Degrowth

I've been reading "The Future is Degrowth" and enjoyed both actually wanting to read more of a book (rather than just feeling like I should finish it) and the way it's helping me to make sense of some of my uh, midlife-in-a-climate-crisis crisis.

My Dad called me the other day and I feel kinda bad because I ranted at him incoherently about the state of the world and politics. All he did was innocently ask me what I thought about "Adam Bandt's statement today". I'm still not even sure what Adam Bandt said that day. Poor old Dad got both barrels of my existential crisis: "Fuck parliamentarianism and why doesn't Michelle Grattan retire already, she'll be dead soon". I realise this is partially me processing the fact that I'm about to let my membership of The Greens party lapse after being a member for 16 years. It's not a small thing. Still, it probably wasn't a nice thing to say to a bloke in his mid 70s.

What reading the book has made me keep thinking about is an interview I'm pretty sure was in the leadup to the 2010 Federal Election on 7.30 with Bob Brown. Somebody senior in the Greens - possibly not even Bob - had said something about economic growth maybe not being All That, and the Parliamentary Press gallery absolutely lost their shit. I remember Brown being repeatedly badgered on 7.30 "Do you believe in growth?". And I distinctly remember him dodging the question and refusing to answer it. I now realise that was when I first started to become disillusioned with both the party and parliamentarism generally. Even 12 years ago it was clear to me that degrowth was necessary - even if I'd never heard that term. That Senator Brown refused to say "No, of course I don't religously believe in 'economic growth'" felt like a betrayal. I went on to have a quite central role in the 2014 state and federal elections, but even so, I think something inside me broke that day and I never really recovered. We only ever notice these things in retrospect.

I'm almost up to the chapter that promises to reveal how we're actually going to move to a Degrowth world economy. I'm not really expecting a viable blueprint, but it's still nice to feel like maybe there's some hope.