The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less: The degrowth movement wants to shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being.
The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less: The degrowth movement wants to shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being.
The degrowth movement wants to intentionally shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being. But is it a utopian fantasy?
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The article is, in my opinion, purposely mischaracterizing the degrowth movement. I would say degrowth is more a natural reaction to the excesses of capitalism than movement about addressing climate change.
I'm a pretty big degrowth advocate and I approach it first from a climate change standpoint, however capitalism is clearly the primary driver behind climate change, so I rarely see the point in making a distinction. But I'm happy to coordinate with those who approach it primarily from an economic standpoint, too.
Isn't the former very naturally part of the latter though ? And doesn't the article also raise that point as well? Fundamentally it's an idea that often gets interpreted through both those lenses because it could help with both conflicts, which is also what by definition is it's purposely trying to accomplish, the first explicitly and the second is implicit in
... within planetary boundaries.
This connection I think should be embraced because climate change is more attractive as a topic to most people than critiques of capitalism but obviously one leads naturally into the other. Saying that degrowth aims to address climate change is more just a description of partial content rather than a mischaracterization and the body of the article tries reasonably to explain other parts as well, less work and better well being are right there in the title, both not a dishonest description of other parts of the philosophy.
After all no one that accepts degrowth as a concept would answer the question "Should we degrow to combat climate change ?" with a "No" All answers would be "yes and ..." or "yes but ..."
At the end of the day Vice writing will never be perfect but nowadays for genpop media outlets it tries much harder than most to paint an honest picture of the world, and calling this article a mischaracterization seems to me a little harsh, if you've never heard of it the article certainly could honestly teach and spark interest for a this "new" way of thinking, and you need just one word to google to get more rigorous explanation if you wanted it.