Sublime

cetera—household items make up only a small fraction of the material required to maintain our standard of living. A greater amount is needed for buildings, roads, and infrastructure. But even these taken together are dwarfed by the greatest contributor to the daily flow of materials: waste in the form of tailings, gangue, fly ash, slurry, sludge, s

how to organize an economy when natural resources are valuable, jobs are scarce, and equity matters.

First, there will be an incentive to find some asset other than money to save with.

scientist, author, Senior Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, and one of the foremost analysts of our energy future, explained it to me: In short, our rate of consumption is overshooting our planet’s sustainable sources of production. According to the Global Footprint Network, humanity is currently using the equivalent of 1.75 Earths to provide th

Eco-footprint analysis is the basis of the widely reported statistic that if everyone on the globe lived as Americans do, we’d need five planets to support the human population.

. . . a steep winding-down of the size of the industrial economy. It strips away its burdens and complications, nurses the human ecology back to health, builds local competence and discovers a sense of place. . . . This is managed descent. . . . The shock is as gentle and as survivable as foresight can make

For the average American, the daily flows of materials (other than water) total more than twenty times a person’s body weight, nearly all of it waste.

André Gorz est un des pionniers de la décroissance en France. Dès les années 1970, réduire la production économique lui semble une nécessité en raison de la finitude des ressources : dans un monde physique où les ressources de la production sont limitées, chercher à produire toujours plus est matériellement impossible. Toute activité de production