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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Degrowth: conceptual dynamite shaking the foundation of growthism
“In 1973, the ecological economist Herman Daly published his book Toward a Steady-State Economy, making the case for an upper limit on material-resource use and economic activity. The idea was accepted and elaborated upon by other heretical economists and environmentalists. However, it became increasingly clear to a broader range of researchers and analysts that economic growth must not only be halted but also reversed.
“A year before Daly’s book was published, the Austrian philosopher André Gorz coined the term décroissance (French for degrowth), referring to the degrowth of material production. Starting in the early 2010s, the degrowth movement began to spread widely. Degrowth is now the subject of hundreds of articles in academic journals, shelves full of books, and the open-source Degrowth Journal.
“Giorgos Kallis defined degrowth as ‘a trajectory where the ‘throughput’ (energy, materials and waste flows) of an economy decreases while welfare, or well-being, improves’. In this vision, the economy is nonexploitative and radically egalitarian. Infrastructure, resources, and goods and services related to health, education, water, and energy are treated as a commons. Production is localized. The economy is diverse, with cooperatives and nonprofits predominating.
“Degrowth stands in stark opposition to the ‘green growth’ argument that physical and economic expansion is not subject to biophysical limits and can be rendered ecologically benign through technological means. And the degrowth vision is prevailing. A 2023 survey of 789 climate-policy researchers found almost three-quarters of them favoring degrowth or no-growth over green growth.
“Timothée Parrique has explained that degrowth is intentionally provocative.
‘If sustainable development or green economy advertise a certain vision of prosperity, degrowth subvertises it; it hijacks the notion of growth. The word itself creates dissensus [the opposite of consensus]. It acts as a semantic weapon of mass disruption, as conceptual dynamite shaking the foundation of growthism and making space for discussion.
“The chief focus of my book, Anthropause, is on degrowth as emancipation. That is, I examine the many ways we can free ourselves from the growth economy and its many harmful impacts by seeing true wealth as the collective pursuit of meaning, social justice, and beauty while living within ecological limits.”
Reclaim your future
“Europe is trembling. We stare at the news tickers, paralyzed by what’s going on in the White House, what tariffs might be imposed next, or which gas tap Moscow might turn off. We feel helpless. We feel like pawns on a chessboard moved by giants. To understand the solution, we must first accept the diagnosis. We are vulnerable because we are needy.
“We have outsourced our basic needs. We don’t cook; we order delivery. We don’t mend clothes; we buy new ones on Shein for the price of a coffee. We don’t make things; we buy plastic gadgets on Temu that break after three uses. We don’t talk to our neighbors; we doomscroll on Instagram and TikTok, feeding our brains with rage-bait generated in Silicon Valley.
“Every time we buy a fast-fashion t-shirt, we are funding the very geopolitical power that makes us nervous. Every hour we spend on social media, we are letting foreign tech giants reshape our culture and polarize our democracies. Every cubic meter of gas we burn to heat poorly insulated houses funds aggressive wars.
“Solarpunk is often dismissed as purely aesthetic. But true Solarpunk is political. It is about decentralization. If we want to become independent of the ‘Big Three’ (US tech, Chinese manufacturing, Russian energy), we need to localize our survival. We need to stop being consumers and start being producers and stewards. Here is what that looks like in practice. . .”
Sentience, feedback, selection, evolution
“Now we turn to one of the more perplexing aspects of materialism. How can sentient living beings possibly arise from matter alone? Dualism asserts a sharp ontological divide between animate and inanimate (mind and matter as a parallel aspect), categorically prohibiting animate beings from being wholly composed of inanimate matter.
“Our inability to connect all the dots from atoms to conscious experience tempts us to declare that failure to map it means it may as well be declared non-existent. Materialist monism amounts to being satisfied that matter/interactions can plausibly form the entire basis of reality, even if we don’t understand how. Anyway, lacking a complete map, how does materialism deal with our experience as sentient beings, or other sentient life?
“Microbes sense and react to the conditions they encounter, as do spores, sperm cells, seeds, plants, fungi, and animals. Many technological devices we manufacture have no trouble accomplishing these feats either, in their clumsy ways. Clunkiness aside, sensing-and-reacting, then, is not the hard part.
“All Life, or all matter is empowered to act and react in this world in ways that necessarily effect change in the world beyond themselves via copious channels of interaction. But how is sensing connected to action? In microbes it might be that sensed conditions trigger generation of certain proteins whose presence compels a particular action.
“But how does the organism know what to do, so that it executes good/adaptive decisions? That’s the magic of evolution: it keeps organisms that are configured to respond appropriately, and terminates those who aren’t. So, even a random choice will be ‘good’ in some circumstances. Life, in a sense, is a scheme for locking in adaptively beneficial interactions in contextually relevant scenarios. This is the power of feedback in the presence of self-replication.
“Not having the whole picture ourselves does not at all mean the picture can’t be painted by the universe itself over billions of years of trial and error in feedback. To declare [materialist monism] impossible seems a hasty, arrogant, and evidence-free assertion.”
An evolving web resource of allies promoting paradigm shift
“A Primer For Paradigm Shift is not about trying to make the American Consumer Culture ‘green’, rather it calls for leaving the American Consumer Culture behind. Paradigm shift is not a future utopia. It is part of every day life for a growing number of people.
“The Primer’s scope is personal, home, neighborhood and nearby. The ideal is for modest projects to connect, build on each other, and increase the scale of economic, social and political transformation. We have many allies, assets and tools to work with plus a wide range of real life examples of paradigm shift to help point the way.
“The Primer is free. The website is ‘living’. There will be new content added continuously. The Primer invites input from readers, especially information about groups and individuals who are engaged in projects and initiatives that fit within the realm of paradigm shift.
“The Primer explains that virtually every progressive public interest organization, large and small, local or national, exists to repair some kind of damage caused by capitalism and its consumer culture. That means they are all on the same ‘Team’. My experience is that capitalism is not broken. Rather, mayhem and damage to people and planet is just what it does.
“”How we Define Our Own Time And Money is how we pay for and create paradigm shift. Be The Change encourages the reader to shift their own lifestyle and then become an advocate based on their own experience. Another aspect is Taking Paradigm Shift To A Wider Audience.
“A core task of paradigm shift is reducing eco-footprints. The Primer calls for de-growth in a graceful way. There is a full explanation of the use and value of the ‘footprint calculator’. Economics is about taking care of the needs of life. Many needs can be taken care with barter, trade and social cohesion instead of cash, while some ‘needs’ can simply be eliminated. We have many tools, assets and allies to work with.”
Decentralized bioregional economic tools
“If bioregions are going to become more economically self-reliant and culturally self-directed, they must be able to insulate themselves from the neocolonial workings of global finance and markets. This means that bioregions must be able to assert their own investment priorities by intensifying their intra-regional commerce. Their basic challenge is to fend off outside commercial control and extraction so that the regional economy can benefit from the ‘multiplier effect’ of locally circulated money.
“Without some deliberate strategies for consolidating market activity within bioregions, capitalist businesses and global capital will override regional eco-stewardship and self-determination. An agenda this broad, ambitious, and long-term will necessarily vary from one bioregion to another. These bioregional strategies include:
- Community participation in creating and managing small, shared infrastructures like WiFi access, solar energy, water systems, grain milling, information-sharing, and databases can be catalytic for the bioregional economy in general.
- Assuring that major bioregional assets like arable land, groundwater, housing, forests, etc. remain inalienable – off-limits in perpetuity to private purchase – makes a bioregion more stable and secure.
- Market structures and relationships bring together farmers, suppliers, food processors, wholesalers, distributors, institutional food services, and restaurants as coherent regional ‘food webs’.
- Peer-organized governance of a network of agroecological farmers, technologies, researchers, and civil society players that can work at multiple, interconnected scales.
- Complementary bioregional currencies, mutual credits systems, timebanking, crowdfunding.
- Regions can develop ‘import replacement’ strategies so that specific crops, goods, and services can be offered by ‘homegrown’ independent businesses as possible, rather than depending on national and international businesses.
- A number of experiments are underway to develop climate-friendly, hyperlocal building materials that can acceptably substitute for carbon-intensive modern synthetics. Examples include hemp, stray, clay, ecologically harvested timber and wood chips.
- Culture-led energy transitions are useful to support local energy-generation to unleash greater local self-determination, creativity, and system-resilience.
- Indigenous peoples have enormous contributions that they can make to bioregioning efforts – in resurrecting eco-cultural practices of the past, learning about the spirits and behaviors of more-than-human life, and forging shared commitments to restoration.
- Bioregional festivals.”
Deep adaptation in the face of failed climate goals
“The world is poised to overshoot the goal of limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as a three-year period ending in 2025 has breached the threshold. The 1.5-degree target was set at the Paris climate conference. But climate scientists say that 10 years of weak action since mean that nothing can now stop the target being breached. ‘Climate policy has failed’ said atmospheric chemist Robert Watson.
“There is a growing fear that climate [disruption] in the future won’t, as it has until now, happen gradually. It will happen suddenly, beyond which things cannot be put back together again. ‘We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world with devastating consequences for people and nature’, says British global-systems researcher Tim Lenton.”
Gas-fired electricity will surge 50% just to power AI
“The US is leading a huge global surge in new gas-fired power generation driven by the expansion of energy-hungry data centers to service artificial intelligence. Projects in development are expected to grow existing global gas capacity by nearly 50%.
“All of this new gas energy is set to come at a significant cost to the climate. The gas projects in development in the US will, if all completed, cause 12.1bn tonnes in carbon dioxide emissions over their lifetimes, which is double the current annual emissions coming from all sources in the US.
“Said Jenny Martos, project manager at GEM’s oil and gas plant tracker, ‘As the AI bubble inflates, the US must decide whether it will double down on a fossil future while the rest of the world pivots to renewables’. ‘Frenzied data center growth with little transparency or guardrails puts the public at risk of massive cost increases’, said Steve Clemmer, director of energy research at the Union of Concerned Scientists.”
Most radioactive spot in the Western Hemisphere
“After many years on a back burner, the first step of work has begun on one of the Hanford nuclear reservation’s most radioactive sites. Two weeks ago, Hanford finished loading its first [concrete] cask with capsules of extremely radioactive strontium and cesium from 13-foot-deep water pools into a larger cask to be stored in a dry area. One cask holds 121 capsules.
While water blocks radiation, there’s a risk of the pools leaking radioactive water into the ground. Hanford started converting the underground tank wastes into glass in October. All of the 1,936 capsules are expected to be in storage in 18 casks by 2028 or 2029.”
Energy conservation instead of nukes at data centers
“The Pacific Northwest’s electrical grid is strained by aging transmission lines and data centers that use enormous amounts of energy to power artificial intelligence. Oregon and Washington could potentially see rolling blackouts during extreme weather as soon as this year, while green energy sources like wind and solar are slow to come online.
“But there’s a quieter solution that’s playing out across the region one home, one school and one business at a time. It’s an energy [conservation] policy that Oregon has been pushing for decades. ‘If we use less energy, we won’t have to invest so much in new power plants, new transmission lines’, Oregon Department of Energy director Janine Benner said.
“In 1980, the Northwest Power Act was central to the idea of energy efficiency. It was cheaper for ratepayers if they could reduce their energy use so power companies didn’t have to invest in more nuclear plants, said Jennifer Light of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council (NWPCC).
“‘If we can encourage consumers to buy these products that use just a little bit less than the alternative, adding that up over millions of households or millions of businesses creates this large amount of energy savings. And that’s really what energy efficiency is’, Light said.
“By 2050, NWPCC estimates the region can reduce energy use enough that conservation will have the same effect on the grid as a doubling of what Portland General Electric delivered to its customers in 2024.
“Since 2002, an Oregon nonprofit, Energy Trust of Oregon, has been funded by ratepayers through a surcharge on utility bills labeled ‘public purpose charge’. That small surcharge brings in hundreds of millions of dollars for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. Through this program, Energy Trust has delivered 216 energy efficient manufactured homes since 2022 and is hoping to deliver an additional 110 homes this year.”
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