The Tao of Degrowth
I came to the degrowth movement from a spiritual perspective to begin with. Before I get too woo-woo for any environmentalist academics, allow me to explain. I first heard the term “degrowth” from reading Charles Eisenstein, and it stuck in my brain as the first vision I’d heard articulated for how to do this whole “total societal transformation” thing. It has always been a total vision to me, one that encompasses change far beyond economic contraction and environmental sustainability: a complete reshuffling of societal order so that a natural dynamic equilibrium of people and nature meeting their needs can arise.
Degrowth, in my mind, has always entailed building a society around a revolutionary commitment to shared human interests operating within our ecological means. That means promoting social justice, because it’s inextricably linked to ecological justice. It means promoting a solidarity economy, because placing decision-making power with the workers is essential to the well-being of people becoming front and center in the economy. It means changing our self-concept to one of harmony with nature, in contrast to the capitalist drive to accumulate and hoard.
And to me, the so-called “spiritual” is no different from the natural. It is emotions, it is nature, it is finding harmony within and between those realms. That’s all I’m talking about here, because my understanding of…
