Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Gerry's posts Post Back to profile
Gerry McGovern

Degrowth is the only hope

Imagine a world where you work three or four days a week. In your free time, you play sports, spend time with loved ones, garden, and engage with local politics. Overnight shipping, advertising, private jets, billionaires and SUVs no longer exist, but health care, education, and clean electricity are free and available to all.

We must massively reduce our energy and material consumption to have any hope of saving our environment.

grist.org/looking-forward/the-

22 February at 10:33 | Open on mastodon.green
19 comments
Gerry McGovern

They say that degrowth is utopian and delusional. But what could be more utopian and delusional than believing you can infinitely grow, consume, waste and pollute on a finite planet?

22 February at 10:41 | Open on mastodon.green
Thijs_Goverde
dr elmyra

@gerrymcgovern I want to see degrowth supporters set out visions for how we will support the most vulnerable in our society. This piece is pitched to the middle classes (and I do understand the need to appease the middle classes) but I need to see how we will support disabled people, homeless people, poor people, refugees (economic, climate, and otherwise).

22 February at 11:03 | Open on wandering.shop
Gerry McGovern

@elmyra That's a great and important point. From what I've read, universal income is part of the degrowth approach. Fairness is key and essential. It's a cultural mindset that shares a lot with indigenous cultures I've read about.

22 February at 11:19 | Open on mastodon.green
Misuse Case

@elmyra @gerrymcgovern This is an important point because there’s a certain faction of degrowthers who will, when you press them on this issue, act like disability and chronic illness are symptoms of capitalism (instead of things that happen regardless of capitalism) and get real cagey about how we ensure that mobility-limited people will get around in a car-free society and diabetics will get insulin, etc.

/1

22 February at 12:04 | Open on twit.social
Misuse Case

@elmyra @gerrymcgovern Not that I’m against degrowth generally because we have to put up with a lot of junk, pollution, and bullshit with the way things are, but UBI and “doing community care like in ancient times” are not going to substitute for medicine or mobility aids. People need to check their ableism.

/end

22 February at 12:06 | Open on twit.social
dr elmyra

@MisuseCase @gerrymcgovern yep. And even if a non-zero amount of disability and chronic illness *is* caused by capitalism, any degrowth society is going to have to deal with the soon be billions of people with some form of long covid/ME that it will inherit from capitalism. Unless the plan is to just continue capitalism's eugenics campaign against us...

22 February at 12:31 | Open on wandering.shop
Gerry McGovern

@MisuseCase
These are, of course, huge and critical issues. There's so much work to do to try and set the conditions for a better and more sustainable society.

@elmyra

22 February at 12:42 | Open on mastodon.green
Syulang

@elmyra @gerrymcgovern My view is that #degrowth is inevitable and unavoidable simply because infinite growth is literally impossible and always has been.

The question is thus not "Should we pursue degrowth?" but rather "Do we want a managed and organised degrowth, shaped and influenced by human society and our democratic wishes. Or, do we wait for catastrophic, uncontrolled degrowth dished out by natural forces that neither knows nor cares of our collective hopes, dreams and aspirations for society?"

If we have any concern whatsoever for bodycount, we will go with the former.

@elmyra @gerrymcgovern My view is that #degrowth is inevitable and unavoidable simply because infinite growth is literally impossible and always has been.

The question is thus not "Should we pursue degrowth?" but rather "Do we want a managed and organised degrowth, shaped and influenced by human society and our democratic wishes. Or, do we wait for catastrophic, uncontrolled degrowth dished out by natural forces that neither knows nor cares of our collective hopes, dreams and aspirations for society?"

22 February at 12:09 | Open on aus.social
dr elmyra

@Syulang @gerrymcgovern I think what the degrowth rhetoric increasingly glosses over in an effort to appease the middle classes is the need for concurrent radical redistribution. Not just from the private jet owning classes either. That article gives me the creeps because it's very much "you'll still have your lawn and white picket fence, you'll just work three days a week".

22 February at 12:35 | Open on wandering.shop
Gerry McGovern

@elmyra
I was talking to an ecological economist a while back and she was saying that fairness was crucial to dealing with overconusmption. That is the society is fair, people don't feel near as much a need to "keep up with the Joneses'" because their aren't any Joneses. A motto may be: "Nobody gets too high. Nobody let fall too low."

@Syulang

22 February at 12:38 | Open on mastodon.green
Gerry McGovern

@Syulang
A perfect summation. We'll either degrow or be degrown.

@elmyra

22 February at 12:40 | Open on mastodon.green
Tushar Chauhan

@gerrymcgovern Do you realize how uncomfortable the idea of equality and fairness is to the rich and the 'successful' ? The global north will never give up the advantage that colonialism gave it. It would mean sharing and living on equal terms with people considered poor, lazy, uneducated, and many other culturally engrained adjectives ascribed (explicitly or implicitly) to the losers of the colonial lottery. This also works within countries and groups with disparate income distributions.

22 February at 11:29 | Open on mastodon.mit.edu
🍉

@tchauhan @gerrymcgovern I think many who support degrowth do realize this, yes.

22 February at 11:50 | Open on tech.lgbt
Tushar Chauhan

@cozymel @gerrymcgovern Yes, but it needs to be said more often, especially to audiences from the tipped half of the scale. And to establish a cloakroom where privilege can be checked out before entering the discussion.

Otherwise it invariably ends up being an economic or socioeconomic argument without historical context.

22 February at 12:04 | Open on mastodon.mit.edu
Starry Starry Knight

@gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green Ultimately the fairest method of distribution of finite resources is a lottery... a method to which humans are evolutionary programmed solidly against...

22 February at 11:46 | Open on sharkey.world
Foxgirlthing Foamer

@gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green actually we can have two day shipping but only with a little something called HIGH SPEED FREIGHT TRAINS (and also Steeplecab Electric Freight Trains) #Trainposting

22 February at 11:51 | Open on transfem.social
Nicole Parsons
Go Up