Saturday, September 12, 2020

The Growth of Degrowth: From a Circular to a Spiral Economy




The COVID-19 pandemic has brought drastic life changes to the worldwide population. The global economy has been shaken, so are our social interactions. Terms like “social distancing”, “virtual meeting”, “working remotely” have become part of our vocabulary. While the world is slowly returning to—or even only planning—a lifestyle pre-pandemic, the lesson taught by COVID-19 is not learned. The reopening of the economy focuses on returning to the economic growth, mainly based on consumerism and greatly contributing to the environmental crisis, which seemed to have slow down due to the change of lifestyle brought by the pandemic.
    A positive transformation, directly related to dealing with the crisis brought by the pandemic, could have been actualized by the shift from the paradigm of economy growth to degrowth. The term degrowth—a translation of the French term “décroissance”, also known in Italian as “decrescita”—encompasses political, economic, environmental and social theories as well as movements...Read More