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Tristan Sykes's avatar

Language is important, but honesty, is more so.

When I write, I'm assuming the audience is well-enough educated. Regardless of whether they like what I have to say, I don't infantalise them with dishonest and abstract fantasies of what will never be.

This is collapse. The 'Great Dying' of the End-Permian mass-extinction took tens of thousands of years to do what is happening now in hundreds. We are utterly #fubar. Finished. #TheEnd.

Regarding the laudable if somewhat misguided efforts of The Degrowth Movement, ask yourself this -

Can the unsustainable be made sustainable again?

"While I agree with the broad goals of degrowth, the specific vision championed by most degrowth advocates relies on an egalitarian distribution of industrial goods. It calls for “modern housing, healthcare, education, heating/cooling, transit, washing machines, refrigerators, induction stoves, sanitation systems, computers, mobile phones, internet, etc…for all 8.5 billion people.” Its advocates claim this can be sustainably provided based on calculations of the energy and material inputs necessary to produce and operate all of that stuff.

The problem is that the calculations are laughable."

"...the calculations are laughable." - Very clearly, even efforts directed towards what is poorly described as 'degrowth', in effect, demand the maintenance of an already unjust and ecocidal system of extraction and exploitation and a hypergrowth of this violence and destruction as the systems of production are transformed, (at least in theory) redesigned, and built anew - energy, housing, transport, agriculture, medicine.... etc.

The truth is that these efforts cannot be divorced from the 'externalities' of a finite world, nor can they be divorced from the imperialist economics which would enable such a transformation. None of these efforts can be said to be 'growth-free' and none of these supposed degrowth efforts can be termed 'stable-state'.

In reality, none of these processes occurs without material/energy use and the entropic waste/pollution which inevitably follows it. None of this occurs without violence to the more-than-human world, and none of this occurs without maintaining violent systems of capitalist exploitation and oppression.

This popular and mainstream version of degrowth perpetrates the same violence it claims to mitigate. Alternatively, rather than make new and transform, lets seek to repurpose the enormous amount of already existing products, as salvage in a collapsing world.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-07-16/on-abundance/

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Richard Bergson's avatar

Guilty! Although I do like the term 'sufficiency' in place of 'degrowth' for the uninitiated.

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