Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The unprecedented drop in emissions resulting from the shutdown reinforces an idea over a decade old yet too infrequently acknowledged—the need for economic contraction in addressing the climate crisis.
The good news is that the path to both improving our resilience and making a viable Energy Transition to a low-carbon economy, while minimizing the chances of catastrophic climate change, is the same: planning a controlled and socially fair reduction of the material sphere of the economy.
The CUP programme advocates an Ecosocial Transition based on a degrowth of the economy in terms of energy and materials.
The idea of a world based on active transport, and on cycling in particular, is a recurring theme in thinking on degrowth.
The transition into this future will be painful but it will be even more painful unless we radically rethink what is going on and how we all need to respond.
This means that there are a number of ecological economic needs for a change in the structure of the Nottingham economy which will have to happen – above all relocalisation of economic relationships, particularly in food production.
Degrowth carries within its own name an unmistakable message about its content (stop growing) that gets to the heart of our civilizational problem: the obsession with perpetual growth.
So, let us reach a truce and build a mass movement to take on the real enemies of environmental justice. The stakes are too high to do anything else.
Like a toolbox to unpack and understand the complexity of the socio-ecological crises we live in, political ecology is dedicated to a more just and inclusive world.
In Europe, “degrowth” is actually a movement, while in the US it is barely mentionable in polite society. To question “growth” would be the death knell for any serious politician.
No one would deny that it is possible to make capitalism greener, nor that it should be urgently done. Yet the proposal of eco-productivism remains short-sighted.
We cannot let ourselves be dragged into framing our aspirations for a better world in the language of growth, for it immediately traps us within the logic of capital; and on that terrain we will lose.
