Manuel Casal Lodeiro

The proposed model, Community Development and Resilience Cooperatives (CDRCs[1]), relies on three fundamental pillars to articulate its strategy: direct democracy, cooperativism, and agroecology.

That we have to live within the limits of the planet was already clear; now we are going a step further and proposing that degrowth is a reality and that together we have to design a political roadmap so that this degrowth does not fall, as always, on the most vulnerable.

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.

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.

I’m happy to communicate that yesterday, 2009/08/27, the city council of the Borough of Teo, in Galicia (NW Spain), passed a resolution acknowledging peak oil. As far as we know it’s the second Spanish local authority in doing so after La Palma in Canary Islands in 2007.