest aren’t solutions at all.
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.
