Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
That platform, Artisans Cooperative, just launched its marketplace in October 2023, ahead of the holiday season. It is a place where artists and makers can list and sell their goods, and collectively run a business. It is a place where customers can browse and find actually-unique items that they can trust are made with care and skill.
Central to the idea of the Restanza, as proposed by the Italian anthropologist, Vito Teti, is that places sometimes characterised as “left behind,” inferior to the metropolitan hubs of the modern world, can be brought back to vitality, that being left behind can be reimagined as the positive act of purposively staying behind.
Perhaps the title of this piece is a bit too provocative. Even if Hannah Richie falls within the usual eco-modernist discourse, she is not obsessed with economic growth. This builds a good basis for agreement.
In a world where capitalism and green growth are often touted as the only options, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto is a glimmer of hope shining through otherwise dark times.
Some 24 million United States workers could be affected by the coming “silver tsunami,” which refers to business owners of the baby boomer generation retiring without a succession plan for their businesses.
The Cuban version of degrowth is not affixed to the looming climate catastrophe, but rather, more fundamentally, focused on the fine details of triumphing in a world of chronic deprivation. In Cuba, the US embargo is the mother of invention.
In the global North, degrowth should not be posed as a movement that calls for unjust sacrifice but as an instrumental tool in helping to end it.
So at one level, the choice we have is whether we manage growth down gently, and improve wellbeing outcomes at the same time, or just have it come crashing down around us.
But: I suspect that the only way for the Post Office to regain trust is to do this: to become a mutual, with proper public objectives about serving our communities. To be a proper Guardian, in other words.
We’re reaching the point where the climate crisis slows the machine.
“How can we change the system?” There are different ways one can answer this question. One way that, at least to me, is increasingly becoming the silver bullet for large-scale transformation is Community-Based Wealth Building.
Perhaps what the sustainability movement most needs is not more alternative products and technologies, but simply a confrontation with growth – something much less material. Thus, just talking about degrowth constitutes bold environmental action.
