Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Maximize profits, exploit nature, hoard money, and, like Buzz Lightyear, grow the economy to infinity and beyond! That’s the modern economic playbook. But for decades, one renegade country has taken a contrarian stance that actually cares about people’s wellbeing and environmental health: the Himalayan nation of Bhutan.
The forest ecosystem has so much to teach us. We envision a new kind of philanthropy that learns from and mirrors its interconnected resilience.
We rejoin Herman Daly in the late 1970s – a tumultuous time for our renegade economist. His so-called “radical” critiques of endless growth – and his insistence that the economy must operate within the Earth’s limits – left him isolated in his field and at odds with colleagues. Yet, from this difficult period emerged a new vision of economics.
Instead of seeing the Earth as an inventory of resources – as government policymakers and corporations tend to do – people can begin to see the challenge as how to take care of “flows, networks, and relationships” – the dynamic forces that drive living planetary systems.
We stand at a turning point. The tools for impact measurement exist and knowledge continues to grow. But the decisive step is cultural: Are we ready to take impact seriously – not just as a metric but as the goal of our actions?
With this manifesto, we are putting national governments everywhere on notice. We are not going away. We will become bolder in our local experiments and in our challenges to your authority.
We follow Herman from the lecture halls of Louisiana to the forests of Brazil – and through a period of global upheaval and personal transformation. It’s the late 1960s: war, civil rights, and the first whispers of ecological collapse are reshaping the world.
Ecologists, this is a call to emerge from your niche occasionally, enough to acknowledge the root cause of the issues you study. You don’t need to start a new movement. There’s an existing movement of academics and activists establishing the need for degrowth to a steady state economy and raising awareness of this need.
These communities are not just surviving, they are innovating within their means. But without structural support, resilience has its limits.
How is freedom, a polysemantic term, understood by the majority today? What is the relationship between modern freedom and the perpetual growth system? And what kind of freedom would post-growth have to put forward?
Our bodies respond to heat by adapting if we let them. But with the widespread use of air conditioning, few people are obliged to adapt. That actually makes them more susceptible to heat-related illnesses.
From trading posts to tech empires, corporations continue to grow in strength. Without reform, their power may soon eclipse public control entirely.
