Frectally speaking

Look around and you’ll see that some years after the Great Recession of the last decade and in some parts of the planet  (inc Dublin, Ireland) where I’m based that its all talk of Growth again..

Yip, yahoo, GDP is back up.

Yet is you think about this GDO/growth obsession we have lived with for decades and ask “Why?”/”What does constant GDP growth mean?” you can come the conclusion that there is a Growth Delusion

Simply put, nothing natural grows for ever.
We live on one planet with limited resources, so there is only so much land, fresh air, water for us all.
Sure we can add some more billions of people to the planet, but not billions of billions, you get the idea of natural limits.
Now you might say Moon and Mars to me, but hold on a minute.. we cant just burn through all of earths resources and move on .. at least I wouldn’t want to.

No, we have to be smart and brave enough to acknowledge that we have one earth to look after and human consumption cant grow forever.. (for a long time yet, but not *forever*), so get our heads beyond this growth thing and think “grown up” steady state sustainability for a bit.

Then look around, look at this..

238 leading academics call on EU to prioritise a wellbeing economy

“For the past seven decades, GDP growth has stood as the primary economic objective of European nations. But as our economies have grown, so has our negative impact on the environment. We are now exceeding the safe operating space for humanity on this planet, and there is no sign that economic activity is being decoupled from resource use or pollution at anything like the scale required. Today, solving social problems within European nations does not require more growth. It requires a fairer distribution of the income and wealth that we already have.

…

The good news is that within civil society and academia, a post-growth movement has been emerging. It goes by different names in different places:décroissance, Postwachstum, steady-state or doughnut economics, prosperity without growth, to name a few. Since 2008, regular degrowth conferenceshave gathered thousands of participants. A new global initiative, the Wellbeing Economies Alliance (or WE-All), is making connections between these movements”

So enter the WellBeing Economy Alliance

The essense of their plan:

Connects and convene seven meta movements from around the world (both radical ones and those closer to the current system). These meta movements will be: businesses; faith and values groups; academia and think thanks; civil society organisations; governments; practitioners such as cities which are implementing wellbeing economy initiatives at scale; and institutional innovators.
WEAll will support their strategy, collaborations, dissemination and replication. 

This breakthrough movement is on the move.. the time is now

#WeAll