Sam Bliss

Degrowth resonated with many people in our community. That is the remarkable result of DegrowthFest, for me. I am thrilled but not surprised that so many friends and neighbors were keen on this movement and idea that is so dear to me.

Once free from the efficiency mindset, we see that setting legal limits is not the only solution to the Jevons phenomenon. If efficiency makes growth, maybe inefficiency makes degrowth.

In their textbook Ecological Economics, Herman Daly and Josh Farley list sustainability and justice as the field’s first two goals. If the GND’s goal is to facilitate, through policy, the transition to a socially equitable low-carbon economy, then ecological economics basically bills itself as the science of the Green New Deal.

It turns out, degrowth is a lot of things: a criticism, a proposal, a hypothesis, a provocation, a conversation, a deceleration, a downscaling, a reimagining, a project, a lens, a movement, a set of practices, an invitation to dream of worlds beyond growth.

In this context, degrowth is the proposal to intentionally shrink the physical size of wealthy economies, whereas decoupling is the hope that growing economies will at last break free from growing resource use and environmental damage.

Your body makes itself from the matter around you. What you eat, drink, inhale, touch, and experience literally becomes you. You are your environment, and it is you. Releasing toxic substances into the environment means injecting them into bodies, human and non-human. The climate system connects everyone’s environments.