{"id":58791,"date":"2021-07-28T09:37:59","date_gmt":"2021-07-28T14:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58791"},"modified":"2021-07-28T09:39:11","modified_gmt":"2021-07-28T14:39:11","slug":"58791","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58791","title":{"rendered":"On Degrowth"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Degrowth<\/a><\/h3>\n
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“The Good Life” mural painted by Amanda Lynn, Forestville, Califonria, 2021. Photo: Kamran Nayeri.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

What is degrowth? <\/b><\/p>\n

Degrowth is an ambiguous\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>label used by different currents that have emerged or have been reconsidered as such since the 1960s when the contemporary environmentalist movement got underway.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>The bulk of these movements identify as Greens although it includes eco-anarchists (e.g. Trainer 2010; Australian\u00a0Simplicity Institute<\/span><\/a>) and others.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>The ambiguity of what degrowth stands for is a problem both for its proponents and its critics that sometimes misrepresent it.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I will briefly review and discuss degrowth by focusing on a recent book\u00a0The Case for Degrowth<\/i>\u00a0(2020) by Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D\u2019Alisa, and Federico Demaria (herein, \u201cThe authors\u201d). Mike Davis has recommended the book as \u201celoquent and urgent.\u201d The authors themselves declare: \u201cThe purpose of this book is to motivate and empower citizens, policy makers, and activists to reorient livelihoods and politics around equitable wellbeing.\u201d (p. 5)<\/p>\n

In their view:<\/p>\n

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\u201cDegrowth makes the case that we have to produce and consume differently, and also less.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>That we have to share more and distribute more fairly, while the pie shrinks. To do so in ways that support pleasurable lives in resilient societies and environments requires values and institutions that produce different kinds of persons and relations.\u201d (ibid.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yet degrowth \u201cdoes not claim one unitary theory or plan of action. A remarkably diverse network of thinkers and actors experiment with different initiatives and engage in healthy debates about what degrowth, and what form it can or should take un different contexts.\u201d (p. 19)<\/p>\n

Thus, degrowth appears as as d\u00e9croissance in France, decrescita in Catalonia, and sumak kawsay (an ancient Quechua word for \u201cgood living\u201d) or Bon Vivir in Latin America, Ubuntu in South Africa, and so on.<\/p>\n

Intellectual sources of degrowth<\/b><\/p>\n

At its core degrowth is about volunteer simplicity as a lifestyle choice. Voluntary simplicity has deep historical roots. In the U.S. its intellectual origins is in\u00a0American transcendentalism<\/span><\/a>, most directly the teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the more practical example of Henry David Thoreau.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>In the Western tradition simplicity is a theme in Christianity. According to\u00a0St. Thomas Aquinas, God is\u00a0infinitely simple. The Roman Catholic and Anglican religious orders of\u00a0Franciscans\u00a0also strive for personal simplicity. Members of the\u00a0Religious Society of Friends\u00a0(Quakers) practice the\u00a0Testimony of Simplicity, which involves simplifying one’s\u00a0life\u00a0to focus on what is important and disregard or avoid what is least important. Simplicity is tenet of\u00a0Anabaptistism<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Recent sources of degrowth come from the\u00a0Club of Rome<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>a\u00a0think tank<\/span>\u00a0headquartered in\u00a0Winterthur<\/span>,\u00a0Switzerland<\/span>. Meadows, et. al. (1972) published\u00a0The Limits to Growth<\/span><\/a>\u00a0a report prepared at Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u00a0(MIT) using simulation models to predicate the future of economic growth on a planet with limited resources. In 2012, one of the researchers of the original study, Randers (2012), published the last report\u00a02052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years<\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Intellectually more interesting sources include E. F. Schumacher\u2019s\u00a0Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered<\/i>\u00a0(1973) and \u00a0\u201cBuddhist Economics<\/span><\/a>\u201d (1966) as well as Herman Daly\u2019s stationary state economics such as\u201cTowards a Steady-State Economy<\/span><\/a>.\u201d\u00a0(2008) and others (see,\u00a0here<\/span><\/a>).\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Degrowth “The Good Life” mural painted by Amanda Lynn, Forestville, Califonria, 2021. Photo: Kamran Nayeri. What is degrowth? Degrowth is an ambiguous\u00a0\u00a0label used by different currents that have emerged or have been reconsidered as such since the 1960s when the contemporary environmentalist movement got underway.\u00a0\u00a0The bulk of these movements identify as Greens although it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[203,31544],"class_list":["post-58791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-degrowth","tag-kamran-nayeri"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58791"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58793,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58791\/revisions\/58793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}