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Tag: ecosystem
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

Stephen Elop the 47 year old Swedish president and chief executive officer of Nokia Corporation Standing on a burning platform (February 14 2011)

Stephen Elop the 47 year old Swedish president and chief executive officer of Nokia Corporation in a speech posted on an internal blog identified significant concerns at the world’s largest manufacturer of smart-phones, which is quickly being overrun for market share by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Elop using a North Sea analogy warned the company was “standing on a burning platform” and needed to act swiftly to implement radical change to survive, claiming competitors weren’t just taking market share with devices but with an entire powerful enclosed ecosystem which including developers. Elop suggested the battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, resulting in Nokia having to decide how to either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

 

Inspired by Charles Arthur ow.ly/3WD5m image source lucasartoni ow.ly/3WD16

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