Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This is an online course on living well within our means. The pun here is intentional. For, what we are exploring in this course is not just ways of reducing our consumption to levels that enable natural systems to self-regenerate, but that we do so in ways that permit a high quality of life — that we live within our means and that we live well.
In the following I outline three critical areas that in my opinion can further the UBI debate, guided by the overarching question of what might an open ended, ecologically sound and socially just welfare system and pathway towards it look like.
If Guerrilla Translation is a co-op, think of the co-op members as shareholders. Okay, like in an evil corporation, but bear with us. Each member is an owner, holding different types of shares in the collective.
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.
Considering the large ecological debts of the Global North and the related structural inequalities of power and wealth, it can be doubted that a one-fits-all solution such as the SDGs helps bridge the existing extreme inequalities between countries.
We desperately need an economy that can meet humanity’s needs without risking environmental meltdown and undermining the basis for civilization. It’s a smaller economy, but one concerned with meaning and purpose rather than growth.
So here’s what we can do. Let’s not waste time speculating. Let’s impose a legal limit on annual resource use and waste – something that de-growthers have been demanding for a long time – and tighten that limit year-on-year until we are back down to planetary boundaries.
REconomy practitioners is a virtual community of practice (CoP) of and for regenerative entrepreneurs. We do our work locally and we co-create and self-organise as REconomy practitioners to benefit from peer-to-peer support, social learning and coordinated action at translocal, transnational and global scale.
I reject the fetishization of GDP as an objective in the existing economy, so it would make little sense for me to focus on GDP as the objective of a degrowth economy. Wanting to cut GDP is as senseless as wanting to grow it.
The precariat, a mass class defined by unstable labor arrangements, lack of identity, and erosion of rights, is emerging as today’s “dangerous class.” As its demands cannot be met within the current system, the precariat carries transformative potential.
But advocates of the circular economy rarely grapple with a central truth: the circular economy depends on a significant and sustained period of economic degrowth. Instead they tend to focus on innovations that deliver efficiencies and unlock new economic opportunities.
In an era in which we are already dramatically overshooting the planetary boundary on material footprint, this means that aggregate global economic growth cannot continue if we want to avoid chewing through the web of life on which our civilization depends.
