Re: <nettime> Biocultural Corridors

[Jean-Noël Montagné <jnm@autistici.org>]

Le 29/08/2022 à 03:11, Brian Holmes a écrit :
> How to dissolve the deep orientation, or if you prefer, the cosmovision, 
> of capitalist empire? It becomes a realistic question when that 
> cosmovision starts threatening you, killing you. 



The cosmovision of the capitalist empire is growth, the ideology of 
growth, the religion of growth.

We have just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Meadows report, 
commissioned in 1970 at MIT by the Club of Rome, which predicted a 
collapse of resources by the year 2020. We are there.
To dissolve the cosmovision of the empire, we must explain why infinite 
growth is impossible in a finite world.

Here is what was written in the book "Limits to growth" in 1972:

----


"An objective analysis of the facts shows us that, of the three 
possibilities offered - unlimited growth, voluntary limitation of growth 
and limitation imposed by the natural environment - only the last two 
are plausible.

[...]

Every day that exponential growth continues brings our global ecosystem 
closer to the ultimate limits of its growth. To decide to do nothing is 
to decide to increase the risk of collapse. We do not know with 
certainty how much longer humanity will be able to postpone a policy of 
growth control before it irretrievably loses the chance to exercise that 
control.

[...]

The choice is therefore clear: either to be concerned only with 
short-term interests, and then to continue the exponential expansion 
that is leading the global system to the limits of the earth and to 
final collapse; or to define the goal, commit to it, and begin, 
gradually, rigorously, the transition to a state of equilibrium."

( from the french edition of "Limits to growth")

----

For the past two or three years, in Europe, the word degrowth has been 
coming up in the media, discreetly. It has come back even more since the 
invasion of Ukraine by Russia, because Europeans have realized how 
dependent they are on Russia, not only for carbon fuels, but also for 
nuclear fuels. But the words ungrowth/degrowth are still banned by right 
wing, and by some social democrats, they use "sobriety" :-)

It is time to explain, by all means, to the population, that energy, 
mineral resources, agricultural resources, water, democracy, are in the 
process of regression, either for technical reasons (the end of certain 
resources), or for reasons linked to the climate, or for reasons linked 
to geopolitics, or linked to all.

It's quite easy to show how fast ressources are disappearing, even in 
US, how fragile is the economy. In USA, I remember the child milk 
crisis, few month ago, it's one of the first signs of this fragility. I 
use also the example of water scarcity in Taiwan, which has halted or 
diminished the production of semiconductors, and the stop of many 
factories worldwide. California will be the next example of forced 
degrowth due to climate change.
 https://www.drought.gov/states/california

We have only two choices. The choice of a chosen, manageable and happy 
degrowth if we make the associated paradigm shift, or the choice of a 
suffered degrowth, in which we are almost engaged, but which will be 
more and more chaotic and ultra-violent, and will spare neither the 
working classes nor the middle classes.

JN

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