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‘I’m not buying new stuff any more’: the young people getting into ‘degrowth’
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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Degrowth
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Discussions about degrowth and all sorts of related topics. This includes UBI, economic democracy, the economics of green technologies, enviromental legislation and many more intressting economic topics.
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E-Books are a thing, as are libraries, which allow you to borrow a book and return it. You also have the option of buying books second hand and then sell it again or give it away. That is really one of the key parts of degrowth. As soon as you share things, you need less things as a group. Hence the impact is much lower.
Besides a paperback book has a climate impact of 1kg of CO2. The average US American emits 4.6t per year just by driving their car. The impact of reading books is a complete joke against that and again no libraries, no second hand or anything else to reduce the impact.
Also books are really incredibly usefull resources. They are much better at actually explaining more complex ideas, then shorter articles.
So please do not just presume, somebody is going out to buy something. For the most part the big choices an individual can make on personal consumption are housing, transport and diet.
i know i just thought it was funny, let me have my 7 words or however many they are, of amusement smh.
I mentioned second hand stuff, as well as other non physical methods of cosumption in my comment, so some of this is quite redundant. The tidbit on carbon emissions is interesting though.
i mean yeah, i just don't know how much one would need to explain the concept of "hey just don't buy things, or if you do minimize the impact of it." But that's just me i suppose.
i guess so, but owning things is an inevitability in a materialist society. Even if you're homeless, you're still going to own something, even if it's just the clothes on your back. Seems like the most obvious first step to the concept of "degrowth" to me. I suppose continual consumption could be a bigger deal, but most of that is unavoidable (eating food for example) though you can still optimize it, i feel like that should be much more obvious frankly, considering how much we do it every day at the very least.
Thats because degrowth is not just anti consumerism although it is part of it, but to limit economic growth to stay within planetary boundaries. This means that degrowth also wants to built up systems to stop over consumption for everybody, while providing everybody with a good quality of life. This is far from simple, since we currently overuse earths resources, while billions are starving, despite us having enough food to feed everybody with ease. So you end up with stuff like universal basic income, forced recycling systems, commons, global justice, measuring well being and a lot more. There is easily enough to write a book about.
that's fair i suppose, i wouldn't call it degrowth though. I'd call it global economic minimalism or something. Degrowth is pretty broad, but then again people probably aren't going to buy a book titled "economic minimalism" are they? Lol.
Same Energy
If you tried to post a picture. You do so by putting a ! in front of the link like:
Then you get:
Hope that helps, if not ignore it.
I did mean to thanks! Couldn't get the damn thing to work haha.