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Champion of degrowth, less is much more (December 1 2012) Champion of degrowth, less is much more (December 1 2012)

Erik Assadourian the American Senior Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute where he studies cultural change, consumerism, degrowth, ecological ethics, corporate responsibility, and sustainable communities, has been profiled in an article by Malgorzata Stawecka for IPS News titled ‘For Champions of Degrowth, Less Is Much More’. Assadourian states “…intentional societal shifting is essential for a world where seven billion humans are depleting Earth’s biocapacity and threatening the collapse of key ecosystem services, like climate regulation, fisheries, pollination, and water purification, by not proactively pursuing a path of degrowth, then we accept that instead of degrowth we’ll have an uncontrolled global contraction that will lead to much more discomfort and human suffering than degrowth ever would. … The main challenge degrowth entails is the obvious one: how do we convince those with wealth and power to be willing to redistribute this to others – both within and across societies. All would benefit if that dynamic were altered … supporting efforts to create informal economic opportunities like small-scale farming and community gardening, bartering, and repair could help in creating new means for people to sustain themselves … As people worked less, they’d earn less, in turn reducing their overall luxury consumption; fewer people would fly, they’d buy smaller homes, they’d choose smaller cars or car-free lifestyles, and so on, while this would be seen negatively by some, the newfound leisure time and less-stressful lives would offset this – especially if governments also strengthened their traditional role of providing a robust set of public goods: libraries, public transit, safe drinking water, and so on. And these public goods could be funded by increased taxation of the wealthiest, which would also help reduce luxury consumption by the very segment of society having the largest ecological impact on the planet…”

 

Inspired by Malgorzata Stawecka ow.ly/fuLN7 image source Linkedin ow.ly/fuLL2

Charles H. Lineweaver the Australian Astrophysicist and Senior Fellow at the Planetary Science Institute believes finding planets outside the solar system that can sustain life should be made a top priority, and may be crucial for our survival as a species. Lineweaver profiled by Darren Osbourne stated “Determining whether these planets are habitable has become the new holy grail of astronomy, It’s probably one of the biggest, most confusing, and important issues that planetary scientists are going to have to deal with in the next 10 to 20 years. …Over the past few decades our exploration of the Earth has turned up life in all kinds of weird environments where we didn’t think life could be in, and we’re finding all types of extraterrestrial environments that we didn’t know about before, as these two groups expand they start to overlap in big ways, and that’s where habitable planets will be found. …Life, by managing its own environment, makes a planet habitable. It has produced adaptive features as a result of Darwinian evolution to live in colder and warmer environments. …The next step will be to develop a satellite that can look at the atmospheres of these planets, which will be able to give us some information about whether there is life there or not, …and if we don’t find one, maybe we’ll go extinct.”

Inspired by Darren Osborne ow.ly/bs3tA image source Facebook ow.ly/bs1T8

Richard Heinberg the US Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators, has published an article on Aljazeera discussing humanity’s choices to either compete or cooperate in future resource management. Heinberg states “The world’s governments engage continually in both cooperative and competitive behavior, though sometimes extremes of these tendencies come to the fore – with open conflict exemplifying unbridled competition. Geopolitics typically involves both cooperative and competitive strategies, with the long-term goal centered on furthering national interest… If the path towards increasing competition leads to both internal and external conflict, then the result – for winners and losers alike, in a “full” world seeing rapid resource depletion – will most probably be economic and ecological ruin accompanied by political chaos… Yet this is not the only outcome available to world leaders and civil society. A cooperative strategy is at least theoretically feasible – and its foundations already exist in institutions and practices developed during recent decades.”

 

Inspired by Richard Heinberg http://ow.ly/96xbM image source twitter http://ow.ly/96xvU

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