For researchers and activists seeking to envision a future beyond the toxic obsession with economic growth, today is Global Degrowth Day. 

People and groups around the world today are thinking about what it means to create a "good life for all." What does this idea mean to you? What could it look like? What might make it possible?

Here are some excerpts from a new post on our EDC platform about degrowth, by anthropologist and EDC curator Mike Degani.

“Degrowth is a weird and unsettling word. It sounds more intuitive in the original French— la décroissance. For some that’s the appeal, and for others that’s the problem. In any case, the basic idea is that when economies must constantly grow or die, everyone suffers. 

Oil companies will constantly search for new deposits to drill and environments to befoul, companies will constantly search for new ways to squeeze productivity out of their employees, and governments will constantly look for new territories to colonize in order to secure raw materials.

Degrowth is a proposition to think very deeply about the basic engine of our economic world and try and retrofit it on the fly. It is very close to what we here call ecological design, because it means a planned reduction of useless stuff in the word: poison food, bullshit jobs, and obscene toys like cruises and SUVs. It also means a planned expansion of useful and efficient stuff: public transport, public renewable energy, and more free time to do with what we will.

You can see this in the regenerative principles of permaculture, in experiments with natural building materials that store carbon, in the struggle to protect the lives and lungs of communities in Baltimore from environmental racism, and in the simple pleasures of hanging out for a while—all preoccupations of those of us who have been involved in the Ecological Design Collective.”

Happy Degrowth Day! Read more at the link below.