Envisioning Degrowth Food Systems

By working together, we can build a mutually supportive future that regenerates earth systems, including the human condition.

Edited books on degrowth by Anitra Nelson and co-authors. ‘Food for Degrowth’ edited by Anitra Nelson and Ferne Edwards (cover images provided by Anitra Nelson)

Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices, edited by Anitra Nelson and Ferne Edwards is an important contribution not just to debates, but to the practices required for the necessary social and economic transitions towards global environmental sustainability.

Nelson suggests that the term ‘degrowth’ is deliberately provocative and is intended to challenge the prevailing dominant economic paradigm that encourages us to pursue economic growth in all circumstances and at any cost. There have been many contributions to this debate, all seeking to challenge the growth paradigm. One of the most engaging and also one of the earliest is The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth by Kenneth E. Boulding (1966). He sought to contrast the current economy that perceives the earth as an unlimited resource with the reality that it is a closed thermodynamic system in which everything — other than inputs of energy from the sun — is finite:

For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the “cowboy economy”, the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic…