On August 12, 2022, the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung–New York Office will present the book The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism by Aaron Vansintjan, Mattias Schmelzer and Andrea Vetter at “Earth Crisis and the Global Environmental Movement,” a five-day virtual conference co-hosted by the Global Studies Association of North America and the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Program of The New School.
In this panel discussion, co-hosted by The New School, RLS-NYC, and Verso Books, panelists will discuss how degrowth can systematically reform the global economy to dismantle ecological imperialism. Panelists will also share how movements for social and environmental justice, such as the movement for the Green New Deal and energy democracy, must integrate internationalist degrowth perspectives in their organizing.
Panelists:
- Jamie Tyberg: Jamie Tyberg (she/her) is an organizer, writer, and fundraiser from the Republic of Korea who is currently based in occupied Canarsie lands. In 2021, she co-founded DegrowNYC to develop local degrowth organizers of color. Her latest essay ‘Notes on degrowth and the dictatorship of the proletariat’ can be read here.
- Erica Jung: Erica Jung is a co-founder of DegrowNYC, a collective of organizers of color currently based in occupied Lenapehoking who view degrowth as a form of ecological reparations and a revolutionary process.
- Aaron Vansintjan: Aaron Vansintjan holds a PhD in urban geography from Birkbeck College, University of London, during which he studied green gentrification in Montreal and Hanoi. He is a co-editor of Uneven Earth, a website on environmental politics. He is co-author of The Future Is Degrowth and editor of In Defense of Degrowth by Giorgos Kallis. He lives in Montreal.
Also featuring special guest:
Mariko Frame (Merrimack College) on “Degrowth, World-Systems Theory, and Ecological Imperialism: Toward a Concrete Research Agenda.”
Degrowth, or the reduction in material throughput of economies, has emerged as a crucial concept for envisioning future sustainable societies. This presentation overviews a preliminary research agenda—how to incorporate the concerns of world-systems theory and ecological imperialism into the degrowth discourse. Advanced industrialized countries in the Global North are overwhelmingly responsible for many of the global ecological crises through their unsustainable consumption of the Earth’s resources and pollution of sink-capacity. As previous research from the author has uncovered, these trends occur through the mechanisms of ecological imperialism underpinning the capitalist world-system. Consequently, the degrowth discourse, which has largely focused on the reduction of material use through domestic changes within the economies of the Global North, needs to systematically envision reforming the aspects of the global economy that enable ecological imperialism.
