… the idea of infinite growth on a finite planet doesn’t make sense to most people. Yet that’s precisely the basis of most national economies today … legions of economists, politicians, and their patrons in the world’s leading capitalist countries have championed constant growth to justify the continuous extraction of resource wealth from predominantly impoverished countries and transforming it, with cheap labor, into products and services that make a tiny fraction of humanity obscenely rich, while leaving nearly half in poverty.
Picture kids in a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now picture Elon Musk. That’s essentially it. Of course, there’s also the fraction of us who live mostly in the Global North—not just the billionaires—who live in relative comfort for now: kids in school, roofs over our heads, food on the table, health insurance.
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The alternative?
Don’t grow, at least not by building more things we don’t really need. Grow socially, instead. With everyone in on it, from the kids in Congo to New England prep schoolers. That’s what the degrowth movement is all about.
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The sum of these changes would effectively end neocolonialism, by allowing poor countries to obtain just compensation for their mineral riches and not be compelled to extract them for slave wages.
—Charles Gasparovic
Read or listen to the full article, “Road Maps for a Finite Planet: The Growing Degrowth Movement” by Charles Gasparovic here:
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/degrowth-movement-roadmaps
Cover photo (a minesite in Rwanda) by Safi Erneste on Pexels.com
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