Papers

Today, the environmental movement seems riven by divergent commitments to climate justice, on the one hand, and to wilderness conservation, on the other. In an essay titled ​​“In Wildness Is the Liberation of the World,” historian Andreas Malm (2018) suggests that these commitments might be reconciled through the recognition of common social justice values and liberatory aspirations in the protection of what he calls “wildness.” This article responds to that essay, challenging that, due to insufficient attention to contemporary environmental struggles and the question of land, Malm fails to precisely diagnose and, therefore, address the cause of the movement’s internal rift. In service of an alternative analysis, this article turns to an ongoing struggle that aims to defend the “wildness” of the Agrafa Mountains of central Greece by opposing the local installation of industrial-scale ‘renewable’ energy infrastructures. Through a review of activists’ self-published literature, this article attends to their objections to these popular, techno-scientific climate fixes and traces how these objections shape their refusal to subordinate the earthly defense of wildness to the planetary cause of climate change. It suggests that activists’ counterproposal to instead get to the “root” of the socioecological crisis presents an alternative path to the reconciliation of the environmental movement’s factions, one which parallels the recommendations of degrowth scholars in its demands for systemic social and economic transformation. Therefore, this article concludes by urging degrowthers to recognize as co-theorists and co-practitioners the communities that are directly challenging growth as they struggle to defend relatively “wild” lands.

Annagreta König Dansokho is a freelance artist, political scientist, and psychotherapist. Born in 1967, she studied political science and rhetoric in Germany and transcultural psychiatry in Paris. Her multicultural background led her towards her fields of expertise which range from artistic research and concept art to psychotherapy and the overcoming of traumatic events. Her art is interwoven with the topics of migration, identity, injustice, and power. The artistic project presented here, Touché: A Mediterranean collection, circles around a world driven by capitalism and profit-orientation. The tragic dimension of illegal migration unfolds here through a fictitious narrative, in which a fabric producer offers materials suited for the crossing of the sea. The clothes that make up the Mediterranean collection are something like a symbol bearer. They represent the interconnectedness between North and South, colonizers and colonized, abusive economic exploitation and hope for a better life. The clothes designed for an illegal crossing of the Mediterranean become, in Annagreta’s project, a product shaped by marketing and branding—an idea behind, and therefore a parody of, our consumer-driven attitude: everything is for sale as long as there is a demand for it. Any product can be advertised for and sold, no matter how dark and immoral its origin or purpose is. This art project unveils this darkness and, at the same time, brings awareness to the possible processes, actors, and stories behind the “curtain.” The project’s connection to the degrowth movement is an implicit one. Annagreta’s artwork triggers associations and emotions without being a direct critique of the hegemonic attitude of the “West” and its capitalist patterns of action. Being even playful at times, her project enables us to understand the paradoxes at stake in complex issues like migration and the mechanisms of the global market and thus indirectly contributes to imagining an alternative scenario.

While health expenditure per capita has more than doubled since 2000—both in low- and middle-income countries and in high-income countries—and its increase has been above GDP growth in most countries, health care systems are not only drivers of economic growth but also have significant ecological impact. Overall, the organization of health care is defined by the biomedical model while other determinants of ill health are vastly ignored. To explore concepts of health and health care in the degrowth movement, attendees of the 9th International Degrowth Conference that took place in Zagreb in 2023 were invited to fill in an online questionnaire on health, illness and death, the perceived causes of ill health, the use of health care services, and policies to take a degrowth transformation of health care forward. This paper reports back on the results of the questionnaire. While respondents were apparently caught between the desire to reduce the ecological footprint of health care and, at the same time, the wish to preserve its current achievements, the scope of current biomedical health care went without being truly challenged. In the face of these intricate uncertainties and dilemmas of increasing complexity, I argue for using a post-normal science framework—together with the inclusion of extended peer communities in the form of deliberative mini-publics and citizens’ assemblies—to develop a degrowth ethics of health and care, where all lives are considered equally valuable.

This article introduces (Un)Natural Language, an art software and an interactive online archive that documents and examines how words make worlds by capturing the underlying ecological threats in government project documents. The project weaves together ecology, linguistics, and computational technology to offer a new analytical lens for language use in urbanization. Through a custom-labeled dataset and a fine-tuned BERT model, the system classifies individual sentences in project appraisal documents, returning visualized analyses that reveal patterns of pro-growth and ecologically detrimental discourse. Merging net art, environmental activism, and natural language processing, (Un)Natural Language offers a novel framework for interpreting public documents by uncovering hidden narratives of extractivism and economic expansion. The article begins by outlining the context and concepts of the work, followed by a description of its operation, design, and technical implementation. It concludes with reflections on the project’s contributions to ecolinguistics, machine learning, and net art. The project reclaims computation as a space for reflection rather than control—inviting viewers to rethink the language shaping our ecological futures.

A small Basque town within the province of Gipuzkoa is experimenting with a convertible local currency and seeking to set up a wider solidarity economy project. This article explores residents’ interpretations of the currency and its potential for revitalisation of the local community and economic life. The history of the Basque separatist movement, and its ties to Euskara revival efforts, have shaped the political identity of the town; in turn, creating a hospitable environment for such an initiative to thrive. Spearheaded by a leftist, pro-independence local government, this project of radical democracy and local economic sovereignty represents an interesting case for the possibilities of localised, postcapitalist futures. Employing theories of social capital and a framework of symbolic consumption, this study posits that community members identify an intrinsic connection between a thriving local economy and a good quality of life. Therefore, the use of the convertible local currency has become synonymous with acts of community revitalisation; therefore, building upon social capital and further enmeshing intimate and economic relations. Moreover, this study identifies numerous factors which contribute to the goals of the initiative, such as a strong degree of idealism among residents, an intergenerational nature of the community, high levels of community trust, and socially motivated businesses.

Like other societal institutions, academia today faces an existential crisis. Rising inequality and authoritarianism, coupled with climate breakdown and collapsing ecosystems, are threatening the conditions under which academic knowledge is produced and shared. At the same time, academics are coming to terms with their institutions’ role in contributing to these processes, particularly in the Global North. Many are recognising the historical and present-day injustices underpinning the hegemony of Western universities, as well as the links between growth-oriented capitalist logics—reproduced, embodied and often sanctioned by academics—and the ongoing environmental crisis. How can academia transform into an institution that contributes to a just and sustainable future for all? In this study, we argue that transformations towards degrowth and decolonisation are already happening in many pockets within this institution, and describe the strategic logics behind them. Thinking with various degrowth scholars, we present our vision for an academic system characterised by radical abundance—meaning a reorganisation and reorientation of the social goods produced by universities through practices of public provisioning and communal sharing, rather than the currently dominant state of artificial scarcity. We then make use of the “strategic canvas for degrowth,” developed by Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, as inspired by the work of Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright, to understand how power is today challenged within the university’s walls, and how transformation towards radically abundant alternatives can be enacted. Using the case of a pro-Palestine student encampment at a Danish university—including how some academics engaged with this student-led initiative—we identify a shared thread across strategies towards degrowth and decolonisation: the critical contestation of what a “university” is, how it functions, and the purposes it is meant to serve.

How can transitions to eco-socialist degrowth happen? And who will lead them? This essay engages with Matt Huber’s recent work on questions of eco-socialist strategy and offers, hopefully, an opportunity to advance a theory of change beyond single political agents and strategies to encompass different forms of organizing based on varied repertoires of contention and disruption. We wish to sustain an expanded understanding of who may be the political agents of change and how they can effectively organize into a powerful alliance of unions, parties, and social movements across differences, recognising the critical role of workers, trade unions, and disruptive industrial action in fossil fuel sectors, that are central in Huber’s model.

Drawing on Marx's previously unpublished research, Saitō argues for a radical rethinking of Marxist theory. The book critiques both green capitalism and state-led climate solutions, revealing how market mechanisms merely displace the contradictions of capital. Instead, Saitō advocates for degrowth communism through commons-based production, shortened work weeks, and worker cooperatives. These findings suggest that a revolutionary strategy of class war is more suitable to achieving social-ecological transformation rather than a reformist approach to markets and states. 

This book review discusses Ulrike Herrmann’s The End of Capitalism: Why Growth and Climate Protection Are Incompatible—and How We Will Live in the Future, situating it within contemporary climate debates. Herrmann’s central claim—that capitalism’s dependence on perpetual growth renders meaningful climate protection impossible—is presented as a clear, accessible synthesis of degrowth arguments. The book is particularly notable for its rejection of techno-utopian solutions such as carbon capture and its skepticism vis-à-vis large-scale renewable transitions under market conditions. However, the review ultimately questions the feasibility of Herrmann's proposed alternative (the “survival economy”), demonstrating that it overlooks political power, class interests, and the growing danger of fossil fascism.