https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/growth-degrowth-kohei-saito-susskind/

The EDC Book Club continues with a discussion of this short and intriguing book. Please share your thoughts about the book in this discussion thread, and join us if you can for a live discussion with the author Anthony Galluzzo and EDC curators Mike Degani and Anand Pandian, on Tuesday, April 30th at…

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A great discussion about the book: the concept of an imperial mode of living, Saito’s critique of Marx and his critique of contemporary constructions of the future, as well as the strategies of collective organizing he suggests as pathways toward a viable degrowth communism. We talked about the stagnation of capitalist economies around the…

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The EDC Book Club continues with a discussion of this exciting new book. Please share your thoughts about the book in this discussion thread, and join us if you can for a live discussion on Wednesday, March 27th:

https://community.ecodesigncollective.org/event/read-with-us-kohei-saitos-slow-down/

Wonderful group discussion, once again!

I mentioned the 10 week Alchemize program I’m halfway through (put on by Green Dreamer podcast, a program about groundedness and creativity): there were two sessions that really spoke to our connections with the non-human, both interior and exterior, and the porousness of the boundary between.

Gavin Van…

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Sending my regrets to the book club for not making it this time. I got about halfway through and was definitely picking up on the unusual verbs. I love that “felting” made it into the summary! To me it described perfectly the texture of a mushroom body on the tongue or between one’s fingers, and I was thrilled to learn that the structure…

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A great conversation today about Entangled Life, thanks to all who joined! Folks out there, have you been reading this book, do you have thoughts you might share? We talked today about the broader relationships that shape us without our awareness or acknowledgment; the invitations the book makes to imagine our shared existence otherwise,…

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I think you’d do better to take each proposal on its own merit rather than make spurious analogies between them. Bemoaning any and all concrete action short of utopian revolution sounds like bad politics and even worse cli-fi.

I’m glad to see you (Michael) put Carbon Coin and geoengineering both in the same bucket, because I have the same (negative) feelings about both of them. I see people get excited about these (and I do think of them as “technofixes”) because they think implementing them is “easier” than, say, wholesale change of the energy system or other…

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The EDC Book Club continues with a discussion of this evocative and captivating book. Please share your thoughts about the book in this discussion thread, and join us if you can for a live discussion on Monday, February 19th:

https://community.ecodesigncollective.org/event/edc-book-club-entangled-life-by-merlin-sheldrake/

Totally agreed, on the importance of all the relational and imaginative work it took to get to those interventions. Any change would require this. I was thinking about why these specific technologies were the ultimate fulcrum. You can organize collectively toward a commitment to many kinds of “instruments,” if you will. These seemed to have…

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I honestly find that a puzzling characterization of both elements. Solar geoengineering in the book required radical and defiant political will from a nation-state; carbon coin required central banks from the most powerful nation-states to back it. In both cases they are desperate actions held aloft by very specific political-ethical…

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Thanks Susan. The “magic pill” quality of both the carbon coin and the geoengineering experiments was the one aspect of the book I was most reluctant to go along with. Good to know he’s continuing to weigh these matters.

I looked through my notes, trying to find where I heard KSR walking back the Carbon Coin… and couldn’t find any links, just my notes about it. Separately, I did find this interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6E34AYmY6A) where he was clear that he didn’t believe in blockchain or crypto as being “the answer.” And that people assume…

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I enjoyed the conversation, and want to follow up on one point:

One of the real strengths of the book as a kind of cultural road map is to take seriously the power of money and its incentives in driving the plot’s events, thus helping us ordinary people see the anchoring role of central banks and finance in any transition (i.e. ‘putting our…

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Great summary! And such a pleasure to be in conversation with everyone.

As an alternative to the hero’s journey, I mentioned Gail Carriger’s Heroine’s Journey, which talks about a different (not gendered) narrative structure where the protagonist’s connection to family and community is broken and the arc of the story is about…

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What a great live discussion today! Thanks to everyone who attended. Folks who are interested in this book but couldn’t be there with us, here are some of the things we talked about, please feel free to chime in and we can continue the discussion here.

We talked a lot about transition and what propels radical change, whether events like a…

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We’re kicking off the EDC Book Club with a discussion of this recent cli-fi novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. Please share your thoughts about the book in this discussion thread, and join us if you can for a live discussion on Wednesday, January 24th:

https://community.ecodesigncollective.org/event/edc-book-club-ministry-for-the-future-by-kim-stanley-robinson/