Coming-out

The concepts of Green Growth and Degrowth represent two major narratives in the public and academic debate on socio-ecological transformation. . . Using a comparative analysis of the two research fields, we confirm several findings from previous reviews, including that Green Growth research is highly policy oriented, focuses on practical implementation and builds on empirical research methods, while Degrowth research is highly theory-driven, focuses on the analysis of complex human-nature interrelationships and builds on a sound theoretical and conceptual foundation. Our analysis further reveals that Green Growth and Degrowth are two rather isolated fields of research with little exchange and mutual reference on related topics. However, the topic of social change and transition represents an intersecting and promising future research area. . . .

We must confront two stark realities about the end of our era. First, the collapse of our industrial civilization is already underway, manifesting as a slow, agonizing process of structural decay, economic exhaustion, and ecological overshoot. Second, this descent is terminal. We have permanently exhausted the physical prerequisites for any future technological reboot.

The ecological concept of human carrying capacity is necessarily complicated because human beings are the ‘ultimate ecosystem engineers’ who moderate the environment for their benefit. For at least the last few hundred years, human ingenuity, access to massive stocks of fossil fuels, and technological development have driven facilitation whereby increasing human abundance has promoted higher population growth rates. However, this positive relationship broke down during the 1950s, and by 1962, the global human population entered a phase where the growth rate consistently declined as population increased. The onset of this negative phase occurred 8 years before a global biocapacity deficit began in 1970. The onset of the negative phase also varies regionally, with the lowest-income and highest fertility regions entering this phase later than higher-income regions. A Ricker logistic model fitted to the negative phase predicts that the global population could reach 11.7–12.4 billion people between 2067 and 2076.

Olivier De Schutter says new economic agenda needed to tackle crises of rising inequality and ecological collapse

The UK has announced much harsher rules for asylum seekers including the prospect of more deportations for those whose applications fail. The US is trebling the size of its deportation force. The EU is doubling its border budgets. And in the coming decades, hundreds of millions of people might be displaced by ecological changes.

We are an international group of researchers and practitioners interested in the emerging fields of post-growth and ecological macroeconomics. Our aim is to advance economic theory, methodology and policy in order to adequately address some of the biggest challenges of our time: climate change, rising inequality, and financial instability.

Le 25 mai 1970, un mois à peine après le premier Jour de la Terre qui vit des millions d’Américains manifester pour la défense de l’environnement, le New York Times évoquait déjà l’hypothèse d’un ecological backlash, d’un retour de bâton contre l’écologie. La menace n’était pas prise au sérieux. La vague environnementaliste semblait portée par la démocratie américaine elle‑même.

The doughnut-shaped framework of social and planetary boundaries (the ‘Doughnut’) provides a concise visual assessment of progress towards the goal of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet1,2,3. Here we present a renewed Doughnut framework with a revised set of 35 indicators that monitor trends in social deprivation and ecological overshoot over the 2000–2022 period. Although global gross domestic product (GDP) has more than doubled, our median results show a modest achievement in reducing human deprivation that would have to accelerate fivefold to meet the needs of all people by 2030.

Climate change is driving rising global temperatures, ecological degradation, and widespread human suffering. Yet, as a collective, humanity has failed to implement sufficient changes to mitigate these threats. This paper introduces the concept of “global narcissism” as a speculative lens to analyze the psychological barriers to climate action. By examining different levels of narcissism and their manifestations in human responses to climate change, this framework highlights key obstacles to meaningful action. While humanity is diverse, and lived experiences vary greatly, this perspective offers a way to discuss patterns of response and resistance. A central challenge lies in humanity’s difficulty in recognizing its symbiotic relationship with the non-human world. Through the metaphor of “global narcissism” this paper explores how humanity’s response to ecological crisis mirrors narcissistic defense mechanisms and suggests a collapse is taking place. This framework provides insights into how psychological int

Climate change will set the parameters of our post-Princeton lives. The fires that devastated the Palisades earlier this month were, as our nation’s exasperated and exhausted climate scientists continue to remind us, only harbingers of the floods, tornados, and heatwaves to come. Global warming is surpassing the climate models that scientists built in the 2010s and early 2020s that already forecasted a borderline-apocalyptic future. Undoubtedly, by the time current Princeton students reach middle age, they will have witnessed a slew of societal structures sag — or collapse entirely — under the weight of extreme weather events and ever-worsening ecological decline.