User:Campaigner8/Degrowth

Frederico Demaria and others collaborated to write an article on the concept of degrowth and its wide-spreading effect on culture and society. This article mainly focuses on the concept of degrowth and how the meaning has evolved. It began as a French word, appearing in 1972, as a description of a societal path. This then evolved to mean an economic recession, and now, presently, an activist slogan and social movement. Protests in Paris in the early 2000s are what really sparked the degrowth movement. It encouraged people to slow down their pace in life and to live better with less. Degrowth is about seeing ecosystems having more value for what they are rather than what they can provide materialistically. It supports the res communis approach, which means that environmental goods are seen as common property and should be treated so. Demaria does not want his readers to think of the environment as this free for all that humans can come and do what they please. There are many more layers to degrowth than just this, a certain section that Demaria highlights are about justice. Degrowth believes in the concept of dividing up excessive income and wealth and distributing it to those who need it. Demaria states that economic growth itself will not eradicate poverty because it only changes the scale and not the proportion of wealth that is distributed. There is also the concept of the global North paying reparations for past and present colonial exploitations of the global South. Demaria makes the point of how the global South was used for their materials and was left with the burden of running out of natural resources to support their own nation and people. There are many levels that degrowth would have to take place - regional, state, and national. This requires organization and a network to execute, but there are arguments on how this should be organized. With this in mind, Demaria stresses the point of how natural resources are declining and private/ personal debts are increasing, and this means that the economy is not growing as fast as the debt is. Degrowth can stop the degradation of materials and help the economy to sustain this ever-growing society that we live in.