Sustainability & Postgrowth Research
tl;dr: Utopian Sustainability needs to balance boldness and humbleness to envision a convivial future in which every individual can feel both at home and free.
500 years ago, English lawyer, philosopher and humanist Thomas More published his book »Utopia«. In it he described the »republic’s best state« on the island of Utopia, a fictional place that he used as a criticism and social commentary on the present state of European society at the beginning of the 16th century.… Read more
Degrowth is a conservative perspective on humanity’s future and thus always runs into serious acceptance problems when dealing with progressive proposals of “limitless” developments. What is needed is a reframing of these proposals as conservative and limiting our future while degrowth is presented as a “new progressivism”.
If you are an optimist regarding your life, technological opportunities and the general scheme of things, degrowth is hardly an attractive political-economical idea – less a philosophy you’d like to call your own.… Read more
Earlier this year, I wrote a blog article on “The End of Europe“. The motivation behind it was this nagging feeling that something went wrong on the old continent, that something along the way to European integration got lost – the heart and soul of Europe and what this European project is about. For 500 years, Europe was about civilization – and dominance, colonization, exploitation of people and planet, bloody wars at home and abroad; but also great successes in the progress of humanity, with the formulation (and “sacralization” according to Hans Joas) of human rights, born out of the European traumata so inseparably connected to its cruel history.… Read more
As a researcher who has dedicated his professional interest to sustainability and its paradoxical connection to growth, I try to be a “public academic”. Public insofar as the very notion of sustainability and its implication for a society, that can most likely be termed “unsustainable”, is highly political – and relevant to all, regardless if they are decision makers in politics and business or “just” ordinary citizens caring for their own and their families’ future well-being.… Read more
Europe is exhausted. It is exhausted after long years of what is labeled as the Eurozone crisis. It is exhausted after pro-longed years of political failure. Every single attempt of deepening the political union of Europe after the enactment of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 and the common currency that followed in 1999, failed in consecutive referendums. Remember Ireland 2001 with the Nice Treaty, remember the Netherlands and France in 2005 with the European constitution. This elitist concept of Europe was too much rooted in an overtly rationalist model of economic necessities.… Read more