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