Degrowth

Yurtopia

October 29, 2019 — September 23, 2023

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Figure 1

degrowth, has its most lusciously designed expression in The Dark Mountain Manifesto, and is a modern pole around which Malthusian arguments congregate. Anarcho-primitivism is an affiliated movement.

I started this notebook because I noticed an increasing frequency of clashes between degrowthers and ecomodernists, and I would like to track this fissure line in environmental politics.

1 Local degrowth and NIMBYism

Very important expression of degrowth conflict is in NIMBYism for infrastructure. If your local stand of old-growth primordial forest is beautiful, but it stands in the way of a new transmission line that could aid in decarbonising the power grid, then what do you do? Ecomodernists tend to sacrifice the local forest for the greater good. Degrowthers are more likely to think this stand fo forest is sacred. Also one might adopt that stance if one did not trust large-scale institutions to actually follow through on making the sacrifice of this forest preserve other forest.

Figure 2

2 References

Pollin. 2018. “De-Growth Vs a Green New Deal.” New Left Review, II,.
Tainter. 2006. Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse.” Annual Review of Anthropology.