“Humankind’s economic activities over the last few centuries have driven the biosphere into overshoot, resulting in a looming cataclysm for life on earth.”
“To reverse this overshoot condition our species must rapidly reduce its population, lower the consumption of the rich, and increase its ecological efficiencies. However, this solution cannot be implemented by growth-dependent capitalist economies, including China’s state-directed version. The unavoidable implication is that the system must now be historically superseded. Because this conclusion seriously threatens the powerful, it has been placed beyond the boundary of permissible thought and discourse. Severe penalties, both personal and professional, await those who stray into the forbidden territory. As a consequence, current discussions about the crisis are largely meaningless, and efforts to resolve it are futile. If the world’s ecosystems are to be salvaged, this taboo must be shattered. In this book I attempt to do so, and then draw my conclusions about the way forward.”
http://contractionism.org/books-2/
Our friends at the Extraenvironmentalist #73 also recently interviewed Frank Rotering to discuss his new book Contractionary Revolution. They cover the reformist solutions put forward by an environmental movement unwilling to face practical notions of society’s power relationships which block effective attempts at a sustainable civilization and the prospect for a series of revolutions to establish a post-capitalist world.