How Much Degrowth Is Enough? Rv9

How much degrowth is enough to create a sustainable civilization.

Décroissance Montréal / Montreal Degrowth - John Fullerton & Joshua Farley

Séance plénière sur la finance et la décroissance.

Plenary session on finance and degrowth.

Ozzie Zehner "Solar Cells and Other Fairy Tales : Symbols and Expectations for a Clean Energy Future"

CSTMS Berkeley

This event was held at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

The seductive tales of wind turbines, solar cells, and biofuels foster the impression that with a few technical upgrades, we might just sustain our current energy trajectories without consequence. Media and political coverage lull us into dreams of a clean energy future juxtaposed against a tumultuous past characterized by evil oil companies and the associated energy woes they propagated. Like most fairy tales, this productivist parable contains a tiny bit of truth. And a whole lot of fantasy.

This talk does not expose a scandal or cover-up in the traditional sense, but rather explores a particular alignment of interests and priorities that presents equally provocative questions to the environmental community. Solar cells shine brightly within the idealism of textbooks and the glossy pages of environmental magazines, but real-world experiences reveal a scattered collection of side effects and limitations that rarely mature into attractive realities.

This talk is based on Ozzie's forthcoming book, Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism (University of Nebraska Press, June 2012).

This event sponsored by STSC

Johan Rockstrom : Let the environment guide our development

TEDtalksDirector

Human growth has strained the Earth's resources, but as Johan Rockstrom reminds us, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and change behavior. His research has found nine "planetary boundaries" that can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems.

"Uneconomic growth" Herman Daly (Right Livelihood Award 1996) WWF

RightLivelihoodAward

WWF Sweden made this film with Right Livelihood Award Laureate Herman Daly (RLA 1996).

The End of Economic Growth : Social Regression or New Beginning?

Abstract for Steve Mock:

The powering-down of the world economy ultimately mean re-localization to relatively autonomous, self-sufficient communities. Steven Mock will argue, however, that it is a mistake to assume that such re-localized communities will also be politically and socially progressive. Many social goods such as human equality, freedom of conscience, and social mobility are sustained in part by their functionality in the service of growth-oriented economic structures, and in turn those structures are the product of a unique social grouping called the nation.

The removal of growth as the conceptual centre of the socio-economic system will lead to the erosion of our identification with these communities of common culture, and a decline in the need to provide the mass literacy and public education necessary to maintain them. And, without growth, competition between individuals for roles higher up the social ladder will be replaced by ascribed roles and rigid, inherently inequitable social formations. Degrowth could lead to the end of goods such as social mobility, individualism, meritocracy, egalitarian gender relations, democracy, and cosmopolitanism.

Abstract for Stephen Purdey:

The ever-bigger world economy is now bumping up against, and in some cases breaching constraints imposed by the finitude of the planetary bio-geosphere. Yet, more and faster growth is demanded as a political priority. How can this conundrum be explained?

Complex adaptive systems often display emergent properties, that is, extra, unanticipated properties which emanate from the synergistic interactions of the system’s component parts. The human body is a complex adaptive system which exhibits the emergent property of consciousness. Can a similar property be ascribed to the human population as a whole? Stephen Purdey will present the case that human society on Earth is also a complex adaptive system, suggesting that our population may be endowed with an evolving ‘collective consciousness.’ Still at an early stage of development, this shared consciousness may be vulnerable to momentary impulses, unreflective behaviour, and simplistic ideas. One such idea—that growth is good and more is better—has been institutionalized as a non-negotiable policy priority, forming the core principle of modern global governance. Given that this idea is untenable in the long run, it must be superseded in our emergent ideational domain. A new form of global governance, guided by new ideas and principles, can foster a more mature shared worldview not premised on the lethal illogic of perpetual economic growth.

Source : https://uwaterloo.ca/environment/events/lecture-end-economic-growth-social-regression-or-new-beginning

Juliet Schor : Working Less

Juliet Schor (http://www.julietschor.org/) is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University for 17 years, in the Department of Economics and the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Schor received her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts.

SEA THE TRUTH - In 2048 The Oceans Will Be Empty

www.seathetruth.nl/en/

The state of our oceans and seas is the main focus in “Sea the Truth”. Leading scientists such as Daniel Pauly suggest that if we continue to catch and eat fish at the current rate, the oceans and seas will be empty within 40 years. The hunt for fish is an economic monster on the run: large bottom trawlers are scraping the bottoms of the seas empty, taking with them all living things with destructive force. The massive amount of bycatch is thrown back into the sea, maimed or dead.

Under the guidance of Dutch MP Marianne Thieme, two young marine biologists Marianne van Mierlo and Barbara van Genne, are searching worldwide for scientific information about the condition of our biggest ecosystems, which cover more than two thirds of our planet. Underwater photographer Dos Winkel shows them the beauty of marine life and the enormous threats to which it is exposed. For the documentary the producers filmed in Newfoundland, on Bonaire, on the North Sea, the Azores and at various locations in the Netherlands. Authorities offer the solution of sustainable fisheries projects while leading scientists say that every fish that is taken now, is one too many. This documentary shows that, unfortunately, there is no such thing as “sustainable fishing”.

“Sea the Truth” premiered on May 19th 2011 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The official Sea the Truth DVD is available now! Order here

The Crisis of Civilization : Full Film

http://crisisofcivilization.com/

The Crisis of Civilization is a documentary feature film investigating how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.

Weaving together archival film footage and animations, film-maker Dean Puckett, animator Lucca Benney and international security analyst Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed – author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It – offer a stunning wake-up call proving that ‘another world’ is not merely possible, but on its way.

Like the book on which it is based, the film consists of seven parts which explore the interconnected dynamic of global crises of Climate Catastrophe; Peak Energy; Peak Food; Economic Instability; International Terrorism; and the Militarization Tendency – with a final section on The Post-Peak World.

The film reveals how a failure to understand the systemic context of these crises, linked to neoliberal ideology, has generated a tendency to deal not with their root structural causes, but only with their symptoms. This has led to the proliferation of war, terror, and state-terror, including encroachment on civil liberties, while accelerating global crises rather than solving them.

The real solution, Nafeez argues, is to recognise the inevitability of civilizational change, and to work toward a fundamental systemic transformation based on more participatory forms of living, politically, economically and culturally.

Also featuring clowns, car crashes, explosions, acrobats, super heroes, xylophones and much, much more!

Paul Gilding : The Earth is full

http://www.ted.com

Have we used up all our resources? Have we filled up all the livable space on Earth? Paul Gilding suggests we have, and the possibility of devastating consequences, in a talk that's equal parts terrifying and, oddly, hopeful.

Josh Farley : Rethinking Economic Growth

PCI Fellow Josh Farley explains the concepts and implcations of money as debt, GDP as a measure of the economy,
and economic degrowth. Recorded at the 2012 Montreal Degrowth conference for The Extraenvironmentalist.
Joshua Farley is a renowned ecological economist working to integrate social, human, and natural capital into the way the world views economics. He is a Fellow of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics and a Professor in the Community Development and Applied Economics faculty at the University of Vermont. With economist Herman Daly, Joshua co-authored the foundation textbook Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications; he also co-authored Restoring Natural Capital: Financing and Valuation. Joshua has received several Fellowships and has spent considerable time abroad, including several years teaching ecological economics at the School for Field Studies Centre for Rainforest Studies (CRS) in Far North Queensland Australia. http://www.postcarbon.org/person/36214-joshua-farley

Erik Assadourian Presents at State of the World 2012 Symposium

WorldwatchInst
 

Senior Fellow and State of the World 2012 Co-Director Erik Assadourian presents his chapter "The Path to Degrowth in Overdeveloped Countries" at the Worldwatch Institute's annual book launch and symposium on April 11, 2012.

TEDxWarwick - David MacKay - How the Laws of Physics Constrain Our Sustainable Energy Options

TEDxTalks

Department of Climate Change Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor David MacKay FRS, is responsible for ensuring the best science and engineering advice underpins DECC's policy and decision-making.
In addition to his role at DECC, David is Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. He is internationally known for his research in machine learning, information theory, and communication systems, including the invention of Dasher -- a software interface that enables efficient communication in any language with any muscle. He has taught Physics in Cambridge since 1995 and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society.
David is the author of the critically acclaimed book, Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air, which is intended to help people understand the numbers around sustainable energy.

There's No Tomorrow - Não Há Amanhã (2012) Legendado PT

VictorMendes002

Não Há Amanhã é um documentário animado de 30 minutos sobre o esgotamento de recursos, energia e crescimento. Inspirado nos desenhos animados pró-capitalistas dos anos 40, o filme faz uma sintese dos dilemas energéticos que o mundo enfrenta hoje.

MDD movimento democracia directa : http://www.mddvtm.org/

O Modelo Cooperativo Familiar : http://www.novacomunidade.org/

There's No Tomorrow : http://www.incubatepictures.com/

About time - Examining the case for a shorter working week

lsewebsite

Speaker(s): Professor Juliet Schor, Professor Lord Skidelsky, Professor Tim Jackson
Chair: Anna Coote
Recorded on 11 January 2012 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building.

As the economic crisis deepens, this is the moment to consider moving towards much shorter, more flexible paid working hours -- sharing out jobs and unpaid time more fairly across the population. The new economics foundation (nef) set out the case in its report 21 Hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century.

Now, in partnership with CASE (Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion) at the London School of Economics, this event brings together a panel of experts to examine the social, environmental and economic implications. They will consider how far a shorter working week can help to address a range of urgent social, economic and environmental problems: unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being and entrenched inequalities.

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College, and author of Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, and The Overworked American.

Professor Lord Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick and biographer of J. M. Keynes. He is the co-author, with Dr Edward Skidelsky, of the forthcoming book, How Much is Enough? Economics and the Good Life.

Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at Surrey University, and author of Prosperity without Growth.

mp3 audio podcast available here - http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEv...

TEDxTC - Jonathan Foley : How Agriculture is Changing the Face of Our Planet

TEDxTalks

We typically think of climate change as the biggest environmental issue we face today. But maybe it's not? In this presentation, Jonathan Foley shows how agriculture and land use are maybe a bigger culprit in the global environment, and could grow even larger as we look to feed over 9 billion people in the future.

E.F. Schumacher Lecture : Gus Speth "Liberalism, Environmentalism, and Economic Growth

The United States is doomed unless the American way of life is radically overhauled, Vermont Law School Professor Gus Speth said in a Jan. 13 public lecture titled "Letter to Liberals: Liberalism, Environmentalism, and Economic Growth."

Paul Gilding: The Earth is full

http://www.ted.com

Have we used up all our resources? Have we filled up all the livable space on Earth? Paul Gilding suggests we have, and the possibility of devastating consequences, in a talk that's equal parts terrifying and, oddly, hopeful.

Confronting Global Change in the 21st Century: Can We Learn to Share the Earth?

Dr. William Rees at Greenacord 2011

UBC Prof. William Rees: end of the growth ethic

UBCinterdisciplinary

UBC Professor William Rees argues that the current growth ethic has put us into ecological overshoot, citing his ecological footprint analysis tool he developed, and may result in a breakdown in civil order and conflict over scarce resources - with Iraq only the first shot in the wars of the future.