Livres

In a selective history of the evolution of the degrowth movement, his chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025) offers a collective and subjective reflection revealing tensions between academics, practitioners and activists. Its four co-authors have lived in and with these tensions, analysing practical experiences in the degrowth cooperative Cargonomia (Budapest, Hungary) and the low-tech ecosystem Can Decreix (Cerbère, France). The chapter aims to launch a formal, respectful and significant dialogue between degrowth academics and practitioners. How did an initial public perception of degrowth as activists who experiment-by-doing based in a radical epistemological critique of traditional academia evolve more and more into an academia-dominated movement? We reflect on the movement’s organisation to suggest how deeper collaborative relationships between researchers, activism and practitioners might strengthen degrowth as an academic field, enhance the credibility and robustness of grounded prefigurat

Chapter 5 in the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025) sketches the French origins of, and approaches to, décroissance. In France, décroissance emerged early – as part of the long history of debates on the industrialisation of the world and its impacts, and of a shorter history of political ecology over the last half-century. Although inspired by a long genealogy questioning the Western industrial trajectory, the word décroissance really came to the fore in the French protest and intellectual scene in 2002, with a convergence between anti-development and anti-advertising movements. Even if degrowth as a slogan and as a movement only emerged recently, its origins, influences, pioneers, pillars and debates were already very strong in the 1970s. After a long hiatus in the 1980s and 1990s, the term décroissance spread spectacularly, entering the political and activist arena at the beginning of the 21st century, designating a sub-group of political ecologists committed to criticising economic development as the do

We need to break free from the capitalist economy. Degrowth gives us the tools to bend its bars.

In 1972, a book changed the world. The Club of Rome commissioned a report that shifted how we see what humans are doing to the planet. Looking back five decades later, what happened next, what did we do and not do, what did we learn, and what happens now? In The Limits to Growth, a team from MIT studied the way humans were using the resources of the earth. Using sophisticated computer modelling, the researchers developed scenarios to map out possible paths for humanity, the global economy and the impact on the planet.

Centraal in dit boek staat de vaststelling dat het kapitalisme niet in staat is de klimaatverandering en ecologische ineenstorting op te lossen. Het schetst een duidelijke weg naar een postkapitalistische economie.

In het vlijmscherpe essay ‘Consumeren als konijnen’ veegt Soumaya Majdoub (VUB) de hardnekkige mythe van de aardbol dat overbevolking de motor van de klimaatverstoring is. Green Growth en geboortebeperking zijn slechts schijnoplossingen, gestoeld op verkeerde veronderstellingen en bangmakerij.

The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now we must face up to its primary cause. Capitalism demands perpetual expansion, which is devastating the living world. There is only one solution that will lead to meaningful and immediate change: degrowth.

Published 1972 – The message of this book still holds today: The earth’s interlocking resources – the global system of nature in which we all live – probably cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100, if that long, even with advanced technology. In the summer of 1970, an international team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began a study of the implications of continued worldwide growth. They examined the five basic factors that determine and, in their interactions, ultimately limit growth on this planet-population increase, agricultural production, nonrenewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution generation. The MIT team fed data on these five factors into a global computer model and then tested the behaviour of the model under several sets of assumptions to determine alternative patterns for humankind’s future. The Limits to Growth is the nontechnical report of their findings. The book contains a message of hope a