LIMINAL COMMUNITIES have mixed feels about the concept of “growth.”

We are, for example, strongly aligned with protopian civilization progress and an inter/personal life of increasing nuance and spiritual depthiness.  The creative production of full-spectrum abundance strikes us as necessary.  We want to build up capacity and build new structures.  That all sounds very growth-y. 

Yet, at the same time, we are profoundly trans-capitalistic, ecologically attuned, multidimensional and we love the cyclic and sustainable just as much as we love development and radical upgrades.  We are fiercely critical of the flatland rat race of conventional modernity, the short-sighted greed of state-sponsored oligarchies, the over-centralization of power, the conflation of quantity with quality, and the mass destabilization of the life-worlds upon which we depend.

So are we FOR or AGAINST growth?  Yes.

The current blend of industrialism, financialism, nationalism & internationalism is system-degrading.  It is pushing the planet past its self-organization boundaries and pouring plastic particles into our bloodstreams.  The standard liberal notion of business-as-usual is massively insufficient to adapt to the changing ecological and social realities, but we cannot solve that problem naively with either (a) regressive pseudo-socialist authoritarianism that sabotages our innovative and productive capacity, nor (b) a dangerously clownish and anarchic pseudo-conservatism that undermines civic well-being.

It is important to bear this complexity about growth in mind as we evaluate our relationship with the postgrowth, degrowth, and ecological economics communities.
   

SURVEY & WORKSHOP

This survey from the Post-Growth Modelling Community is a way to contribute information, intuition and visions to their project of figuring out which kinds of ecologically and socially viable thriving (or at least non-perishing) are possible and desirable. 

The survey will remain open until September 15 2025 and the data will contribute directly to collaborative scenario-building workshops held in Exeter and online.  If you are interested in presenting workshop suggest it here by August 15th.   

In principle, the kind of work they are doing is essential.  We have to gather data, form alliances, solicit intelligence, and run scenarios that explore different variations.  The field of new economics is overloaded with philosophies, political orientations, and conflicting insights. 



POST-GROWTH PARADIGMS

The slogan “defund the police" was a fad in North America for a few years.  It was deeply ambiguous.  A few people seemed to take it quite literally.  Fantasizing, as so many immature anarchists have always done, that we would have a much nicer system with no enforcement whatsoever.  More balanced voices took it to mean the funding structures for civic security should depressurize police departments by empowering additional kinds of community forces.  Others felt that budgets were the best leverage in forcing overly militarized and emotionally insufficient police cultures to adaptively restructure.  So you did not always know what someone meant with a DEFUND sign. 

In the same way, we do not always know what a person means by DEGROWTH or POSTGROWTH. 

Do they want to eliminate half the population, roll back to pre-industrial civilization and execute billionaires?  Or do they want to optimize for general thriving by increasing the lower limits of security and thriving while ensuring that AI-powered international commerce can make more money from cultivating ecological resources than from degrading them?  Or something else or in-between?

These sorts of questions are precisely why the post-growth modelling community needs our inputs.  At the same time, we need to figure out which ideas, individuals and subnetworks within the degrowth/postgrowth communities are resonant with our emerging conclusions and coherence activism relative to that great opportunity we call the Metacrisis.



* BONUS *

Find out more with postgrowth articles on Medium, a review of comparative de-growth studies and this list of 9 essential postgrowth books from Reality Studies.