This past week in Cochabamba, Bolivia Evo Morales has tried to sow the seeds of a different enviromental and political ethos for the world. Those at the conference and millions of others like me who were there emotionally understand that capitialism is at the heart of our consumptive disease. The illusion that endless growth is possible within a closed system is obviously impossible.The same idea is at core of the degrowth movement gaining momentum in Europe. Degrowth is a political, economic, and social movement based on environmentalist, anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideas. Degrowth thinkers and activists advocate for the downscaling of production and consumption—the contraction of economies—as overconsumption lies at the root of long term environmental issues and social inequalities.
The Mud Report has often ranted on about the 'want less meme' in an attempt to crudely say the same things. There's two possible outcomes if we don't cure our consumptive disease. One is slow decline into collapse. The other is rapid decline into collapse. As a parent and grandparent i'm hoping for trojan horse like tactic that can slip behind the walls our 'more is better' worldview and insert the 'want less meme' into our cultural me-onome.
"There cannot be much doubt, sustainable development is one of the most toxic recipes."
~ Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906 - 1994)
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's thesis: The Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen is considered the creator of degrowth, and its main theoretician. In 1971, he published a book called The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he noted that the neoclassical economic model did not take into account the second law of thermodynamics, by not accounting for the degradation of energy and matter (i.e. increase in entropy). He associated every economic activity with an increase in entropy, whose increased implied the loss of useful resources. When his work was translated into French in 1979 under the title Demain la décroissance ("tomorrow, degrowth"), it spurred the creation of the movement in France.
A New Climate Movement in Bolivia - by Naomi Klein
