Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Degrowth means primarily the abolition of economic growth as a social objective. This implies a new direction for society, one in which societies will use fewer natural resources and will organize and live differently from today. Ecological economists define degrowth as an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that will reduce societies’ throughput of energy and raw materials.
If climate crisis has a silver lining, it may be the power to provoke residents of high-GDP high-emission countries to question the portrayal of their own societies as “developed, ” in the sense of full-grown, perfected, complete.
Ten years ago, Brian Eno suggested a word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. The word he came up with is “scenius.” Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes.
By focusing solely on the ‘creating a better world’ part, and refusing, as a movement, to give a narrative of the systemic, structural reasons that led to this situation of near-collapse, I think the permaculture movement is undermining its potential. What I am criticising is the representation, by the permaculture movement and mainstream media, of individual attitudes as the solution.
When – as with climate change – we are dealing with something scary, unprecedented, wicked, and huge – something which causes a lot of anxiety, depression, and despair [a word whose etymology, in French and in Spanish, seems to derive from the lack of hope) – hope seems integral to our future.
The eight richest billionaires now command as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population. Analyzing the roots of such disparity has become a focus of economists; doing something about it, a focus of social justice activists. In his new book Success and Luck, behavioral economist Robert Frank asks, on the more granular level, why do some succeed in life while others do not?
At Rizoma Field School, we hope to educate a network of individuals who can hack, subvert, create, resist and share strategies across contexts. We encourage mutually beneficial partnerships so that we can work together in envisioning and creating a world that can be continually better for all its inhabitants.
The word that keeps coming to my mind to describe this evening is ‘fragile’. It captures both the strength and the vulnerability of my situation, of the puffins and of the islands themselves.
As our focus shifts from individuals and individual species as the unit of survival to the collective of life — its complex dynamic interactions and relationships — we begin to see that collaborative and symbiotic patterns and interactions are of more fundamental importance than competition as a driving force of evolution.
Thankfully, the elements of a new imaginary are all around us. The outlines of a new political economy that is both humane and in which the fulfillment of the person is conjoined to the well-being of one’s community are already visible…
Our global civilization is facing the threat of its own Big One in the form of climate change, resource depletion, and species extinction. If our worldview is built on shaky foundations, we need to know about it: we need to find the cracks and repair them before it’s too late.
If we ever thought we had secure access to things like education or health care, housing or income support, that sense of security is seeping away. In the US and across Europe, the rise of populism signals new depths of anger among people who feel betrayed by the powerful and out of control of their lives.
