Against Eco-fascism (re: ecofascism and 'lifeboat ethics')

This is a short post riffing off of

degrowther's post here

I've been writing a lot lately about sustainability and one of the things that worries me, too, is the strand of people arguing that to be sustainable, to be ecologically sound, involves embracing a kind of cruelty: this can be xenophobia like what degrowther is criticizing or it can be implicit---or even very explicit---ableism.

Part of what I've been noticing for awhile is this grim-faced "look, we don't like it but maybe the healthcare some people need just isn't viable" coming from people who want you to think they're being reasonable. The problem is that I think this is fundamentally bullshit. Even if we accept the premise that it's expensive and resource intensive to take care of severly disabled and chronically ill people, so what?

We don't need to reject technology per se, we need to reject an economy that relies on always consuming and producing more than the year before. Once we clear out the overhead of unnecessary consumption from planned obsolesence and the predelictions of the ultrawealthy, we can devote resources to keeping as many people as possible healthy and happy. There's no reason at all to think we can't make the energy and resource overhead to be able to provide care and assistive tech to everyone, especially once those fields are not being driven by an extremely corrupt for-profit system using patents and closed science to stifle what could be community medtech innovation. For example, look at all the people working on homebrew insulin pumps

The Open Artificial Pancreas System project

Coming back around to degrowther's point: in order to resist ecofascism, we need to build into our calculations the axiom that we *will* take care of each other and fit the rest around that. Beware talk of tradeoffs and hard decisions when it's coming from someone who will never have to sacrifice for themselves.