Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Slower growth — and ultimately zero growth — is good for people and the planet, but not for those in power, who for millennia relied on women’s reproductive labor to produce more workers, consumers, and taxpayers. Today’s Trump-era and even progressive pronatalist policies try to reverse the trend, but there’s a reason why they won’t work.
The Strait of Hormuz crisis is disrupting supply chains just as previously suppressed government reports warn that ecological breakdown and resource depletion are converging into systemic collapse. This may be a preview of what lies ahead if we don’t confront this reality.
In the concluding installment of this discussion series, Tom Murphy and Dave Murphy wrestle with whether a just energy transition can truly be sustainable, or whether modernity itself is a dead end on a finite planet.
In this installment of an ongoing series, Tom and Dave Murphy explore what “sustainable” truly means and whether any disruption to natural ecosystems or energy flows by humanity is inherently unsustainable.
Can modern civilization survive for the long term within planetary limits? This dialogue pits optimism about renewable energy and human adaptability against a more fundamental critique: that modernity itself may be incompatible with ecological sustainability.
As low-lying island states face the loss of their territory, new legal and political strategies are emerging to sustain nations in exile. Whether they can preserve sovereignty, identity and cohesion without land remains an open question.
If modernity cannot endure within planetary limits, what comes next? Dave Murphy and Tom Murphy debate the likelihood of collapse, the possibility of adaptation and what we owe each other in a time of ecological overshoot.
Those coming into power now on a worldwide wave of discontent appear to understand little about the ultimate underlying causes of that discontent.
Human and earthly limits, properly understood, wrote the conservationist Wendell Berry, are not confinements, but rather inducements to fullness of relationship and meaning.
On this episode, Nate is joined by the creator of Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth, to discuss alternative economies that measure more than just the material wealth created by a society.
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.
The degrowth movement exists to advance these difficult arguments – to take the large body of evidence as to why the current economic process is failing, and propose a range of alternatives which might avert the catastrophic failure of this system.
